Twitter

Dear Twitter,

I resisted Twitter for a long time, mostly because I tend to be skeptical of things that are popular on general principal. I usually come around, and ultimately become such a devoted fan that when the majority moves on to the next new thing I remain a loyal fan. So, I've finally come around to Twitter, and I love it. Not only do I love Twitter but there are some other things that I'm now a fan of that I might not be were it not for Twitter.

First, there are podcasts in general and SModcast in particular. Of course, I've been a fan of Kevin Smith for 15 years and have even been intermittently active on the boards at View Askew. So, naturally, I was aware of SModcast, but I wasn't really a podcast listener so I didn't start listening until I started following Kevin Smith on Twitter (@ThatKevinSmith) and his tweets about SModcast peaked my curiosity. Very shortly after I started listening to SModcast two of my friends launched podcasts as well (@pitchersnpoets, and @Milk_of_Minutia) and now I'm actively seeking out new podcasts to listen to (in addition to these three).

Josh Lawson I also would probably not be a fan of (yet) if not for Twitter. I haven't really seen anything he's done. I keep meaning to watch Spaced, but I haven't yet. I follow him on Twitter though (because of @Alyssa_Milano and the Twitter phenomenon Follow Friday) and his Twitter feed is often hilarious. I feel a little wrong being a fan of someone based solely on their Twitter feed, but I'm a little bit in love with @joshlaw81 and I no nothing about him that I haven't read on Twitter.

What they say (you, know them, they're full of advise and gossip on all sorts of topics) is that celebrities...lets not use that word...entertainers like Twitter because it gives them an opportunity to communicate with their fan base directly and immediately which is cool especially for someone like me who geeks out over stuff a lot (hence this blog devoted to being a fan of things). Kevin Smith replies a lot to tweets from his fans (not to mine yet, but to many others), which is kind of to be expected as he's always maintained pretty close ties to his fan base, but he's not the only one that does.

Of all the things I am a fan of, and there are many or I wouldn't be doing this, perhaps prime among them is Sports Night. It's the perfect storm of brilliant writing (that's both funny and poignant) and amazing acting (that, again, is spot on with the comedic timing and hits all the emotional notes as well). I've purchased a ridiculous number of copies of Sports Night on DVD. I give them as gifts to people, I lend them out and then have to buy a new copy before I get them returned to me (there was a point when I had three copies of it for this reason but I'm back down to one copy now), and of course, when the anniversary edition came out I had to buy that. On one of my other blogs I reference my love of Sports Night in at least 6 posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), I frequently used quotes from it to illustrate points (at least
four times), and sometimes even put Sports Night references in the titles of posts (here and here). So, as you can see, I really love Sports Night. I'm a particular fan of the character of Jeremy and the actor who plays him (Joshua Malina), so imagine my excitement when I discovered that he's on Twitter (@JoshMalina), and that he too is often hilarious in his twitter feed, and that when I tweeted about how great he and his twitter feed are, he replied to me.

So, yeah, I'm all atwitter these days.

Love,
The Fan