Category: Twitter

The Racists and Bigots Hate Miss America Nina Davuluri

On By Michel McDonaldIn Bullying, TV, TwitterLeave a comment

Miss_America_Nina_Davuluri

I haven’t watched Miss America since I was a kid, and even then I wasn’t paying very much attention.  It’s just not something I really care about.  Give me RuPaul’s Drag Race any day of the week.

I didn’t watch it, but apparently on Sunday night, Miss New York Nina Davuluri, who is the very first contestant of Indian descent to be crowned was crowned Miss America and the internet nearly exploded in a mushroom cloud of pure putrid racism.

Here is a link from Buzzfeed showing a few of the vile tweets.

Some people called her Miss Arab, Miss Al Qaeda, Miss Terrorist and Miss 7-11.  People were saying that Miss Kansas should have won.  Why?  Because she’s white?  I don’t understand what makes Miss Kansas a better candidate for Miss America.  Because she hunts animals?  Because she has a tattoo on her stomach?  Because she loves her country more than Nina Davuluri?  How do they know the level of love Nina has for her country?  I mean, honestly, do they even know her at all?  Have they met her?  Have they had a conversation with her about how dedicated she is to the United States?  I bet you if you asked her some history questions, she probably  knows more than these bigots do.

It’s funny how they don’t care if a person’s ancestors (or parents) were born in Italy, Ireland, Scotland, Germany, Hungary or England, but if your ancestor was born in India and your skin color reflects that, all of a sudden you’re not a true American. White doesn’t mean American.

Nina is from New York, so what is a typical New Yorker to these people?  Is she supposed to be like Fran Drescher?  Or what about Julie Chen?  Yeah, she’s from New York.  Check it out.  I mean what is a typical New Yorker supposed to look like?  Is she supposed to be white with brown hair and a thick New York accent?  Please tell me what the expectations are for being a true New Yorker.

This is 2013.  I just can’t believe there is still so much hatred and racism.  People from India are not terrorists and they are not affiliated with Al Qaeda.  Indians are not Arabs either.  I feel if you are going to make a racist statement, you should at least look at a map so you can see that India and Saudi Arabia aren’t the same country.  Here, take a look if you don’t believe me.

saudi arabia and india

I don’t know the rules of Miss America and I don’t know Nina Davuluri, and I’ve already said I don’t even watch the show, but I’m pretty sure that they wouldn’t crown a woman Miss America if she weren’t an American.  Like I said before, having white skin does not make you a true American.  If you want to know who the true Americans are, go find a reservation and ask around.  The Native Americans might have something to say about your racism.

Everyone is entitled to their own opinions just as I am entitled to point out their ignorance.  We all as Americans have free speech, but I think free speech and hate speech are two separate things.  Get your facts straight before you start calling someone you don’t even know names.

“Those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.” “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”

You know what my mother always said to me when I was a child?  Come on, you know this one.  “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.”  Do us all a favor and just keep your mouth shut if all you can do is spout your racism and hate speech.

Facebook Unfriending Glitch

On By Michel McDonaldIn Facebook, TwitterLeave a comment

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Have you noticed that your friends list number has dropped on Facebook and you can’t figure out why, or who unfriended you?  That seems to have happened to me a few times already in the last few months.

It first happened a few months ago when I had gotten into a bit of an argument with a long time friend.  I noticed that my friends number had gone down by 3 exactly, and it just turned out that her, her son and their roommate had all unfriended me.  I went to each of their Facebook profiles and the “Add Friend” button was active, which meant we were no longer friends.  I was more pissed off about that than the actual argument that we had which seemed like nothing compared to ending a friendship.  I emailed her asking her if she unfriended me and she responded the next day telling me that they did not unfriend me, that it must be a glitch.  I didn’t friend any of them back, I gave them the opportunity to send me the friend request, and only my friend sent it and not her son and their roommate.

At first I thought “yeah right, glitch, uh huh.”  I didn’t believe it was a glitch for a second, but when the friend request finally came, bygones were bygones and it was all water under the bridge.

A couple of days ago I noticed that someone had unfriended and blocked me on Facebook and unfollowed and blocked me on Twitter and I found out that it wasn’t personal, she just didn’t want to be friends on social websites with people she doesn’t actually know in person.  I get that, it hurt my feelings, but I understood.  But my Facebook friend number had dropped, not just by 1 friend but by 5.  I thought I must have said something that was so offensive that I am just losing people in droves, but as I was going through my list of friends, I had noticed that some of them were still in there, but they had deactivated their accounts so that was why I didn’t see them anymore.

One friend in particular did unfriend me, or so I thought.  We have known each other for 8 or 9 years from playing EverQuest.  We have never actually met, but we have spoken on the phone and played EQ together for hours a day.  We haven’t really spoken in quite some time though because she rarely ever goes on Facebook.  That’s why it was shocking that she had unfriended me.  I asked her if I said or did something wrong and she responded to me telling me that she never unfriended me at all, that it must be a Facebook glitch.  She and I have never had an issue, so I believe her when she said that.  I have no reason to believe that she would be deceptive with me.

So, if you have lost friends on Facebook, don’t take it as personally as I did, perhaps it’s a glitch or perhaps they deactivated their account because of how dramatic Facebook can be.  Oy vey can it be dramatic *SMH*.  It never hurts to ask, and when you do ask, be kind because they probably thought you unfriended them.

My Chrome Apps and Extensions

On By Michel McDonaldIn Books, CR-48, Games, Google Chrome, TwitterLeave a comment

I am really enjoying Google Chrome these days. This is my Google Chrome front page. As you can see I have a few apps and unseen a few extensions.

The apps that you can see are pretty cool. The top ones are what came automatically in the browser and the rest I added. If I can’t use programs on my desktop then I gotta find a way to use them on the browser only laptop.

Typically when you are given things in a new product, the first thing you do is get rid of the junk you don’t want. Well, I did get rid of something. There was an icon for a Poppit game from Pogo but when you click it, it loads the Pogo website with the Pogo logo but the game never loads. So screw it, it’s gone lol.

Entanglement is a really cool game and I like to play it so I kept it. I’m not very good but I’m just a beginner. You gotta start somewhere right?

The Gmail and Google Talk ones I can do without but I’m not going to get rid of them if I may need them one day. Instead of using those, I downloaded the app LiveGO . It allows me access to MSN, Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Yahoo and AOL/AIM all in one web page. For Facebook MSN, Gmail, Yahoo and AOL, it allows me to get access to my inbox and IM. It doesn’t have MySpace or Skype and I really wish they would get Skype on there so I can use the webcam. The IM’s have the webcam button but it says Coming Soon when you mouse over it. Hopefully they will get that up and running soon. For now I can use Google Talk to video chat, although I haven’t had the opportunity yet as I still don’t have any Gmail friends in all the years I’ve had Gmail.

TweetDeck is great. I’ve used that for Twitter on my Desktop so I now use it on the laptop in browser format instead of the installed version my desktop has. I actually like the browser version because the program takes forever to load and the browser loads instantly.

Autodesk Homestyler is such a cool one. You get a measuring tape and measure the rooms in your house and add rooms in the program according to the measurements. Ok I don’t needthis but it’s neat. I can add furniture to each room so I can make decorating decisions. I’m not a decorator but Darrin is so he can use that.

Google Books I added because I’m a book-worm. Although I have a Nook so I don’t need that but I was using it to look up books. I may get rid of it if I need the space though.

Todo.ly is a to do list lol. Yeah I know, lame. I may get rid of it if I don’t use it that often.

Picnik is for photo editing, although they want you to pay for premium features, I just wanted it so I could use it for the webcam. Since I can’t have Gimp on this laptop I needed something but if I really need to make a graphic I’ll just make it on my desktop.

Spider One Suit FREE … It’s Spider Solitaire lol. I can’t imagine a world where there is no solitaire on a computer.

SoopBook is for writing your own book. You can write it in there and invite people to read it and correct your mistakes. Although I don’t know if I want anyone messing with my autobiography but it’s a good way to write it since I am using this as my primary computer.  It also gives me a backup so if my computer crashes then I don’t have to worry about a backup copy.

I haven’t been writing my book at all lately anyway because I’ve been too busy. When I am ready to write again I have SoopBook and/or my desktop to write with. Although I could use SoopBook when we aren’t home and I have the laptop with me so there’s a good reason to keep it for a while.

Do I really need to explain YouTube, Hulu, Google Maps and Scratchpad? I’m sure you know what those are.

I have a few extensions which are on the very top of my browser, to the right of the address bar. I’m using Glue, AOL, Gmail and Yahoo email notifyer so if I’m not in LiveGO then I can see if I have email or not. Then I have Aviary for taking screenshots for blogging (example above).Amplify extension which I use occasionally for blogging and finally After the Deadline which is a great spell/grammar checker, not just for blogging but anywhere you type on the internet.

I am still adding extensions and apps so this is not all I am playing with. There will be more but for now, this is what I’m up to. Playing with and learning how to live with a browser only based laptop, it’s actually not as difficult as it sounds. I’m sure anyone can cut their ties to programs if they really had to. I guess this is an if you were stuck on an island, what program would you bring with you” type of question. Well, in my case I’d have to say the Google Chrome browser would be the only program I need since I can find a way to add all of my programs as web apps.

Ok that’s it for now. I’m tired and my eyes are too blurry from staring at this 12.1 inch laptop screen for the last 16-18 hours lol.

True Blood – Blood Bites on Twitter

On By Michel McDonaldIn TV, TwitterLeave a comment

If you are a huge True Blood fan as much as I am and you also have an addiction to Twitter then you probably already know about Blood Bites.  I didn’t know about it until this week thanks to Sam Merlotte, the role player that is.

Every Wednesday night you can go to the Blood Bites website or you can just watch them tweeting live.

The fun part about it was even though it was probably a 5 or 10 minute scene in the show, it took an hour to tweet out but what made it fun was that they were tweeting what they were thinking and how they were feeling and who they were looking at.  It was like reading a novel.

Occasionally some other True Blood role-player would role-play on my list but they weren’t a part of the “show” so they most likely didn’t show up on the “Blood Bites” website.

I didn’t even know about this until now and I kick myself in the pants for not knowing but I really wasn’t into Twitter until very recently so how could I have known.  After all, nobody told me about it.  I also don’t remember seeing anything advertised on HBO about it.

Hopefully if you are a fan of the show and wouldn’t mind seeing them role-playing in Twitter then use my list .  I have all of the True Blood role players, well, I might be missing some, I don’t know.  I keep finding out every day that there is someone I didn’t have in there so I add them.  Some of them require permission to view their tweets too which I found out when I wasn’t seeing both sides of a conversation even though I was following them and they were on my True Blood list.

What is an easier way to see their live tweets is using TweetDeck or some program or website that streams the tweets as they are tweeted so you don’t have to keep refreshing the page.

They don’t just role-play on certain days, they role-play all freakin’ day long.  I’m glued to TweetDeck all day now, I should be doing other things but I can’t peel my eyes off the True Blood list lol.  It’s like I’m addicted to that one list of mine, I don’t care about anything anyone else is saying on Twitter except for the role players lol.

I wonder if any other show does this.

Note that the role players and True Blood on Twitter is not affiliated with True Blood or HBO.

True Blood on Twitter

On By Michel McDonaldIn Books, eBook, Kindle, TV, TwitterLeave a comment

You know, I’ve been a fan of Vampires my entire life, anything supernatural actually. I make it a point to watch any movie or tv show that has vampires, witches, werewolves and anything else that is supernatural.

When True Blood came on HBO I was psyched that I had HBO to watch it on lol. But mainly I was just psyched because it was a new vampire show.

I’ve only recently discovered the awesomeness of even though I’ve been on Twitter for a couple of years now. Since I started following Sam Merlotte on Twitter I noticed that he was role-playing. I started following another True Blood character that he mentioned and notice that person was role-playing too.

Thanks to Sookie Stackhouse, I discovered there is a website with all the True Blood character twitter names. “You can find all of us here: http://tweepml.org/?t=460087 #TrueBlood”. Go there and follow them all.

I also created and then some. If you check out that list you can see that the characters are actually tweeting each other. It’s like watching the show but all text, no visual. It’s sort of like reading a book.

I love the role-playing, it’s the best way to get my True Blood fix during the week. Since there are only 3 more episodes it will be interesting to see if they continue to role-play after the season is over until the next season.

I have not started reading the Sookie Stackhouse books yet but I will be buying the 8 book boxed set soon. I was hoping that it would be the first book(s) I bought on a Kindle that I plan to buy in the next month or 2 but considering the Kindle version is $55 and the actual paper book version is $35, I might just buy the paper book version instead.

Well, back to the drama on Twitter.

Twitter Is So Junior High

On By Michel McDonaldIn My Childhood, TwitterLeave a comment

When I was a teenager in Junior high school I was targeted by the bullies for a daily beat down. I don’t know what made me the target, I didn’t act effeminate but I was accused of being gay and beat up for it. These kids who beat me up didn’t even know me. They never met me, they never talked to me, they didn’t know one thing about me yet they beat me up for being gay.

Keep in mind I was in the closet and had a girlfriend as my cover (who I met years later in a gay bar, turns out she was a big lesbian using me as much as I used her).

I was threatened every single day that I would get beat up after school so every day I ran home from school. We were only 2 blocks from the school anyway so I didn’t run very far but that is the reason my calves are so big to this day.

One day I was walking to gym class and I was running a bit late, there weren’t any people behind me, I was at the tail end of the crowd going to the gym. This kid came out of nowhere, ran up to me, kicked me as hard as he could in the nuts then ran away. I didn’t know who he was and I never saw him again. There I lay on the ground in the most pain I had ever been in my entire life. I was in so much pain I couldn’t see, I couldn’t yell, I couldn’t think. I lay there on my side on the concrete with my hands on my crotch. Nobody there to help me, no witness.

Someone found me and took me to the nurses office and for some f’d up reason I got detention.

Ok, I had to tell you that so I can tell you this. Yesterday, someone I follow on Twitter tweeted this:

“If you want someone to unfollow this Saturday, @markdavidson is a good candidate. Can’t believe someone can deal with him #unfollowsaturday”

Well, without knowing who the guy is, I retweeted that. Now, don’t you think that what I did was exactly what those kids in junior high school did to me? I don’t know Mark Davidson yet I ran up to him and kicked him in the nuts without so much as a hello, nice to meet you. I never read any of his tweets, I never read his blog, I just rt’d that without even thinking.

I sent him a @ mention last night after he retweeted my retweet telling him I was sorry. I woke up this morning and looked at my tweets and remembered that he told me to read his microblog for a few days and I’ll understand why this person tweeted that in the first place. Well, it’s not necessary for me to do that. I had no right getting in the middle.

So I guess this is my public apology to him. Here I am on my quest for equality and here I am the hypocrite and for that I apologize.  This is certainly a lesson for me that I will never forget.

Twitter Karma

On By Michel McDonaldIn TwitterLeave a comment

Awhile ago I talked about using Twiends for following and getting followers on . When you follow people you get credits depending on how many credits people are offering. The credits you receive end up being given to other people for following you. It’s a pretty neat process for raising your Twitter followers.

However, not all of those people you followed are going to reciprocate. That’s bad karma. I follow everyone who follows me and when I see that someone didn’t reciprocate it frustrates me. There wasn’t much I could do about it because I didn’t know who I was following that wasn’t followingme back.

Until now. I found a website with a service called Your Twitter Karma that will help you find out who is following you and who you are following. You click the twitter button to sign in with your twitter account, it asks you to deny or allow them to connect to your twitter then when you click allow it signs you in. You click Whack and it loads every person you follow and your followers.

The first thing you see is a summary.

See the 2 on the left are people who I follow but as you can see they never followed me back. The 2 on the right I follow and they follow me. This website cannot bulk unfollow because that violates Twitters . So, that means you have to look at every person one at a time. You can click their name and their twitter page loads in a new tab so you can see whether or not you wanted to continue to follow them.

In my situation I didn’t want a bulk unfollow because I want to keep following celebrities who are never going to follow me.

Unfollowing those who don’t follow you levels the playing field though because if I am following 1461 people, I want 1461 people following me too. With the exception of the celebrities of course but you get the picture. Although the amount of people following me is well below that 1400 number so the number of who I am following is going to drop dramatically soon but over time I’m sure that will go up again with Twiends.

Anyway, I just wanted to share this new bit of information that I have found.

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My New Addiction – Twimbow

On By Michel McDonaldIn TwitterLeave a comment

I’ve said in my previous Twimbow posts, I’ve never been a “Twitter” person, well, I said Twit. I’ve been staring at Twimbow all day. Now that I know about lists I feel comfortable because I’m not pressured to look at 50 tweets a second.

I’m also learning color coding. See the image below, the colored boxes above all the tweets. That is an awesome feature because now I can give each group of celebrities (and friends) a certain color. Like all the Bravo people have Orange, all the E! people have purple, all the SyFy people have lime green… Friend tweets are all yellow. But this will allow me to filter who I want to look at as far as celebrities and friends go.

I’m having way more fun than any person should with Twitter lol.

@Twimbow: New Revelations

On By Michel McDonaldIn TwitterLeave a comment

Well I have finally figured it out.  I guess because I don’t use Twitter that often I never learned that there are lists that you can add people to.  Twimbow allows you to use your middle column to view only people in a list that you choose.  DUH!  So naturally I am making a list and only putting in people I really want to follow, friends and celebrities.

So, I can stop blocking people, which I stopped doing when I learned that blocking equals unfollowing followers.  A huge Oops.

Also the 3rd column in the Twimbow website is a search window.  Notice the magnifying glass?  The search area above that allows you to type a specific persons name to look at all their tweets and mentions.

Notice the column on the left (which is the middle column in the website) says Celebrities, that’s my new Celeb list.  And notice the magnifying glass in the column on the right that says Twimbow?  I get it now.

Now that I have this new information I will be a very happy Twimbow user.  I’m very excited because I finally get it now.  What can I say, I guess I get stupid in my old age but I learn… eventually.

Taste the @Twimbow

On By Michel McDonaldIn TwitterLeave a comment

A few days ago I was searching for something that had to do with rainbows, I think I was looking for an image. I really don’t remember but in my Google search I found Twimbow. It said it was in pre-Alpha so in order for me to use Twinbow I had to sign up and wait for approval. Well, I got an email today with my approval.

When I found it on Google I read that it was a new Twitter application so I thought what the heck, I could always use a new way to go on twitter. I’m not really much of a twit er wait no that came out wrong… or did it? I don’t get into twittering as much as a lot of people do so I don’t really use it. The problem with Twitter is that I am following so many people and I look away for 5 seconds and there are 20 more tweets. I look away for 5 minutes and there are 500 new tweets. It’s overwhelming so I don’t use Twitter as much as I would like to.

Twimbow is a bit different in the respect that you can choose what tweets you want to look at. Look at this image, this is the main page. The left column has direct messages, your mentions and people mentioning you, all color coded. The middle column are everyone’s tweets that you are following and the right column are the Twimbow mentions.

What I would love to see happen next is being able to either block certain people’s tweets or only show certain people’s tweets. That way you can block out all the spam tweets from people you really don’t know who you follow that advertise a lot.

The problem is, I follow everyone who follows me whether I know them or not. So because of that my twitter page is overwhelmed with tons of new tweets. I don’t want to unfollow those people but I don’t want to read their spam tweets either lol. And some of the people I follow are speaking in Russian. I can’t even read their tweets.

I said earlier that you can choose what tweets you see, this is what I mean. In the image above you might have noticed at the bottom it said Monitor. Well, if you click that you can type in some key words or phrases and anyone who tweets those words or phrases will show up under that word.

For this example I typed in 4 words, Nook, Kindle, Ebook and Gay. So every time someone says those words I will know it. You can also move those boxes around. When I typed them all out they were all vertical on the left side, I moved them so they are horizontal to see the tweets in them.

You could also type in certain people’s names like if I only want to look at Kathy Griffins tweets or any time someone said her name then those will be the only tweets I see. I typed Xanapus and my last tweet came up but because nobody ever says my name 😦 that won’t have any new tweets.

I would like to only follow certain people’s tweets like I said Kathy Griffin but also Alyssa Milano, Bethany, BravoAndy, hello Ross and a few other celebrities. I only want to look at friend tweets and celebrity tweets.

I like Twimbow because their site looks way cooler than Twitters does. Hopefully they will have ways of blocking or only allowing certain people so I can enjoy it even more.