The best place to date on the internet

Posted on by 20poorandfabulous

Aside from making a joke Christian Mingle dating profile my freshman year of college, I have never tried online dating. Sort of. If we’re talking specific dating websites like Okcupid, Tinder, eHarmony, then fuck no. I still can’t wrap my head around making a digital poster trying to sell yourself in under 30 seconds to a bunch of people who are superficially judging the SHIT out of you. It’s the digital dating equivalent of the poorly dressed guy with gross teeth and whiskey breath trying to chat you up in the bar after you just spent 2 exciting hours picking out your outfit, curling your hair and applying liquid eyeliner, just to find an anal fissure rain on your pretty parade. No thank you, sir. Why put so much effort into a dating profile filled with hungry rats when there’s a way more effective place to date online?

Are you ready for this shit?

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It’s TWITTER.

For about a year, I gave out my Twitter handle instead of my phone number or Facebook or email. And actually my current bf, who before was a really, really light acquaintance, thought I was hilarious on Twitter and it eventually led to us hanging out, dating and gettin’ all lovey and shit. All of those other mediums are WAY too personal to give out to someone you’ve just met or a cute acquaintance. Here’s why:

  • Texting is never casual and always stressful with new people.
  • Facebook is like inviting a new person into your family dinner, high school reunion and a digital record of your life for the past decade simultaneously
  • Email is like you’re ready to give up and share bills already

Why Twitter is the best place to date

On Twitter, you don’t have to use your real name if you don’t want. I think there is a deep meaning in adopting a user name, because it frees you from the confines of societal norms that your government name ties to you. You can express yourself more freely, which is the kind of communication you should get out there right away when it comes to meeting new people. None of this “so, where’d you go to school?” bullshit and straight to the “corn dogs are fucking AWESOME” jam. Twitter lets people read you and your thoughts as you go about your normal, daily life, (and lets you read them too), which I think is a WAY better dating tool than constructing a profile of your Best And Most Interesting Qualities to lure dates. Dating profile fluff isn’t getting anybody anywhere. Showing who you are on Twitter will get you somewhere (unless you totally suck and in that case ain’t nobody can help you but God herself).

This is you on every OkCupid date you've ever been on
This is you on every OkCupid date you’ve ever been on

Your Twitter handle is also low commitment contact information to give to cute guys or girls in the bar. You both can follow each other, casually fav, retweet (!!!) or reply to tweets, without there being a ton of intimate pressure to text or endure a fucking awkward and outdated facebook chat *shudders*. Plus, there’s already a bunch of random people following you on Twitter anyways, so adding one more isn’t weird like being immediate Facebook friends would be.

And if you’re reluctant to hand out your Twitter handle, get theirs. That way you can see what kinds of things they write about or retweet before you decide to follow them. If it’s a ton of sports stats and inspirational quotes, then you just sidestepped adding a bunch of a “your” vs. “you’re” tweets in your feed. If it’s a bunch of funny complaints, jokes and relevant cultural references? Cool, new material to steal and use on your coworkers.

What’s best is that in the off chance that your prospective date doesn’t have a Twitter handle, you’ll know they suck and can avoid a week of annoying favs and @ replies. It’s a win win. Yes, the argument could be made that there are cool and interesting people without a social media presence. Lemme know when you find one who isn’t also worried about the fluoride in the water controlling our thoughts. It’s 2014, yo.

So next time you think a guy/girl is cute, think about sending over your twitter handle on a cocktail napkin. You never know if it could turn into a brief and fun romance, new jokes to retweet/steal or a lifetime of LUUUUUVVVVVV.

 

7 Questions in Heaven with DJ_BASKETBALL

Posted on by 20poorandfabulous

7 Questions DJB

I met DJ_BASKETBALL on Twitter after a friend of a friend told me that if I like funny and weird, I should definitely follow @focra. We became Twitter friends, and then he told me he was releasing his album of midi covers sometime. THAT SOMETIME IS NOW. DJ_BASKETBALL sat down at his computer last week and answered all my questions for your reading pleasure. HERE IT IS. Download his album MIDI MIXXES for free here and WELCOME TO THE TECHNICOLOR WORLD OF DJ_BASKETBALL.

1. Describe your new album in 3 emoticons.

Emoji ghost (I like the android one better than iOS tbh,) cat smiley :3 and probably the o___o

2. Why is your name DJ_BASKETBALL?

I was talking to a friend online (and I guess I’ve only known him online, so) and we were spitballing DJ names.  DJ_BASKETBALL was one of mine and it stuck.
from haroldsavage.com
from haroldsavage.com

3. If you could pick any actress to live in a world where your music was the constant soundtrack, who would it be and why?

Maaaaaan.  Uh.  Emma Watson and / or Christina Ricci because they would probably “get it.”  But I’m probably projecting.

4. Who is your favorite pop star and why?

I thought about this one a whole lot and I think I’ve settled on Nicki Minaj.  While she hasn’t really been around to stand any test of time, I appreciate her vivid, up-front persona.  I like the fact that it doesn’t come off as forced, or manufactured by anyone outside of herself, but I’m sure many would disagree.  (Haven’t caught her on American Idol because I don’t think I’ve watched American Idol in years.)
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5. Why did you pick the songs you covered for the album? Which one is your favorite?

Just naturally drawn to all of the songs.  The process was disappointing sometimes, because some of them would just turn out to be poorly made / orchestrated MIDI files, but these made the cut on that front.  With that in mind, I think that OVENS and BENNIE_JETS are my personal favorites, because they’re the most dynamic tracks.

6. You are also a chapbook author by your IRL name. Give an excerpt of your favorite chapter.

this is from my first chabook, and I usually make it a point to read this out loud:
courtney love is tap dancing somewhere, at some point in time
robert rodriguez is channelling someone distant
during the penultimate refreshor other kinds of archiving gmails
i call out a really
i want to get powerfully drunk with you for only five minutes
i want to climb on top of a building and be very scared
during your life
and about it
there was a boring synchronicity of costco memberships

COVER_FINAL

7. You’re ALSO a visual artist. Describe what you listen to/drink/eat/scream when you’re drawing alone in your apartment.

1.  Listen –  put my 15+ year library on shuffle, and if something STRIKES me I’ll listen to more of it / stuff along those lines / music I listened to around that point in time.  If not that, all kinds of RAP.
2.  Drink – Whiskey, usually.
3.  Eat – Big fan of pretzels.
4.  SCREAM – Not usually.
from haroldsavage.com
from haroldsavage.com

Celebrité: Amanda Bynes is getting annoying

Posted on by 20poorandfabulous

Everyone knows Twitter is full of useless information: jokes about dying alone, endless/useless fights about politics and details about strangers’ day to day lives. But once in a while, some fairweathered tweet about a useless celebrity sets me on fire.

Amanda Bynes erratic behavior is becoming a bore

Image via People
Image via People

It’s sort of beating a dead horse at this point to say “Why do we CARE about these people?” Is it because our love lives are stale? Our cubicle is depressing? We don’t have enough interesting things going on it our lives? Probs a combination of the three and a BAJILLION others, but I digress.

My problem with this tweet, and most gossip columns tweeting about AB, is that her crazy weird behavior is something we care to know about. Wearing crazy wigs to court because she shaved her head to wear bad wigs? SHOW ME THE PIC. Mumbling to herself all over NYC? YOU GOT A SOUND CLIP? Throwing a vase/bong out of a high rise window? I LOVE GLASS CHIPS. Entering stores and locking herself in bathrooms to “apply makeup”? DAMN THAT GURL IS HIP. Sure, calling Drake ugly and everyone else ugly is kinda funny and entertaining. But seriously, what the hell is her game?

I will dissect this in three ways:

  • Amanda Bynes is having a mid life identity crisis. Not legit crazy, which would explain why she has never been held by a court for incompetence. It also explains why her friend Drake Bell (granted I don’t know anything about him besides he starred on her show “The Amanda Show” in the early 00’s) said in an interview with OK! magazine that “She’s a sweetheart. I had lunch with her yesterday, and she’s brilliant. She’s good, and she’s healthy.” Without actual mental issues, there’s little anyone can do just because she’s acting weird and rude.
  • She is uneducated and starved for attention. At least Joaquin Phoenix’s weird year was for art. Unless Amanda Bynes is writing a dissertation on the absurdity of post-modern media, or planning to compile a book of tweets that mirror modern life in the era of useless information, I’m gonna continue to think she’s acting out for attention.
  • She thinks acting erratically and getting media attention will bring her career back to life. She’s not wrong, which is even sadder commentary on modern American pop culture and how to be successful. Be a dick! Be crazy! People Love it!

No matter what, the Amanda Bynes news is getting old. Either she’s going to continue to spiral into even more erratic behavior for more and more media/twitter attention, resulting in who knows what, or the public is gonna get bored of her weak attempts at staying relevant. Only sweet time will tell whether our fave semi-crazy B is gonna take it too far or reign herself back in. Oy. Vey.

Black Harvard student kicked out of bar for being black; Social media to the rescue!!!

Posted on by 20poorandfabulous

Being racist is fucking lame. Jonathan Wall, a Harvard man who happens to be black, was kicked out of a bar in Raleigh, North Carolina for being black. Yes this happened, yes this is 2012, and yes social media is kicking the shit out of this bar and racism in general. YAY!

Of course, this happened in North Carolina, the SOUTH, where they don’t care about much except hating everyone who isn’t white, christian and toothless being a total drag.

Not to say that EVERYONE in those states is like this; there are racist people everywhere regardless of geography, gender, race, etc. However, it’s to a much higher degree in the states like North Carolina that really wanted to keep slavery and unequal societal statuses for everyone!

I feel sad for racists and homophobes. I pity them. Carrying all that hate in your heart is bad for you. Carrying hate for anything is bad for you. There’s no excuse!

Black Man Kicked Out of Racist Bar: Cops Dont Help, But Social Media Does.

Like the smell of my colon?

Posted on by 20poorandfabulous
Screengrab via sadanduseless.com

I blame it on Bush. Then again, I blame everything on Bush era tax cuts, because those were so fucking rude.

I think I like “My Hands Smell Like Colon” best, because of the weird capitalization and the fact that it’s a very real situation. Check out more at Sad and Useless.

Gross: 25 Extremely Upsetting Reactions To Chris Brown At The Grammys

Posted on by 20poorandfabulous
You can't just hold a puppy and expect to be loved again. Nice try, though. You almost fooled me. Photo via chrisbrownpictures.info
You can't just hold a puppy and expect to be loved again. Nice try, though. You almost fooled me! Photo via chrisbrownpictures.info

Holy. Shit. What is WRONG with these women? Check out some disturbing Grammys tweets about Chris Brown.

25 Extremely Upsetting Reactions To Chris Brown At The Grammys.

Gross: Twitter to censor content per government request, goodbye freedom of speech!

Posted on by 20poorandfabulous
Photo via elitedaily.com
Photo via elitedaily.com

Ugh. Really, Twitter?

In a statement released through Twitter’s company blog, they explain their motives concerning censorship in countries who request it:

“As we continue to grow internationally, we will enter countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression. Some differ so much from our ideas that we will not be able to exist there. Others are similar but, for historical or cultural reasons, restrict certain types of content, such as France or Germany, which ban pro-Nazi content.

…Starting today, we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country while keeping it available in the rest of the world.”

What are they afraid of? Us? Photo via webpronews.com
What are they afraid of? Us? Photo via webpronews.com

That’s disturbing. Especially seeing as Twitter and Facebook were huge catalysts in the uprisings and subsequent revolutions in the Middle East and South America over the past year.

Twitter only gives famously bad examples of group communication like Nazis, but who’s to stop them from censoring socialist or populist uprisings against, say, a massive opposition to big governments and big corporations? (Hello, Occupy Movement!)

The legality of this political- I mean company- move is not the question: Twitter can do whatever they want with their company and their product. Someday we will have a social network that is neither Facebook nor Twitter that will be run by people who have an actual grasp of this idea behind freedom.

Until that day, all this current censorship talk, first coming from the US government with SOPA and PIPA and now through Twitter, makes one start to wonder: What are they so afraid of?

 

Activism: The SOPA Blackouts

Posted on by 20poorandfabulous

I LOVE the SOPA blackouts. It’s an interesting event happening on the internet, a place where it’s rare to have a realtime event. Image

When thinking about the SOPA debacle, my mind immediately goes to money, and a power struggle between the people at large vs. powerful corporations and powerful government officials. What bothers me most about the discussion is that the people holding seats in Congress and the House of Representatives are old. I don’t mean to be ageist, but if these people are as technically challenged as my own parents and basically anyone alive in the 70’s, then do they even know anything about the bills they support, and what they mean for mass communication, ACTUAL freedom of speech and liberty?

The Egyptian protests that were put together using Twitter and Facebook are a perfect example of why the government wants to pass bills like SOPA. Mass communication among the people is a huge threat to government control. What if the government had the power to shut down Twitter and Facebook, maybe during protesting times, under the vaguely written SOPA bill? And even certain news websites, because they were doing and saying things the government simply didn’t like? Is that free speech? Or is it free speech, government-approval pending?

This is not Democrat vs. Republican. Not by a long shot. This is censorship for the masses.

I read today on reddit that the entertainment industry paid Congress 93 million dollars to fast-track a bill like SOPA so they could get control over the piracy issue. Does that even make any sense? As a country, a body of people, is it O.K. that corporations are able to pay our politicians to create or not create certain legislation?  We’re the people, right? Shouldn’t they be working for us?Image

Maybe the entertainment industry should find better ways to sell their products, or (shockingly) try to be innovative, instead of trying to push government censorship in our alleged “land of the free.” Or maybe, the entertainment industry could stop producing movies with that “Get ‘Er Done” asshole and make quality things, that people would actually want to spend their money on. Piracy will always find a way, Jurassic Park style. I believe there is no way around it. Enforcing any kind of censorship in the United States of America is a disgrace to everything we as a people have ever believed our country to be.