There are some people on Twitter who still don’t follow me. I know! WTF? I am embarrassed because there is this one guy, @yonderboy who is an excellent twitterer. You know, funny, brief, mad. He is my new favourite. @andrewsayer used to be but then @lilylauren came along and although he lost his edge, he seems happier now. It’s nice. There is a dog and everything (@cassiedog) so you know, life goes on.
But @yonderboy? I know nothing about him other than everything that he has on the internet. We were already weird animals before the internet and now even more so. I believe he is an angel headed hipster with a burning something or other.
But wait, isn’t this kind of creepy and weird? Blogging about your favourite twitterer because they don’t follow you. Isn’t it mostly desperate and simply somehow wrong? If it was someone else perhaps, but as it is me, no. It is instead a kind of endearing, poignant and witty take on the whole twitter following/follower oeuvre. It isn’t twitterstalking even if it looks like it, because I am an artist.
Some might ask isn’t this just a shameless attempt to just get him to follow me? And the answer would be “No, because I am in fact, ashamed.”
I have in fact found it to be lonely surrounded by so many people, to be so popular (over 2000 followers now – hahahaha). Twitter is a different animal to every user. I of course want to use it for both feverish self promotion and surrounding myself with lovely people and we all laugh and have so much fun ahahaha i have friends i have friends. Can’t I do both? Of course I can. Should I derive any of my self worth from the quantity or quality of people who follow me? Of course not.
Copyright Lupis Yonderboy (in case you were wondering)
In my last twitter blog post I cleverly mentioned some of the cool Melbourne people who didn’t follow me in a sad and pathetic but also witty attempt to get them into my list of followers. Isn’t this just the same post again? No, this one has bacon in it. It sort of worked last time except for @yonderboy and also for @fulltimecasual who messaged me to say that he ALREADY followed me and wasn’t I a dickhead! And I said YES! And we laughed. That is how Twitter should be.
So it raises the broader question: Why doesn’t everybody follow everybody? No, that’s not it. Why don’t these people follow me? We all live in the same city and I am lovely. It couldn’t be simply that my twit stream is an unending cascade of inanities because I mean this is the internet and people should be used to that by now. It couldn’t be the constant self promotion because it is me who is doing it and I am enormously entertaining and A GENUINE SWEETY IN REAL TIME. Maybe it is because my cartoons are mostly behind a filthy paywall and I should be punished. This is probably fair enough, the paywall is an abomination (an abomination that pays the bills). But this is Late Capitalism and I am on the bus. So WTF? Perhaps it is the effortless sense of entitlement I project so seamlessly. No, I doubt it is any of those things because then it would be my fault ROFL no. So what can it be?
Perhaps it is wrong to wear my heart and other internal organs on my sleeve. I just want to be liked. Is it so wrong to want to use Twitter this way? No, of course not. And what about people who follow you and then stop like @timdunlop. What? Who is he anyway? Some kind of guy? At some point I traded popularity and promotion for credibility – somewhere, not sure where.
Which brings me to @yonderboy and why I would be concerned with this one guy not following me whoever or what he is.
Copyright Lupis Yonderboy again probably
I had a dream about that avatar with the dancing bear. Spooky! Like I said, how creepy would it be if it wasn’t me? Ha!
Maybe the problem is that I want it, I want the cool tweeps to like me and they can smell it on me! They smell the fear and the desire on me like a shark smells the blood on a surfer who before he went surfing was bitten by a dog that smelled fear on him and bit him because it smelled the fear! Maybe that is why. In that way Twitter is not unlike Primary School and you may be surprised to learn that I was a mildly odd and quite lonely child.
So I @replied to yonderboy “You don’t follow me” and he mocked me. It was funny (of course) but mocking. I am ok.
Copyright whoever um well I dunno
And he draws funny pictures and posts things like this.
And now, NOW I am bearing my soul telling of the sad loser event of how I was rejected on the internet (AGAIN) and people will read it and they will laugh at me and mock me and some will follow me and some will not and some will stop following me after they started and only the universe and they will know what on earth possessed them to do it. People will tell me it doesn’t matter and they will be wrong. I need to ask @yonderboy how he did that dancing bear guy animated gif as an avatar but I don’t want everyone else to know because everyone else will want one and then I won’t be special. I can get away with copying him because I am a cartoonist and it is post ironic or something but if people see me actually asking – that is weakness. And the sharks that smell the blood resulting from the bite from the dogs that smell the fear will come. What is becoming exceedingly clear is that I am over thinking it.
14 Comments
i can’t believe i mocked you, i feel so ashamed. well, i don’t, but i kinda feel ashamed for not feeling ashamed. that’s gotta count for something, yeah?
i followed you. i also signed up on this blog just so i could write a comment. intense, huh? like camping..
Still not making me want to join twitter (I would follow you of course FD), though it is amusing. In an absurdist kind of way.
Still waiting to find out what I should have done on ogulation day.
My only problem with Yonderboy is the continual movement makes me feel seasick. Not that I’ve ever been seasick. Somewhere, in the annals of Crikey I complained about an ad which was all movement. It literally made me queasy. All same Yonderboy.
PS: Twitter is surreal. Yesterday I realized I was , um, er..conversing with two squirrels, two cats, a dog who lives on the moon and a mime. And that is all with three days.
#within three days.
But this was funny though
I think you’re drinking waaaay too much coffee and its causing some severe anxiety for you… I’m glad he now following you back. Hopefully all the angst was worth it.
Strewth I stopped at yonderboy. If you’re out to be a twitter and Crikey guru you’re talking to diverse markets and that says – get a grip on your audience. Crikey and Yonderboy are poles apart so chirping on about n*p*ples and honey lesbian f**king while covering Steve Fielding and Christ you’ll turn us and you inside out. Spreading the Mr Dog scent is about critical thought. Are you up to it?
Oh pish tosh I’m not out to be any kind of guru. Yonderboy is an acquired taste. Imagine if your daughter brought home a bikie or a young liberal. Or a cartoonist! ewwww
I don’t really get the fuss about @yonderboy. As far as I can see, his tweets fall into two categories, generally:
1. NSFW links. Whatevs.
2. variations on the theme “I’m fucken (sic) awesome”
Maybe I’m just scared by the tweets where he says “if you cross me/annoy me/undermine me I will bash the shit out of you”.
Not very angel-headed hipster to me. But I’m an old set-in-my-ways kind of guy, so maybe I don’t know what an “angel-headed hipster” is.
Aaagh! FD I’m back in my box with fervent hopes for you wrapped in a doggy bag. I thought cartoonists were the milk of human kindness unlike Liberals and I’m still out on bikies and children as well as the Janette of a day t-shirt. You bark big time!
Me either Luke. And if you read them all in a lump it does look really weird. But Twitter is not for lumping, it is for snatching as it hurtles past. And someone who tweets three funny things in a row on Twitter can be considered a comic genius.
the craziest thing is, all my tweets are done months in advance, and fed into a giant super computer that calculates which tweet would have maximum effectiveness from situation to situation. i find it interesting how tweets i wrote back when i was a child finally gain topicality when tweeted in today’s modern age.
@luke here’s a nice picture of a bunny to make up for how fucken awesome i am..
http://is.gd/ovuA
@christine i has something really insight full to say – i think it may have been agreeing with you, but i was distracted by thoughts of nipples. mmmm..
but seriously folks, first dog is me. we’re the same person. think about.
yeah, i thought about it. couldn’t make it stick. have the suspicion it’s true though..
It is true. We are yonderboy, or are we? My new favourite is @ninjameoba. He is funny like @yonderboy but without the pictures of ladies with no clothes on.