a penny for your thoughts about the Posting process on character count–limited websites (i.e. Twitter) vs relatively unconstrained websites like this one. did you find it frustrating to work under a character limit? are there drawbacks to the amount of freedom you have here?
A lot of my twitter use I regret because it was a huge waste of time--a kind of counterfeit sociality, an erythritol for loneliness; in 14 years I only made about five mutuals (inexplicably including one of my favorite modern poets, though she left twitter not long after)--but I do think that the character limit, for all its obvious flaws in trying to have an actual conversation, was a great exercise in concision, albeit one with diminishing returns after the first decade. I spent my middle school years getting transformed into a MODOKISAT1, which was very helpful for the next several years of standardized testing but also molded my already too-prolix writing style into something so baroque as to be borderline unreadable. I started posting on twitter (as opposed to just reading the feeds of a handful of webcomic artists and also the Chicago Sun-Times' tech columnist) around when I went off to college; between the constant practice at writing epigrammatically and (what on the balance was certainly much more influential) my professors critiquing my cul-de-sacs and 64-dollar words, I learned to get to the point.
You will notice, I am sure, that in the previous I have not been doing this, because I find writing like a blowhard2 fun and also funny. Cohost was good for this even beyond the lack of character limit, I'm not sure why--something about the absence of general ironic detachment making it easier to inhabit the role of the egotist, knowing that I could shed it for the next post? The enforced short-form of twitter has a blurring effect that asks the reader to read all your individual posts as a collective text, making the earnest "I like this!" post and the distanced "asserting that you are unreasonable for wanting to leave the cave I've trapped you in" post strange bedfellows. I do miss that melange sometimes; the freedom to make a post nearly anything here means that to suit the medium a post needs to define itself to the reader, rather than just sit conformably along the rest of collage.
QUESTION = ANSWERED
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Mental Organism Designed Only for Killing It on the SAT3
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Specifically, Lillian Perfectform circa 2011
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Scholastic Aptitude Test