Month: July 2012

I Love the Block Button.

This is my policy on handling Twitter followers.  It’s really simple, and it’s driven by my desire to not be used as an ego-boost for people with nothing to contribute to society.  You may think this is arrogant, or that I am an asshole; my response to either of those things is, “Hello, have we met?”  You may think it’s foolish and that I am leaving followers on the table that might help me promote myself, to which… well, look, I want to promote my work, but I have standards.

So:

There are people I follow because they are informative or entertaining.  It does not bother me if they don’t interact with me, because I understand they get a metric assload of @mentions.  It does not bother me if they don’t follow back, because we’re not pals.  Their value to me is in what they say, and I’m perfectly content with just letting them say it.

There are people I follow because they are my pals.  (Duh.)  Since they’re my pals, they follow me back.  (Duh.)

There are people I follow because they have caught my interest for one reason or another.  I may unfollow them later if they don’t follow back, or they may move to the first category.

Lastly, there are people I follow back because they have followed me, and are real people who are either friends of friends (in which case I’m going to give them a chance to be friends, obviously) and/or are following me because of my work on SBN or TOG or just because they’re interested in what I have to say and it would be fucking rude NOT to follow them back.  Besides, they may end up falling into another category as a result.

However, there are also people I will immediately, without hesitation, block as soon as I see they’ve followed me, and I’m more than likely to use the “Block and Report Spam” button when I do it.  Spammers go without saying, of course.  Networkers… if your profile talks about your use of social media, and/or if it’s obvious from perusing your profile that you’re just gathering followers for the sake of gathering followers because you, being a dumbass, think that’s important… blocked.  Get the fuck off Twitter while you’re at it, you goddamn leech.  If you’re following me just so you can pimp your business or whatever… blocked, and possibly reported as spam unless there seems to be a valid reason why you may have targeted me.  (I’m an asshole, but I can at least understand certain attempts to market to me.)  And I may even block you even if you seem to be a real person, but you have never interacted with me or follow anyone I know… because if you have absolutely no connection to me, I will assume you’re just trying to get a followback to pad your follower count.

Finally, if your account is locked, you follow me, I immediately follow you back, but you don’t acknowledge my follow request in a reasonable amount of time… I will assume your intentions are no good and block.  If I’m not around when you follow me, I won’t follow back until such time as you interact with me, but I won’t block either.  At such time as you interact with me (and I’m around when you do), I’ll then follow back, and you’re on the clock as if I’d been around when you followed me to begin with.  (This one annoys me, as it’s my opinion that if you follow someone, their followback should automatically come with the presumption you wish to accept their follow request.  Get on that, Twitter.)

You may notice that it seems like it’s an either-or proposition, and you’re mostly right.  I love the block button, and use it liberally… but if you’re not someone I think deserves to be blocked, then I almost certainly feel you’re someone who deserves the courtesy of being followed back.

The Jon Engine.

I have a problem.  Okay, I have lots of problems, but we’re just going to talk about this one for now.

I hate stupid arguments.  I don’t mean arguments that are stupid because people shouldn’t be having them, I mean arguments where it doesn’t matter whether the person is right or wrong about the underlying facts because their argument is stupid.  It drives me absolutely batshit.  In fact, some of the most bitter and spiteful arguments in which I have ever been embroiled have been with people I actually agreed with in principle, but felt that their dumbass approach to arguing the position did more to convince people of the opposite side of the debate than anything.

A really good example of this was when someone once argued that voting on Bill Clinton’s impeachment was justified, but their argument is that getting a blowjob from an intern is worth getting impeached over.  We got into a nasty scrape over that one, because I called the guy out for being a complete moron, even though I agreed that an impeachment vote was proper because he’d committed perjury.  I just cannot tolerate someone eroding my position on the basic issue by arguing my side of the issue like a drunken, uneducated dolt.

Sometimes, the violation of my sensibilities is so egregious that I start arguing the other side of the debate as a devil’s advocate, for the sole purpose of beating the crap out of my opponent.  That’s probably a character flaw on my part, but it’s not going to change… because the level of discourse these days is so horribly depressed that I just don’t feel I have a choice.  I, and really by that I mean “we” insofar as the people most likely to be reading this are smart folks too, have to crush this wave of ignorance.  Our society is in the position it’s in largely because we, as a society, won’t challenge the people who are “on our side” for their fuckery.  That, in turn, leads to a consistent decay over time in our society’s very ability to process argument logically.  It leads to crack-headed extremists being taken seriously by people.  It leads to a complete lack of truly objective reporting in the media, because the only time anyone gets challenged is by people who don’t agree with the proposition.  As a result, everyone who does agree can just dismiss the opposition as simply being opposed.

Healthy debate within a circle is just as, and probably more, important than debate between circles.  It’s important to remember that just as a general rule, but you should also be very, very aware that it’s a lot of what makes me tick personally.  If I am arguing with you, always remember I may actually agree with your primary position and just think you’re fucking up the argument.

Humanity Sucks.

So, tonight I was twitteranting about a report on the local FOX station.  While searching for a murder suspect, the Tulsa PD opened the door of their K-9 unit, and the dog bolted, rushing into a yard and biting a seven-year-old boy who was playing in his own damned yard.

The cops just stood around, doing nothing; they offered neither apologies nor assistance.  They had (or claimed to have) no first-aid kits in their cruisers, and — here’s the part that really kills me — forced the family to call 911 themselves rather than just calling the incident in.  Got it?  At least a half-dozen cruisers on the street, and they can’t radio for a bus to come check on the kid THEIR DOG injured.

We all know the real deal here, right?  The cops basically stood around pretending nothing for which they might be responsible had occurred, because taking responsibility would open the police department up for a lawsuit.  Actually doing their job of protecting and serving takes a backseat to covering their own asses.  And we’re in that state of affairs because you can bet your ass that the family, if the police had taken responsibility for the incident, WOULD have sued, instead of accepting that shit just happens sometimes and being grateful that the police were trying to rectify their mistake.  God forbid we fail to try and profit off misfortune.

I really fucking hate humanity, and demand that the aliens who abandoned me here to study this backward-ass species come get me.

Of course, immediately after that report, we had video filed by a reporter.  I don’t know what the story was about, because I was too appalled by the fact that she was driving the news van while being filmed by the cameraman (who was in the passenger seat)… and she spent almost the entire time looking into the camera.

While driving.

Yeah.

A Plague of Discourtesy.

In March of 2009, circumstances landed both my daughter and I under the same roof for the first time since she was two years old.  On her part, the circumstances were that her mother was about two inches from having her committed to whatever facility they had in Orlando where parents send kids they Simply Cannot Deal With, and being suddenly uprooted and shipped off to a tiny little shitburg in Oklahoma seemed like a better idea than basically having her locked up.

One thing I noticed right from the get-go — something I hadn’t noticed during the various visitations I’d had with her and her brother over the years — was that she seriously lacked any respect for anything.  I tried working on it, making a point to be precisely what her mother wasn’t (at least according to my daughter), but that pretty much ended the moment I caught her out in a particularly egregious bit of wrongdoing.  Of course, by this time she was over eighteen, making most courses of action less than effective.

Continue reading “A Plague of Discourtesy.”

OH MY GOD HE KEEPS GOING AND GOING

Lately, I have been, shall we say, vexed.  There have been topics I’ve wanted to touch on that just cannot be handled in the Twitterverse.

I don’t mean serious topics (although you can probably assume with a great deal of confidence that will happen here eventually).  I mean just normal ranty bullshit which takes more than a few short sentences to get off my chest.

I used to have a LiveJournal for this; well, I actually still DO have a LiveJournal, permanent account even.  But there’s just something… not right about posting there any longer.  The triple-digit friend count there still exists, yet I’m certain that there aren’t even a dozen people who even notice if I post there anymore; all MAH FRENZ are on Twitter now, pretty much.  Mind you, most of the time it’s just the act of venting into a public space that I need, as opposed to lots of reaction and comment.  So posting here and getting no reaction or comment is a completely different thing from posting there and getting none.

Of course, it’s entirely possible that I will get reaction and comment here.  Thanks to the Jetpack addon, y’all can just comment with your Twitter handles, which is convenient.  (I won’t make that conversion on Those Other Guys until/unless someone who can hack themes can fix me up)

Some things I will NOT post about here:  college sports.  Oh, okay, that’s the one thing I won’t post about here.  Except that I’ll probably cross-link all my work from here, as this is now the official personal blog, see.  Groovy.