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This blog is a table of contents for my Twitter threads, starting in 2012, and working through toward the present. I include links to the threads, as well as quick descriptions of the threads.
From time to time, I like to do a blog post reflecting on the time frame of the threads I've most recently posted to this blog.
The posts below mark my final Twitter threads of 2017.
One thing I will mention up front about almost all the Twitter threads in the last three months of 2017 -- they have almost all been twisted out of shape by Twitter's platform.
I'm not sure what's happened. But almost every single one of the Twitter threads I posted from October of 2017 to December of 2017 has been "realigned" so that the tweets are all lined up in the thread out of chronological order.
This makes the threads kind of incoherent, or extremely incoherent, depending on the thread. The way I write my threads aims to make each tweet a sort of standalone. But all of my tweets are arranged in my thread according to some sort of logical pattern. Depending on how much the thread depends on that overall logical pattern, the twisted threads can end up sounding really incoherent.
So my apologies in advance for that.
Some notes on my personal life during this time period:
By December of 2017, I had gotten pretty consistent again with my Twitter thread posting. A lot of my social media work during 2016 and the first part of 2017 was on Instagram. But by mid-2017 I had moved back to Twitter pretty much entirely and have used that platform ever since.
My personal life was pretty quiet through the end of 2017. As I've mentioned a lot before, for my day job I'm a business consultant. For most of 2017 I had one client that accounted for almost all of my work. But that client ended up hindering a lot of my work. When I found ways around those roadblocks, the client then started to delay my paychecks, making it really difficult for me to pay my bills on time.
So in July of 2017 I took on a second client -- not necessarily because I needed the money, but simply because I needed to make sure I had at least one client from whom I could rely on steady cash flow, so I could pay my bills.
Things got worse and worse with my first client until October of 2017, when I had to stop working for the client altogether. I ended up transitioning to nearly full-time work for my second client. Through October and November of 2017, I did have to struggle a little bit with that client to get permission to do some specific things I wanted to do. But once I had that permission, I was able to drive performance for that company, through March of 2018, to an incredible level. My work for that client was the greatest work I have done so far for any client of my business consultancy. I only hope to attain or exceed that level of performance again.
So, in terms of work life, while I dealt with stress, I wasn't really dealing with terrible money issues. That freed me up to focus on my own personal pursuits. And I feel that really shows in my Twitter threads.
In May of 2017 I'd pretty much removed myself entirely from associating with Denver's art gallery scene. I felt like I'd been betrayed by the owners of a gallery I'd spent the previous two years doing a lot of volunteer work for. And I felt like I'd been hurt a lot by other folks in Denver's art gallery scene. So I just stopped talking to everybody.
So you'll notice that, while I still go to art museums from time to time, my visits to art galleries drops almost completely to nothing.
While I liked a lot of people in Denver's art gallery scene, the truth is that, outside my friends at the one specific art gallery, I didn't have any real friends in Denver's art gallery world, per se. So when I left that world, I didn't actually leave a lot of established relationships behind. That fact makes me sad. But it's also kind of a relief.
Like a lot of the rest of the United States, I was disappointed by the election results of 2016. I ended up not doing a lot of political activity in the first half of 2017. But after the Charlottesville tragedy, I, like many others in the US, got back on track with my political activity.
I tried to be active in a number of different ways. Hopefully that shows in my threads. I tried to pay attention to city, state, and national politics. I tried to attend regular assemblies, political meetings, and volunteer events like phone banking, etc. And I tried to read more political documents -- including documents put out by parties -- and an administration -- I didn't agree with.
I think that some of the things I paid attention to and some of the stances I took politically made some of my fellow Democrats upset. And while I don't agree with some of the things I said, I also don't regret some of the attempts I made to align myself with or try and empathize with people whose values were not the same as those of the Democrats.
I have always tried to think diplomatically. And that means you have to integrate your ideas with ideologies that don't match yours. Those ideologies may even be hostile in their opposition to your ideology. However, being diplomatic is about trying to find ways to work with people who don't have your best interests in mind.
I don't think the Democrats have been very diplomatic over the past few years. I'm not saying I blame my fellow Democrats. But I also don't feel bad about my own efforts at diplomacy. Not that it matters, anyway. I'm just one person out here all by myself. So...
Creatively, one big event of my life during this time was that I finished writing my amateur novel Summer Azure. The theme is essentially a Dance Moms fanfiction mixed with a lesbian version of a Lolita story. The themes definitely matched up with things I'd been thinking about for a long time.
I studied a lot of the history of youth/adult lesbian love scandals in the US and UK as part of my work on Summer Azure. And I'd studied that stuff for almost two years by the time I'd finished writing Summer Azure.
So by this time I felt confident enough in some of these topics that I began to discuss them on Twitter. Unfortunately, this may have led to me being even more ostracized -- and, by the way, subtweeted -- on Twitter than I had been before.
Unfortunately, I also began discussing this stuff as the United States began to use the Me Too movement in backlash against its sense of having been violated by 2016's election results. I don't feel like getting into details here. But in 2017 people in the US were accusing just about everybody -- but especially gay people and women -- of sexual assault. I stood against the silliness. And I stood against the then expanding assumptions that all youth/adult attraction was immediately some kind of sexual assault. As a result -- standing way against popular opinion -- I was even more ostracized on Twitter.
However, as you'll see in my 2018 threads, all of this research kind of dovetailed with a very big news event of that year: the passage of FOSTA-SESTA. My reactions to FOSTA-SESTA in 2018 kind of doubled up on the research I'd been doing on youth/adult love in 2016 and 2017 and in ways that likely made me even less palatable to the folks who had been following me on Twitter since 2012.
So that's a little bit of background as you read through the posts below, representing my Twitter threads from June through December of 2017.
Thank you, as always, for reading. Please feel free to provide any constructive feedback.
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