CategoriesOff Topic rant

People on the internet crack me up. Trolls in particular.

Everyone is a tough guy (or girl) on the internet. The total lack of social filter or any semblance of decency seems to be non-existent when a select few sit behind their computer screens.

It can best be exemplified in this example.

Random guy to Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson on Twitter:

“Dude, my cat’s vomit could have made a better movie than San Andreas. It was that bad. Plus, your mom’s a whore. #smallbiceps.”

This behavior is analogous to the phenomenon of road rage (not so much the busting a cap in someone’s ass because they cut you off on I-95 type of road rage, which is a tad excessive to say the least; but more so the type of “rage” people project when they flip someone off in their car or yell any number of expletives through their car window and then immediately drive off.)

There’s no urgency to “get away” in a car, because, well, they’re in a car.

Someone can tell someone else to fuck off and before the recipient of said “fuck offedness” can respond (with a fist in the other person’s eye) the culprit is either two stop lights a head or illegally swerved into the car pool lane and high-tailed it out of there.

It’s a whole nother ball of wax when there’s less of a barrier.

People react and act much differently when the other person is face-t0-face.

Lets re-visit our random Twitter guy from before, but this time put him face-to-face with Dwayne.

“OMG, dude, I loooooooved your last movie. The way the lighting in the background made the sweat on your biceps glisten was amazeballs. Can I touch them?

No homo.”

When left with the alternative…a six foot, five inch, 270+ lb behemoth of a human being standing right smack dab in front of him, our internet tough guy changes his tune and turns into a giddy school girl at a One Direction concert.

I had a interaction with a troll recently, on Twitter.

The story begins with a completely random, inert, ho-hum, not-so-very-special Tweet on my end.

All I was trying to convey was that, for most trainees, there’s no need to worry about muscle fiber type, rate coding, neural firing patterns, inter and intramuscular coordination, or anything of that nature in order to get strong. While all enter the conversation, the ONE thing that’s most in our control is the size of our muscles.

A larger muscle with more cross-sectional area has a greater ability to produce more force.

KISS – Keep It Simple, Stupid.

See, nothing special. But, you know, train-of-thought information.

Not long after I received a response from someone on Twitter. To the effect of:

“Do u actually train people or just tweet? Most guys I know who are any good, don’t have time for this. Just curious.”

[NOTE: I’d link to the actual response, but in the aftermath, the person BLOCKED ME from following HIM, which is funny, because, I’d rather masturbate with sandpaper than follow this jackass. But anyways].

In Fairness: he did catch me on a rather “aggressive” day with regards to my Tweeting prowess. I think it was my tenth of the day.

So I chimed back, rather innocuously, with:

His response (again, I can’t re-post verbatim):

“LOL, exactly. Tony, stop writing about stuff you never do. Must be in between clients, right? Time waster.”

What I wanted to do was respond with something like this:

And then reiterate to him that, “no, I wasn’t in between clients because…I WASN’T AT THE FACILITY IN THE FIRST PLACE!”

Side Note: Did I mention it was my day off and that I wasn’t training people?1

But I didn’t. I resisted the urge to get into an internet dick measuring contest.

Rather than play into what he inevitably wanted me to do – engage – I just shot back with:

And that’s when he blocked me (which, for the record, I’m not complaining about).

Which begs the question:

If I wasn’t “any good” or he saw no value in the information I provide, why was he following me in the first place?

Which also begs the question:

Why even write this post in the first place?

1. Understandably it serves no real purpose, and I could have just as easily spent this same time writing a training program for a client.

However, writing about it is cathartic in a way and makes it less likely I’ll want to stab someone in the throat.

2. I just wanted to write this afternoon.

Something fun.

Furthermore

Lets do some Twitter math.

According to my profile, I joined Twitter in December of 2010. That’s ~1,580 days. Up until the writing of this post I’ve Tweeted a total of 5,351 Tweets.

That’s an average of 3.3 Tweets per day (95% of which are either links to my own posts or various articles I come across I feel would benefit my followers). Only like 0.8% are LOLCat videos.

Lets say it takes 20 seconds to write each Tweet. That’s a total of 60 seconds out of my day spent Tweeting.

Clearly I need to re-evaluate my time management skills.

  1. It was my day off