Gone are the gut-wrenching, mind-bending panic attacks.  I am so thoroughly geek that I have previously mourned the outages.  Lately my attitude has undergone serious degradation, sinking from the once experienced OMGWTF to a more apathetic status of Meh.

Although I am rather cavalier about the outages, I still use these times of Twitter-exia to come up with new ways to poke fun at Twitter and those of us who use it.  What fun is a ridiculously obsessive self-absorbed addiction if you can’t humiliate yourself and others like you when given ample opportunity to do so?

Can I get an Amen?

During one recent outage I looked over at my amazingly geeky other half and said, “I have the perfect alternative to that idiotic Fail Whale.”   I proceeded to explain what I believe to be a new and greatly improved Twitter Failure Mascot – one with less sweet and more meat – less happy and more snappy – a snark among snarks wrapped in the familiar net of doom and gloom.

Yes, my friends, the goofy and somehow happy-to-be-a-failure Fail Whale has been replaced by his snarkier cousin, Fail Seaman.  I believe that there is an animated version in the future, complete with Twitter related snarky commentary.

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There’s no such thing as giraffes!

Giraffes are from outer space

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It’s no longer breaking news that there was a series of DDOS attacks on the internet last week.  I didn’t notice it so much on Facebook because (1) I’m not on there as much and (2) Facebook often seems slow and bloated to me.  But my beloved Twitter? Oh yes, I knew it was dead.

So what did I do?  Like any good geek I panicked, I cried, I moaned, I wailed.  I paced the floor aimlessly, babbling to myself about the end of the world as we know it, the TRUE Twit-pocalypse was upon us, dontchaknow…  (Do I need to insert sarcasm tags to avoid the sarchasm I think may ensue from those unfamiliar with my wit?)

At any rate, at one point I sang to myself, “The day that Twitter…died.”  <insert eyebrow raise and pondering face>

I make up a lot of song parodies, but rarely write them down (bad geek).  This time I did.  Many thanks to @MadBrad, @lwcavallucci and @Daily_Pinch for encouraging me to publish this.  Brad – I know you said to YouTube this, but I am video challenged.  There is always another parody in my back pocket, so maybe the next time.

So with many apologies to Don McLean, below is the work product of my Twitterless time:

The Day that Twitter Died

A long, long time ago…
I can still remember
How that tweeting used to make me smile.
And I knew if I had my chance
That I could make those tweeple dance
And maybe they’d be happy for a while.

But August made me cry a river
With every Tweet I tried to deliver.
Bad news from the TweetDeck;
I couldn’t type one more peck.

I can’t remember if I cried
When I read about the twidowed site,
But something touched me deep inside
The day that Twitter died.

So bye-bye, Twittter access denied.
No more TweetChat no more TwitPics
The Twitterverse has now died
Them good ol geeks were mourning the API
Singin this’ll be the day that I die.
This’ll be the day that I die.

Did you write the Book of Tweets,
And do you have faith in the geek l33ts,
If the Twitterati tells you so?
Do you believe in Twitter polls,
Can Twitter save your mortal soul,
And can you teach me how to tweet real slow?

Well, I know that you’re addicted now
`cause I saw you tweetin all over town.
Your iPhone was a blaze.
Man, I love that touch interface.
I was a lonely twitter n00b punk
With a flip phone & my network sucked,
But I knew I was out of luck
The day that Twitter died.

I started singin,
Bye-bye Twittter access denied.
No more TweetChat no more TwitPics
The Twitterverse has now died
Them good ol geeks were mourning the API
Singin, this’ll be the day that I die.
This’ll be the day that I die.

Now for 3 hours we’ve been on our own
And dust grows thick on ev’ry smartphone
But that’s not how it used to be.
When Kawasaki tweeted for the restless mobs,
With a phone he borrowed from Steve Jobs
In a tweet that came from you and me.

Oh, and while Bill Gates was looking down,
Eric Schmidt stole his geeky crown.
Tweetchat was adjourned;
No tweet trend was returned.
And while Scoble read a book on quarks,
The tweeple gathered in the park,
And we texted dirges in the dark
The day that Twitter died.

We were singing,
Bye-bye, Twittter access denied.
No more TweetChat no more TwitPics
The Twitterverse has now died
Them good ol geeks were mourning the API
Singin, this’ll be the day that I die.
This’ll be the day that I die.

The chaos caused by hack attacks
The ‘Net was now most surely doomed
YouTube played a funeral tune.
We sent email and launched IM,
To bemoan the most certain end
Of every tweet we’d ever sent

While the hackers kept up their attacks
The world wide geeks were working fast
We tried to tweet once more
Oh but all we got was a 504.
cuz when we tried to give them our appeal
Those bastards still refused to yield.
Do you recall what was revealed
The day that Twitter died?

We started singing,
Bye-bye, Twittter access denied.
No more TweetChat no more TwitPics
The Twitterverse has now died
Them good ol geeks were mourning the API
Singin, this’ll be the day that I die.
This’ll be the day that I die.

Oh, and there we were all in one place,
A twitteration lost in interwebz space
With no time left to start again.
So come on: Ev be nimble, Biz be quick!
Ev and Biz sat on a javascript
Cuz scripting is a hacker’s only friend.

Oh, and as I watched them highjack ev’ry page
My tweets were steeped in a snarky rage.
No geek born in hell
Could break that hacker’s spell.
And as DDOS morphed into the night
Ruining Twitter’s website
I saw the Hacker laughing with delight
The day that Twitter died

He was singing,
Bye-bye, Twittter access denied.
No more TweetChat no more TwitPics
The Twitterverse has now died
Them good ol geeks were mourning the API
Singin, this’ll be the day that I die.
This’ll be the day that I die.

I met a geek who tweeted the blues
And I asked her for some happy news,
But she just surfed on down the road.
I went down to the Apple store
Where I’d learned of Twitter years before,
But the man there said that Twitter wouldn’t load.

And in the streets: the lolcats screamed,
The spambots cried, and the bloggers dreamed.
But not a word was spoken;
The Twit Apps all were broken.
And the geeks that I admire most:
Jobs and Schmidt and our Twitter Hosts
They caught the last train for the coast
The day that Twitter died.

And they were singing,
Bye-bye, Twittter access denied.
No more TweetChat no more TwitPics
The Twitterverse has now died
Them good ol geeks were mourning the API
Singin, this’ll be the day that I die.
This’ll be the day that I die..

They were singing,
Bye-bye, Twittter access denied.
No more TweetChat no more TwitPics
The Twitterverse has now died
Them good ol geeks were mourning the API
Singin, this’ll be the day that I die.

Note to original thought thieves: I have proof that I wrote this. Don’t make me send my cousins after you.  Or the law.  kthxbai.

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Anyone who knows us is fully aware of our geek pride.  We wear it on the outside – so much so that even our cars tagged with Geek plates.  True story! True, true.

It seems that geek is chic these days, but we were geek when it was very uncool.

On this soggy, unseasonably cool day, I would like to share with you a video that says it all.  Thanks to @seattlegeekly for tweeting this!

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