So as many of my readership found out (all three of you), I’ve broken down and joined Twitter. I explained my break down to bdotdub thusly:

even curmudgeons need to experience life outside the cave every once in a while. we’ll see how it goes. remember: the sun burns.1

That’s not the whole story. I realized that I’m losing touch with a lot of my friends, mostly due to my hectic schedule, somewhat due to being selfish, and a little because I don’t have an adequate mechanism to shoot random ideas at people and get some back. While I think the idea of writing a less-than-140-character message expressing a random idea that probably no one will care about is a useless one, the idea of having a friend read my thought and think about that idea, having implicitly just communicated with me, is not a bad one. I get the same in receipt.

That, and it takes little effort to either send or receive, so the addition of it to my day is non-intrusive.

I’m still on the fence on calling them “tweets” though. I do hate that they’ve corrupted the use of ‘#’ to indicate a topic to which to send “tweets”. I hope that ‘#’ will never leave my mind as the IRC chat room symbol.

Alas, if you’d care to, you can now follow me at minusnine on Twitter.


  1. Yes, thanks to my core classes at Columbia, I still reference Plato’s The Allegory of the Cave. ↩︎