[This post was originally published on The Living Room Tumblr.]
Back on September 29, on the eve of the federal government shutting down, I announced a “shutdown” of my own: an “indefinite hiatus from Twitter“ (with the typical exceptions for Instagram, Tumblr, local event live-tweeting, and so forth). I had various reasons for this sudden decision — including, but not limited to, my desire to avoid the inevitable #DERPNADO of stupid arguments about the shutdown and debt-ceiling crisis with people who are Wrong On The Internet.
Of course, my tweeps were understandably skeptical of this announcement, given my track record of failed “hiatuses.” But looky here! According to my Twitter archive (which I downloaded during my Election Day “hiatus break”…heh), October 2013 was my least-active month on Twitter in almost four years, dating back to December 2009! That’s so long ago, it’s before Obamacare became law and destroyed freedom! 🙂
Throughout 2012 and 2013, I’ve been averaging nearly 3,000 tweets per month. But in October, I tweeted only 561 times… and 363 of those were during a single ~48-hour period early in the month, when Tropical Storm Karen was active — along with major thunderstorm, tornado, blizzard and wildfire threats elsewhere in the U.S. — so I took a “hiatus break” for the sake of my weather-blogging obligations to Pajamas Media. Outside of that two-day #SNOWFIREICANENADO, though, I only tweeted 198 times in October, which works out just over 6 tweets per day. For me, that’s unheard-of! 🙂 And it explains why my “word cloud” for the month (courtesy of Wordle) looks like this:
There are several notable things about this word cloud, outside of the obvious dominance of “Karen” and other words related to weather and geography. First and foremost is the amusing fact that I tweet so much about my own #hiatuses, “hiatus” is the fourth-largest word. That means, excluding words like “the,” as well as Twitter-specific common phrases such as “RT,” I tweeted the word “hiatus” in October more than any other word except “Karen,” “storm” and “tornado.” Heh. Looks like it beat “PANIC” and “DOOM” combined! (“PANIC” is near the bottom left — just left of “snow,” which is itself just left of “tornado.” It’s quite small. “DOOM” is even smaller, immediately to the left of mighty “Karen” and surrounded on its other three sides by “Halloween,” “weather” and “Iowa.”)
Another notable thing is how small the word “shutdown” is. (Did you even notice it? It’s vertical, in black text, on the lower right-ish side of the image. Look to the right of “now” and below “hurricane.”) If not for my #DERPNADO-avoiding Twitter hiatus, that word probably would have rivaled “Karen” in size — with “debt” and “ceiling” and “Tea” and “Party” and “Boehner” and “Obama” and “Cruz” and “Lee” close behind. “PANIC” and “DOOM” would have been much bigger as well!
Also notable is the prevalence of terms related to Becky’s and my local community of Stapleton: specifically, its official account (@StapletonDenver) and two hashtags: #lovestapleton and #StapletonHalloweenMadness, all on the left side. That’s due in part to my “Stapleton Civil War” satire, and in part to the craziness of Halloween in our ‘hood.
Apropos of which, one last thing: look closely at the area just to the right of “storm,” below “hiatus” and “threat” and “live,” above “mph.” Do you see the URL, http://t.co/wUMzuY4xXG? That’s the Twitter-shortened web address of my “channel” on Ustream, on which I broadcasted live video of trick-or-treating craziness on October 31. I tweeted out the URL repeatedly during the night, enough times that it made my list of most-used “words” for the entire month. Heh. (Alas, the URL of my time-lapse video of our 1,200+ trick-or-treaters just barely missed the word-cloud cut.)
P.S. Speaking of “Heh,” if you look very closely, you’ll see that Glenn Reynolds’s favorite word made the cut. It’s near the bottom right, colored red, in the area underneath “hiatus” and “just,” immediately below “like” (green) and “U.S” (orange). Heh. Indeed.
Anyway, that concludes today’s episode of pointless navel-gazing by yours truly. You may now return to your regularly scheduled lives, already in progress. And I will return to—or rather, continue—being on #hiatus. (With the usual exceptions. Like the tweet announcing this Tumblr post. Heh.)