pile.org

What Twitter accounts does Ben use?

Edited October 27, 2022: Elon Musk just bought Twitter and fired much of the executive suite, and while they probably weren’t the best possible bunch, they’re a damned sight better people than Musk can even imagine being.

I shut down my Twitter accounts, and have been microblogging on Blurt for several years now (my personal microblog and my commonplace book, the latter a replacement for the almost-as-venerable-as-my-main-Twitter-account @sben_links).

What follows is for historical interest, if any.


Plenty.

The basic philosophy here is that just because somebody knows me, that doesn’t necessarily mean they want to read about the articles I found to be interesting, or the video games I’m playing, or whatever.

There’s actually another consideration. I use Twitter a little idiosyncratically: I’m a timeline completist, and so don’t follow many more than 100 people (or other entities), and so a sudden change in how a person tweets can really throw off the gestalt of my timeline. (I also don’t see anybody’s retweets, but that’s for another time.) And I don’t want to do that to anybody else. So when I get a sudden idea to tweet about something different, to tweet differently, I just create a new account.

All of which is to say, here are my Twitter accounts:

@sben
My main account. What I’m up to, what the kids are up to, humblebrags about food, etc.
@sben_links
My second account. These are links to articles I found particularly interesting. “The Only Thing on the Internet Worth Reading.”
@sben_sworcery
Originally just for tweets from Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP. Now a general video game account, most recently for Dwarf Fortress.
@sben_games
A counterpart to @sben_sworcery, which I use for tabletop games.
@sben_books
I stopped using Goodreads a little while back on account of my dissatisfaction with Amazon. I now tweet here when I start and finish a book, with the occasional “live-tweet” event.
@sben_music
I recently went through our entire music collection, alphabetically by album title. I starred my favorite albums, but they’re probably not all that interesting. It did inspire a few other people to try the same thing.
@sben_asoiaf
When I reread A Song of Ice and Fire in anticipation of A Dance with Dragons, I posted one tweet per chapter (though not quite in order). I’ll do the same when I reread Dance.
@sben_walks
I’m walking across (part of) Europe, and this is where I tweet and cross-post photos.

And there may be other, secret Twitter accounts that you do not know yet.

Updated October 25, 2016 (new accounts, changes to old accounts, and a bit of philosophy), March 24, 2017 (@sben_walks), and October 27, 2022 (deleting them all).