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Twitter and Stinky Tofu, or How I Spent My Saturday Night

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In my quest to bother Kings fans, I accidentally annoyed Blackhawks fans instead.

By Megalodon
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It smells like poop and garbage.
It smells like poop and garbage.

This past Saturday night, the Kings lost to the Blackhawks and were eliminated from the playoffs. I wasn't watching the game, because I was attending the 626 Night Market at Santa Anita Park.

Just because I wasn't watching, though, doesn't mean I couldn't talk shit.

When people who aren't on Twitter ask me what the point of it is, I usually tell them about how it's great for following breaking news, or how during big cultural events everyone makes jokes together and it's a lot of fun...but in truth, THIS is the true purpose of Twitter:

The Kings had JUST lost. The pain of Los Angeles fans was as fresh and sharp as it would ever be. There would never be a better time to mock, bait, and tease Kings fans. And so that's what I did. While walking around the Night Market drinking an overpriced beer, eating from weird food trucks, and trying desperately to avoid standing anywhere near a place that served stinky tofu, I took to Twitter in the hopes of making a few Kings fans out there feel even worse than they otherwise would.

Some people work to make the world a happier place. I had a similar, yet directly opposite, goal.

Lots of people online love to correct other people and are also totally incapable of detecting sarcasm or identifying whether something might be a joke, so if you're an asshole (like me) looking to bait people into responding to your bullshit, including obvious factual errors is usually a great way to get results:

I've got to hand it to Kings fans, though - very few of them responded at all to my childish insults. Maybe a lot of the more emotional ones were smart enough to get off of Twitter in the aftermath of their team's loss, or maybe some of the dumber ones learned their lesson after I did basically this same thing back in May:

I'll admit I was getting kind of frustrated at the lack of backlash to my Tweets. I, like any bully, crave attention. What was the point of my petty cruelty if no one was getting angry?

Finally, though, after much thought, I produced a Tweet that struck gold:

I'll be honest: I'm pretty proud of this Tweet. I'm pleased with the way I sort of managed to insult three teams at once, while hopefully leaving Kings fans unsure of how to respond:

This is the Tweet that got results...though not the results I had been expecting.

The trouble started when @ChiTownSports retweeted and responded to me:

Clearly, this guy was taking my comment very seriously. He had no time for the wonderful Penrose stairs-style humor of my initial Tweet. He wanted to make sure I knew I was ignorant. I sent back an expression of my thanks:

After that, things started moving quickly. Apparently a lot of the people who follow @chitownsports share that account's disdain for subtle, artfully-crafted humor, and all of them also decided to take my comment completely seriously.

Thanks to Trenton for preserving the Tweet from @anothersurf, who deleted his Tweet where he told me he hoped I would burn in hell forever.

Another dude, @GoHawks31, also deleted some shit-talking Tweets of his own later on, and unfortunately I don't have those preserved. Rest assured though, they were pretty dumb.

It was through a retweet from @GoHawks31 that my tweet came to the attention of the young man who would make my Saturday night truly delightful (gay?), a Mr. @MarcosPolos90.

I present the following interactions between myself and Marcos "Student, 22, sports enthusiast, born in Chicago raised in Florida I think, Go TBLightning, Blackhawks Rays Bucs, I Follow back, Clearwater, FL" Polos without comment. I hope the whole thing is as fun for you as it was for me.

What is Twitter for? What's the point of it?

Twitter allowed me to team up with a Kings fan and Bruins fan in order to publicly aggravate a sleepy 22-year-old Blackhawks/Lightning fan from Florida, all while walking around the Santa Anita racetrack and eating bulgolgi fries. Never before in human history has such a wonderful thing been possible, and I consider myself blessed to live in this brave new era.


And now, a word about stinky tofu:

Stinky tofu is a popular dish in certain regions of China and Taiwan, and can be found in Southern California as well if you are some kind of crazy masochist. You'll know it if you are ever anywhere near a place that serves it, because it creates a smell that will haunt your god damn dreams.

From a distance, the odor of stinky tofu is said to resemble that of rotten garbage or manure. Some people have compared it to the taste of blue cheese[3] while others have compared it to rotten meat. It is said the more it smells, the 'better' its flavor.[1]

I'm pretty open-minded about food. I'm not afraid to try new things. But I will DIE before I ever eat anything that smells as bad as stinky tofu does. It is, without exaggeration, the WORST SMELL I have ever experienced in my entire life. I was feeling nauseated a full 24 hours later just thinking of the odor. It literally smells like crap and vomit and I would vote for a law that made it illegal to cook it anywhere without having warning signs and a big tent around the place like they use when they spray a house for termites.

I just don't understand it.

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