Another “journal” dedicated to the criticism (not really) and recognition of excellence in tweeting.

TWEETUS ILLUMINATIO MEA, TWEETAMS EST LITTERAE

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@georgelazenby by name

Genre: ol’ man meta

The collection of tweets published by ‘name’ stands more as a philosophy of existence in an absurd world than as literature. According to name, “self-confidence is at best choosing not to look at the fact that people are idiots for believing in you” – a theory that may or may not be reflected by his 120/10,0000+ ratio. What’s more, name appears to possess a certain admiration of those mired in the pedestrian. “finally envy people who care about drapes” he tweets. “watch paris texas in an industrial freezer,” he advises, as though urging oneself to make meaning via pop cultural moors can spontaneously ground a man in the here and now. Considering the plight of Sisyphus, it would be easy for a tweeter with name’s wisdom to write off existence as wholly absurd and without hope. Alternately, name puts up a brave front in the face of the existential. “Who the fuck are you to know what you are?” he asks. “get a laser pointer—we gonna go back to fuck with emily dickinson” he encourages. Still, given the fact that death is inevitable (and that unless you are DJ AM or tree_bro, one’s followers will inevitably unfollow) we sense a deep anxiety.

@nytyrant by New York Tyrant

Genre: magical fatism

Hitching your whole star to an entity as fleeting as a tweet is a bad idea. The Tyrant embodies this knowledge, appearing confident enough in his own voice to experiment with a range of tonal modes. He explores the romantic (“I’d understand if I saw someone at the races, jacking it to death almost, since the energy and horsemuscles and speed are essentially porn.”), the literary (“Because I could not stop for Hardee’s The drive thru was for me The Mustang held but just ourselves and a quarter bag of weed.”), ardent fatmiration, and even an occasional promotional (“@lesmistons @nytimes @newyorker @nypost @Nymag OUR FONT IS EMOJI SYRINGES AND GUNS”). When one visualizes The Tyrant on deck, one sees the sillhouette of a man flicking tweets off his fingers like Nerds candy into a night sky. Suddenly, with a start, our man grows bored and goes on to do something else entirely, like snort Pop Rocks, without worrying about retweets, faves, unfollows. Perhaps it is naïve of the editors to believe a human so impervious to judgment exists (we do know The Tyrant weighs twitter with a certain degree of gravitas, as he has been known to tell writers [paraphrase] “love the tweets but your work is shit”). Still, let’s choose to believe in something. Everybody needs a hero.

@bleachedfawn by calyptra

Genre: neo-feelism

Calyptra’s haunting and heartbreaking tweets unfold from inside a porcelain dollhouse with a roof of jet black hair and Elliot Smith’s acne scars on the façade self-cutting itself under a buzzing moth trap and subsisting on one semen-laced cupcake per day only to purge the cupcake later through bleeding gums and vibrating teeth drunk on bleach and daddy’s milk vomiting vomiting onto the foot of a high school cheerleader who is getting very badly fingered by a stolen emo boy with acne scars that match the dollyhouse’s façade and vines for ribs and a heart filled with small dead things and three candles lit in solemn girly vigil for him, which he is too stoned and Haloed out and busy tweeting to notice.

@hologramrainbow by ∆STR♡L ∆SHLEY

genre: the light side of the dark side of the moon

They say if you remember 2012 you weren’t there. But Astrol Ashley was there with an iPhone, politely accepting LSD and transforming Canada and cyberspace into a day-glo convever belt. Although she can’t resist CAPITAL LETTERS, Ashley has conducted a dissertation in ego-removal, with tweets depicting explorations in non-duality, affirmations, energetic spheres, enlightenment, psychic illusions and the moon. “Shout out to everyone smoking weed right now having a panic attack. You’re not alone,” she tweets, cementing her role as a contemporary Wavy Gravy figure–the tweeter you want tweeting you off the ledge after you’ve eaten the brown acid. What’s more, Ashley will just as fluidly give “shout outs” to dolphins, sequoias and star seeds as she will to Skrillex and Drake, depicting a multivalent, interdisciplinary approach. With a penchant for the utopian subtweet (“i like your vibes” “you’re a hurricane, nice to meet you” “I am running through a field with you and the Sun is picking us up”) Ashley has set her controls for the heart of abundance. And abundant she is—often churning out what feels like 6 billion tweets per day.

@crispinbest by crispin best

Genre: the cosmic jester

feel so pumped every time i figure out a way to give even less of a shit

my achilles dick

birthday greetings from the post apocalypse we all deserve

whitey’s on mars

only god can juggle me

These are some original tweets from one of Britain’s trillest young madcaps, crispin best, blessed since infancy with little anxiety of influence as well as the ability to deconstruct joy to its draziest, most essential fragments. In Brave New World, fellow Brit Aldous Huxley claims “the right to be unhappy” as well as “the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what might happen tomorrow…” Best’s tweets challenge and shift these seemingly inalienable rights, wherein misery is no longer a plausible identity. Rather, his innovative and far-galactic-reaching tweets contend that misery is, in itself, merely performative and that identity is really not worth worrying about.

@lorianlong by lorian long

Genre: out on bail fresh outta jail california dreamin soon as i step on the scene i’m hearin hoochies screamin

Long’s tweets have gone in and out of lockdown so many times that the twitter bird doubles as a parole officer. In what is often described as a male-dominated internet tradition, here now are the essentials — brought out of obscurity and into the light of contemporary analysis. This collection encompasses many still-unsolved feminist problems, including: finding a room of one’s own (“aggressively shucking corn while listening to my new roommate fuck 4 people in her ‘den of peace’”), woman’s desire to control her body (“the saddest flesh of all is when you wave goodbye to someone and your tricep never stops”), sexual identity (“spent ~10 minutes trying to decide if it’s ‘tragic’ ‘romantic’ or ‘tacky’ that current sex partner/bff has same infinite jest tattoo as me”), reclaiming spirituality within a patriarchal framework (“don’t talk to me about ‘the void’ unless you know what it’s like to have 2 cocks in every orifice”), deconstructing the nuclear family (“home is where i can smell my mother menstruating”), economic independence (“if i hadn’t had an abortion 3 years ago i’d have a 3 year old who couldn’t buy me anything anyway”) and the search for selfhood (“when my ex said ‘all women are flowers waiting for me to pluck them,’ i ate a heaping pile of lentils and told him to fuck me in the ass”). Withstanding both contextual and practical criticism, Long’s tweets illustrate that the natural aptitudes of women do in fact differ from those of men…and are way more rad.

@postcrunk by lord crunkington III

Genre: the revolution will be favorited

lord crunkington III makes signifying systems his bitches and meganarratives his hoes, disseminating multiple connotations within every tweet and dwelling in the realms of endless differing and infinite semantic play. “i am in a relationship with america and it’s complicated” he tweets, juxtaposing the question of nationalism with the annoyingness of facebook. “sext: that hegemonic rule and overarching power structure of systematic oppression really brings out the color in your eyes ;)” he tweets, deconstructing the meme of the sext through the lens of dialectical critique. He takes down the cops (“police askin me questions and i’m like ‘bitch, this ain’t formspring’”), the hair care industry (“RAP GAME WHITE BEAUTY STANDARD”) and spiritual materialism (“she in the namaste bookshop with the louis vuitton bag and the prada shades buyin an om shot glass”). While Anonymous, Black Mask and Time’s Up are well-traversed in the themes expressed herein, this feed is not written expressly for them. Rather, lord crunkington III is all-inclusive (“there’s a paradigm shift in my pants and everyone’s invited”). If they are to survive, it is the 99% who should be reading lord crunkington III. Here is a feed that seeks not only to fuck with the world but to change it.

@pompadoured by Gene Morgan

Genre: first-wave Dadism

Before the trope of “Dad” became a thing (and it definitely is a thing, as typified by accounts like @coffee_dad), Gene Morgan–web master/publisher of a myopic, self-referential, circle-jerking lit blog called htmlgiant–was daddy of dadcore. Morgan has been listening to Bone Thugs in the parking lot of the Montessouri school since before you knew what favstar was. What’s more, Morgan’s tweets show that being a human—even a male human— means not only embracing your fucked up relationship with food (“About to eat some casserole and get my homicide on”) and having a fucked up relationship with your body (“Monster Energy drink that comes as a powder and is delivered with the “awesome power” of an electric green spoon and needle.”), it also means finding joy. This is a feed for anyone who has ever stood at the intersection of chicken fingers and Gatorade and wept like a baby.