Thursday, January 16, 2014

Things I Like of the Year (Twitter Edition)


When I was in journalism school, one of the big buzzwords was "content curation." Apparently, all of us were going to make a living finding and disseminating content, rather than coming up with it ourselves.

This seems to be a viable strategy if Buzzfeed and the various Buzzfeed clones are to be believed, but I'm not convinced it's a sustainable way for an entire generation of journalism students to find employment.

The reason it's not sustainable, of course, is because you really only need one content curator, if that curator has impeccable taste. He or she could be the lighthouse of the digital age, guiding us through the murky ebbs and flows of the world wide web.

Where could we find such a person, such a paragon, such a savior?

Look no further noble netizens, for I have revealed myself, Kyle, the once and future content curator.

Look upon these tweets with amusement and wonder, for I have traveled across the ages to bundle them for you.

Come, take a peak inside my stupid head. Please don't judge me for my weird sense of humor.

Here are some Twitter accounts that I liked from 2013 (and before and beyond):

Twitter Japesters


@wettbutt




John V amuses me because he uses the tools of internet culture to make fun of internet culture. In his tweets, he often references being owned online as if it's an actual thing worth caring about, pointing out the inherent absurdity of such concerns. His tweets make it sound like he despises the prevalence of irony (or at least what that word has come to mean in our current culture), but he doesn't necessarily traffic in sincerity (irony's chief rival), he's operating on another plane, post-irony. John V is at the forefront of the irony wars, he will one day pilot a mech constructed entirely out of Jonathan Safran Foer novels.

He also sometimes tweets earnestly about the work he does as music therapist, which is a cool thing to do and elevates him beyond joke robot status. He's partially responsible for The Subpranos.



@bransonbranson



Branson is cool because he's a big guy from Missouri with a beard and a puffy coat. He likes sports, which is also cool. I like the Appalachian flair that he brings to Twitter, it's a nice change of pace from bi-coastal know-it-alls. He also invented Teen Orc, which is one of my favorite twitter things ever. (Between when I wrote this [Wednesday night] and now, he posted this Teen Orc Retrospective, which is great.)




Characters


 I like twitter characters because they give me something to follow when I'm at work and can't watch TV.

@dadboner



Sad-sack Karl Welzein is a pretty well known Twitter commodity at this point, so much so that creator Mike Burns has released a book based on the character. While Karl may have slowly devolved from a bored dad to a self-destructive idiot, there's still something inspirational and true in his perpetual belief that K-Money Welzein will overcome his sad station and actualize his inner rockstar, only to thwart himself by jettisoning these dreams as soon as he finds a distraction. Karl is America.

@love_that_goku





Love_that_goku (aka Christian H.) is a teenage immigrant from South America who aspires to be Goku from the seminal, glacially paced anime Dragon Ball Z (also Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball GT). His quest for power has led him to allegedly burn down his neighbor's house, attempt to sabotage his Quantum Leap loving uncle's wedding and leave his infant nephew in the woods in order to build strength in the child. The only thing that rivals Christian's passion for DBZ is his hatred of the police, which led to several confrontations between he and the local police force. He was also once cyber-bullied by Blues Traveler.
My favorite thing about Christian is his overwhelming positivity in the face of adversity.
The guy that runs this account, Lucas Gardner, has a couple of other funny characters, but none touch me like this young warrior from Ecuador (I think that's where he's from).

@PFTCommenter


PFTC started as a little joke account mocking the thinly veiled racism and general backwards-ass nature of the commenters on Pro Football Talk, but his empire has quickly grown to the point where he's regularly posting editorials on both SBNation and Kissing Suzy Kolber. Whoever runs this account is a genius and regularly pulls transcendent pop culture references into his idiotic breakdowns of NFL action. My favorite PFTC joke is either when he described Jeff Garcia as a "Gruden Grindr" or, after a game in which the Patriots lost on a close call to Carolina and Tom Brady chased the refs into the locker room, he said that it may have been a "stand your ground situation" if Cam Newton had tried to do the same thing.

Real People


@jon_bois


Jon Bois is a writer for SBNation from Louisville. His tweets are charmingly silly and direct, kind of like a sports and pop culture takes through the mind of a child or a web-savvy grandfather. When he's not tweeting goofy jokes, he does Breaking Madden and manages SBNation's vast archive of GIFs. He also invented SupperJumpin'.

@emilynussbaum


Emil Nussbaum is the television critic for the New Yorker. Her tweets don't often make me laugh, but she's far and away my favorite TV critic. It helps that she's not hamstrung by having to do weekly recaps like my two other favorite critics (Todd VanDerWerff [@tvoti] and Alan Sepinwall [@sepinwall]). It probably also helps that we have nearly identical tastes. She was the first proponent of the "Bad Fan" Breaking Bad theory and she's one of the few public defenders of unfairly maligned shows like The Mindy Project and unfairly ignored shows like It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. She's also quite chatty with her readers on Twitter, which I always appreciate.

@TCUCoachP



On the sideline, TCU head coach Gary Patterson looks like a humorless orb of defensive acumen. On Twitter, however, he is perpetually delighted by pictures of animals moving in ways that remind him of his gridiron pupils. While colleagues Kevin Sumlin and Steve Sarkisian take a slightly more understated approach to announcing new commits on twitter (tweeting "yessir" and "woof woof" respectively [though now that he's at USC, I don't know what Sark will tweet, judging by his proven tendency to stick with the same thing over and over, probably "woof woof"]), Coach Patterson knows that subtlety is just another tool of the deceiver, and instead chooses the phrase "#recruitingisheatingup." It may be patently silly, and also potentially violate NCAA bylaws regarding social media, but CGP is nothing but a straight shooter. Just look at his response to haters.

It is impossible to dislike this man.

@UT_MackBrown

Prior to Mack Brown resigning as the head coach of the Longhorns, his Twitter account was filled with useless inspirational coaching pablum like this.
I can only imagine this was because someone like Nick Voinis in the athletic department was handling Mack's social media duties. Now that he's divested himself of his duties as a head coach, Mack's Twitter is genuinely spectacular. From live tweeting the MNC game and the Golden Globes, to these weird genuine bursts of human enthusiasm, Mack has become a must follow.



Mack is like Wall-E (the robot from the film Wall-E), he's spent the past 30+ years as a football automaton, and now we're watching him rediscover his humanity online. He's got good taste in TV too.
Even his inspirational doofiness has improved.

He's appropriated Karl's trademark "Ha!" at the end of tweets. How did we ever fire this man?

@kyleagregory
I am the best at Twitter.
Posted by kyle at 5:17 PM

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