dadavies’s posterous

Warning: copious, highly offensive swearing.

Time was, fail was simply a verb that denoted being unsuccessful or falling short of expectations. It made occasional forays into nounhood, in fixed expressions like without fail and no-fail. That all started to change in certain online subcultures about six years ago. In July 2003, a contributor to Urbandictionary.com noted that fail could be used as an interjection “when one disapproves of something,” giving the example: “You actually bought that? FAIL.” This punchy stand-alone fail most likely originated as a shortened form of “You fail” or, more fully, “You fail it,” the taunting “game over” message in the late-’90s Japanese video game Blazing Star, notorious for its fractured English.

According to Nielsen's data, Twitter reached 10.7 percent of all active Internet users in 2009 "despite a lack of widespread adoption by children, teens, and young adults." The firm notes that people under the age of 25 make up almost a quarter of all US Internet users and yet only 16 percent of Twitter's audience in June of 2009, meaning that Twitter is "under-indexing" the youth market compared to the Internet as a whole. Conversely, the large majority of Twitter users (64 percent) fell into the 25 to 54 age group, and 20 percent were 55+. That's right: there were more Twitter users who are our parents' age than those who are in high school or college.

Credit where credit's due.

We get knocked by the anti-anglers who say that fish feel pain, and I believe some university bods have proved that some fish do feel pain, but until you sit me down next to a carp and it says to me 'I feel immense pain', then it's an open-ended question.

Find me a better quote than that.