PSA: I might block someone I interact with by accident, but if someone comes to you saying "Alexandra blocked me and I think it must be an accident because we never interact.", it probably wasn't.
If I don't like how someone treats others, I don't wait to see how they treat me.
I was contacted once because someone appeared to be going into a spiral over having been blocked by me, which they took as a public declaration that they were "dead to me" and possibly the start of some further hostilities.
At the risk of being "But for me that was Tuesday, and I don't think about you at all on Tuesday"... I had no idea who the person was or why, specifically, I had blocked them.
But at a guess, I probably saw them pitching similar drama at somebody I follow.
There are people on this website I loathe. There are people I mistrust. There are people I find grating or unpleasant. There are people -- verified public figures -- that I stoop to needling more often than I like.
But I don't have any vendettas.
I view blocking and muting as user-controlled tools for curating the experiences that Twitter serves up to us. Even if I'm cutting off an argument, I don't view blocking someone as an insult, or weapon, or a message of any kind.
Might me preemptively blocking people for stuff that has nothing to do with me lead to me occasionally blocking someone who doesn't deserve it, because I missed the context?
If we grant that "deserve" is a concept that applies (which, I don't think it does), sure. Yeah.
But... oh well? There are tens of millions of people on here. Access to me in particular is neither a precious commodity nor an intrinsic right. The time and energy it takes managing random parasocial contact online is huge. I'm already using what I can spare on being "fair".
If I see a tweet that makes my blocking finger twitch, I go to the person's profile to read their bio and recent timeline. I do a search for their tweets to/from the person they're talking to, in case they've got a dynamic I don't know about. I do check.
Blocking isn't a judgment, a punishment, or a thing that is done to you. It's a choice being made by the blocker about what they consume and what doors they leave open.
And I know that it can be hard to feel that way when it happens to you. And I know there are conditions like anxiety and rejection sensitive dysphoria that can make it even harder.
I sympathize but I'm not going to change how I use Twitter at the expense of my own mental health.
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We've got two cats in our house. One of them understands doors well enough to let herself into a room, close the door behind her if she wants privacy, and then let herself out again. The other gets herself stuck in rooms by closing the door accidentally.
The one who has figured out doors also understands mirrors enough that she can plot sneak attacks based on watching reflections, while her sister routinely loses fights with her own reflection, shadow, and tail.
And no, we don't have the lever type doorknob. Mostly it's just that it's an old house with old doors and most of them will open if you jiggle the hardware a bit or give the wood a good thumb in the right spot near the latch.
The more we watch the kind of "just in time" logistics that underpinned The Cold Equations breaking down all around us, the more deeply I come to despise that story.
Partway through Aimee Ogden's story, I thought I saw where she was going. I thought I saw a twist she was setting up that would poke a hole in the premises that John Campbell pushed on the original story to make certain the girl definitely died for holy physics and the economy.
But what she does instead is better than that. It's inspired. It rebukes not the specific fictional premises imposed on the original story as bounding conditions on its fictional universe, but the very existence of those premises. She rejects the premise behind the premises.
I've seen a lot of people apparently defending NFTs by saying, of NFT-associated artwork, "People who keep asking what utility it has don't ask that of other art."
There may be other viewpoints, but for my part, it's the utility of the *token* that I question, personally.
The utility of art is that it's art. I know that art speculation (and art-based money laundering) predate NFTs by a wide margin, but by and large, one spends money on art in order to have more of it. The art is an end in itself.
If you tell me you're making art, I don't have to ask you what it does. You might have deeper goals. It might accomplish other things. But its main job is to be art.
If you tie this art to something else that's complicated and effort/resource-intensive, that's a different story.
More than this... I think we should not discount the extent to which human psychology means this feeling allows one to behave exactly as if one believed the false claims were true, because "they ought to be".
People... all people... "actually believe" something regarding factual matters in the same sense that we "actually remember" stuff that happened. Our brains are constructing things on the fly. If they feel consistent to us, we accept that the construct was always already there.
Yep.
"Where there's smoke, there must be fire... and where there's flames on the side of my face, there must be smoke, so here are a hundred things that *could be* smoke, and surely some of them must be."
Like this is somebody synthesizing the ideas "preschoolers are too young to be tested on reading" and "preschoolers are old enough to understand rhymes" in the worst possible way.
...I thought the kid had spilled an ice cream cone on his head somehow, but I guess that's supposed to be a hose, maybe, and the stuff on his head is water, rendered differently from the sweat droplets that are there to provide backstory for the hosing.
The Twitter prompt games I tried last week were fun and interesting, but took more of my time and energy than I'd expected... and while I think the creativity that resulted within myself from them "counts", it kept me from doing more writing-writing.