Bleeding Neon

I’ve been using Twitter for about a year now. When I was first turned on to it, likely by Jason Feinberg, who runs a successful music marketing company (so he should know what’s useful) I didn’t really “get it.” Much like other new users, the novelty of posting and following short non sequitur bursts didn’t make much sense to me. I’m someone who has trouble editing articles to less than 500 words, let alone encapsulating thoughts in 140-character bubbles.

Of course, here we are, 14,000+ tweets and 1000+ followers later, so I guess I figured it out. The thing with Twitter is that it can be whatever you want it to be. Unlike Facebook or blogs or YouTube, Twitter is less a social media service than it is a communications tool, much like phones, fax machines and e-mail. If you want to broadcast one-way messages, you can do it. If you want to engage in conversations, you can do it. If you want to build a community, you can. If you want to link the heck out of the interwebs — well, you get the picture.

I take a multi-part approach to Twitter. I use it to stay in touch with friends, keep up with industries I follow, distract myself when needed, and most importantly, build a community with which I can share my various creative projects without feeling like I’m spamming anyone. It’s for this reason I haven’t followed a million people nor do I try to force myself on new followers.

I’ve run into a wall, recently, however. It feels like, as Twitter grows and so do all of our follower/following counts, there’s becoming too much static in the signal. For most of the people I follow, this doesn’t seem to affect the effectiveness of their communications, for one key reason that I can never duplicate: They are singularly focused Twitter personalities.

Let me explain: Chris Sims, one of the web’s most popular comic bloggers and geek comedy writers, has a very strong following on Twitter as he does everywhere else. But that’s because, even though he dips into comic writing and satirical blogging, everything he does is focused on geek culture. So most of his followers are likely part of that geek culture and therefore dig everything he tweets.

I, on the other hand, depending on which hour of the day you catch me at, play drums in a rock band, write/draw comics, report on music for multiple magazines, cover art for a website, develop web content and social media for companies and am generally regarded as a Las Vegas cultural historian and dude-about-town. And about all of these things I blog, tweet, etc. That means the people who follow me as a cartoonist don’t likely give a damn about the closing of an art gallery in downtown Las Vegas, and concurrently, the Las Vegans who follow me for links, news and commentary on issues related to Sin City may not be into the latest comic from Pop! Goes the Icon. And on it goes.

So even though 1,000+ people follow me on Twitter, I can feel the disconnect between their disparate groups. Now, I have experimented with running multiple Twitter accounts in the past. I set one up for Pop! Goes the Icon early on in my Twitter use. But I found that I was merely duplicating (though not exactly) not only the content of tweets on both accounts, but also the follower base as well. Plus, this was just after I collapsed all of my divergent blogs into one (this one!), and splitting identities on Twitter is hard, especially back then when it was so personality-driven.

So sure, I could set up an account for my band, an account for PGTI, an account for my writing (@BleedingNeon, anyone?) and a personal one for randomness, but I’ve found in best practices, people want to connect with people. They want to identify with someone. They want to connect with someone. And I really can’t imagine maintaining multiple accounts again. It’s hard enough just to manage all of the social media initiatives tied into the music and comics and journalism and external clients and OMG I KNOW RIGHT?

I’m not certain I have a solution — this was really just a mind-dump here, after having a revelation about the interest split amongst my followers. But I do feel that between the changes made to Facebook’s UI (user interface for you non-techies) and the increasing dissonance on Twitter, the whole reason for me being on either in the first place (purely out of networking necessity) is being diminished daily. As communications tools, they still work (I’ve gotten at least five or six gigs I would have otherwise missed through Twitter and Facebook the last year or so), but I wonder for how long.

I know I neither am nor look that old, but sometimes, I’m made to feel like it. And an assignment I fulfilled for the Las Vegas Weekly a few weeks ago was one of those times.

I had to cover the CD release party for a young pop-punk-metal band, A Smile From the Trenches, at The Farm, one of Las Vegas’ only all-ages music venues. It was the Thursday before Nevada Day, the day our fine state celebrates its statehood — and it happens to be Oct. 31, so basically, state workers and students get off every year for Halloween. So The Farm saw a decent number of teens for a weeknight, a few hundred by my estimate. Good news for the local music scene, right? Yes. But …

Let me put this into perspective: I am 33 years old. I do not wear skinny jeans. I have significant gray in my beard. I don’t smoke. And I don’t care much for screamo bands whose names do not start and end with “Thursday.” So there I was, either stuck in a room surrounded by kids more than half my age listening to loud, screamy bands, or stuck outside surrounded by underage smokers, being very careful not to look even sideways toward a female patron for fear I’d look like a pedophile. Or more likely, feel like it. And this being an all-ages venue, there was NO LIQUOR IN SIGHT.

The article turned out all right, I think, and the guys from both A Smile From the Trenches and its record label, DC Hardcore, were very nice and accommodating. And the band was definitely far less terrible than its predecessors that night. But in all, it’s not a situation I’d like to repeat anytime soon. Fellow slightly-worn journalist Dave Surrat was there that night to write about the venue itself for the CityLife, and if not for his not-so-young presence and that of promoter pal John “Ducky” Slaughter, I’d likely have gone fully insane.

But I think this can all be summed up by my tweets from that night:

• The Farm has no signage but easy to find: Parking lot full of teens. Ugh.
• has never felt as old as I do at this all-ages venue right now. Oh the things I do for music journalism.
• is finishing my Corona and then heading back to the emo teen hell. Also, I lost $5 at video poker. Think @lasvegasweekly will cover that?
• Either this screamo band has six members or they just have a young girl who appears to play keyboards but really’s just there to look cute.
• Good news: The kids still mosh. Kind of.
• is standing next to the modern equivalent of rock hoes. The bands change but the hoes stay the same.
• Why yes, Virginia, I am watching a screamo band cover Katy Perry’s “Hot & Cold.” Why do you ask?

As I may have mentioned recently on this blog thing, I recently moved into a new house. New to Sara and I, not new to the world. But it may have well been. It was completely remodeled by the previous-previous owner, and never occupied by the guy from whom we bought it.

Anyway, we’re not here to talk Better Homes & Gardens stuff. And I’m sure I’ll bitch later about pests, plumbing, pools and other homeowner annoyances starting with the letter “P.” We’re here to talk about something much more pertinent, something that’s close to my heart, something upon which I rely for my very subsistence:

The internet. Specifically, my lack of connection to it.

The last two weeks have tested my patience. I mean, really tested it. Like a giant final exam for which I didn’t have any time to study. Because I know this will turn into a disorganized ramble, allow me to jump to bullet points here:

Twitter: OK, if you’re a Twitter user, a Facebook user who reads Twitter-fed status updates or someone who reads tech news on a regular basis, then you probably know Twitter has been having some serious issues the last week. The site suffered what’s known as a denial-of-service attack last week, which basically means hackers flooded the site with so many requests it overloaded the servers, shutting Twitter down for about two hours. That’s fine. It happens. But after the site came back up, and I saw everyone else’s tweets streaming through the public timeline, I could not update my feed. Not from the web. Not via text. Not through my Twitter app on my Blackjack II. Nothing. It was a very strange feeling, akin to digital paralysis, where I could see and hear everything going on but not speak, move or otherwise respond or take action. Twitter is a free service, though, so I cannot fully complain, but my frustration was compounded by …

Cox Communications: Honestly, even Cox I can only be superficially mad at. We had high-speed internet via Cox at our previous house, so logically, we decided to transfer the account over to the new house. Easy, right? Sure … except that I spent half the day two Saturdays ago waiting for the installation guy to come out, he went and ran coaxial cable across a room to get everything in the right place, went to test the signal and … then realized our house was not connected to Cox’s lines. At all. And never had been. Oh, sure, the house itself was wired for four cable outlets. But they were connected to nothing. And neither have been the five surrounding houses on our street, which is a grouping of custom lots outside of any development or homeowners association. Cox was supposed to send out a team to survey the area and see what they could do, but after a week I said “f*ck it,” told Sara to cancel that nonsense, and I called up the local telecom company, through which I’d enjoyed high-speed internet access for a few years prior …

Embarq: Man. I thought this would solve at least one of my problems. I called Embarq last Thursday, my fifth day with no web access at home and the same day Twitter went kablooey. I called hoping for a quick solution, but the fastest they could activate our service was Monday. Monday. Mind you, I had two article deadlines that weekend plus Friday’s Utopian comic to post. But I was fine with waiting, as I figured I could just do the free WiFi thing at a coffee shop to get done what needed to be done, and turn in my stories on Monday when everything was back up and running. In the interim, I had wireless internet access on my smartphone, right? Um …

AT&T: I have a web-enabled, fancy-ass smartphone for specific reasons: Mobile access to the internet. To my e-mails. To Twitter. I pay a good chunk of change each month for unlimited data. I’ve been with AT&T for years, mainly because I was with Cingular for years when AT&T took over the company. I’ve had no problems whatsoever in the interim. Until last week. Until I couldn’t get network access, not even 50 percent of the time, maybe more like 25 percent. That’s unacceptable. At one point on Friday, I was ready to pull my hair out (chest hair, I guess): I couldn’t update Twitter. I couldn’t access the internet via my phone or at home. And then I went to ReJAVAnate, a groovy little indie coffee shop around the corner from my new house with free WiFi, and … my laptop would not connect to their network. It took me about an hour (and an iced decaf mocha) to figure out what the hell was wrong with my connection settings. But I finally did get online, updated the webcomic, did what research needed to be done, and went home, satisfied that something was happening. All I had to do was wait until Monday, and everything would be all right …

Except that Embarq blew it. On Monday, I plugged in my DSL modem, plugged in my wireless router, and … got reintroduced to internet speeds I haven’t experienced since I was on Netcom dial-up back in 1998. I am (allegedly) paying for the 3.0 Mbps DSL plan. I can’t get downloads faster than about .5 Mbps. Uploads, about a quarter of that. Youtube videos won’t load; Hulu just laughs at me. Even loading ONE basic jpg image either takes 10 minutes or doesn’t open at all. What. The. Hell.

That is where I’m at.  This morning, AT&T — after one customer service call and a long chat session yesterday explaining that at least 10 of my friends on Twitter were complaining about outages in the Vegas area all week as well — allegedly pinpointed and resolved what they finally found was a network issue on their end. Twitter has been — despite the usual burps — back up and allowing me to tweet to my heart’s content. Cox has been given its marching papers. Dish is coming out to install its equipment on Friday instead, and let’s pray that doesn’t get borked as well. And I have an e-mail into Embarq, which will be followed by a phone call here pretty soon. After I finish typing this rant.

Seriously. I can’t win.

Two fists beat as one

The Fist came out of hiding last night for Twestival at Revolution Lounge, as discussed in length yesterday. There was a great turnout, with many blue “tweetinis” consumed and plenty of anonymous Twitter-folk converted into real, live people. No word yet on whether or not the 175-plus Twestivals taking place around the world raised $1 million for charity: water, but I’m pretty sure we had $1 million worth of fun, either way.

I shot some video last night of both Revolution and a new Latin-themed nightclub at the Rio, ND’s Fuego, but a) the video’s not that great and b) I haven’t had time to edit it anyway, as I’m in deadline hell, so I’ll just leave you with this report from KLAS-TV Channel 8 anchor Dave Courvoisier, who’s also very active in the Twitter and blogging community:

“Tweet. Meet. Give.”

That’s the tagline for Twestival, a charity event organized by the Twitter community taking place in more than 175 cities around the globe today. The goal is to raise at least $1 million for charity: water, a non-profit organization working to bring clean and safe drinking water to people in developing nations.

The Las Vegas event kicks off at 7 p.m. at the Beatles Revolution Lounge inside the Mirage resort on the Las Vegas Strip. Pre-registration for the event has closed, but tickets can be purchased at the door by cash only. All proceeds benefit charity: water, and in addition to the cool people, sexy atmosphere and free “Tweetinis” going around, there are some cool raffle prizes if you cough up a little more than the $20 standard donation, including bottles and tables at Light Group nightclubs, personalized, limited-edition cupcakes from Retro Bakery and gift cards from Dunkin’ Donuts.

It’s all for a great cause, it’ll be interesting to meet the faces behind those mysterious tweets, and awesome people such as KLAS-TV’s Dave Courvoisier, CineVegas’ Roger Erik Tinch and, of course, me, will be there.

charity: water for Twestival from charity: water on Vimeo.