Catmachine

This year was my twelfth year on Twitter. It's grown from one of many experimental social media platforms back then to something everyone has heard of. Despite its now corporate nature and the way it can be constantly abused and used as a channel for bile and hatred by the cowardly and the loud, there is still something about it I find compelling. Many of the important features that have come to define the platform (@-ing people, RTing a tweet) were first invented by early users of the system and it's partly these home-grown origins that I like ("...the street finds its own uses for things..." William Gibson, Burning Chrome) but what keeps me coming back is something else, something personal. I can of course see where the main criticisms are coming from but I disagree with them. "Oh it's just boring, who wants to read what someone had for breakfast every morning?" If that's all you're seeing then you're following the wrong people. ...

For some reason I never kept in touch with anyone from school - bunch of sadistic bastards the lot of them ( and that was just the teachers... aah ). An unusual side effect of this state of affairs is that the people I've known the longest aside from my family are fictional. My oldest friends don't exist. Well not in this reality. I'm not talking about characters in books - they're frozen in aspic going through the same motions again and again every time you thumb their pages. Even characters in long running series of books can't really be counted, partly due to the nature of the medium. Any recurring characters in an author's works (such as the Vampire Lestat who somehow contrives to become even more irritating every single time Anne Rice churns one out) are going to be central to the story and therefore we're almost always privy to their thoughts. Real friends are always seen from the outside and we have to guess what they're thinking. Characters i...