Leigh Alexander

Popular themes for internet cat pictures suggest that the cat is perplexed by his/her environment; the cat is demanding of something in a regal fashion [cats may often be implied to be ‘overlords’ or ruling-class characters from science-fiction movies]; the cat is excited to have succeeded at something while remaining oblivious to the practicality of his/her accomplishment.

I rarely saw him on ‘rec.arts.poetry’ thereafter either, although I think on one occasion like a year following our incident I searched his name on the newsgroup and found one extremely bad poem he had posted on the newsgroup [even at age 14 I knew it was an ‘extremely bad poem.’]

During this time the individual will have several windows open, generally several browser ‘tabs,’ a Microsoft Word document in some state of incompletion, the individual’s own Facebook page as well as that of another randomly-selected individual who may or may not be on the ‘friends’ list, 2-5 Gchat conversations that are no longer immediately active, possibly iTunes and a ‘client’ for Twitter.

Foursquare intends to ‘make a game out of’ going to places like someone’s house or a coffee shop. Theoretically you and all your friends are in possession of 1. Mobile devices 2. Twitter and/or Facebook accounts 3. Foursquare accounts. You and all your friends also enjoy going to the same coffee shops, restaurants and houses, theoretically.

Take pictures of the food you’re eating in other countries and post them on Facebook. Take your time ‘figuring out your plan’ while your aging parents extend themselves to pay back your student debt. Brag about your dick size. Brag about your game. Brag about how many beautiful women you have been with this week to the woman you are drunkenly going home with.

The Twilight series of books/films is widely perceived to be bad, sexist and potentially in possession of a ‘Mormon agenda,’ even by people who have not consumed any of the books or films nor are able to articulate what a ‘Mormon agenda’ is besides ‘having a ton of wives’ or ‘not having sex’ or ‘having a ton of babies while being really nice to people.’

Your feed will continue to be populated with the deceased person’s most famous quotes, YouTubes of memorable moments in the person’s career, or 140-character conveyances about what that person/that person’s work meant to the individual who is commemorating them by Tweeting. You observe this with curiosity and some compassion, a public funeral ceremony for a stranger in which you are not participating, and feel increasingly uncomfortable.

Your bro IMs you being like ‘sup’ and you respond ‘hang on, I’m in the middle of something at work’ and they reply ‘lol.’ Or you get an IM like ‘how are you,’ and you go ‘I’m okay, sick of the rain’ and they reply ‘lol,’ or you say ‘I’m good’ and they say ‘lol.’

I have received a mail suggesting I should marry the sender when we are single and something to do with that they would/wouldn’t wear bow ties, can’t find the mail. I regularly receive drunk mails from a friendly Scottish guy with an aggressive brand of humor. I have received a mail about how I destroyed someone’s life somehow…

Once you send the person you only recently only kind-of met a text message that says ‘hey is anything going on tonight’ you will ‘tip your hand’, so to speak, and you should be aware that you should not send text messages like that, nor text messages to the effect of ‘what are you up to’ after a certain hour unless you would like the recipient to construe your text message as a sexual invitation. That is just the world we live in.

You might read all of these tweets and status updates and feel excited and attempt to assemble a CMJ ‘plan of attack’ for yourself and your friends. The official CMJ website seeks to facilitate this by implementing a ‘schedule builder’ so that you can put all the bands you are theoretically going to see into one schedule so you will always know where to go for which ‘act.’

Engineered to lambaste Facebook gaming products as spearheaded by arguably the most popular Facebook game, ‘FarmVille,’ Cow Clicker simply required of players who install the game to click on a picture of a cow, the picture of a cow then appears in the player’s Facebook feed with the notification ‘[Facebook user] is clicking their cow.’