Twitter and blogger

I have been playing around with twitter for a while, and it's slowly growing on me. The conversations, the quick messages back and forth, the chance to see what's going on with friends: it's nice. What I can't do is reconciliate that with blogger. I will remove the twitter window from the blog because of that.

When I put the twitter window in, I was planning to use it to talk about Age of Conan experiences. Then I moved from Umeå and back to the rather crappy desk-top computer I still use at the college in Volda (no way am I even going to try to put it on the lap-top), and I haven't been able to play since June. I am supposed to get a new desk-top machine, but that was in August, and now it's November. Months of play-time lost, and months of having to rethink the twitter window.

I find that by displaying twitter to my blog, I show the short end of conversations. It feel silly, and also pretty intrusive as it displays my responses to other people, in a context where they do not talk to me. It's a break of the conventions of polite conversation, which is along the same line as hearing only one half of a phone conversation. You hear/see responses that indicate and reveal intimate information about the other party, while the other party is not there and is not even aware of in which context their information is revealed. It has overtones of gossip, outing and betrayal, which may be a reason why some find it so incredibly offensive to listen to cell-phone conversations in public places where they can't escape, like busses and trains.

Anyway, I don't want to be the one who shouts out intimate information about friends in the public square, while they aren't there. So down it goes, that twitter window. Not that I have been all that active in it, anyway.

Living in Hyboria

I am playing around with a couple of things now. First, I decided to try twitter, and made a profile there. I have to admit I fail to see the intense popular demand for details about what happens RIGHT NOW in my life. OK, I am occasionally an attention whore, but really - one thing is posting a good recipe and some angsty confessions here and there, but a minute-for-minute update on them is a little too far even for me.

What I do think is fun though, is reading about other people's experiences in different types of projects, such as work at or around conferences, a quest to reach a deadline, experiments with food, more general topics which is about something slightly beyond their immediate self. Subjective, but a subjective I can relate to without feeling we should be in a committed relationship.

Hence, I have for the time being decided to devote my twittering not to what happens here (it's same old same old anyway: I get up in the morning, eat, go to work, work, occasionally remember lunch, shop, make dinner, go for a walk or do some pilates, read, play games, call the family, fiddle with pictures on flickr or just on the computer, go to bed, rinse and repeat) but to what happens in Hyboria. So far I have been treated to a solid dose of genderconscious outrage, only tempered by extreme annoyance with the game performance. I am only at level 5 though - I know from WoW that I didn't really start liking it until around level 30. And I didn't understand anything about what was going on until level 50. Yeah, I am a little slow.

Anyway: I have put in a sidebar here, a little widget, that posts my twittering. I am by the way quite happy with the options of Blogger, now that I have finally gotten around to using them. Once over the hurdle of updating and moving my links from the old template to the new, I have become a fan of the options in the new template. I may get a little over enthusiastic for a while, but bear with me.

Tweet, tweet

I am far behind the curve, and slacking, obviously... Still, I am starting to see how it can be fun. What am I up to? Twittering, of course, the not-so-new craze of long-distance gossiping.

With my back protesting any posts that take more than 5 minutes, Twitter is perfect: I get 140 keystrokes to play with, to let the world know what I do, and I don't have to sit around reading long blogposts. Restrictions give freedom, and all that.

But already I am starting to wonder if there are "Twitter stories" out there, like the-phone-book, where all stories had to fit the sms format.

If there are none, we could make them. Collaborative twitter collections, each message an individual story, but each story connected to what happened before, somehow.