What is best in life? Hypocrisy about Twitter!

A while back, I made a big song and dance about never joining Twitter, because my inner Guy Gardner would be painfully exposed for all the world to see, and because there was enough white noise in my life.

But then I had to work over Christmas and it was so fucking boring I had to do something, so I flip-flopped like the hypocritical fool I always am and set up a Twitter account.

So far I just use it for lurking about and following a whole bunch of people, and all I post is favourite comic panels and movie stills. But it has been unexpectedly helpful in two different ways.

Firstly, it's invaluable for judging people, especially the ones you admire, and find the real dicks, because they can't help themselves. In the first couple of days, a couple of local writers I had followed said some balls-out stupid and mean things about somebody I knew and liked in real life, over petty political ideology, so all that respect vanished like a fart in the wind.

(Which is a horrible thing to do, silently judging people by their tweeting, but I'm not going to attack them for it. I'm just going to ignore them. I've dealt with enough dickheads in my life. I don't need any more.)

And the other thing that has proven hugely invaluable to seeing big, breaking news of all sorts flash across the world, which is great for my day job as an online news editor. You still have to verify it, and check it, and fucking check it again before you go for it, but it gives you a terrific heads-up. I beat almost all of immediate competition at getting the Bowie news up, almost entirely due to a couple of despairing moans that Sean T Collins tweeted, and confirmed it with Duncan Jones' sad, moving message.

(Which is another horrible thing to do, associating the passing of a brilliant creature like Bowie with the rush of breaking news, and I always feel bad about getting excited by the death of a simply outstanding human being, but I'm a horrible person. I'm a breaking news journalist, man. We're all scum.)

I'm about five years too late to discover all this, and I'm making the kind of startling observations that were first raised a long time ago, but coming in late gives a whole new perspective, and peoples' Twitter personas have evolved and grown and changed in the past few years. It's still noisy as shit, but it's been a bit too quiet lately anyway.