When Fake Twitter Campaigns Go Horribly Awry: A Victim's Perspective

DragonForce - Through the Fire and Flames (HD Official Video) from DragonForce on Vimeo.

Yesterday I described how I partook in a fake Twitter campaign that literally destroyed Colin Reuter's life (or at least caused him to have a really, really awkward conversation with his mom). Today we have Colin's reaction to my attempted destruction of his life via misogynistic, drunkenly affected tweets.

But first! This yammering. 

Now here's the problem: The interview was conducted over Gmail Chat. I rarely use gmail chat, and when I do, I'm generally not having conversations with dudes who type as fast as Herman Li from Dragonforce plays guitar — I got dropped like Andy Schleck's chain in Stage 15 of the 2010 Tour De France. That's what happens when the guy who basically owns the internet tries to e-converse with someone as e-gnorant as myself.

No, I Am Colin Reuter

 

 I done a bad thing.

A few weeks back, I participated in the execution of a fake Twitter campaign. It was all fun and games until the dude's mom found out. That dude is Colin Reuter. If you don't know who Colin Reuter is, well, Colin Reuter is the guy who runs Crossresults.org, and he is basically the owner of the internet. When he and his friends go out to some particular place or event, people say "The Internet is going to be there." That sounds like a joke, but it's not.

You know what's a joke? Calling Crossresults.com, "Crossresults.org." It just really pisses Colin off.

But ya, it doesn't piss him off as much as when his mother stumbles across a fake Twitter account created in her son's name, and then gazes in shock and horror at a whole bunch of misogynistic, belligerent, frat boy-like tweets that make him sound like the biggest scumbag on earth.

That type of thing would really get Colin's dandruff up. (If that were the actual saying and he had actual hair to have dandruff in.)

I may have gotten a little carried away,

Not It

Once, back when I was a stupid kid living in Boulder, after a long night of partying, I thought it would be a great idea to pick up a cooler full of empty beer and liquor bottles, raise it right up, high over my head and slam it on the floor. My logic: the cooler would stay latched and its fragile contents would shatter inside, it would be f—ing brilliant! But it wasn't really. Mainly because the cooler didn't stay latched, it exploded open, spewing shattered glass all over the carpet. A half-conscious hippy who was lying on the floor with his greasy head resting on the bottom step of a staircase slurred: "Not it!"

And that, is what this post is destined to be — thoughts and ideas scattered all over the place. I'm going to start with a sort of "what I did this past weekend" section and then move into a NEWS section, there's so much stuff coming up right now. Here we go...

Saturday was pretty action packed. In the morning I lead a kids ride at NEMBA's National Take A Kid Mountain Biking Day. It was rad. I had some real rippers in my crew, GB NEMBA president Adam Glick's son Sam was one of the more impressive riders.


Check him out cleaning a sick rock-lunge move above. I'll have a full write up and the whole photo sequence of Sam's move up on the International Bike blog sometime this week.


I got out for a little post kids ride spin. I've been enjoying riding around The Fells, basically my back yard. There are actually a lot of similarities between the trails of Pisgah and Massachusetts. Only difference is the total lack of extended climbing or protracted descending in Mass. That, and we don't have rhododendron groves like they do. The bruise I got on my ass from the above bobble is deep and causing bio-mechanical disruption. I sat down on the pointiest rock I could find from about three feet up. It was great.


Saturday night we did a little bicycle pub crawl down to Harpoon's Octoberfest. OK, not much of a crawl...we stopped at exactly one bar because we were running late. We got to Harpoon an hour before last call. At that point there were hundreds of people lurching down the street like zombies, heading away from Harpoon. There were police everywhere, they were trying to coral the inebriated masses into shuttles. It's always good to show up to the party just as martial law has been declared.


Octoberfest is one of those things people get really excited about and then, once they get there, they go "what the hell am I doing here?" You pay $20 to get in, which gets you one beer ticket. Then you have to wait in long lines to pay bar prices for beer (unless you've got a sweet hook up like I do). Then you stand in a beer and puke covered parking lot drinking your beer while listening to horrible music and repeatedly getting bumped into by glassy-eyed, drooling dudes who want to fight anything that moves. It's awesome.

That said, I will no doubt get bamboozled into going to the thing next year.

Above: Christopher Igleheart and Gerry Finnegan

Sunday I made it up to Gloucester for the big cyclocross race. I did more walking around and talking to people than I did actual race-watching, which is usually the case at these sort of events.


I talked to local frame builder Matt Budd about getting together to ride the mountain bikes and his crazy shifter mounts.


I did get some spectating in. Seeing Tim Johnson win at his "hometown throwdown" is always nice.

And now...
Here's The NEWS:

Some of you may have noticed that I began contributing to Bike Rumor last week. It's a challenge, I can't just go over there and talk weird like I do over here. I have to throw some facts in there as well. I do try to bring my "voice" into the stuff though. Here's a list of the posts I've done thus far:

• Celtic Ray Allen's Custom IF Corvid
• Custom Trek Speed Concepts for Kona Ironman
• G-Force Gel Brake Hoods and Killer Mutant Poly-Mermen
• Review: Ergon GR2 grips vs. Pisgah Stage Race
  

The Ergon thing and the G-Force thing have a good amount of silliness in them. Definitely more silliness than I have going on here today, that's for sure. I've been shamelessly bugging all of my "industry insider" friends for hot tips. If you, Big Bikes reader-person, have anything you think I should write about, hit me at wellonabigbikeya at the gmails with the dot com.

In an attempt to be more inter-netty, I have re-joined the Twitter. My handle is "BigBikesThom" because some undeserving prick had already taken BigBikes. I was shocked to find that Twitter has a blog. I wish I could think of a good analogy for what that's like. Is it more like a kangaroo wearing a front-facing fanny pack or buying the Cliff Notes for a book only to find they are longer than the book itself? Or is it nothing like either of those things? We'll never know.

So you can follow me on the Twitters but I'm not sure where you'll be following me to. If I could find that scene from Animal House where the dude grabs the marching band leader's baton and leads the band into a dead-end alley on Youtube, I would link to it. Because that would be very accurately illustrative of people following me on Twitter.

If you live under a rock (you obviously don't live under the same rock I do, otherwise we probably would have bumped into each other at some point) there is a f—ing massive cyclocross race this Wednesday NIGHT up in Shrewsbury, MA: The Night Weasels Cometh. It's brought to you by some of the same people as The Ice Weasels Cometh, along with some different people. My only real involvement with the thing was the doodling of the above logo. I went to art school, I used to know how to draw, I don't know what happened. I'll also be covering it for Cyclingdirt. Hey, I gotta earn my FREE, sexy Crossresults kit somehow.

Alright, that's all the news that will fit today, I got a couple more things but they can wait until tomorrow or the next day or the next day.

Top 8 Big Bikes Posts in

The Form of "Tweets"

I had to cancel my Twitter account the other day because it was infiltrated by a virus. I received a direct message on Twitter from ex-Trek/VW Pro and current Trek test-pilot Travis Brown. Of course I was a little bit excited to get this message: "OH MY GOD, Travis Brown knows who I am!" I was stoked, I have to admit. His message went something like this: "You look funny here." And there was a link to a photo "on Twitter," so I excitedly went and logged into "Twitter," with my username and password. Brilliant. I did the same thing once with my Paypal account, it didn't go well. But you know what Ol' George W. said: "There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again."

Ah, it's an oldie but a goody, I miss that guy. What's he been up to? Can't he just show up on talk shows once in a while and say something stupid? Or at the very least run over a Scottish cop with his bicycle now and then?

But ya, you can get fooled again...well I can anyway.

The link was apparently fake, it definitely didn't go anywhere, I was a little baffled...until I started getting emails from friends saying "this link is bullshit, isn't it?" All of them were a lot quicker than I was, they knew some evil robot in Myanmar was after their passwords.

At least this time I only had to delete a Twitter account I wasn't using anyway. During my two months on Twitter I "tweeted" exactly twice.

My two "tweets":

"Not tweetering, until further notice."

and

"There's nothing to see here, it's all happening over here (link to Big Bikes).

So Twitter wasn't really working for me. I don't have an iphone or some other fancy mobile communication device, and tweeting from your desktop computer is like making fried chicken at home and then putting it into a big white and red striped bucket, it's just weird.

So, without further ado, I present to you the top eight (because we can't afford ten) Big Bikes posts condensed into "tweets."

8. Muddy bike race today, got the W!
http://wellonabigbikeya.blogspot.com/search?q=glocester+grind+efta+necs

7. I attacked Tim Johnson while wearing a Sasquatch suit!
http://29ercrew.com/tparsons/04/15/1857/

6. Single speed cyclocross...stupid!
http://wellonabigbikeya.blogspot.com/search?q=totally+subjective

5. Socks?
http://wellonabigbikeya.blogspot.com/search?q=where+do+they+go%3F

4. I made a recovery drink...yuck!
http://wellonabigbikeya.blogspot.com/search?q=another+horribly+failed+experiment

3. Bicycle commuting is crazy...Point like champ kind!
http://wellonabigbikeya.blogspot.com/search?q=steel+cattle

2. Something happened...I don't know...April fools!
http://wellonabigbikeya.blogspot.com/2009/04/april-fools-h-ha-very-funny.html

And finally...

1. I'm stupid...I fell in poop!
http://wellonabigbikeya.blogspot.com/search?q=the+dog+shit+on+my+omework

I have no idea why Twitter wasn't working for me.

This post was inspired by VeloCB

Twoogling

The plan for this morning's blog post was to do a sort of photo essay on my snow ride over to Allston last night to see The Stooges tribute band "The Scrooges." But for some reason the memory card in my camera was blank this morning. I had no plan B, and the story isn't actually that great without the photos, so I will now subject you to an almost tweet-like assortment of random half-thoughts.

Twitter.

I finally signed up for a Twitter account. I'm not sure why. My two "tweets" are"

"Not Tweetering...ever (until further notice)."

I followed that with:

"Nothing to see here, it's all happening over here: http://wellonabigbikeya.blogspot.com"

I don't have a fancy phone, and tweetering on my computer seems weird when I spend so much time blogging. And at the risk of pissing off all the tweeterers out there — I just don't get it. I heard Biz Stone (blogger co-founder, Twitter founder, my former classmate, who I am very proud of) on NPR a ways back talking about Twitter. He said something about how he was re-carpeting his apartment, so for example he would post "I am re-carpeting my apartment right now." I scoffed, "Ya Biz, blogger is pretty awesome, but that twitter crap...good luck!"

And we all know that Twitter was a huge failure. THAT IS NOT TRUE! Biz (or Issac as he was known when he was a, little bowl-hair-cut-having kindergartner) Stone and I went to the same elementary school and the same high school, but while I was off drinking beer under a bridge, he was off planning world domination in his mom's basement. We took very different paths and on my path when someone tells me about an idea like Twitter I say "that is really dumb." On Biz's path when someone offers him a quarter billion dollars for the company he started he gets to say "no thanks, I'm holding out for a better deal."

Rooter did point out a very viable use of Twitter the other day. He told me he googled "Cyclocross World Cup" on Twitter (I told him that the kids call it "twoogling." Made up) and found a live video feed of Sunday's race in Kalmthout. That's pretty cool.

If the kids call looking up things on Twitter "twoogling," then searching blogger for things would, of course, be called "bloogle-ing." Of course.

Shortest youtube video ever.

I've got something kooky in the works with the Double Hop guys (more on that later). The subject of skateboarding came up during an email exchange. To show them that not only did I skate back in the day, but that I can still dust off a trick or two even at my advanced age, I linked to the video above. But I saw that in the comments section, one dissatisfied customer had written:

"Quickest video I've ever seen on YouTube. "

I was deeply hurt. I had to see what kind of Youtube comment monster had lashed out at me so harshly. Turns out the guy is a stand up comedian. Then I thought, "this guy is a stand up comedian and that's the best he could come up with?" Upon watching his self-proclaimed pretty good Vincent Bugliosi impression I realized that, yes, that probably is the best the guy could come up with.

I also noticed that the video of me skating had been viewed quite a few times (more than any of my bike vids anyway). I wanted to comment on The Comedian's self-proclaimed pretty good Vincent Bugliosi impression saying, "Hey douche bag, my video might be the quickest video on Youtube ever, but it's been viewed WAY more times than your self-proclaimed pretty good Vincent Bugliosi impression, so HA!"

Then I noticed the title of the me skateboarding video: "Gleaming The Cube." My buddy Jason who had posted it had borrowed the title of the seminal 1989 Christian Slater film of the same name.

People were not Youtube-eling "Thom Parsons on a skateboard."

The only reason it has so many views is because folks were looking for clips of bad dialogue and stunt doubles performing a Hollywood movie director's idea of radical skateboard stunts. Without the title my video would have far less views than my critic's self-proclaimed pretty good Vincent Bugliosi impression.

Just imagine if Jason had entitled it "Paris Hilton Nipple Slip."