AVOIDᅠANNOYINGᅠPROLOGUES (with annoying prologue).

A year ago I would have killed for a 16-line high tweet that looked good. That's not true. But I might have slapped someone.

I love this tweet because it is nearly all prologue, with finally a three word exhortation to avoid exactly what has just been demonstrated. As a bonus, it is mostly space, which agrees with my minimalist temperament.

On average, a couple of times a year, Twitter does a major re-write of their source code. Most users don't even notice the change. But as a nutjob hard-core vertical-alignment freak and exposed #TwitterArt (ist) who is always trying to push the limits of Twitter, I am sensitive to these changes.

A few months ago, Twitter shut down my favorite #140art trick. My hard-space no longer works. Twitter requires, correction, required a character to start a new line, but Twitter thought a hard-space (Alt-0160) was a character, and although I had to enter each hard-space manually within the composition window for it to work, it allowed me to "make chess moves off the board that were still technically valid."

A month later, Twitter, enabled the ENTER key for its Internet feed. Since I joined Twitter, back in November of 2008, an ENTER was rendered as a soft-space. Favstar renders the ENTER key correctly; is Twitter now taking cues from favstar?

The ENTER key Twitter change is so major I still don't know what to make of it. My first impression is: "Chill, Harv, this is just Twitter, where you blow off steam; your tweets don't mean anything, they have never meant anything, they never will mean anything; it's 140 characters for Goddess sake! And after the first EMP bursts of WWIII all that Internet info will be lost forever: Nanobots to nanoscrap in nanoseconds!"

Then I start fixing up my obsolete #TwitterArt that hasn't worked for years, but can now be modified to work, and I start thinking that maybe, just maybe, I can take some of my old 3-tweet sequential #140art pieces and cram them down into single tweets!!

Of course, by the time I get them ready to spew, Twitter will probably upgrade their code again, wrecking all my planned tweets.

@hg47 (1/3rd filled glass Harvey)