As of today, May 6, 2021, I finally have all of my Twitter threads cataloged, from October of 2012 through the present.
My basic idea was that if people on Twitter liked my threads, they could use this site as a place to access just my threads, and all of my threads.
In a sense, I thought of this blog as a YouTube channel for Twitter. Just like on a YouTube channel, you can access all of a creator's videos, on my "Twitter Channel," you can access all of my Twitter threads.
It has always surprised me that Twitter has never made a "channel option" for folks on the platform who do a lot of threads, so people who like those creators' threads can access just the threads.
But it might simply be that there's really no demand for, say, binge-reading threads. It might just be that people enjoy getting tweets in their timeline, in their feed, in real time, but not necessarily reading threads, like one might read articles or blog posts.
Nevertheless, I made this table of contents for all my threads -- about 1,300 as of today.
And I sort of expect that, now that I've brought my Twitter table of contents for just my threads into the present, Twitter will come out in the very near future with a "channel" option for everybody.
Or, who knows? Maybe my Twitter will be erased entirely. You never can tell.
It has taken just over three years to catalog all of my Twitter threads into this table of contents blog. But my work has generally all been in fits and starts.
In 2018, I cataloged 41 threads. In 2019, I cataloged 242. In 2020, 291. And then, this year, I cataloged the final 761 to get the project finished once and for all.
The vast majority of the work I did on this blog to get it present in 2021 took place only over the past few weeks. Part of the reason I was able to get as many Twitter threads cataloged over the past few weeks was that I lost my job in mid-March of 2021 and have had time, "between jobs," to focus on finishing this project once and for all.
But another reason I was able to catalog so many threads over the past few weeks was that I had honed my process for cataloging the threads.
When I began cataloging these threads, my blog posts weren't just links to the thread. Almost every single blog post contained links to the websites for the institutions, updates to any of the people or institutions mentioned in the thread, and a sometimes quite detailed summary of the thread.
I realized that giving this much detail in my "table of contents" was probably more distracting than on-target with my mission -- which was simply to provide links to my threads.
So as I pared down each blog post to simply the link to my thread and a simple, one-sentence description of the thread, and no additional links -- since all the links I was including were generally in the threads, anyway -- I could work a lot faster.
There were some exceptions, as some threads I've written have been "personal opinion" threads, and I have tried to clarify what I was trying to say in those threads, or update my opinions, if those threads felt out of date to me as I posted them.
When I began this project, I simply found all my threads for cataloging by going through Twitter's free analytics tool. Theoretically, with that tool, you can go through all of your tweets, day by day.
However, practically, in April of 2018, I was finding that the analytics tool really only gave me my tweets in any consistent manner (as I recall now, in 2021), back to about 2014. So even though I was writing "threads" back in 2012, I was really only able to find threads using Twitter's free analytics tool going back to 2014.
It seemed to me in 2018 that the best idea would be for me just to use the analytics tool, go all the way forward, through to the present, and then come back to my tweets from 2012 and 2013 (and maybe early 2014, if I remember correctly) and catalog them later.
However, as I continued posting threads using the analytics tool, I started noticing how certain things I definitely remembered posting about in 2014 and 2015 just weren't showing up. I started searching for those threads by just using Twitter's basic search bar on the main page. I found them.
It became clear then that Twitter's free analytics tool not only didn't get any of my "threads" (if I remember correctly) from 2012 and 2013, but that it also didn't catch all of my threads from 2014 and 2015.
So my first strategy for finding threads that the Twitter analytics calendar wasn't picking up was to type my Twitter handle, @preemimaboroshi, and certain uniform phrases I always use in my threads, like "finished reading," into Twitter's basic search bar. In this way I got a good listing of all the threads I'd written about, for instance, books I'd read.
I also knew I went to certain places a lot, like certain movie theaters, and that I almost always listed the name of the theater I went to when I saw a movie. So, by searching by my Twitter handle and the name of venues, like movie theaters, in Twitter's search bar, I could find a lot of the threads I'd written about events I'd attended.
But I knew for sure, even then, that I was still missing a lot of the "threads" I had written on Twitter between 2012 and 2015.
So at some point -- I believe in February of 2019 -- I changed up my strategy for finding all of my threads.
I'm a somewhat meticulous notetaker. I journal and take notes in paper notebooks. And I number the back of each notebook and give the time frame for the notes in the book.
So in February of 2019 I decided to pull out all of my notebooks and go all the way back to October of 2012, looking, page by page, for everything I had done during that time. I would then search for those things on Twitter. I would enter my Twitter handle and the exact name of the thing I wrote about into Twitter's basic search bar. It usually then pulled up my "thread."
The reason I say "thread" is because, from October 2012 to March of 2014, I didn't actually write proper threads. I would write reviews of things. And the reviews would be multiple tweets long. But the tweets were all single tweets. They weren't linked into a thread.
It wasn't until March of 2014 that I even knew what a thread was. I learned about threads, interestingly, from the Twitter profile of legendary sci-fi author William Gibson. Either Gibson or someone he'd retweeted described threads. I was like, "Oh! Okay!" And I started doing threads, instead of multi-tweet reviews of things, starting with my review of Joyce Carol Oates's novel Carthage, on March 23, 2014.
So another thing about all of these earlier "threads" is that, each of my "table of contents" posts for them includes not only a link to each and every tweet, but also the tweet itself, transcribed, so people don't have to go hunting down each tweet.
The effort to get all my "threads" through March of 2014 cataloged was, therefore, a real chore. But I didn't really do a ton of "threads" through March of 2014.
In 2012 and 2013, I was still largely doing my online writing via blog posts. I was doing a number of different blogs at that time. And my Twitter served largely to direct people to my blog. It was really only once I knew what an actual thread was that I switched almost entirely over to using Twitter as my online journal.
So, after I developed my process, in February of 2019, of going through each of my notebooks, cross-checking with Twitter's free analytics calendar tool, and making sure I had all of my threads, I started moving steadily through all of my threads, up through 2014 and 2015.
Once I reached the 2016 calendars -- if I remember correctly -- using Twitter's free analytics tool, I could see that Twitter was missing fewer and fewer of my threads.
I could have stopped using my notebook altogether, once I reached the threads I wrote in 2017. But it became a habit for me to do the cross-checking. I also liked doing it as a sort of act of recapitulation. In many ways, it was therapeutic to revisit my life, day by day, or page by page, since October of 2012, by going through all of my notebooks. It was therapeutic. But it was also painful.
I should also mention that, when the tweets show up on Twitter's free analytics calendar tool, it's a lot easier to search for them, as you just copy the text of the tweet and paste it into Twitter's basic search bar. The tweet and the thread then show up.
It was sometimes a bit more difficult for me to find things by searching by my handle and the name of the thing I did a thread about, as sometimes I didn't always have the exact name of the thing.
Also, for some reason, Twitter's search bar has changed. Now you can no longer search for tweets by a profile by entering their tag, like @preemimaboroshi, and other words into the subject field. The tag no longer counts as a search term. So, nowadays, I wouldn't even be able to do the work I did to make this thread happened. This change happened on Twitter only a couple months ago, maybe in March of 2021. It's a pretty bad change, honestly.
Eventually -- I can't remember when -- I also started breaking up my work process.
Originally, I would just find a thread and catalog the thread into my "table of contents." But doing all of the pieces of the process at once -- looking through my notebook, cross-checking with Twitter's free analytics calendar tool, doing a search for things that weren't in the calendar, finding the thread, and cataloging the thread in the post -- became tedious.
So I broke the work into two parts. I would look through my notebooks, cross-check with the Twitter analytics calendar, find the threads, and put the links to the threads into an Excel spreadsheet as one part of this work. This way, I could pull, say, 100 or so threads at a time to catalog into my blog. The second part of my work would just be cataloging the threads into the blog, which I could then do in sort of high-volume blasts.
This actually made my overall process a lot more enjoyable. One part of the process was essentially just me revisiting all my old notebooks and Twitter threads, with a little bit of cutting and pasting added in. So that was more like studying mixed with a trip down memory lane.
Then the other part of the process became, essentially, high-volume admin work, or maybe like high-volume database-creation work.
I like both parts of the process separately. But together, they're tedious.
At this point, other than the formatting of my blog posts, which, as I mentioned above, streamlined my process a lot, my process didn't really change. I got better and faster at the process. But the process didn't really change.
Some might ask, "Well, why didn't you just get one of Twitter's free downloads of all your tweets and find all of your threads that way?"
It's possible I could have done it that way, and that it would have been much easier for me to do that way.
However, I doubt this is true. Ever since I first started using Twitter, I was always retweeting things. So I would have had to wade through all of my retweets, just to get to my tweets. And I would have had to wade through all of my single tweets, just to get to my threads. And, at the end of the day, with a profile with 40,000 tweets on it -- and 1,300 threads -- I still would have been doing a lot of grunt work.
Besides, I'm not totally sure those Twitter downloads catch everything, anyway. Some people I have paid attention to on Twitter say they don't. So I might still have ended up having to hunt stuff down.
At the end of the day, no matter how you slice it, cataloging 1,300 threads is just going to take a lot of grunt work -- I think.
When it comes to actually getting the grunt work done, I think it's just a matter of finding the rhythm for doing the grunt work that works best for you. I liked my method because, at the beginning, it was a lot like detective work, and, once my process was fully developed, it was like database building combined with a nostalgic trip through my paper journals.
My threads definitely fall into different time frames.
In 2012 and 2013, I didn't do a lot of threads, because I was more concerned with posting stuff to my multiple blogs -- which are still online and available to read.
In 2014 and early 2015, I started doing a lot more threads on Twitter. But I was also not doing a lot of threads, as I was working at a job where I would do 60-hour work weeks.
From early 2015 to late 2015, I did a lot more threads -- if I remember correctly. Also, the threads had a lot more to do with the arts scene in Denver. At that time, I was getting a lot more involved with an art gallery in town and, as a result, I was visiting galleries on a very regular basis. I was also, following a big management change at my company, slowly being pushed out of the company. So my work hours were steadily decreasing, and my time for doing things like Twitter threads was steadily increasing.
From 2016 to mid-2017, the number of threads I did decreased a lot. This is because I started doing almost all of my writing on Instagram. All of my Instagram posts are, as far as I know, still available to view at my profile, which is preemiemaboroshi -- not preemimaboroshi.
I did about 300 Instagram posts through 2016 and 2017. They almost all related to the Colorado arts scene. It's a really good record of the arts scene at that time. But I also really regret having joined Instagram.
And, in a lot of ways, I regret having gotten so closely involved with the Denver arts scene from mid-2015 to mid-2017. I would have been a lot happier hanging out on the sidelines. If I'd stayed hanging out on the sidelines, I'd probably still be visiting galleries today. As it is, I stay away from them all, because the relationship I had with the gallery I volunteered with so much turned really bad -- largely because of my own personality issues, for sure.
From mid-2017 to mid-2018, the number of threads I did on Twitter increased a lot. I'm pretty sure I did 900 Twitter threads in total, 300 per year, from 2018 to 2020. From mid-2017 to mid-2018, after having ostracized myself from Denver's arts scene, I was trying to find some new kind of social life. I was also finding footing doing work as a business consultant.
From mid-2018 to mid-2019, my social life generally consisted of doing political volunteer work. And that's definitely reflected in the threads. My work life was like a roller coaster, as I would have good times with clients followed by really bad times and times where I had no clients at all. I also had to deal with a lot of troubles in my neighborhood, which really upset me.
Another thing about my threads from early 2018 to late 2019 is that each thread has been twisted by Twitter's platform out of chronological order. So some of the threads are really jumbled up and don't read well at all. Most of the threads read alright. But almost none of the threads have been left intact by Twitter's platform. In fact, when I first discovered this problem in April of 2020, I was really upset and even thought I would stop cataloging anymore threads. It took me until March of 2021 to convince myself not to worry about this issue and to get back to work on the project.
From mid-2019 until March of 2020, a lot of my life was dominated by independent study. I didn't eliminate political volunteering from my life. But I also didn't talk about it. Instead, I was working really hard on studying subjects that were important to me -- namely the history of sex laws in the United States, so I could really understand why politicians in America were working so hard to limit Americans' freedom of sexual expression, especially online.
March of 2020 is when the COVID-19 pandemic became a reality in America. And I think my Twitter threads reflect that. As 2020 developed, I retrenched a lot. My threads became even more about studying -- though I started doing a lot more internet-based research -- probably to offset my inability to go outside. So I do a lot more research pieces, as opposed to just reviewing books and movies. I like my research-oriented pieces. But I'm not crazy about opinion pieces I've written that aren't based in research.
As for 2021?
I don't know if I can say what my Twitter style has been so far this year.
In terms of my life, the past two months have been a breather. But they've only been a breather because the one client I had left, a client I had worked with since May of 2019, let me go in March of 2021. I haven't found any new clients since then. And when I speak with prospective new clients, I just feel so much fear that I'm going to walk into a bad work situation again that, not only can I not agree to work with them, but I feel less and less interested even in looking for other prospective clients.
In terms of money, I haven't hit a place where I'm scared yet. But I will soon -- most likely in July of 2021, if I don't find any clients by then.
But again, I'm so sick of the business world that I am just less and less interested in looking for new clients each day. It's quite possible that, even though I feel relaxed and cheerful every day, I am more depressed than I've ever been in my life. I don't really see what hope there is for me on the horizon. My relaxed and cheerful feeling might simply be due to the fact that I'm in the eye of the biggest hurricane of depression I've ever dealt with.
My life has been -- and I think my Twitter threads reflect this quite well -- a constant struggle to find some place in this world. I've struggled against people who, no matter where I went, simply did not want me there. Despite the fact that a lot of people like me, a lot of people also don't like me. And the people who don't like me always destroy the life I've built up for myself. And my own personality issues certainly don't help the situation.
Time after time, year after year, I rebuild and rebuild. But I might possibly finally be finished rebuilding. I might be at the point where I'm in a final collapse.
However -- I think my Twitter threads also reflect that my life has been a constant experience of beauty.
Beautiful books, beautiful movies, beautiful theater experiences, beautiful art museum and gallery experiences.
Beautiful political events, beautiful marches, beautiful rallies.
Beautiful experiences creating my own art.
Beautiful times with friends.
Beautiful times with family.
Hopefully people find that these threads really do reflect the beautiful experiences I've had in my life. If I'm able, through my threads and through this blog, to have shared this beauty, I'll be thankful.
I am thankful.
Thank you for reading. Please enjoy.
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