My main entertainment for the past week or so has been the fact that Paul Doucette has finally gotten his own Twitter account. Rob Thomas has been on forever, and there's a main band account that at least three of them (Thomas, Doucette, Kyle Cook) have access to, but up until now for some reason Doucette hasn't seen fit to get his own. He has remedied this, and there has been a steady flow of deadpan snark ever since. Broken up once, very briefly, when he decided to tweet a photo of Rob Thomas -- phone in hand, posting to his own Twitter feed at the same time -- at lunch. Which is funnier than it has any right to be.

I follow what is perhaps a surprising number of people on Twitter, considering how often I forget I even have an account. It's one of the first places I check when I'm investigating someone. Tweets seldom have the benefit of an outside proofreader, which means it's a good way to determine if someone is normally an idiot when their PR people aren't watching over them, and whether they can spell. It also gives a good cross-section of comments over a stretch of time, which is useful for figuring out just how stage-managed someone's media presence actually is. All celebrities have a public persona to some extent -- everyone does, but if you're not famous it's just called 'behaving yourself in outside society' -- but some are more heavily based on reality than others. As far as I can tell, Taylor Swift really is that sweet, and Clark Gregg really is that much of a wiseass. Miyavi confuses people from time to time, but let me assure you that his English is fine. Excellent, in fact, and all the screwballery is completely intentional; his Japanese is also exactly like that. I still don't know to any degree of certainty who's behind Sunflaaash -- the long dead patches between bursts of typing strongly suggest it is only one person -- but if it's not Fielding, it's someone who has the same general sense of humor, which means I like them anyway.

It's pretty evident who thinks of Twitter as a succinct news channel, and who thinks of it as a conversation. News channels don't much interest me, but people who play twing-pong with randoms do. I don't usually expect to get a volley back from any of my smart remarks, but it happens -- your best bet, if you're wondering, seems to be to catch people while they're bored out of their ever-loving minds at an airport somewhere. The Fug Girls answer me back pretty consistently, which leads me to believe that one of the following is true: 1. I'm hilarious; 2. I'm lucky with my timing; 3. They answer pretty much everyone; or 4. Heather and Jessica know who I am. That last is a little bit scary. I'm well aware that the internet is a giant public corkboard, and that it's entirely possible that the people I read and write about are aware of what I'm doing, but I'm also aware that it's an insurmountably fucking huge corkboard, and that the odds of some specific person running across this thing by accident are not that great, at least without involving a vanity Google search.

If you are someone I've written about, and you've tripped over my blog: My policy here is not to say anything I wouldn't say in person. Or at least, I stick to things that I would tell you to your face if I could figure out a good segue between, "I love your work. Could I get you to sign this related piece of media?" and "So, I was watching stuff on YouTube, and I noticed something about your innermost soul...." I have no good way to judge how startled people are going to be when I spit out things that are not normally said aloud, and I think public events where five hundred other fans are waiting around to get a photo taken are not really a good time to experiment with this. But rest assured that I don't write about people I don't like, because why the hell would I annoy myself by investigating someone I didn't? This goes equally well for people who have won Oscars and semi-anonymous randoms who run blogs and podcasts and YouTube channels that entertain me.

If you just read this thing and think I'm moderately awesome, PIMP ME. One of my New Year's Resolutions is to give this whole self-promotion thing a sincere try. It doesn't come all that naturally to me, considering that I word pretty much like breathing -- I tried not writing once for a while, and I very nearly went insane -- but I am trying to get over it.

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