I tried to stay silent on the whole Musk/Twitter thing. Yes, Musk is one of the biggest assholes on the planet, and it'd be satisfying to see him destroyed and penniless. Yes, Twitter was once very important to me, and it's sad that all signs point toward imminent implosion. It's almost like the whole Neil Young / Spotify thing in reverse—now it's the celebrity who is the problem, and the internet platform that is being mourned, and yet here I am, still tired, still oh so tired.
Plus, I feel like I've had like three different funerals for Twitter on this blog already, and that was before some evil billionaire bought it, so there was the risk of overdoing it. It's not really that important. Just some fucking internet thing. Nothing lasts on here. (I was going to make a joke like "nothing except blogs on Blogspot," but I know that one day, hopefully in the very far distant future, even this blog will meet its demise, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.)
Am I "off" Twitter? I don't know. I guess. I think my plan is to keep PoYB's Twitter up for now, not really tweeting but more using it as a handy way to stay occasionally connected to some of my favorite music critics who don't really seem to have a home base anywhere else online besides Twitter. Also, there might come a day when I need to DM someone—like Kadafi Li!!—and I'll need a functioning Twitter account to do so.
As far as my personal Twitter account goes, the one I've had for officially now over fourteen years now, the one with a profile picture still me as a fresh-faced nineteen-year-old wearing a braided Santa Claus hat, I mean, I don't really see any reason to keep it around. I don't really follow too many people besides a couple friends, and those friends are the same people who follow me (and I have their phone numbers and email addresses, so Twitter's not really how anyone keeps in touch). I'm not "engaging" in Twitter in any way besides posting random thoughts every once in a while.
I think that's the main concern, though, at least mentally/emotionally. It's the weirdest thing—over the past decade and a half, I've conditioned myself to mentally tag certain thoughts I have as "this is a tweet." That might only make sense to those who have been tweeting since the '00s, but it's true. This is how my brain works now. And I don't know if I can just turn it off. I don't know if this type of brain functioning is healthy or unhealthy or what. It could be an egotistical thing, I guess, but it's not like any of my tweets are getting more than one like tops at any point. It's not ego, it's more like... what is the word for when you want to seem funny and smart, but only to yourself? Is that still ego?
I don't think it's a question as to whether I should shut down my personal account. It's probably time. I don't want to support the similarly-sized ego of a braindead 4chan rich asshole, and I don't want to be around when the ship truly starts sinking and it becomes a safety risk. But I also need to have somewhere to unload some of these random ideas or witticisms that pop into my head from time to time. I guess the best way to look at it is that they are micro-blog posts. I think that was the original purpose of Twitter, right? That everyone was blogging in the mid-aughts, but Twitter condensed that process to 140 characters? So I don't know why it shouldn't work the other way around.
So here's my plan, if you'll indulge me for one more moment. I don't want to shut off my brain, but I don't want to keep my Twitter. The compromise is that I will continue to write "tweets," except that I will write them in my blogging memo on my phone's Notepad app. Then, occasionally, I will unload all those "tweets" onto a blog post. I will bury the post under something else (like today!), so as to not seem like I need this. I just want it. And who knows, maybe after I post these micro-blog posts, some of them will eventually turn into regular-sized blog posts (confession: that has always been the case!).
"Tweets" from November to December, 2022
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