A lot of my tweets are from when I’m half asleep or drunk or something. In real life, if you say things like, “A long time ago a dog stood up on two legs and got sad and that’s where humans came from,” people kind of dismiss it, or they’re like, “Uh, let’s not talk about this.” There’s not really a point in any conversation to insert that thought, but on Twitter you can just say these little tiny things that don’t have to have any context or introduction. They can just stand alone.
Our Twitter account, @Chicago_Reader, has around 42,700 followers, who use it to learn about egregious mayoral overreaching, among other things. A 22-year-old Missouri transplant who tells me she doesn’t get out much has 11,000 people following her account, @aRealLiveGhost. They learn about the best ways to miss a loved one or how to reimagine awkward social interactions through cute and wise animals. If there were more people like Kimmy Walters, maybe we’d have fewer TIF problems and more GIF problems—and that’s a good problem to have. —Asher Klein
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People have a lot of different names for the Twitter community I belong to. They used to call it Twet Crew. Now it’s Weird Twitter. I don’t really like any of the names because it’s not like we’re a definable group of people. It’s just people on Twitter saying what they want. I actually met @dry_hugs in New York, and we seem really different. @rare_basement uses Twitter in a really different way than, like, @famouscrab. And @dril does not use Twitter in the same way at all. At least one person thought I was @UtilityLimb. I’ve been called the “more accessible” @utilitylimb because I reply to people.
Twitter is superpoetic, to me. I don’t know how you could say that some people’s tweets are not poetry. @UtilityLimb’s feed is poetry—you can’t really argue with me about that! It’s apocalyptic poetry; it’s so cool. @UtilityLimb (RIP—he doesn’t tweet anymore), @dril, and accounts like that, they inhabit this world where there’s just death and cops everywhere.
At first it was weird because I saw him at the airport and I had only seen him in Skype and in pictures. When I ran up to him—he actually tweeted this—the first thing he said was, “You have hands!” It felt real all of a sudden. I mean, it felt body-real.
