The only tweetstorms worth saving
Most tweetstorms are perfectly harmless, some are downright satisfying, and only a few make us seriously consider gouging out our own eyes. But — how shall I put this? — there is a reason most of them were not written in a form that encourages long preservation of the entire thing. Even the better Twitter threads are very much of the moment. They were not built to last. Nor should they have been.
Luckily, there are exceptions. Here are some of the tweetstorms/multiperson twitter threads that Kottke readers voted to include on the World Wide Web’s space ark.
Please Stop Roasting My Goddamned Shoes. Comedian Jon Hendren found a pair of red Vans with a leopard print lining in the back of his closet. Did his fellow comedian friends let this pass without comment? No, they most certainly did not.
If you’ve never read “Please Stop Roasting My Goddamn Shoes,” buckle up. If you love it, check out its best rival/nearest successor, @spookperson’s “my dude looks like the babadook” thread roasting Roger Stone.
The Two Mayors. The climax of Dan Sinker’s epic story of @MayorEmanuel, an alternate-universe version of then-candidate Rahm Emanuel and unabashed love letter to the city of Chicago. This is actually the day before the election, where alt-Rahm meets then-Mayor Daley, learns that he isn’t the only Rahm Emanuel in this universe, and that Chicago’s mayor has cosmic responsibilities never hinted at in public. This twitter thread, played out over months, eventually became a terrific book.
@MayorEmanuel’s final official tweets also deserve to be saved, so here they are:
I can see a thousand fucking skylines, and they are all as motherfucking glorious as the first, and I can feel the touch of my friends.
— Rahm Emanuel (@MayorEmanuel) February 24, 2011
And now all I can hear is that music, and suddenly everything just fucking…
— Rahm Emanuel (@MayorEmanuel) February 24, 2011
“A Wild Weekend In Florida,” or “Zola’s Story,” by Aziah King It’s never been entirely clear exactly how much of any of this really happened, but the microserialized true-crime story was and is a bona fide phenomenon. “A Wild Weekend” also uses breaks between tweets better than any Twitter story I’ve ever read — most tweets are perfectly self-contained, but a few of them are used to build suspense or cut from one moment to the next to great effect.
This tweetstorm has a Goodreads entry. It was optioned for a movie. That’s some real game theory.
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