Category Archives: Farce

January 18, 2014 · 22:54

Twitter Humblebrag

First, a little background…

I got a Twitter account two or three years ago “just because”, but didn’t start using it on a regular basis until early 2013.

My initial opinion of Twitter when I first heard about it was low – just for use by teens to see what the latest gossip and BS was from the Kardashians and Justin Bieber. That opinion changed pretty quickly once I started using it regularly. It’s a tool, just like any other. Yes, you can use it to follow movie stars and bubble-brained airheads who are “famous for being famous”. You can also (as I do) follow:

  • the New York Times
  • CNN
  • the Los Angeles Times
  • NPR
  • dozens and dozens of NASA accounts, including astronauts currently on ISS
  • reporters covering astronomy and the space programs
  • planetary scientists
  • astronomers
  • writers such as John Scalzi, Chuck Wendig, Seanan McGuire, Richard Kadrey, and Neil Gaiman
  • musicians such as Amanda Palmer
  • favorite sports teams and the beat reporters who cover them

You get the picture? There’s some absolutely amazing, creative, intelligent, and hilarious stuff going on there.

I am a long, long way from being a “big name” on Twitter by any stretch of the imagination. As of this last Wednesday morning, I had all of thirty-one people “following” my account.

I’m still enough of a novice and wannabe on Twitter so that I have all of my notification alarms turned on. This means that my phone goes “boop!” any time someone responds to, “favorites”, or “re-tweets” anything I tweet. It doesn’t happen often — two or three times a month might be a “big” month.

I occasionally will comment or react to some tweet or another, and on a handful of occasions I’ve gotten a response, a “favorite”, or a “re-tweet”. The “high point” of my “Twitter career” I think was when I once responded to a tweet by the NASA Morpheus Lander account and it got two or three “favorites” and maybe two “re-tweets”. I’ve gotten a couple of local LA television reporters to respond to tweets I’ve sent their way.

As they say, “Big whoop!”

Then came last Thursday night when I was busy writing my entry for Chuck Wendig’s “Flash Fiction Challenge”. As usual, my Twitter feed was up in a window on the other monitor. (I use the Janetter client most of the time on my desktop.) A bizarre little tweet caught my eye as it popped up:

16-Jan-2014 Twitter 01Assault and attempted murder using a squirrel as a weapon, eh? There’s something you don’t necessarily see every day!

16-Jan-2014 Twitter 04The Bloggess is a writer & entertainer who is followed by many of the people that I  respect and follow (three of whom you can see listed there), so I started following her some time back. She can be very entertaining, often in a really thoughtful and weird sort of way which I enjoy and respect. As you can see, she has many, many followers.

16-Jan-2014 Twitter 02Now there’s a response that I like!

16-Jan-2014 Twitter 07Apparently other followers of her were equally enamored.

I often find my muse slipping out and making snarky, snappy, (hopefully) witty comments in tweets that I shoot off into the Twitterverse. 99.999999% of the time they go ignored and unseen.

This was that 0.000001% event for me:

16-Jan-2014 Twitter 03About thirty seconds after hitting “send” my phone went “boop!”. Then “boop! boop! boop!”. Then “boog!boop!boop!boop!boog!boop!boop!boop!” And it didn’t shut up for a while.

The Bloggess had “favorited” and “re-tweeted” my post to all of her 365,613 followers. They’re not all online every second watching every word she types, obviously, but a decent percentage of them are, and they seemed to think my tweet had an appropriate amount of snark, so they started responding, “favoriting”, and “re-tweeting”. Then The Bloggess started following my account (hi there!) and others did as well. (Am I supposed to be clever and funny all the time now? No pressure!)

The “boop!boop!” chorus subsided after a while, although there were a few more yesterday, and even a couple today. The current totals are:

16-Jan-2014 Twitter 06I haven’t done an exact count (maybe Twitter has a stats function somewhere that I could check, but I don’t know where it is) but I would bet that the 10 “retweets” and 29 “favorites” on this tweet exceed all of the “retweets” and “favorites” combined on every tweet I’ve ever done. And the number of my followers jumped from 31 to 38, a 22% increase overnight.

Let me assure you, I’m not having any delusions of grandeur here. This is neither rocket science, brain surgery, or high finance.

On the other hand, one of the things I’ve done in the last year is to actively try to establish my “personal brand” using this blog and social media. That’s why I’ve set up accounts and been using Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and Instagram. I’ve been active on Facebook for years since it’s been extremely useful in keeping in touch with friends in SF fandom and high school classmates that have scattered all over the country. I keep seeing articles and advice that says that such a “personal brand” will serve you well in job hunting, particularly on LinkedIn. (Well, we see how well that advice has worked.)

If I am able to establish some sort of career as an author, either part-time or full-time, such a “personal brand” and a solid presence on social media will be invaluable. So when that happens, you can say you knew me when. “Yep, I read his ‘Twitter Humblebrag’ blog post when it first came out. I was one of Paul’s fans and readers before it was cool to be one of Paul’s fans and readers!”

No egoboo here — just me and my self-satisfied grin. (Don’t worry, The Long-Suffering Wife will knock me off of this pedestal I’ve erected for myself, probably immediately after she read this. In four, three, two, one…)

 

 

 

 

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Filed under Fandom, Farce, Job Hunt, Paul, Writing

January 9, 2014 · 20:55

What Does The Dog Want?

We all love our pets, but face it, all of our assumptions about what’s going on in those noggins is as anthropomorphic as hell. And “assumptions” is the correct word, because even on the “easy ones”, we could be wrong.

For example, when the cat crawls into your lap, starts purring, and starts nudging and nuzzling your hand, our assumption is that the can wants to be scratched, stroked, and petted. But how do we know that the real goal isn’t really to get between us and our keyboards?

When it’s 6:00 and the dog is running around your feet and whining, we assume that she wants to remind us that it’s dinner time. Sure, when we feed them (because they’ve trained us to do that when they act like that) that’s great, they’ll take it (dogs never, ever turn down food), but what if they really are trying to get us to open that cupboard where the food’s kept just to check and see what’s in there?

When the dog’s scratching at the door, dancing, whining, and crossing his legs, we assume that they want to go out and pee. But what if they’ve really got a “Dancing With The Dogs” practice scheduled and they don’t want to be late?

And those are the “easy ones”!

What does it mean when the dog has had dinner, has had “dessert”, has had treats, has been out in the front yard (twice), has been out in the back yard (three times), has fresh water (two bowls at different ends of the house, heaven forbid she should have to walk that far if she’s parched), has dry food, and still is up in your face every five minutes whining? We have no clue.

We’ve tried to get her to “use her words”, but that’s not going all that well. I’m sure it’s our fault, not hers.

In “Up” they had that great device by a mad scientist (see, someone’s working on these things!) which allowed the dogs to communicate with humans. (“Squirrel!”) Why can’t we have one of those in real life? (“Only available in this TV offer, but wait, there’s more! Order now and we’ll send you a second Petalk Helmet for your other dog, you just pay additional shipping and handling.”)

What would happen if such devices existed? Would you need different models for dogs and cats? It seems obvious to me that you would, but I’m not the mad scientist here. (I’m just a little angry.)

Better yet, what kind of output would you get if you put a cat-to-human communication helmet on a dog, or vice versa? That’s a show I would pay to see! Extra points to whoever invents the dog-to-cat communication helmet. Or dog-to-squirrel. Wait, that’s probably why they had “Universal Translators” in Star Trek.

But in the bigger picture, if we have so many problems with the details in communicating with creatures that share 90% of our DNA and have evolved along side us for hundreds of millions of years, how will we ever communicate with an alien species if they land their UFO’s on the White House lawn?

Maybe they’ll already have invented human-to-alien communication helmets for them to use with us. Will they wear the helmet, in order to utilize their far superior intellectual (or telepathic) abilities? Or will they make us wear the helmet so that they can avoid undue strain on their necks? (I’m assuming, of course, that alien UFO’s don’t come with chiropractors in their crews.)

Will they naturally gravitate to football players to communicate with because they’re already wearing helmets? If they’re looking at old television footage due to the limitations imposed by the speed of light, will they think that Terry Bradshaw or Joe Montana is our leader? (Are we doomed?)

Or will they show up and have communication helmets for only the dogs or the cats? If they have aliens-to-dogs helmets, the cats will be even more pissed off than humans will be. (If you have a cat, you’ll understand.) Humans will probably get nice chewy treats for taking care of the dogs. If they have aliens-to-cats helmets, well, it’s obvious that we’re all pretty much screwed.

Unless we take the alien-to-cat communication helmets and put them on a dog! That should mess up those alien brains, sort of like what Jeff Goldblum did in “Independence Day”.

Y’all think that over and let me know your thoughts (via comments, not author-to-reader communication helmet).

I’ve got to go take the dog outside. For the tenth freakin’ time tonight.

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Filed under Cats, Dogs, Farce, Science Fiction

January 8, 2014 · 20:27

Not Enough Mad Scientists’ Inventions In Real Life

I think the title says it all! For decades we’ve had one movie, comic book, and television show after another featuring all kinds of cool crap invented by mad scientists or evil super-villains, yet none of this stuff has shown up in real life where it could really be useful on a daily basis.

If mad scientists had as many spinoff products as NASA does, we would have our flying cars today like we were supposed to!

I was thinking about this on a long drive home today. (I also had Supertramp’s “Child Of Vision” blasting at full volume, especially that great piano piece that takes up the last 3:50 of the song, but that’s neither here nor there. I just wanted to mention it.) Specifically, I was thinking about it while following yet another $100K sports car in the fast lane, going 55 MPH in a 65 MPH zone with no traffic.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could push a button on your dashboard to have giant arms pop out of both sides of the car, extending out in front of you, with big prongs like on a fork lift? Then you could sidle up behind the slow poke, slip the prongs under his car, and the system would lift his car up over you and place him gently behind you where he belongs. The mechanism collapses back into your car — problem solved!

Garbage trucks have mechanisms like this for picking up the big bins and flipping them up over the top of the truck to dump the trash. All we would need would be to work on some minor upgrades and modifications to the system. Am I right? Huh??

How about a better way to deal with telemarketers? Is there anything worse than your third call of the day from some idiot who wants to sell you home improvement services or magical credit repair consulting? So why isn’t there some useful product from “Acme” to deal properly with these calls? Would Wile E. Coyote have put up with this? No, he wouldn’t! So let’s get him to work on the project. Maybe something along the lines of a tracing & tracking system that identifies the exact location of the telemarketer, then launches an 800 ton rock onto their head using a giant rubber band. What could go wrong?

What about the people who deliberately and repeatedly enter the narrow and cramped parking lot through the clearly marked “EXIT ONLY — DO NOT ENTER” lane, tying up traffic all the way around the block? Would Ming the Merciless put up with this? Would Kim Jong-Un sit idly by with this sort of atrocity taking place? I dare say not! But I say that, instead of simply punishing these scofflaws, let’s do it while rewarding the good citizens of our community that are fighting for truth, justice, and a good $5 burrito! So let’s figure out how to get a Reduce-O-Ray built which would zap the good guys and take away five pounds of ugly fat and teleport it into the butt of the agents of anarchy coming in through the exits!

As an additional bonus, if you see someone all of a sudden getting one of those bedonk-a-donk butts in just a few days, you can avoid letting them drive to that business meeting. We all win!

I’ll expect first draft schematics on my desk by the first of February.

 

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Filed under Farce, Freakin' Idiots!