Posted January 27, 2010 at 1:22 am
It's weird how much flak I've gotten for Wil Wheaton's mention of me. Everything from stand-offish sarcasm from a few emails, to others angrily using Twitter to contact both Wheaton and myself. What's the big deal? I'm a fan of his, so I drew him into my comic and twittered about it. Yes, I twittered about how I wanted him to see it. I didn't start a spam campaign or pass out his email address or anything. I twittered that I wanted the guy to see my work. Now before you start painting "Thunt was getting his readers to spam Wheaton" on a sign and waving it above your head, let's take a moment to look at some important numbers.

-Wheaton has close to two million followers on Twitter.
-He Tweets dozens of times a day, often with inane/entertaining questions to his followers.
-I currently have a meager 1,450ish followers and when I ask them a question such as "can condensed milk go in tea" I get maybe 30-50 responses in the space of a couple hours.

So if (1,450 Twitter followers + inane question = 30 to 50 tweets) then (1,638,000 Twitter followers + inane question = somewhere around 49,000 tweets) I actually can't imagine him getting 49,000 responses every time he asks a question on Twitter, but lets just say, considering how many times he tweets with fun questions or "look at a picture of the waffles I ate for breakfast", that it's a lot. Wil Wheaton is clearly not a man who minds getting Twitter traffic.

Does my mentioning on Twitter about how much I'd like Wheaton to look at my comic, get people to send him tweets? Yes. Does it flood him with spam? Of course not. The tweets he got about my comic from Goblins readers is nothing when compared to his usual daily traffic, which as I've mentioned, he encourages. Let's also not forget that we're talking about Twitter here. Twitter. It's not his email or his website, it's Twitter. The same social networking site that people use to show pics of their cat sleeping or their lucky D-twenty. This is the site that is primarily used to tell the world that your shoelace broke or that the guy in front of you at the bank has body odour. Twitter is simplistic, pseudo-intellectual tripe and I freaking love it. It's the perfect place to say "hey geeky celebrity, check out my backwater, Canadian comic in which you appear cause you rock".

One email that I received talked about how Wheaton only linked to me on Twitter to "shut me up". However, Wil also copied a snip of my comic and posted it on his Tumblr account along with a comment about how funny he found it and how he liked the shirt I'd drawn him in. This doesn't seem like the actions of a guy who just wants to shut me up or who feels like I'm flooding him with a tidal wave of spam.

Now that that's said, let me take this moment to recommend his books. They're pretty much mandatory reading for any geek and you can find them along with a huge amount of other brilliant and hilarious material over at his site. Along with my recommendation to buy his books, I'm aggressively asking all my readers to go over to his Twitter account and tell him how awesome he is. Tell him he's intelligent, tell him he's funny. Make him smile. In fact, I also want everyone to go over to Neil Patrick Harris' Twitter account and compliment him for rocking our worlds. Then when you're all done there, head to Girl Genius' Twitter and thank the Foglios for making such great comics. Then onto Lar deSouza and Ryan Sohmer for their inspiring work. Wait a second... my call to spam is starting to look an awful lot like social networking. Hmmm...

You see, as much as I'd like to think that I have the kind of tspamnami powers that some angry folks claim I have, I'm just one more person having some fun on Twitter, and what some people call "encouragement to spam", I call respecting someone I look up to by telling folks about him in my own way.

As always, thanks for reading and following me on Twitter.

~Thunt