A tweet-nado to remember

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[This post was originally published on The Living Room Tumblr.]

Last Thursday, the SyFy network aired an absurd, low-budget, deliberately campy made-for-TV movie called “Sharknado.” It was a ratings bust, but a Twitter blockbuster, starting on Wednesday when the final trailer hit the Interwebs, causing a frenzy of anticipation, commentary and snark – a “snark-nado,” if you will. As Thursday dawned, the use of #Sharknado ballooned on Twitter, and by the time the movie aired, it was a genuine Twitter phenomenon.

I would argue, in fact, that the #Sharknado of Thursday, July 11, 2013 may have been Twitter’s finest hour for absurdist comedy since the days leading up to the predicted #Rapture of May 21, 2011. I memorialized that event – which I now remember primarily as the source of a series of funny tweets that cemented my bipartisan, multifaith bromance with Zach Bloxham – with a blog post, so I thought I would do the same with #Sharknado.

After the jump is an embedded Storify archive of my tweets and RTs about #Sharknado – and, later, having fun with “-nado” as a generic suffix – but first, a few (okay, a bunch) of my favorites:

There was also, in the aftermath of #Sharknado, my invention (well, quasi-invention; I came up with it myself, but later eventually saw that a few others had gotten there first) of the term “derpnado” to describe Twitter’s periodic outbursts of political absurdity at the latest Outrage of the Moment. Here are some tweets on that:

So, there you go. 🙂 An even fuller history of #Sharknado and its aftermath, as told by my Twitter feed, is after the jump.