How Twitter works (and why you need to know about it)

Following yesterday’s post, I had quite an interesting conversation with someone from the didn’t-retweet band. What transpired over the course of the discussion was that, by the band’s own admission, they didn’t really understand how Twitter worked. More to the point, I got the feeling that the label didn’t really understand the medium, either. Social media have come so far in eclipsing websites and emails that is very worrying if anyone along the chain isn’t engaging with it properly, so I’m listing my response here (redacting names) in the hope that it would be helpful to anyone else who doesn’t really “get”  how it works.

Henry Rollins talks sense on Steubenville

This is a sad thing to write about, and doesn’t really fall under “inspiration”, but I think Henry Rollins’ blog post about the Steubenville rape verdict certainly inspires food for thought. As usual, he was talking a lot of common sense, but there were two things that particularly troubled me:

The Google Glass feature no one is talking about

While I’m still laid up with this nasty bug, have a read of this scarily fascinating article.

Goat edition supercut (and other stuff that made me laugh out loud today)

I should not be laughing my ass (goat … sheep …) off quite so hard at this, but bloody hell.

The Taylor Swift one alone has had me giggling like a loon all day. 

#musicmonday : Nick Cave and the Stool Pigeon’s guide to music journalism

Bugger! Is that the time already? Sorry, I have been too busy laughing my assorted menagerie off at this piece from The Stool Pigeon someone’s just passed to me:

Bastard lovechild — Is sex out of wedlock still considered edgy? So why would anyone still be writing that albums ‘sound like the bastard lovechild of X and Y musicians’? I mean, there’s a good chance your parents hadn’t gotten round to tying the knot by the time you were conceived. But so what? It doesn’t make you a latter-day Edmund from King Lear. Hell, it doesn’t even make you Jon Snow off Game Of Thrones. And he’s f***ing boring.

Why don’t women say ‘I’m pretty?’ Here are ten reasons

I’ve often thought about blogging about this because it’s something that has fascinated me: the last taboo among women. You can never think you’re pretty. This column by Tracy Moore at Jezebel answers the question, and it’s a welcome relief to know that it’s not just me. See, I thought I had great self-esteem. I reveled in knowing that I secretly think I am pretty – not stunning, not a head-turner, but commonly quite attractive – until I hit the knock-out blow that my friend posted: “Tell me how awesome YOU are!” and I couldn’t respond. Overlooking those pounds I swore I was going to lose by January, I have a good smile … but my teeth are crooked. My calves are a good shape … but my skin is pale and blotchy and I have thread veins from pregnancy. My eyebrows aren’t symmetrical, and my nose turns up slightly more on one side than the other. I can’t think of anything about myself to compliment without slapping some huge caveat over it.

As Tracy writes:

In response to a piece called “Why Can’t Women Think They Are Pretty?” — a thoughtful look at how rare it is for women to simply admit they are pretty, when instead they are armed with a laundry list of their flaws at the ready — I was all prepared to write at length about the fact that it would do us well to focus on anything but the pursuit of beauty, so tenuous and undependable it is.

But then I put the question to four of my twenty- and thirty-something friends instead, and discovered that rather than hand-wring about the issue, every one of them had a totally figured-out narrative about their own prettiness and prettiness in general, full of exceptions and asterisks and rules, honed over a lifetime.

Best reactions to the Russian meteor

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tl;dr – what you REALLY agreed to when you signed up

Blah-blah-blah-blah I accept. I mean, who really reads those Terms of Service anyway? I know, I try to, but they’re so very long and if you decide they’re being unreasonable, what choice do you have? OK, so you can choose not to use the service, but that usually feels like shooting yourself in the foot when those disclaimers are rarely used for evil and usually just to indemnify themselves against frivolous lawsuits.

But it would be nice to know which particular demon we were offering up our firstborn children to, so Terms of Service; Didn’t Read has very helpfully put together a rough guide to all those nasty, unreasonable clauses we agree to every day without bothering to read properly. 

Nobody gives a crap about your stupid little project: 5 strategies for surviving the internet

It was just about the rudest comment I’d ever seen: “Give up, mate … no-one gives a s*** about your stupid label and the s*** music you release…”. It wasn’t quite true: many, including me, cared quite a bit about this brave little indie, but it is a Have Not in the digital world, and with that, I can sympathize.

It’s very difficult to gauge hierarchy because it changes so fast: one week this little blog has more readers than the biggest magazine I wrote for; the following week, almost none. White Swan Events, I call them – unpredictable storms of traffic activity, but it’s dangerous to read too much into them, either way, because

Rule 1: Visibility does not equal engagement

Azealia Banks and Perez Hilton are amateurs: wittiest celebrity insults of all time

So Azealia Banks apologised to her gay fans after calling Perez Hilton a “f*ggot” and telling him to kill himself, because that was a jaw-droppingly stupid thing to do. The ugly spat arose because he sided with her rival, Angel Haze, a couple of days after Ms Haze posted a diss track about Ms Banks, to which she retaliated in kind.

[Caution: all links contain strong language]