Twitter Archive Wrap-up

The previous three posts have all my Twitter activity from 2008-9, 2010, and 2011.  Not all of the tweets have to do with It's Pub Night or with beer, but the Twitter account is mostly an extension of the blog.  It's not a place where I interact with family or work colleagues, and not very seriously with the few friends who are connected on Twitter.

This post has links to what I tweeted and analyzes when, who, where, and how I tweeted.  The only unanswered question is WHY?

When I was actively blogging, I got very annoyed by blogs that were more about blogging than about their supposed subjects.  I'm not sure how I would have reacted to these posts which just hash and rehash blogging and tweeting done years ago.  In my defense, one reason I started a blog was to document the current moment, for the benefit of readers in the future, and this furthers that ideal.  I will put the tweet archives for 2012-2022 on separate pages to keep them out of the blog post stream. 

Here are all the posts and pages with the complete tweet history, up until late November 2022 when I requested the archive from Twitter.

• It's Pub Night: Early Tweets (2008-9)
• 2010 Tweets
• 2011: The Golden Age Ends
• It's Pub Night 2012 Tweets
• It's Pub Night 2013 Tweets
• It's Pub Night 2014 Tweets
• It's Pub Night 2015-18 Tweets
• It's Pub Night 2019-22 Tweets

It's been fun to look over the Twitter archive and remember what was happening 10-15 years ago.  While extracting, timestamping, linkifying, and ordering the tweets, I gathered some statistics about them that may or may not be interesting.

Activity

I was never a very prolific tweeter, and it has really fallen off in recent years.  The archive I downloaded contains 9230 total tweets.  Here are the yearly totals:

• 2008: 25
• 2009: 797
• 2010: 1347
• 2011: 1847
• 2012: 1333
• 2013: 1092
• 2014: 723
• 2015: 307
• 2016: 357
• 2017: 526
• 2018: 342
• 2019: 141
• 2020: 157
• 2021: 146
• 2022: 89

You might attribute the recent dearth to the pandemic, but the downward trend began in 2012 and was obvious by 2014.  Looking through the archive, there is a single tweet with the word "covid" in it, and that is a re-tweet of someone else.  Mainly, Twitter became less fun as more politicians and celebrities joined, and as the company tweaked their algorithms in ways that disfavored quirky occasional posters like myself.  There were fewer local fun people to interact with.  I don't think we were shadowbanned, but the effect of the algorithms was the same.

1555 of the tweets seem to be retweets, though in the early days you might add RT to a piece of original art to pretend to have a conversation with someone like Barack Obama or your friend Wallace, like:

Friday July 25, 2014 05:02 PM

  RT @BarackObama Thanks dude! RT @halfbipolar 9:15 RT @BarackObama Hey @halfbipolar What time does pillowfight play at the Hawthorne Theater?

Actually I can't remember if I started that or if Wallace did.  Anyway, some of the statistics below could be skewed a little by retweets, though the big picture is accurate.

More pictures start appearing in tweets in mid-2012, and become more common as time goes on.  There were pictures in tweets before then, but often had to be hosted on a different site like twitpic.

People

Another fun thing about this project was to look back at who the beer Twitter/Portland Twitter characters were at that time.  Some are still active; some have lost interest or quit drinking; some I now realize I did not know at all and have no way to begin tracking them down.  A few have passed away and are dearly missed.

In the early days you could make IRL friends that you first met on Twitter.  I don't think that happens much anymore, thanks to the algorithms.

All told, I mentioned or replied to or retweeted 1131 unique user IDs.  I mentioned my wife once, and each daughter three times.  I wasn't connected on Twitter to any other family members, and absolutely no one at work.  Here are the top people I tweeted to or mentioned in tweets:

• SamuraiArtist: 589
• Beervana: 268
• jwall4: 144
• AGSHender: 143
• UrbanBeerHiker: 143
• NewSchoolBeer: 136
• JfwellsPDX: 122
• itspubnight: 118
• brewpublic: 115
• HumuloneRed: 115
• socialretard: 113
• ConOat: 112
• beerinator: 101
• TracyTThomas: 95
• turbodog: 92
• SnobRitch: 91
• Notteham: 83
• bikeportland: 72
• rojasburke: 71
• TheBeermongers: 66

Man I miss UrbanBeerHiker.  Though I did see him 4 years ago, about a year or so after he ditched Twitter.

Technology

At first most of my tweets were done via text message, which was actually a pretty common way to tweet back then, if you recall.  I would also get text messages if someone mentioned me, or if selected people tweeted anything.  It took a while before I sent a few pictures to Twitter via text message.  Here are the various ways my tweets arrived on the platform:

• Yoono (2010-2014): 3141
• Twitter Web Client (2008-2018): 1922
• Plus 19 tweets from Twitter "Mobile Web"
• Plus 70 tweets from "Twitter Web App" -- how is this different?
• 54 of those are from 2022 after TweetCaster stopped working
• TweetCaster for Android (2014-2022): 1832
• Twitter SMS (2008-2015): 1505
• Plus 98 "MMS" tweets (picture attached)
• Also 3 text tweets while I was at a show at Dante's in 2016 (???)
• Also 1 text tweet in 2018 from a plane on the runway in India
• Echofon (2010-2011): 463
• Twitpic (2010-2012): 81
• Instagram (2017-2018): 43
• Beermapping.com (2009-2011): 28
• twitterfeed (2009-2010): 12
• Supposed to automate tweeting of new blog posts, but more work than simply tweeting them myself.
• Twitter for Android (2014, 2022): 6
• Twitter for Websites (2011, 2013-2014): 6
  

About 17% of my tweets were via text message.  Another 22% were typed into the Twitter webpage. In 2010 I discovered browser plugins that made reading and posting to Twitter better:  first Echofon, then yoono.  40% of my tweets were with these plugins, and now I can't remember a thing about how I used them.  In 2014 I got my first smartphone, and quickly discovered that third-party apps are much better than Twitter's own app:  1) no advertisements or promoted tweets; 2) they give you the tweets in order, not according to Twitter's stupid algorithms; 3) you can temporarily mute people or subjects.  I used TweetCaster for about 20% of my tweets until it abruptly stopped working in 2022.

#Hashtags

I am not a great hashtagger.  There are less than 500 hashtags in my tweets, and 158 were from trying to cross-post to Facebook without having to log onto it.  Another 48 were from the #ontappdx days of Taplister, back when Twitter was about more than Twitter.  Here are my top 20 hashtags:

• fb: 158
• OBF: 50
• ontappdx: 48
• PDX: 43
• gabf: 41
• freshhop: 38
• craftbeer: 29
• pdxbeer: 28
• pedalpalooza: 25
• BBC11: 21
• beer: 15
• ff: 15
• SundayParkways: 15
• SBWF: 14
• freshhops: 13
• haf2011: 13
• pdxbeergeeks: 10
• hrhops12: 8
• rimshot: 8
• sampletraystunt: 8

Links

Below is the list of sites I linked to the most on Twitter.  A lot of the links in my tweets are obscured by link shorteners.  For this list, I replaced as many of them as possible with the true targets, though that is heavily skewed towards posts on its-pub-night.com itself.  The pdx.be and nblo.gs shorteners are defunct, so those 63 links are not knowable.  Some t.co and bit.ly links couldn't be found for some reason, or maybe they pointed to other t.co or bit.ly URLs (my process of tracing the links is not exhaustive).  The twitter.com links are often modern quote tweets, not real interesting links.  Still, the list gives you a pretty good picture of where I linked to:

• twitter.com: 603
• its-pub-night.com: 585
• bmap.us: 311
• twitpic.com: 146
• newschoolbeer.com: 62
• pdx.be: 53
• instagram.com: 50
• bit.ly: 39
• t.co: 38
• beervana.blogspot.com: 24
• youtu.be: 17
• oregonlive.com: 16
• blog.oregonlive.com: 15
• brewpublic.com: 15
• youtube.com: 15
• maps.google.com: 14
• imageshack.com: 13
• nblo.gs: 10
• thenewschoolbrewblog.blogspot.com: 10
• portlandbeer.org: 9
• bikeportland.org: 8
• anearforbeer.blogspot.com: 7
• beerpulse.com: 7
• facebook.com: 7
• flickr.com: 7
• urbanbeerhikes.com: 7
• wweek.com: 7
• beeradvocate.com: 6
• beeronomics.blogspot.com: 6
• google.com: 6
• notsoprofessionalbeer.com: 6
• nytimes.com: 6
• web.archive.org: 6
• apintfordionysus.wordpress.com: 5
• dontdrinkbeer.com: 5
• examiner.com: 5
• i.imgur.com: 5
• pdxbrewtunes.blogspot.com: 5
• thebrewsite.com: 5

Preserving History

This exercise seems like a way to further the historical preservation goal mentioned at the beginning of this post.  It also shows how fragile documents can be, even in the Internet age.  For a while I used a link shortener called pdx.be, which seemed really cool because you could make custom links like "pdx.be/erReviewMaker", but it went offline at some point and took all the links with it.  Even if a shortened link still exists, the website it points to may be gone, or may have reorganized their content. Some tinyurl.com links to new It's Pub Night posts now fail, though others succeed. Other information is lost when tweets are replies to someone else's tweet, but Twitter can't find the original.  Everything can combine to leave tantalizing mysteries like:

Thursday October 15, 2009 10:40 AM

  @rpFactotum That's awesome and too bad at the same time. Happened last night? http://bit.ly/3jzqAD

The username "@rpFactotum" is no longer valid on Twitter, the tweet being replied to can't be found, and the bit.ly link points to content that has vanished or been renamed.  Wish I knew what this bad awesome thing was that happened the night of Oct. 14, 2009.

I fixed whatever broken links in these tweets pointed back into It's Pub Night.  In terms of broken links in the blog itself, if you're lucky the Wayback Machine will have preserved the original links.  For example, San Francisco vs. Portland from 2010 links to two paintings in the SFMOMA collection which are uniform gray rectangles, but now in 2023 the links are broken.  The archived page at the Wayback Machine has links that correctly point to an archived version of the museum website, so you can see what I was carping about.  With that in mind, here are snapshots of It's Pub Night for the busiest years, so that hopefully you could navigate to links which are broken today:

• December 2008
• December 2009
• December 2010
• December 2011
• December 2012
• December 2013

Just before I requested the archive in November 2022, and days before the new Twitter owner posted his infamous pair of polls, I posted my first Twitter poll.  The text of the tweet is in the archive, but not the poll choices or results.  Since the poll was about this anniversary, I'll put a picture of it here (sadly I got the anniversary date wrong).  As a measure of how brutal the Twitter algorithms are, my poll only got 15 responses.  I realize not all followers are real or active, and lots of people are discouraged by Twitter right now, but interaction from 1% of followers tells me I've been put on a shelf.  I had to beg for some of the votes even.

2012 Toronado Barleywine Festival Recap

The weekend I recently spent in Oakland happened to coincide with the final days of San Francisco's annual SF Beer Week. That was why Beer Revolution had an L.A. brewery takeover when I was there, and it's also why I was able to partake of some lip-puckering Cantillon drafts -- Mamouche and 2010 Iris -- that Saturday evening at The Trappist.

Another legendary SF Beer Week event is the Toronado Barleywine Festival, and on Sunday morning I couldn't resist heading into the City on BART for that, especially since I knew I was going to have to miss the Lucky Lab Barleywine Festival in my own hometown. Publicity for the event said it would begin at 10 AM, and following the "arrive early" rule of thumb for festivals, I walked past Toronado a little before 10 while searching for some pre-barleywine breakfast. There was already a line of perhaps a dozen people waiting out front.

Now, 10 AM is pretty early to start with the big beers like that, so I was a little relieved when I came back at 10:30 and found that the place hadn't opened yet.  I took my place at the back of the line, and waited until the doors finally opened a little after 11.  My notes say that I tried about 14 of the beers that day though some of those were little sips generously shared by my neighbors at the end of the bar.  My three favorites of the day were:

• Speakeasy Old Godfather 2009
• Emelisse Barleywine
• Stone Old Guardian 2009

All three had that brown sugar note that tastes so good in a big barleywine, with the characteristic alcohol heat.  If you're not familiar with Emelisse, it's a Dutch brewery that is starting to show up more often over here, though I'm more used to seeing their Imperial Stout than their Barleywine.  I'm a little surprised at how much I liked the 2009 vintage barleywines at the festival -- that's pushing the envelope on how long a beer should be aged, in my opinion.  Maybe I need to be more flexible about that.  At the other end of the spectrum, here were three I didn't like:

• Alaskan Rough Draft 2011 -- fruity, too sweet, "tootsie roll"
• Shipyard Double Old Thumper -- too sweet
• Triple Rock Dragonaut -- weak

Getting to the festival early was definitely a good idea.  Sitting at the bar, I was treated very well by the notoriously touchy Toronado staff, who did a good job keeping the samples flowing.  There were two sizes:  small (3 oz.) and medium (6.5 oz.), $3 and $5 respectively, though sometimes the smalls seemed to be as full as the mediums.  Apparently there was a large serving in years past, but experience had proven that to be a bad idea. 

If you go to the fest, remember this trick that Ezra told me about:  bring an empty six-pack holder to carry your samples back to your table, since you'll want to order a few at a time.  It ended up not mattering for me since I found a seat at the bar, but the people with six-packs were definitely having a nicer time of it.

Where Angels Fear to Tread

This week I was in the Silicon Valley for work. Not my favorite place in the world, but I was determined to make the best of it. The rental car place had upgraded me from a Hyundai to a Cadillac, so Monday evening I decided a drive to Santa Cruz was in order. Beermapping.com recommended that I hit Red Restaurant, and I was really glad I did.  The place had a great laid-back atmosphere with lots of couches spread out around a cozy room, and a wonderful tap list of about 30 beers  The goblet of Lost Abbey Angel's Share in the picture only set me back $5.50.   Friendly service and serviceable food rounded it all out.  If you're headed there, don't be confused by the ground floor -- a burrito place and a smoky bar called the Red Room -- find the stairway outside that leads upstairs to the Red Restaurant.

That Angel's Share was a thing of beauty:  dense toffee flavors with a boozy brandy edge, balanced with unobtrusive hops.  Despite what a big beer it was, it wasn't at all cloying.  I would have drunk one after the other if I didn't have to steer a land yacht 40 miles through the rain on winding mountain roads to get back to my motel.  Back at the motel, a Unibroue Maudite -- a Belgian-style beer that I usually love, and which garners an A- on Beer Advocate -- seemed syrupy and one-dimensional compared to the memory of the Angel's Share.

Tuesday evening I took Caltrain up to the City to hang out with our friend Andy and check out a couple of North Beach places that I hadn't been to.  La Trappe is a Belgian-themed beer-snob favorite that I was embarrassed to have missed during our family vacation in March.  With my sights set on La Trappe, Beer Advocate came up with another North Beach gem to try: Kennedy's Irish Pub and Curry House.

Kennedy's has a respectable 30-some-odd beer taps, but I was also interested in the Indian-food angle of the place.  I figured the menu would consist of British-inflected curries, but when we got there I was surprised to see that in addition to the standard fare, they also served South Indian dosas and utthappam.  This was a bit of overkill for me -- I had already had a huge pesarattu dosa with upma for lunch that day at Dosa Place in Santa Clara -- but there is so little in the way of good South Indian food in Portland that I was happy to repeat myself.  The Kennedy's dosas were not exactly kosher: in fact we ordered a spicy chicken dosa and a lamb utthappam.  Those are odd variations on a basically vegetarian cuisine, but they were tasty enough and a welcome departure from usual bar food.  If you go there, one dosa is enough for two people.

The schizophrenia at Kennedy's doesn't end with the Irish-Indian juxtaposition.  There's also sort of a sports-bar vibe to the place, with TVs in every corner, and pool, foosball, and air hockey.  Andy was excited when we ambled up to the door -- "This is one of the last bars in San Francisco that has air hockey," he said.  If that wasn't enough, on our way out we discovered that one room in the place is now a wine bar with rotating exhibits of modern art, and local meet-the-winemaker events.  With something for almost everyone, Kennedy's is definitely a place to check out.

Full of spicy food, Andy and I made our way over to La Trappe.  There was a kind of resonance with my Red Restaurant experience:  the cellar dining area of La Trappe has a similarly dark and relaxed ambience, and even has a little candlelit cove of couches and coffee tables if you are just there for a beer or two as we were.  What really resonated with me was that they also had Angel's Share on tap, though at a more diabolical big-city price of $8, for a less generous pour than the one I had the night before in Santa Cruz.  I was really happy to get another shot at such a wonderful beer that isn't available in Portland.  Andy ordered a Kwak that was served in one of the more ridiculous pieces of glassware ever seen -- a round-bottomed beaker that rests in a cheesy wooden stand.  Good beer, and a really fine atmosphere that left me wishing I had more time and money to spend there.

The beer tourism was a welcome relief from the woes of business travel.  I highly recommend La Trappe and Red if you find yourself in SF or Santa Cruz respectively, and Kennedy's is a fun, funky place that I expect to return to again.  And take as many shares of Angel's Share as you can get -- it's a stunner.

San Francisco vs. Portland

While waiting in line at the Rooftop Coffee Bar at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art earlier this week, I couldn't help but overhear a young lady nearby ranting about -- of all things -- how pretentious Stumptown Coffee is. She was talking to a somewhat older gentleman -- her father? her art professor? -- and seemed particularly offended that Stumptown's cafes serve French-pressed coffee instead of drip coffee. "Of course," she added with disgust, "Stumptown is from the most pretentious city I've ever been in: Portland."

Interesting.  She's enjoying a visit to a museum that currently exhibits not just one rectangular painting of a uniform gray but also a second such work, yet she thinks coffee presses are pretentious. Not to mention the fact that the Blue Bottle cafe we were standing in serves an espresso drink designed by kitsch-meister Jeff Koons, whose porcelain Michael Jackson is also on display at SFMOMA. I mean no disrespect to the museum or the art world, but isn't irony delicious? As I stood there pretentiously sporting my Hawthorne Bridge T-shirt, I turned to ask the Stumptown hater, "Portland is more pretentious than San Francisco?". "Well," she replied, "it certainly has a higher ratio of pretentious to non-pretentious people."

Oh well, Portland will always have its detractors. In fact, the girl at the art museum reminded me in a way of cranky Portland beer blogger Dr. Wort, though instead of finding us too pretentious, he thinks things are too sloppy here, and he pines for the more refined San Francisco beer scene he experienced as a lucky denizen of the Bay Area. Though conceding that SF has a relatively small number of breweries and brewpubs, the Doc fondly remembers them as places where -- this is a quote -- "the gastronomic delights abound". It's tempting to pick apart the doctor's fawning over some California places that he would excoriate for their blandness if they magically appeared here in Portland, but I think I better get on with my own report of this week's trip to San Francisco.

It was a family vacation, so there weren't any late nights or beer-soaked days, but Carla and I made it out to a few beer places. Sunday evening we swooped down on our San Fran man Andy, who hiked us from his apartment to Zeitgeist and then Toronado, neither of which I had been to before. Toronado was smashing -- an interesting, well-rounded selection of draft beers, reasonably priced. It's got a little bit of a dive bar feel to it, in the sense that you could sit there in the dark and be perfectly at ease. The place is famed for bartenders with attitude, but I thought the service was good, and they even forgave me a faux pas when I accidentally slammed my empty glass down on the zinc bar with a loud bang. The delicious cheap sausages from Rosamunde's next door were the icing on the cake. Kind of ridiculous I'd never been to Toronado; now I'll make sure and get there every time I'm in the city.

On the other hand, Zeitgeist was a disappointment. In his recent report on San Francisco, Ezra said Zeitgeist has about 40 taps, but Sunday at least 25 of those were blown -- the Sierra Nevada Imperial Stout blew with my order. My wife only gets IPAs anymore, and there wasn't a single IPA or even Pale Ale left when we were there. She ended up with a so-so amber called Poppy Jasper from El Toro. The Zeitgeist beer garden is set up pretty nicely, but it was way too crowded. We found a vacant place to sit, but had to wait awhile for the empties from the previous occupants to be bussed, and forget about a rag to wipe the table. Of the 500 people in the yard, 350 were smoking cigarettes and another 25 were openly smoking pot. I've got no particular beef with those activities, but it wasn't our scene.

On other nights we made it out to 21st Amendment and the Thirsty Bear, both walkable from our Market Street hotel. It had been a few years since I'd been to 21A, so I was glad to get the chance, but the taplist was a little disappointing -- IPA, Amber, Red, Light Golden, Watermelon Wheat... ho hum. The Smoked Imperial Porter was the standout, though it bore a cruel California price tag of $7 for 10 ounces, plus tax. Of course Carla went with the IPA, and it was very tasty -- the hop aroma would remind you of orange blossoms or apricots. The food we tried was quite decent, if a little spendy for what it was -- a brick-oven pizza and a loaded cheeseburger (no tater tots).

We didn't try any entrees at the Thirsty Bear, but the oysters with avocado granita and sea salt were brilliant. I enjoyed the abbey-style Belgian ales (one golden, one "amber") that were on as seasonals, although we found the cask IPA to be a little humdrum. It's an odd place -- they get a lot more business from the convention center nearby than from any kind of regular local crowd. It's worth a visit if you're in the area.

I realize that this post meandered around quite a bit, and might not have all that much to do with the headline. For me the main beer lessons of this trip were: first, Toronado goes a long way toward redeeming the sparsity of San Francisco's beer scene; second, be it ever so pretentious, there's no place like home.