love & hate: from knuckle tattoos to the internet's emotional pulse with Twistori

This is one side of the story of twistori. I will tell the other later.

grown up, sophisticated...

Anyone who knows me knows about my rants. I like to rant. I rant about a lot of things, and always have—but as the years have accumulated in me and changed me, so have the topics of my rants shifted and changed.

When I was a young kid, I ranted about people. I couldn't stand almost anyone around me (and not without reason). I hated that I had almost nobody to talk to, to relate to. I hated how easy it was to fool and trick people, how nobody was awake enough to notice. I hated how everyone was so tied up with themselves all the time that they didn't see.

I was still ranting about people when I got to middle and high school, but by then I was also ranting about technology. I'd found the internet and developed some friends who, at least, weren't confused by my vocabulary, and most of them I found through tech "communities." Tech (and writing) became the thing for me, so it consumed a lot of my waking thoughts and thus also featured heavily in my rants.

Rants which were still bitter and angry, because I was a bitter and angry person.

i finally told her i loved her

In the past few years, time and experience—and more importantly, dedication to learning from that experience, however painful—have mellowed me.

Most of my rants are now positive. Instead of being self-serving Rants to Wither You with How Smart and Cynical is Amy they are, in a way, Rants for Good: ranting on behalf of people; about responsibility, against victimhood; about shipping and thinking for one's self. I rant about bad software, and bad writing, and bad attitudes, and try to be constructive about it, to help and prod people to go and do better.

Because people can do better, and people can and *do* change. Change is something I believe in. I can't look back on the young, angry, disconnected me and still believe in a static world.

I still see lots of change needed in the world and I figure I'm stuck here for the next 60 or 70 years, so I'm in it for the long-haul.

So, to the point. Finally. Perhaps.

This has been an anti-manifesto for a new project, built around Twitter, that Thomas and I produced and shipped yesterday. It was an idea that I'd been kicking around for months; for which I'd registered the domain two months ago; and which had, in my head, grown so immense (and so awesome) that it could never be built by mere humans.

The project as I just described has also been the subject of many private rants to friends, as has the reasoning behind it.

Yesterday morning on waking I half-thought to myself, "Amy, you're a hypocrite." So I accosted Thomas in his bath and demanded some technical knowledge.

Six hours later, we both tweeted about Twistori.

twistori

Will it change the world? No, probably not, for any significant value of "world."

Do I have hope that it will help us further our Rants for Good agenda? Yes, indeed.

Was it also a lot of fun? You bet your sweet ass.

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