Recapping #AstrosCatfish, Episode 2

So here we are. Part 2 of this crazy tale. If you remember, I ended Part 1 with the discovery that @texansbabe supposedly had an ex-boyfriend who was willing to vouch that she was, in fact, a real person. But the timing of his response was poor since it was just before we discovered the real girl from @texansbabe's avatar.

When @jercybarrato confronted @texansbabe it was mere seconds before the entire account was deleted. Why would Ryan Avera claim to be an ex-boyfriend of a photo that turned out to be a completely different girl? Why indeed.

It was at this point that I discovered Mr. Avera writes for a blog called Clutch City Chalk Talk. Several people began putting two and two together and claimed that @texansbabe was trying to sell these ripped off t-shirt designs for Clutch City Chalk Talk and Mr. Avera. That led to several amusing denials from @ClutchCityTalk. I'll share one of them here.

I had to check their timeline to see if this claim was true or not. Here are just a few of the tweets I found that clearly show CCT does actually sell clothing.

Ok ok, big deal right? Maybe not to some people. Here's my issue. A writer for Clutch City Chalk Talk makes a fake account to try and sell t-shirts for profit. T-shirts that they ripped off from someone they follow on Twitter. That's not the way that things are supposed to operate in Houston sports fandom. We work together. We support each other. We promote each other.

We don't make fake accounts and promote t-shirts in "secret" on DM. See a few examples below. I was flooded with more examples, but for the sake of brevity I'll just post two.

That's exactly how @texansbabe originally approached me as well. Several DMs begging me to retweet some Astros and Texans t-shirts that I would have been embarrassed to put on my timeline. Needless to say, I did not retweet.

That's not the only thing that the fake @texansbabe account was pushing. The person behind the account was using Jercy's photo to attempt to attract some sort of "sexy" talk. I just had to shake my head.

That's not the worst example, but this is a family blog so I'll just leave it at that. I mean, really?

So let's wrap this up shall we? In my opinion it clearly appears that Ryan Avera created a fake account using photos of attractive females to do two things. 1) Try to flirt with guys to get them to promote their horrible t-shirts, and 2) to use the fake account to try and get pervy with several of our lovely female Houston sports fans. Gross.

And since Mr. Avera created the Clutch City Chalk Talk blog and follows Mr. Dunsmore on Twitter, it seems pretty clear that they knew all along where that awesome SpringerDinger graphic came from. Weak sauce.

To repeat what I said earlier, there are several blogs/sites that cover your favorite Houston sports teams. Nearly all of them help each other out. Nearly all of them promote each other and share their ideas and their creativity. Nearly all of them are worth supporting because they are fun, entertaining, and honest. Clutch City Chalk Talk is not one of them.

*this article and these views are purely those of Jeff Fountain (@astrosguy) and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the other writers/editors of the Crawfish Boxes.