I may have lied a little about the planned posts, if only because inspiration struck and I’m prone to whim decisions the same way my cats are prone to napping on tables despite being told tables are for glasses and not for kitten asses. Oh well.

There are plenty of commentaries on social media, and I’m almost entirely certain I’ve written posts on the topic before.

Let me make something entirely clear before I continue: I am by no means a master of social media, nor do I always behave according to whatever arbitrary guidelines are set-up to dictate the best ways to Tweet, Facebook, and so on. At no point have I, or will I ever out of self-respect and not being able to take such things seriously, claimed to be a social media guru (or maven or expert or whatever). Twitter is fun, it provides me with a platform to interact with other artists, and I’ve met some pretty awesome people thanks to it. I also live-tweet entirely too many shows far too often, but let’s not talk about that here.

For some reason or another, I attract a number of followers on Twitter who seem to exist solely for the purpose of helping other people buy followers, which is a concept entirely lost on me. I may not have the largest following on Twitter (or Tumblr or here or whatever), but the folks who follow me and engage me in conversation (or curse my name, which is far more common than the engaging in conversation ones) are the sorts of followers I really enjoy having around. It’s not about the numbers, and it shouldn’t be, because those empty, pointless followers are just there taking up space. If I say the word followers again beyond this sentence I’m going to bludgeon myself with a thesaurus.

The real point of such social media is to find people with similar interests, share those interests, help each other out, and maybe have some fun conversations along the way. Maybe post the occasional picture of cats doing adorable or absurd things, like asking if they can have a cheeseburger via the use of poor grammar (Nope nope nope, I will not write that question out). Occasionally it can be used for such delightful things as connecting with, and potentially offending, celebrities. I wouldn’t recommend the latter.

Instead there are people who are so obsessed with the idea of inflating the number of people who appear to be interested in what they are saying that they spend actual, real money on making that happen. Holy shit. Maybe it’s just the way my brain works, as I’m still transitioning from being a broke college student to a broke adult in the working world, but there is something extremely backwards about this idea of “I want more people to like me so I’m going to make it look like a lot of people like me by BLOWING MONEY OUT OF EVERY ORIFICE TO ACHIEVE SUCH ENDS”. I can tell I’m getting a little too tired because I chuckled at that and considered saying “out of every hole in my god-forsaken body”, a comment you can not unread, but I chose against it. Until this past sentence, obviously.

Did I mention this week has been an unholy sort of Hell?

The one rare time spam accounts, follower-selling or otherwise, amuse me is when they comment here. A lot of my spam comments read like really great compliments, at least up until the parts where they not-so-subtly insert questionable web sites selling knock-off designer doodads and gewgaws. You guys say the nicest things, though, even if I refuse to ever allow your comments see the light of day.

One more day until it’s my weekend off, and I will be traveling for a wedding. And enjoying some much overdue alcohol consumption that I am not even slightly sorry for.