The Twitter Redemption (or, don’t forget to dance)

August 7, 2008

I’ve never really understood the draw of Twitter. Due to the sheer weight of (social) media coverage I’ve tried a few times to get interested, but each time I do I find that all I end up getting out of it is yet another source of noise. Now, to be fair to Twitter, when I do give it a try it is entirely as a lurker – I’ve only made one tweet, to test out my account, and I think it was “Um…” Anyway, the other day I cycled back to another “give it another whirl” phase and turned on the Twitter radio for a few days and out of all the babbling popped this:

“There was a hoax. A dreadful hoax. They made you miss everything.” http://tinyurl.com/3dfor8

02:18 PM August 05, 2008 from web

Jeff Atwood

Which made it all worthwhile. Twitter, one of the more inane and bizarre information disco balls in this over-connected digital world of ours, bounced a url through Jeff Atwood’s brain and flashed something wonderful in my eye. This wonderful thing was a YouTube video – a short animation of an Alan Watts talk by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of South Park. Whatever you may think of South Park, Alan Watts is brilliant, and the animation was perfectly done, a very pleasant combination. There is a collection of three of Alan Watts talks produced by the same team here. If you’ve never listened to Alan Watts, I highly recommend downloading a few of his talks (any torrent search will do) for a much needed, very refreshing Eastern view of the world from a charismatic Western mind.