This would be my word count thing

[kiya]

If I'd gotten any work done today, as opposed to opening up the WIP ten hours ago and not actually managing to get anything written.


I got an email earlier -- I bitched about this briefly -- that was in part predicated upon the notion that I had both registered certain actions as associated to a particular individual, and that I retained who the hell that individual actually was.

Is it just me, or is making that sort of presumption about an acquaintance -- perhaps especially a net.acquaintance with whom one has had no private communication nor in-person interaction -- incredibly arrogant?

I suspect I'm a sigma or so on the low end of remembering who random people are and associating their past actions consistently to whatever file folder they belong in, which probably biases me somewhat. But I also can't imagine someone with whom I have no personal connection necessarily remembering anything in particular about me, or even remember that I hold a particular position, especially if it's not one of those things that I harp on consistently. I just don't figure that I have that sort of place in people's lives; there are hundreds of thousands of things that are higher priority in 99% of humanity's lives than my whimsies and my insignificant actions.

(About a month ago, I was having an argument with someone because I thought that someone was being stupid. I was talking to Kevin about it at one point, and he used a pronoun, and then paused, not sure if he'd used the right one. The person's handle strongly suggests gender, and I told him the name, and he said, "Oh, right," in the tones of someone who understood why I was having the argument in the first place. Apparently I'd had a go around with that person a week or two before. Didn't register to me as being connected. Lousy filing system.)

I've had people be incredibly offended that I don't remember who they are from interactions on usenet before they did something noticeable enough to get a file folder. I can understand the fact that the weirdnesses of my memory mean that people often get very skewed filings (because stuff that connects to whatever got the file folder created sticks better) is worthy of some irritation. I don't understand the resentment of the existence of prioritization that means that most people don't get file folders. I don't think that I'm in-nature different from most of humanity here: most people just plain aren't significant enough to anyone to get their own file folder. However many billion Chinese don't care.

My cynic wants to chalk it up to the solipsistic nature of aspects of the human psyche: sometimes, not being a named character in someone else's story can hurt. I can't understand why one would presume that one is a named character, though, in the life of someone to whom one has no personal connection whatsoever.

Comments

[kiya]

And I went and did something stupid, and looked up the thread on google that spawned all this pain, only to find some jerk saying that I "went out of my way" to make him feel unwelcome elsewhere.

Right, Dan, I killfiled you publically after asking you politely for over a year to cut your fucking posts down rather than quote a hundred fucking lines to make a two-line comment somewhere in the middle. "Going out of my way to make you feel unwelcome" that ain't. Trying to deal with the fact that you said valuable stuff sometimes but were a complete fuckwit about netiquette, on the other hand. . . .

[oneironaut.livejournal.com]

And he still doesn't cut his posts down.

Plus this habit of his of picking fights with people by misreading perfectly innocent, factual statements, or diplomatically-worded statements of what is obviously opinion or personal experience -- deliberately, so far as I can tell, or at the very least through a masterful application of bone-headedness -- and then going on at length about how very wrong they are, which just drives me insane.

[kiya]

Heh. Your turn. I've done my time.

[oneironaut.livejournal.com]

One point four.

While this isn't a phenomenon I've encountered personally yet, it's one I expect to encounter in the future, because my filing system works in much the same way -- and not only must someone do or be something vaguely noticeable before I can distinguish them from the faceless mass of the rest of a newsgroup, sometimes vague noticeabilities will accrete in inaccurate ways. I still have a hard time telling Mary Kuhner, Zeborah, Irina Rempt and Elizabeth Shack apart, despite the fact that I respect each of them.

[kiya]

Now that we've had surrealistic conversation about the meaning of one point four elsewhere. . . .

I'm not sure that any of them are recognizable to me unless they're talking about something specific-to-them. I mean, I can identify Zeborah if the subject is Korea, and . . . okay, nothing else comes to the file folders from here, though I think I can recognize bits of Irina's WIP. I'm much better at identifying her on rgrn, where she posts as something else.

I'm having train wreck reactions to rasseff. I shouldn't go look at it, but I can't not look at that thread, even though it's why I left. Who, me, have issues with breakups? It's not like it's the first time someone's seen fit to slander me there either.

This has been an unsolicited whine.

there ought to be an icon for confusion

[redbird]

This may be one of those Martian moments: different people's thresholds of noticing vary widely. If someone sticks up for you in an argument, they probably feel that makes them at least a named character in that story. If the same kind of argument rolls around again, and that person's filing system comes up with "Darkhawk, argument about [fitb], I stood up for her last time" they don't expect yours to come up with "Oh, that argument again, who is this person?"

This isn't the billion-Chinese thing, exactly: neither you nor the other person (assuming I'm reading your vaguenesses correctly) think a billion Chinese know about this, or care. It's more, imho, a matter of overlapping or concentric circles: how many discussions, on how many topics, in how many places, does it take before a person is noticed? Before they're remembered? Before they're important to you? (Three different thresholds, perhaps.)

"Martian" because this is another place where people tend to assume that other people work the same way: those with good filing systems expect the same, those with bad filing systems expect that, and so on.

Not sure I'm making sense, not sure it's prudent of me to post here, but...

Re: there ought to be an icon for confusion

[kiya]

I suspect you may be right. :/

*sigh* I just can't . . . really wrap my head around the presumption that one is remembered specifically in the absence of evidence of one's own significance. And a good part of my feeling-hurt is bound up in what looks from my perspective to be someone bitching me out for not following through on holding him as significant as he thinks I ought to. Which, among other things, is first-degree boundary assault and violation from this side of the tracks.

I guess that's why I can't wrap my head around the presumption: it's not my place to judge how significant other people find me. Doing so is invasion-of-territory. Thingy.

Well, now I know why I was feeling weirdly uncomfortable about one of clairaide's recent posts. I'd been wondering about that.