This is just one example, but one that amuses me.

Someone I don’t know made the comment:

I saw a bumper sticker that said “Make tea, not war”, and what a wild ride they are in for when they learn literally any fact about tea.

I will explain this, because tracing the topic switches is my point, and I suck the fun out like a vampire clown. In a nutshell, the British Empire is the story of a culture discovering a stimulant, finding it enabled them to take the technological and intellectual lead (The [Scottish] Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution) which required them to colonize half the world in order to secure the natural resources to feed itself. Including more tea. If you’re not from Southeast Asia, Tea is War.

My friend replied.

I say, why not make both?

Which includes this War Is Boring link detailing the history of the boiling vessel that is a distinguishing feature of British armor. Here we switch from a critique of imperialism and people who don’t know history to a dive into the specifics of military history. With, of course, a reference to an old taco commercial.

And here, I’m intending to reply to my friend.

In maybe 1990, I found that my school lib was a is documents depository, and I found the journal of the tank corps. Head-to-head comparison of Abrams & Challenger and the tea was deciding factor.

I tend to treat Twitter like a wide-open irc channel, or like chat, and I really did not expect to get any response. My average tweet gets between 50 and 150 “impressions”. This one got 51,139 as of this writing.

And the responses are debating whether the Challenger still has the NBC kit and the Chobham armor, which are add-ons optimized for the irradiated and ruined landscape and Soviet weaponry assuming the Cold War went hot and the Russians pushed through the Fulda Gap in the 1980s.

We talk about subsets of Twitter users, like AI Twitter or Cat Pic Twitter or Mechanical Keyboard Twitter. I have accidentally found Tea-Drinking Tank Fan Twitter.

I’m glad Tea-Drinking Tank Fan Twitter is out there, obsessing about the comparative advantages of MBTs and steep times for us sinners. But clearly, this shows people are engaging in the conversations they want to have, not the conversations that are actually there.

Twitter is weird.

If you have any questions or comments, I would be glad to hear it. Ask me on Twitter or make an issue on my blog repo.