Saturday, July 9, 2016

The 10 Greatest Tweets of All-Time

Twitter is a bad place and most tweets written on Twitter are bad. But here are ten good ones. To be clear: these are the only ten tweets that are good. If you did not make the list, it is because your tweets are bad. I don't consider this to be that confusing.

10.
Sports Twitter is a truly contemptible place, and nowhere is it more toxic than Chicago Blackhawks Twitter. While #FSUtwitter's readiness to defend Jameis Winston drew the ire of responsible sports fans, the NHL is less popular than college football, so some are unfamiliar with the phenomenon of fans defending notorious scumbag Patrick Kane.

And while certain facets of NHL media chose to ignore very disturbing rape allegations against Patrick Kane (not to mention the time he beat up a 62 year-old cab driver over 20 cents worth of fare, which is the kind of thing you have to be a real sociopath to do), others choose to bombard Patrick Kane-related PR moves. Is it juvenile? Often, it is. And this tweet itself walks a fine line between rape joke and social commentary, but it ultimately it leans towards the latter because those who have whitewashed Kane's history deserve any ridicule on any level that can be levied.

9.


The entire business model of Best Fans St. Louis is based around screenshots. But there is no accountability for any of it. Which isn't to say that they are making up things (except when they claim hot ESPN mics picked up on Cardinals fans yelling the n-word at Jason Heyward), but it strips the internet of context. Some lunatic tweets death threats against underperforming Cardinals? Somebody ironically writes "Bush Stadium" or "trader"? It doesn't matter because it's all the same.

Luckily, the true feelings on Best Fans St. Louis came to the forefront. Thank you, Crying Birds, for uncovering their true feelings.

8.


As far as I can tell, this is a completely earnest tweet. The hyperbole of random soldiers succeeding against the best football players in the world is comical enough but this tweet's true highlight is the word "dominate". It's not good enough to compete or play; they would DOMINATE. If you disagree, you simply hate the troops.

7.


So the original tweet, which declares "I would still rather have Stephen Piscotty for president than anyone actually running", is great. Often during election cycles, an easy way to score cheap comedy points is to make a joke about how bad presidential candidates are. And it's a cynical ploy to be "political" without offending anybody, but in the end, it offends the whole damn system. That's why I have such vitriol for the "Bud Light Party" commercials with Seth Rogen and Amy Schumer: presidential elections are important things, and reducing them to a plot device to sell your terrible beer is vulgar.

With that said, I would actually rather Stephen Piscotty be president than Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Gary Johnson, or Jill Stein. Frankly, I find it bothersome that anyone would vote for Johnson or Stein: your candidate isn't going to win anyway, so why would you not vote for actual, genuinely better candidate Stephen Piscotty? In the end I'm going to vote for Hillary Clinton because my desire to see the president not be Donald Trump supercedes my desire to #wellactually people on the internet when Hillary does something bad, but that's only because Piscotty doesn't have a chance (stupid Cardinals hatred).

Anyway, I went with the Hochman quote-RT because the original tweeter, El Maquino, despises Hochman, and his seal of approval led to Maq unpinning the tweet. Also, I don't get why people hate quote-tweets. They're okay!

6.


So this one is going to take some explanation, which diminishes the efficacy of the tweet, but it is one of the funniest things I have ever seen.

NFL writers are the most boring, self-serious people on the planet. Jeff Darlington is one of these people. It's just what it is: I follow more MLB, NBA, and NHL writers on Twitter than I do NFL writers because the other leagues at least have a sense of humor about things. NFL Twitter is Dead Damn Serious about the long snapper of the Cincinnati Bengals restructuring his contract so that Andy Dalton can get a raise (while it seems unfair that only one player, the starting quarterback, comes close to making his true value from NFL teams, it's a start).

Crying Jordan is objectively unfunny, but it is the persistence of it which made it funny. There is nothing inherently funny about a picture of Michael Jordan crying, even if you dislike him, and even putting his face over sad athletes is pretty bland. But in recent months, it has exploded to a point where Crying Jordan is being put on balls, over entire states, and just about everywhere.

During the final game of this year's NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament, between Villanova and MJ's alma mater North Carolina. And when Villanova won on a buzzer beater (every year, people try to convince me college basketball is popular, and I barely remember the end of this game that happened three months ago), Twitter did what Twitter does. Crying Jordan on top of present-day Michael Jordan. Crying Jordan on top of the entire UNC team. Et cetera.

Jeff Darlington simply posted the origin photo of Crying Jordan. He just wants to fit in!

5.
This tweet is the single-greatest encapsulation of internet commenters I have ever seen on Twitter. A Patrick Kane fan assuming moral high ground. A fan gaining a groundswell of support from Deadspin comments thanks to a non-joke passively referencing something something best fans in baseball. Viewing racial strife as a prop for which to argue about sports while paying so little attention to the issue itself that you don't even bother to verify the name of one of the major players within it. The internet's tendency to add worthless comments like "You sir win the internet".

Double Birds is very good.

4.


The first three replies to this tweet are the best thing to ever happen on that godforsaken website.


3.


Fendi Hotdogbun has 1,168 followers and this isn't a percent of what he deserves. He is consistently funny and terrific and it pains me to remind everybody, once again, of how badly he got owned here.

Please do not RT this tweet. Fendi will not appreciate the own.

2.



Donald Trump is a garbage person that I do not like but in the end, if he were to praise me, I'd probably accept the praise pretty enthusiastically, because I am a gigantic coward.

Deadspin did not. They see right through Trump: that he is trying to ride the coattails of the now-fashionable sports blog, and they are having absolutely none of that. That Trump immediately turned on Deadspin is itself a moment worthy of consideration.

1.

This tweet, from an account purporting to be former MLB outfielder Ricky Ledee, is perfect. And it comes so close to being forgettable. He walked a tightrope and he achieved perfection.

"Yea" is funnier than "Yeah", although I typically prefer the latter. There's something more casual about it. The lack of punctuation is critical: a comma or a question mark ruins the nonchalant nature of the tweet. And this tweet is endlessly quotable. Just try it: after you've consumed an adult beverage or two or three, tell somebody "Yea I've had a few beers so what." The cadence will warm your heart. It is the greatest tweet ever written.
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Saturday, June 4, 2016

Stuck

I had a good Memorial Day weekend. I went to a friend's wedding on Saturday (I'm not really the sentimental sort, but it's hard to argue against an open bar and a free meal), I wrote a VEB post on Sunday in which I took great pride and which I feel ranks with some of my best work on the site. And on Monday, I had a nice afternoon/dinner with my family.

On Tuesday, I woke up and felt miserable. Instantly, inconsolably miserable.

I didn't feel sick. I didn't have any logical reason to feel bad, and I had a decent day at work, but I felt awful. It happens every so often.

My work day, while not bad, was very busy, so I hadn't tweeted throughout the day just as a matter of circumstance. By the time I got home, I just didn't feel like it. So for the next five days, I didn't.

I still posted tweets to publicize my blog posts, because I feel like I owed my VEB cohorts some demonstrated effort to raise awareness for the website as a whole. But that was it. I would still check Twitter, though not nearly as often as I normally would, because it is a necessary tool for me to stay informed about my myriad interests, but I wanted to take a break from the interpersonal communication aspects of Twitter. It was by far the longest I went between posting tweets on my own since I joined the website in March 2011.

A few people noticed my habits had changed, and I told them I was fine. I'm still not sure if I was lying to them.

Those who know me well know that I have struggled with moments of sheer melancholia, pretty much forever. I have never been diagnosed with depression, though I am quite certain if I saw a psychiatrist, I would be diagnosed with it or something related. It never gets that bad, in the sense that I've always been able to compartmentalize it (it didn't affect my work, at my day job or blogging, and had I chosen to tweet, I'm quite certain I could've faked my way the last few days) and I've never contemplated violence, against others nor myself. But I still have those moments. And when I'm asked if I'm okay, I always say I am, because this is what people want to hear.

The reason I took a break from Twitter is because I felt like a fraud on it. My Twitter persona has always been an exaggerated version of my personality in real life: in real life, I am often sarcastic and quick-witted, though in a much more subdued way than I am online. I'm not as shy as I once was, though it still takes me a while to feel comfortable with new people. To be clear, I don't consider this to be a personality defect--I'm far from alone in this regard. But it's in such stark contrast with my much more extroverted e-persona.

The truth is that Twitter has been, for over half a decade, my comfort zone. Through some of my most insecure moments--when I felt like a failure, when I felt very alone--Twitter was where I could feel secure to say whatever I wanted. Much has been written, usually in reference to awful people who use Twitter for racist/sexist/homophobic/etc. sentiments, about how people hide behind avatars (I do not actually resemble Homer Simpson nor do I own a "TV SPORTS" pennant, though I would like one). But it works for me because I think I'm a fundamentally good person. I'm empathetic and caring and even when I don't do a good job conveying it, it is central enough to who I am that an uninhibited version of myself is, even if annoying, tolerable on a human level.

The phrase "quarter-life crisis" has become associated with those who fear the unknown. Think The Graduate (I took this analogy from the Wikipedia page on the phrase): Benjamin Braddock faces uncertainty about how his life will turn out following his graduation from college. I'm six years older than Braddock and probably won't live to 108, so I'm more inclined to view this as something of a third-life crisis. And it's the opposite of the quarter-life crisis: it is not fear of confronting the unknown, but rather the fear of routine. The fear that I'll be stuck in my current life pattern--not that I have a bad life, but rather the feeling that things could improve.

Twitter became a routine. It became boring. I got tired of regurgitating the same tired cliches over and over. I got tired of using it as a substitute for actual interpersonal communication. I'm not going to jump right back into tweeting exactly as I did before, because what I was doing before wasn't fulfilling for me. But I will be back, and hopefully, in every sense of the word, better than I was before.
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Sunday, May 29, 2016

Watch @FWBluesFan slow dance...for charity!

Many people who are reading this know Twitter user @FWBluesFan, either through Twitter or in real life. Those who know him know that he is generally a quite mannered person. But yesterday, May 28, with my own two eyes, I saw him do something wildly antithetical to this persona.

While at the wedding of our friend, Twitter user @dspPickuptruck, the Fort Worth Blues Man participated in dancing, as people often do at wedding receptions, but the true highlight was during a slow dance song, Ed Sheeran's omnipresent 2014 hit ballad "Thinking Out Loud", in which he and the groom engaged in a slow dance.

I have mentioned this to a few people already, and consensus is that this did not happen. But not only did it happen, but I have video to prove it. Two details about the video.
  1. It is 35 seconds long and they dance for about 34 seconds of it. The video ends with a pair of bridesmaids, who were also dancing to the song, crashing into me.
  2. At one point, listeners can hear a voice other than Sheeran's belting the lyric "that baby now". The voice is mine, attempting feebly to sing.
I would love nothing more than to share this video with you. I've watched it several times and hope others will get the privilege. Now, I could just post the video on Twitter, but we have made the decision to try to parlay our silliness into helping a worthy cause.

I will post the video of @FWBluesFan and @dspPickuptruck slow-dancing to "Thinking Out Loud" to Twitter and to this post if we are able to raise $69 for the American Cancer Society.

Yes, it's silly. Yes, it's juvenile. But who says that supporting a good cause must be ultra-serious? I made the decision to turn this video into a charity effort, and @FWBluesFan picked a very worthwhile cause. In fact, I donated to the cause myself.


So really, you guys only need to raise $59. If every one of our followers donates five cents to ACS, the video will go beyond my cell phone.

If you would like to contribute, go to donate.cancer.org and make a one-time donation. E-mail me at johnjf125 at gmail dot com to confirm that you made the donation: a screenshot of the donation screen, forwarding a confirmation e-mail, a screenshot of the confirmation e-mail, etc. are all acceptable as long as it is clear that it is authentic. 

If you want to blur or block out information (such as I did above, where I blurred my phone number), feel free to block out as much as you'd like as long as you maintain the dollar amount donated. If you want to keep it completely anonymous, you may blur out single bit of information on the e-mail aside from the dollar amount while using a dummy e-mail account. All information regarding individual donations will remain 100% anonymous.

As an extra bonus, if we can raise $420 (yes, I am 12 years old), I will record an audio commentary of the video (it will actually be much longer than 35 seconds). Hopefully I can convince one of its co-stars to also appear to break down the video, but I can promise that I will be there. So we are only $410 from that. Less than 34 cents per follower gets us to this level.

All donations are welcome and encouraged. No amount is too small. Thank you in advance.
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Sunday, May 22, 2016

I wrote a spec script for Crying Birds's TV show


Having partially inspired Crying Birds to creative heights with his pilot about a television show in which Grobot (henceforth referred to as "Nick"), @lil_scooter93 (henceforth referred to as "Heather"), and former St. Louis Cardinals quad-A outfielder Adron Chambers share an apartment with me, I have decided to begin a spec script for this show. While I personally would have titled the show "Apartment 2F", I #re2pect CB's decision to name it "Four Stories." And here is the story I have chosen to tell. I have only a vague idea of how scripts are written, format-wise, so please just enjoy the CONTENT on its own terms.

As the scene begins, John is sitting alone on a couch in the living room, typing on his laptop. That commercial where Jon Bon Jovi strums an acoustic guitar, singing and obliterating a small child as part of selling DirecTV is on in the background.

 *Nick walks in the apartment*

NICK: Do you know if Addie bought milk at the store this morning?

JOHN: Wh...Addie? Who's Addie?

NICK: You know, Adron.

JOHN: Wait, you're calling him Addie? I think we need a vote on this.

NICK: What the hell's wrong with Addie?

JOHN: Well, first of all, it doesn't even save on syllables. And if one of us is going to be nicknamed Addie, it should be Heather, since she's an accountant.

*Heather walks in the apartment*

HEATHER: Who's an accountant? (Laugh track, which otherwise does not appear on the show, for some reason loses its absolute shit over this joke)

JOHN: Oh, um, nobody's an accountant here, absolutely nobody. Nick just thinks we should call Adron "Addie".

NICK: Look, if you want to call him Adron, you go right ahead, but I think Addie sounds good.

*Adron walks in the apartment*

ADRON: Heyyyyyyyy gang. (This is his catchphrase, and because sitcoms are almost uniformly garbage, this is one of the better catchphrases in the history of television)

EVERYBODY ELSE IN UNISON: Heyyyyyyyy Adron! (Yeah, I know Nick's supposed to be calling him Addie, but this was really just a set piece at the beginning to pad the word count)

ADRON: Hey, I was just, I was thinking about something.

JOHN: What's that?

ADRON: Well, like, you know, it's kind of weird that I'm living with you guys.

JOHN: Nah, man, it's awesome. We're an interracial, mixed-gender group. We're like The Revolution here (oh, also I'm wearing a Prince t-shirt in the scene, RIP).

ADRON: No, it's not...it's not that. But, like, you're a bunch of single people in your 20s. I turn 30 later this year, and also I'm married. Doesn't logic suggest I should be living with my wife?

HEATHER: You're married?

ADRON: I...I think so. Wikipedia didn't say. Look, anyway, this just seems weird to be.

NICK: Don't be an asshat, Addie. This is a great setup we have. Yeah, you kind of stand out in the group because you're the old guy and also because you are a former professional baseball player and we're just a bunch of weird people on the internet...

ADRON: I'm still a baseball player, Nick. I'm in the Cubs minor league system.

HEATHER: The Cubs? So, um, do you hang out with Jason Heyward or Kris Bryant ever?

JOHN: *Looks straight at camera* Here we go again! *Looks around room* Oh, really? Nobody else is gonna say it with me? *Walks to the fridge and opens a beer that looks exactly like a Budweiser can except it says "Beer" on it* You guys are assholes.

ADRON: No, they're in the big leagues and I'm in the minors. It's like you guys don't even know me.

NICK: Well, we don't really know you. I know you scored that run against the Cubs in 2011 but that's it, really.

HEATHER: It's okay, Adron. I feel like an outsider here sometimes too. (The audience has an audible gasp like she just said she had a freaking brain tumor or something)

JOHN: Well, why's that?

HEATHER: Well, like, I'm the youngest one here. I'm the only woman. I don't even know why you guys invited me to be your roommate. I feel like a token woman here. I'm like Elaine on Seinfeld or that one girl, I don't know, I think her name was Kate or something, on The Drew Carey Show. Like, okay, there's three guy characters so we have to throw a female character into the mix.

JOHN: Look, Heather, I get what you're saying, but this isn't a TV show. (The audience LOSES IT on this joke, which I know I said there isn't a laugh track here but this was too damn much). And yes, we all have our differences. Nick's the tall one. Adron is the one that won a World Series ring with the 2011 St. Louis Cardinals. You're the woman. And I'm the extremely hot one. But while we all have our differences, we're all trying the best we can with these...four stories. (Audience erupts with applause and I win all of the Emmys that Jim Parsons won for The Big Bang Theory for some reason)
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Tuesday, May 3, 2016

A tale of two Blues fans

Eight days ago, Tony X was just some guy with a Twitter account. Tony, whose Twitter handle is @soIoucity, had a little over a thousand followers last Monday night and as of the moment I started typing this sentence, he had 85,692.

The genesis of Tony's spike in Twitter followers, for the uninitiated, is that he turned on Fox Sports Midwest hoping to watch a Cardinals game, but instead found Game 7 of the first round of the NHL playoffs between his hometown St. Louis Blues and the Chicago Blackhawks. According to Tony, he had never before watched a hockey game, but he nevertheless kept his TV on the channel and, as he live-tweeted, fell in love with the game. He was mesmerized by the sport's intensity and the drama of the event.

Granted, most hockey games aren't tightly-contested playoff game sevens between bitter rivals, one of which is your hometown team, and Tony probably got a bit lucky that this was his first exposure to the sport, but Hockey Twitter fell in love with his enthusiasm. He was naive to the specifics of hockey, but he had an enthusiasm which was infectious.

For as jaded as adults can get online about sports, Tony revealed a different perspective: somebody who discovers something new and just wants to tell everybody about how great it is. It doesn't have to be a sport--I discovered Oasis after they'd been selling out soccer stadiums in Europe for over a decade, but that didn't mean I didn't want to scream to everybody I know about how OH MY GAWWWWD YOU HAVE TO LISTEN TO SUPERSONIC RIGHT THIS INSTANT.

I was seven when I watched my first hockey game. Tony was an adult. There is a cavalcade of people best described as "haters" who clearly resent Tony's rise to pseudo-fame, which I do not understand whatsoever--I understand not being interested in seeing some random guy learn hockey on the fly, but the sense of "What did this guy do to earn this attention?" is odd to me. He entertained people and in many cases, reminded people of themselves.

In a strange way, he reminds me of my dad.

My dad is a generation older than Tony, and unlike Tony, has watched hockey before. He used to be a somewhat big fan: the first sport I ever watched was hockey, and it was because I watched the first home game of the Wayne Gretzky in St. Louis "era" (it's a footnote in Gretzky's career, but it was a formative experience of my sports fandom) with him that I eventually started following other sports.

But not long after I took to hockey, my dad stopped caring about it. He has always cited the Blues trading his favorite player, Brendan Shanahan, as the inciting incident which dulled his hockey fandom (this predates the Gretzky trade, but I'm willing to accept that the 1995-96 season was a transition year in a vacuum). But this always seemed strange to me, especially after Shanahan netted a 20 year-old Chris Pronger, an eventual Hall of Famer whose number will rightfully be retired by the Blues.

A month and a half after the Brendan Shanahan trade, the St. Louis Rams played their first game.

My dad was always a bigger fan of the Rams than the other St. Louis sports teams, including the Cardinals. Remember a few years ago when the Cardinals played in Game 5 of the World Series while, at the same time, the 3-4 Rams played the Seattle Seahawks on Monday Night Football? Most people I know ignored the Rams game. I didn't, but the World Series took priority, with the Rams getting my attention during commercial breaks. Dad watched the Rams exclusively. He wasn't at the game or anything--he just cared about the Rams that much more.

Tony X, it appears, was similarly passionate about the Rams. I don't know Tony's age, though it seems that, like me, he doesn't remember a world in which the Rams were not in St. Louis. For all of the national talk about the Rams' brief time in St. Louis, if you're under the age of 30, you remember the Rams in St. Louis as ubiquitously as you remember the Packers in Green Bay or the Steelers in Pittsburgh.
The Cardinals are great and wonderful. Hell, I write for a Cardinals blog. I'm not exactly ambivalent to their existence. But fans have a different relationship with the Cardinals, a ubiquitous local brand, than they do with less successful teams.

A little over a month ago, I wrote about how the Cardinals should specifically court alienated ex-Rams fans, though in fairness to the Cardinals, this was always going to be a less intuitive courtship than one spearheaded by the Blues. Fandom of the Blues, or any hockey team for that matter, is less casual. Say what you will about attendance for the Rams or Blues during lean years (of course, owners dangling the franchises to other cities didn't help the matters, either), but the fans who did show up and who did loudly rep their teams were hardly passive fans.

It had been well over a decade since my dad watched a Blues game. The only hockey I can recall him watching beyond my elementary school years was the last two minutes of the 2009 Stanley Cup Finals, and even after Marc-Andre Fleury's absurd performance stopping a flurry (pun unintended but nevertheless kept) of Detroit Red Wings shots, I could barely get him to muster more than a casual noting of impressiveness.

He usually goes to bed around 8 on weeknights, but he stayed up and watched every minute of Game 7 against the Blackhawks. He made sure before Game 1 against Dallas to know what channel NBC Sports was. During overtime of Game 2, he texted me about how nervous he was. It was the first time he had texted me about an in-progress sporting event since the final game of the St. Louis Rams.

Something is happening here. I had assumed when the Rams moved, St. Louis would collectively find another NFL team, but as it increasingly appears the entire league left us out to dry, this ceased to be an option. So in the end, our new Rams will not be the Chiefs nor the Bears nor the Colts. It's the Blues.

I was a Blues fan anyway, but it was only in 2016 that the Blues saved me.
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Saturday, April 2, 2016

The Weird Cardinals Twitter Bracket Finale

Two weeks ago today, @FWBluesFan and I launched the Weird Cardinals Twitter Bracket, a more (metaphorically) regionalized version of the Cardinals Twitter Bracket from @RooCourtSTL which had swept St. Louis baseball fans by storm. And today, going into tonight, we are proud to conduct the championship round of our bracket between 3-seed @lil_scooter93 and 8-seed @VanHicklestein.

As has been tradition, I will make no formal endorsements on the matter and instead focus on proctoring the vote in as fair of a manner as I possibly can. I would, however, like to congratulate both Twitter accounts on their resounding success to this point.

@VanHicklestein has traversed a difficult road to the final, defeating the nearly four times as followed @HighSock_Sunday in round one, Weird Cardinals Twitter insider favorite @crying_birds in the Elite Eight, and another more followed account in @turpin4prez in the Final Four.

@lil_scooter93 defeated each of the founders of this event, people with an inherent and systemic advantage in this competition, in the first two rounds, and then bested worthy up-and-comer @2xBirds to make the championship round.

Each of these accounts is worthy of its spot in this competition. If, by chance, you do not follow one or both of them, you should rectify that situation immediately. Voting runs until 10 p.m. In the event of each side receiving 50% of the votes, a 69 minute run-off will be conducted Sunday afternoon at an exact time yet to be determined.

We appreciate your support on this stupid idea we had and I believe I speak for the Fort Worth Blues Man when I say that we are overwhelmed and giddy to have seen so many people be so entertained by this little experiment.
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Saturday, March 19, 2016

The Weird Cardinals Twitter bracket

In an era in which "St. Louis Cardinals fan" turned into a pejorative, Weird Cardinals Twitter gives Cardinals fans a sense of community which the team's widespread popularity tends to undermine. By reputation, Cardinals fans are corny and self-righteous at best and deplorable racists at worst. But Weird Cardinals Twitter adheres to no such ideology. We exist as consumers of the Cardinals, not branches of them. We are first and foremost just a big group of friends cracking jokes and not taking itself too seriously. On March 15, @roocourtstl unveiled its Cardinals Twitter bracket of 64 Cardinals related Twitter follows. It has been a tremendous success, motivating hundreds to vote for their favorites (or, as was often the case, vote against their least favorites). And in the spirit of their wonderful idea, @FWBluesFan and I are proud to announce the 1st annual Weird Cardinals Twitter bracket. The initial list of 69 candidates has been cut to 17. Difficult decisions were made and hopefully those who did not make the field are not too offended that we deemed them as having too much of a life to crack this. The seeding is semi-arbitrary and more weight is given to setting up interesting matchups than to editorializing about the worthiness of each entry. Voting on the play-in matchup between the two 16 seeds will begin later today, March 19, with the Sweet 16 to begin not long after. Methodology will be a series of Twitter polls. Here is the bracket (and no, I didn't write my own preview):

 16: @vexedtechie earned his way into the field by coining "Sabermattrics", which he used to track how Matts Carpenter, Holliday, and Adams batted in 2015. As a whole, this epitomizes the analytics-leaning WCT in its irreverence. Twitter isn't about serious statistical research or identifying significant trends to predict future outcomes. It's about stupid puns. 16. @cardsnationjnky on the surface has leanings towards mainstream Cardinals homerism, but it is in his earnest commitment to his persona that Sean defines his brand. After all, if you're going to argue Michael Wacha over Clayton Kershaw, you might as well be really freaking adamant about it. 1. @crying_birds at first glance seems to be a non sequitur machine, but make no mistake: he knows exactly what he's doing. What he's doing is supposed to have killed Twitter by now but instead, it stripped Twitter of its pretense and self-serious #hashtag-ism and now is a form of performance art on a medium forever improved by his presence. 8. @VanHicklestein is a GIF artist and he has #stlcrads (sic) in his bio and he nearly toppled the awful @Total_CardsMove, in every way the antithesis of WCT, in the Roo Court STL bracket. Also he makes good tweets sometimes.

 9. @HighSock_Sunday once asked the GOP front-runner for its 2016 presidential nomination if Joe Flacco is a elite quarterback...and he got an answer. @PFTCommenter is wildly influential on the sarcastic tone of WCT and in this instance, the latter took the former's lead and made the actual news because of it.


5. @turpin4prez combines intelligent commentary on everything from sports to sociopolitical issues with an impossible-to-deny fluency in Weird Twitter conventions. This is his embodiment: 


12. @grobot05 serves the pivotal WCT rule of whipping boy, and he deserves credit for willingly taking abuse for when he has a bad sports opinion, when he is accused of hitting on young women, and for his relatively good nature when his most earnest tweets are roundly mocked.

 4. @Apartment_2F is an outstanding complement to his law school classmate Turpin. If the former, who leans right, and the latter, who leans left, hosted a political discussion show, any good and righteous American would watch. 2F loses some points though for abandoning his "John Daly in American flag pants smoking a cigar" avatar.

 13. @prefix6 has always been good for timely Simpsons references, but it was during the all-too-brief Golden Age of Ditty that his star truly shined.
6. @FWBluesFan slowly evolved into a bizarre observer of all sports, displaying a jaded irreverence towards sports simply by reducing them to platitudes such as "(player/team) tried their best." Oh, and for asking everybody he sees if Joe Flacco is elite. 


11. @thestlcardsfan4 has recently carved a niche as a TV blogger but he remains a blunt Cardinals follow. Mainstream Cardinals Twitter says Mike Matheny is good, and a certain type of intellectual fan will explain why he might not be. At WCT, we can just SAY he sucks because what difference could it possibly make what we think? 3. @lil_scooter93 is the only woman in this bracket, and while a simplistic approach would be to say that she is "one of the boys" among WCT, this is the opposite of the case. Heather doesn't try to hide her personality. She loudly and vociferously is what she is: a passionate and intelligent fan who makes tweets and goes about the WCT grind like everybody else. 

14. @johnjf125 is a mesh of smart and witty commentary on baseball, as well as the torch-bearer of Bridge Twitter. He takes pop culture references and uses them in brilliant analogies to all sports. His WCT brand was devalued when he became an actual serious writer at Viva El Birdos.
7. @azta110790 takes time between his day job shifts counting prairie dogs for the gummint to serve as president of the Tommy Pham Club. Also, he kind of looks like his avatar in real life.

10. @elmaquino is a former Cardinals blogger who departed from the writing game in favor of good baseball observations and jokes on Twitter.


2. @2xbirds, run by @dcwoodruff, provides a unique take on baseball-meets-politics. He took Maq's "Piscotty for President" tweet and has taken it brilliantly too far. Also, Chase created this video of Drew Magary dancing to "How Soon is Now?" by The Smiths, which I think about at least three times a day. 



15. @mstreeter06 is a top-flight GIFster but also is a pronounced WCT team player. Perhaps nobody more consistently replies "nice" when somebody uses the number 69 nor as consistently will reply to mentions to Alfredo Simon how he killed a guy. Just...just check the replies to this tweet.



For those who felt marginalized in the big Cardinals Twitter tournament, I hope you enjoy our weird take on it. Matchups will be posted in the coming hours and days.
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