Move Over Beyonce, You’ve Been Out-Tweeted by Hayao Miyazaki

Number of tweets per second is a record that’s been broken over and over again, and understandably so, as a fairly young service that’s still growing in popularity and utility. This year’s FIFA Women’s World Cup, Steve Jobs’ resignation, and the stroke of midnight on New Years Eve in the Japan time zone have all set a new record for tweets/second in this year alone. But the biggest one was Beyonce Knowle‘s surprise announcement of her pregnancy on stage at the MTV Video Music Awards. Twitter’s servers blazed through 8,868 tweets in a second, breaking the previous record by more than 1k.

It was the biggest tweet/second spike… until this weekend.

You see, this weekend marked the annual television broadcast of Studio Ghibli’s Hayao Miyazaki-directed Laputa (known in the States as Castle in the Sky because of Laputa’s phonemic similarity to a explicit Spanish epithet). Where, in order to keep the city of Laputa and its technology from falling into the hands of the evil Muska, Princess Sheeta and Pazu speak the Spell of Destruction, “Balse,” destroying the Laputa’s core.

According to Japan Trends, it’s traditional among Miyazaki fans to tweet, post, blog, and otherwise update in unison with the cry of “Balse” from the broadcast, and tweet they did, to a staggering 11,349 tweets per second. That’ll be a tough record to beat, but at the rate things have been going, it won’t take too long.

(Japan Trends via io9.)

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Susana Polo

Susana Polo thought she'd get her Creative Writing degree from Oberlin, work a crap job, and fake it until she made it into comics. Instead she stumbled into a great job: founding and running this very website (she's Editor at Large now, very fancy). She's spoken at events like Geek Girl Con, New York Comic Con, and Comic Book City Con, wants to get a Batwoman tattoo and write a graphic novel, and one of her canine teeth is in backwards.

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