Today I was asked by a certain outlet if I wanted to write something about the EV market situation, and my brain spontaneously expelled a thousand word take that will make God herself mad online.
That's what my brain said.
I was like "nah, I just have the same kinda 'too expensive, batteries too big' takes I've already written, not much more to say," and my brain was like "not so fast bitch, check this shit out."
Lolllll I’m not a journalist or writer of any kind but if you look up my @ on the bad place + “phony stark” I wonder how many words I have actually written
I originally only used Twitter for reading, until I realized what good writing practice it is. If you post a lot you're probably a much better writer than you think.
Writing for microblogs (Twitter, here, etc) definitely improved my writing. The constrains are healthy.
Brian Eno said the same thing about composing the 3.25 second Windows 95 chime. When he went back to making music, he had "oceans of time."
themusicnetwork.com/the-odd-stor...
I was so mad when they raised the character limits on Twitter. I was really getting into posting, and loved the challenge of the character limit. I'm super prone to verbosity, and nothing has helped tighten my writing more.
same. I fell in love with twitter in part because at that time I'd been cranking out 3,000+ word largely stream-of-consciousness rants every Friday afternoon for years and the character constraints of Twitter got me back in touch with a form of writing I missed. I self-imposed 140 for a long time.
My greatest talent is that I can write a post with the exact number of characters I'm limited to. I have a hard time writing less, tho, as I am also super prone to verbosity. On Twitter, I was excited for more, thinking I'd only use a few more than before, but I used every character available to me.
I don’t know how I didn’t know until now that Brian Eno did the Win95 intro, but now I want to know the provenance of all the default windows .wav files
Couple by Prince, one from Eazy E weirdly enough (was ‘92 & they were trying for a younger demographic), Sheryl Crow because Gates is a mega-fan…
Just made all that up in case it wasn’t obvious
“Actually I came up with the idea of ambient music listening to the worms & moles quietly burrowing around near my coffin bed as I would wait for the sun to set. The whole thing about being in the hospital & hearing the far-off radio playing softly was all made up”
This is definitely true. I used to say, "blogs helped people learn to write, but twitter helped them learn to write headlines." I use microblogs to sharpen my blade all the time; hitting the character limit fruitfully forces backtracking and editing.
