Twitter Timewarp Tuesday #14

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I like backing up my tweets here, because my website is way less annoying that Twitter. Infinite scroll my ass.

I’m still pissed off about this. Tweetdeck was my favourite Twitter app. It was lightweight, fast and it didn’t have any stupid nonsense like sponsored posts. The only app I get madder about is the death of Google Reader.

Seriously, it can’t be sanitary to be wiping something imbued with rotten meat chunks all over a cup.

Then again, I can’t understand many southern American accents.

Does everyone’s mom count as a monster?

Just stop putting rotten fruit in everything. It just makes things horrible.

Comic Serif does exist. I have gazed upon its hideousness.

Enjoy your forever sleep, kiddoes.

Can somebody for the 80s please explain this to me? Trapper Keepers just seem to over-complicate everything.

I picked the spoon up and the bowl came with it.

If you know what this is a reference to, you win one entire internet.

 

Done for now.

Twitter Timewarp Tuesday #10

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I don’t really know why I feel the need to back my tweets up here. Would Twitter ever just eat all my tweets one day? It’s probably more likely that my website would die.

And I never have anything important to say there, anyway.

I’m awful serious about the sammiches.

Carmen Miranda-ing would be way more fun to do to your enemies than glitter bombing.

It should really only be used on the armpits of teenage boys.

The Net has it forever and ever and ever.

This is one of the reasons that I don’t wear socks, unless it’s really, really cold.

We need to break the cycle and achieve cinematic nirvana!

Really. Think about it.

Well, that’s all for today.

Go do something useful.

Twitter Timewarp Tuesday #8

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It’s some old tweets with a new attitude.

Actually, maybe don’t wear numbers on your face at all, jackass.

They should also comb their hair and stop sitting forlornly on the stairs with their hand on their forehead.

I always told little kids that there were the skeletons of children who got trapped in the ball pit at the bottom of the pit.

Seriously, my dream house is one that I can just take a high-pressure steam cleaner to when I want to clean it.

It would certainly make the House of Commons much more fun to watch.

I shouldn’t try to be philosophical.

It’s The Lord of the Rings joke.

I shouldn’t try to make jokes about The Talking Heads when I’m hungry.

Don’t eat Twizzlers. They’re full of crap.

Well, anybody with a fauxhawk, really. It’s just unprofessional not to shave the sides.

That was fun. I don’t remember writing any of these.

Scrapers Can Eat a Butt

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So I was Googling myself (shameful, I know) and a lot of the main keywords that I thought my website would rank highly actually had scrapers that had stolen my content as the top result.

a drawing of a paint scraper
This is the wrong kind of scraper.

Don’t know what a “scraper” is? Well, it’s basically an automated website that copies wholesale the content from other webpages. In my case, they probably copy my stuff directly from my RSS feed as soon as it updates.

What disturbs me is how often these types of sites are showing up as the top result in search results. Either Google‘s algorithm has gone janky, or lots of people are linking to these websites. If people are linking to them a lot, I blame those damn tumblr and Pinterest bookmarklets, because they’ve made it so that people don’t even think before they link to a bad source. People just share content that they like and they don’t ever think about the people who created it.

Of course, I know I’ve shared things without checking before, so I probably shouldn’t complain too much.

So, if you ever wonder why I sign and watermark everything, it’s because thievery has become automated and it’s impossible to reason with a Chinese robot.

The Internet is Dead

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Oi! Didn’t you hear? The internet is DEAD! All of its organs failed one by one.

Herein lies the sad timeline of the internet’s decline and demise:

BBSes are dead because nobody uses DOS anymore, grandpa. Also, when you want to go to a different BBS, you have to enter in a different number and wait for it to connect? Nuts to that jazz!

Legend of the Red Dragon is fun though…

Newsgroups are dead because giant of ASCII art signatures. Wow, you spent 3 days making a 100 line picture of Jean-Luc Picard out of commas and semi-colons? End every one of your messages with it!

Forums are dead because, really, forums are just newsgroups with an ugly backgrounds and annoying author avatars. Yes, I really think that the portrait that embodies you best is an animated .gif of an arch vile from DOOM. Plus, who wants to spend their time moderating a bunch of idiots?

Chatrooms are dead because of perverts.

Blogs are dead because the posts are too long and all the kids with the ADHD are too impatient to read them. Also, they update too infrequently. Today’s culture demands instant gratification.

Social networks are dead because everyone’s mom and boss has a profile now and it isn’t fun anymore. Nobody wants to interact in a place where all their actions will be under intense scrutiny.

Twitter is dead because of those goddamn hashtags. Also, everyone has updates from every service that they belong to funneled into Twitter. Nobody cares that you just favourited a video on Youtube or that you liked something on Facebook. Stop cluttering-up the feed with your inane noise!

Tumblr is dead because it’s horrible. Really, Tumblr should have been DOA, in my opinion. There are some absolutely stupid bits of Tumblr. The most egregious of which is that 4 out of the 7 posts types have no way for you to set a proper post title for them. Search engines and aggregators need titles to function properly!

Other things I dislike about Tumblr:

  • There is no way to generate a list of all the tags you’ve use and their URLs, making it hard to construct tag archives
  • Tumblr only keeps tacks of up to 200 posts with a certain tag, when you tag more than that the older posts start getting dropped from that tag’s archive
  • There is no way to style your archives
  • When a person likes one of your posts, they get a link in your post’s notes to their Tumblr, but you only get a link back from their Tumblr if they have decided to display their likes in their theme. This has created a culture of users liking everything that they see in order to generate a zillion backlinks for themselves, while suffering no consequences.

Anyway, go have a look at my Tumblr: tumblr.laurelgreen.com

Pinterest is dead because 99.99% of the content on Pinterest is stolen. I dislike that in our current culture that people seem to derive the same sense of achievement from finding great content as one would normally get from creating great content. Finding a bunch of beautiful paintings does not make you an artist, reposting other people’s delicious recipes does not make you a chef, and removing watermarks and origin URLs does not make that content yours. If you have the time to search through the internet to find 300 photos of organic freetrade purple felted wool hats, then you have the time to create something of your own to share with the world.

 

A strange thing, though, that despite being dead, all of these services are still used actively by many people. Maybe people should be more worried about which venue bests serves their particular audience, rather than caring about what’s the newest, coolest thing. The newest thing will be dead soon enough anyway.