Archie and the Tweets

The latest issue of Life with Archie isn't much like the old digests at all. Each one is divided into two stories that need to be read in one reading break each or preferably together. In contrast, the digests have much shorter stories that can be squeezed into a commercial break. Rather than leaving it unexplained due to being “just a story,” this series is getting into quantum mechanics to explain how Archie is simultaneously married to both Betty and Veronica. It's definitely not something that would have come up in the old issues.

As for most of the rest of my reading time this week, I actually looked at Twitter. It wasn't my goal, but I saw a news article about the “Six-year project to tweet the Second World War" http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/twitter/8877167/Six-year-project-to-tweet-the-Second-World-War.html and checked it out. “WW2 Tweets from 1939” https://twitter.com/#!/RealTimeWWII was actually more interesting than either a book of the same information or a stereotypical Twitter account where people talk about random things that don't matter to anyone but themselves. It was nice that there were links to pictures and videos from the era, usually described as “live” to emphasize the illusion that this was all actually being tweeted realtime from 1939. It was annoying that you have to click on every picture rather than it just being posted inline, but I guess that makes it easier for people to load on their phones without using up their data plan. The information being broken up into short “tweets” with links to break up the reading further made it easier to read over the course of a few breaks. I ended up spending around an hour on this site all together even though I wouldn't have spent that long reading the same information presented differently. As an added bonus, one of the clicks had an ad for Cracked.com's Twitter page, https://twitter.com/#!/cracked to waste a lot of time with. This page is only links to articles that aren't all safe for work or family-friendly, but I read at least another hour's worth of articles like “The 7 Dumbest Things Students Do When Cramming for Exams,“ “17 More Images You Won't Believe Aren't Photoshopped” featuring the Kansas City library http://www.snopes.com/photos/architecture/kclibrary.asp#photo which I drove past a lot but never went to since I tutored at a nearby branch.