About 5 years ago, in the early stages of my poker career, I began a blog with the intention of sharing some stories from my life, a majority of which came from poker. I was a professional Omaha player, commonly referred to as PLO (Pot Limit Omaha), thus engendering the blog title "Confessions of a Young PLOfessional."
These days I can no longer truly call myself an Omaha player, try to say I'm not a professional poker player (not many take this with much credence), and moreover, the "focus" of my blog has shifted rather far away from poker.
With this in mind, I have decided to change my blog title to "Life of a -Don," homage to a Logic song, and my extensive background as the head of a mob family.
Hopefully this will inspire me to actually start writing...
Please allow me to re-introduce myself (my name is Cole, my n*****)
There was a day and age where I respected hashtags.
When they first appeared, hashtags seemed the perfect literary tool. To me, they provided something like an alter-ego within a single post...an alternative voice a la Jim Gaffigan's audience voice (#hotpockets). It could provide a shift to sarcasm, a summarizing point, or in times of desperation/confusion, the actual topic I'm talking about (#hashtags). It seemed innocent enough and I enjoyed its introduction.
But now here we are in 2014...
It seems as if Instagram has installed some sort of hashtag quota that users need to fulfill in order to maintain their accounts on the site. Over 50% of your captions are JUST words? Get the fuck out of here. Your caption reads like an actual sentence instead of someone trying to spit out their last words while choking on a walnut? NOT FOR INSTAGRAM.
Do people even realize what they are writing? #Does #anyone #realize #how #much #harder #it #is #to #read #with #all #of #these #stupid #fucking ##s #in #the #way? Let alone TYPE. I fear that in the future the # is going to jump right into the middle of the keyboard lest we not have to mash "Shift + 3" every time we try to write "descriptions." There doesn't even seem to be an article clause like we have for "the" and "a" which are commonly un-capitalized in titles. Hashtag that shit! What if someone is trying to search for all the #a's just to see what people are saying about "A?!" You know some Chinese kid does that somewhere.
And "latergram"??? I had to go and look that shit up online the other day because I kept seeing it and wondering what the hell it was, and why in the world such an apparently meaningless word was being hashtagged in 125% of the pictures I was seeing on Facebook. Turns out its just to notify me that "THIS WAS NOT INDEED AN INSTANTANEOUSLY POSTED PICTURE"...kind of like most pictures of most people in all day every day life...seriously. You have no idea the amount of stress that saved me in wondering when that picture was taken. I was all like, "Wow she's posting it at 9 pm but the sun looks like mid-day...is this REALLY an Instagram or are they just full of shit? Oh it says #latergram, thank God now I can sleep."
You know what a "latergram" really is? A normal fucking picture. That people feel compelled to share instantaneous updates on their lives via social media tilts me enough...that they now feel the need to notify us when its not actually instantaneous...Maybe those old letters we used to write people that traveled through this ancient postal system I've heard a lot about should have included a note at the end, "P.S. Just so you know, this letter only reflects my life/views up until like 2 weeks ago, I apologize for the gross delay."
I feel like there's a few things that people are maybe missing that could help rectify this hashtagopalypse:
1) I can read words that aren't in blue.
2) It has been years since I enjoyed the "see if you can find all of these items hidden in this picture" game...I don't need your hashtag word bank (#maithai #sun #beach #sand #umbrellas #gfy)
3) No one cares when you took your pictures, unless they ask something like "when was this?" at which point you can notify them of a time-frame more meaningful than "not the exact second I posted it"
4) When you hashtag every single word you are detracting from whatever "meaningful" words you were actually trying to hashtag. We are now just reading a sentence full of stupid delays.
5) If you were in any way offended by any of this, you should probably take a break from social media.
I miss the days when I saw "#" and thought "the pound key or something like that in the corner of the phone."
