Talking of Threads…

Threads has been quite interesting so far as a social media experiment, cos I do find myself having a somewhat different relationship with it to what I have with the others, especially when it comes to blocking other users. On Twitter, I tended to mostly block ads and right-wing shitheads when one occasionally got thrown up at me, but more often what I’d do was go into trending hashtags, and in many such instances you just knew they’d be overrun with the aforementioned shitheads and I’d block as many of them as I could there, so I wound up blocking quite a lot. (Of course, given Oolong’s determination to kill the block function, I wouldn’t have been able to do that much longer, another thing which drove me to kill my account.)

Conversely, I almost never do this on Mastodon or Bluesky. Part of that is that I just don’t use Mastodon that much now, and also I think the nature of it keeps the idiots away. Obviously there are idiots, but the defederating thing stops them spreading. Similarly on Bluesky, there’s stupidity but it’s easy to keep out of one’s feed; handily, it’s also easy to make lists of accounts and share them with everyone else, so when someone makes a list of MAGAts or other right-wingers, I can subscribe to that and automatically block the mongrels en masse. That sort of list for pre-emptive blocking is one of my favourite features of Bluesky. I don’t use it often, but it’s handy to have.

On Threads, however, there seems to almost be a culture of “block early, block often”, and blocking at the slightest provocation is kind of encouraged, cos the “For You” page is the default setting rather than the accounts you actually follow. So you open the site and you basically get whatever the algorithm thinks you’ll like rather than what you necessarily want… and though the Threads algorithm is actually pretty good in that regard, I will sometimes encounter someone having a conversation with a dickhead or cluster thereof and that gives me something to block. Indeed, sometimes I’ll just block people for being mildly annoying, even people whose accounts I’ll look over and they might be OK but they post one or two stupid things that irritate me and BOOM. Away they go. And, like I say, the general culture of the place seems to encourage this sort of thing and I’m fine with it.

As a sample, here’s one idiot I encountered a couple of months ago…

Now, “gotten” is not exactly my favourite English word, but it’s not an Americanism. Not if it appears multiple times in a book commissioned by the king of England and published in 1611 when “America” wasn’t even a glint in Ben Franklin’s eye. But it was his reply to me that irked me. Not even the “your Bible” bit (accusing ME of being a Christian? How very dare you), but just the ignorance of clearly not having any idea what the King James Bible even is. I feel an implied sneer in “your bible” that suggests this cunt may be an atheist like I basically am, but if he so he doesn’t seem to have much idea about what he’s opposed to… I mean, atheism doesn’t necessarily require a deep acquaintance with Christian history and all that, but when that particular book is the origin of a remarkable number of words and phrases in that language you love so much, well… Anyway, I blocked him, as I did this guy:

But a few days earlier he also posted this:

“Um, um, I saw this fim everyone thought was great, but ACTUALLY”… I mean, that’s basically what he was saying about The Substance. I haven’t seen either that or Megalopolis cos, frankly, they’re still too new and not out for home viewing yet, but the latter in particularly produced a LOT of hate and a rather smaller amount of love… so Ed’s sniping at this guy for liking it while being snide at the naysayers, but then goes on to be similarly snide about Substance which people mostly seem to be loving. Fuck you, Ed. Blocked.

Finally…

There was a lot of discourse when the new series of Rings of Power was airing and everyone was going off about the extent to which it did or didn’t betray Tolkien and so forth… but this one struck me more than most of that tedious nonsense, and it inspired me to crack open my own ebook of LotR to see if that first claim is true. I only went through Fellowship, but I found this to actually be correct. The songs and poems only appear in 19 out of the 22 chapters of Fellowship. In some chapters there’s more than one. Honestly. All these people expect to be taken seriously? Fuck ’em.