On Using the “Mute” Button on Twitter
Posted on October 12, 2014 Posted by John Scalzi 57 Comments
Yesterday I wrote about GamerGate on Twitter quite a bit, which had the effect of flooding my Twitter stream with comments by frothy lads intent on challenging me to single combat via “debate.” In this case (and indeed in most cases), this largely meant running down a cue card full of already-debunked talking points and/or attempting tired rhetorical tricks in an attempt to change the subject. These frothy lads very quickly met the thumpy end of my “mute” button, because no one has time for that.
That said, muting a couple dozen frothy lads on my tweet stream yesterday did give me some time to reflect on why, how and when I use Twitter’s “mute” feature, and about the feature in general. Allow me to share some of those thoughts with you now.
To begin, “mute” is just about the best feature on Twitter. It’s better by a long sight than Twitter’s “block” feature, which among other things makes it abundantly clear to whomever you blocked that you’re not listening to them anymore — which in some cases spurs them into anger and further negative action. “Mute” just… makes them go away. They might still be talking, and might still be thinking that they’re scoring points against you, which to my mind, and in my particular set of circumstances, is fine. I don’t care if idiots type at me until their fingers bleed, imagining they are brilliantly “debating,” or feeling better about their sad little lives by saying mean things about me to their friends, many of whom I have also already muted. I just don’t see why I need to view their ceaseless yammering on my tweet stream. “Mute” hits the spot.
But isn’t that censorship? The answer to this is: Duh, no. As I noted, “mute” doesn’t stop the pointless jabber of these sorts of folks — they’re free to pointlessly jabber until their fingers are worn down to stubs. It just means I don’t have to see it. Freedom of speech, even in its very widest definition, does not contain within that definition an obligation by anyone else to listen. This apparently confuses a lot of the frothy, but of course that’s not my problem, nor should it be anyone else’s.
(I should note, anecdotally, that there is a high correlation between the sort of person I will mute and the sort of person who thinks said muting is censorship. This is not in the least bit surprising to me. For the rest of humanity, this piece I wrote last year on Speech, Conversation, Debate, Engagement and Communication should be useful.)
So: Why do I mute? Mostly, to clear my tweet stream of stupid and/or exasperating comments. Some things I find stupid and/or exasperating: Threats, insults, less than clever snarkiness, insincere/derail-y attempts to “debate” (which is roughly 80% of them), sincere attempts to debate where the other person is clearly ignorant/misinformed on the subject and I have neither the time nor inclination to hold their hand on the subject, particularly on Twitter (nearly all of the rest; there are shining exceptions), people who are clearly trying to goad me into responding (including people who “@” me in conversation they’re having with someone else as a way to bait me), people who try to get someone else with more followers to pick a fight with me (who sometimes will, and who I will often mute for reasons noted above), and otherwise just people who for some reason or another have showed up in my tweet stream and whose nonsense I don’t want to see anymore.
Which seems like it might be a lot of people, but really isn’t, most of the time. Strange as it might seem, most people who communicate with me on Twitter are pleasant and polite — even the ones who might disagree with something I’ve said, and want to tell me so, or have what I judge to be a sincere question, or a point they want to have clarified. Even yesterday, which was a high water mark in Twitter muting, the majority of tweets that featured someone disagreeing with me were still in the stream. Criticism I can take. Stupidity and mendacity, I have less tolerance for.
(You might ask here, who gets to judge when someone is stupid/mendacious/otherwise just a real pain in the ass? Well, obviously, I do, when it comes to my tweet stream. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure these gormless wonders who I have muted think they’re positively stuffed with brains and logic. That’s nice for them. I’m not obliged to agree, engage with them any more than I choose, or otherwise keep company with them.)
Who do I mute? Unsurprisingly, perhaps, nearly all of the ones who display identifying information them are male, young(ish) and anecdotally, appear to be the bog-standard status-anxious straight white sort who toss insults and stupidity in my direction in order to impress… well, whoever they think is impressed by their being a twit on Twitter. This does not surprise me for several reasons, including the fact that my own politics/social points of view trend away from the ones most commonly espoused by the status-anxious young(ish) straight white men who seem determined to be a pain in the ass on Twitter. I rarely find myself muting folks outside that profile, although of course there have been a few. Some people are just jerks, regardless of political/social points of view.
Other factors that I consider with muting: Whether the account follows me or not (the latter are more likely to be flyby jerks and why bother with them), whether the account profile information is filled out (if your profile picture is an egg, you’re more likely to be a sockpuppet/troll account), how many followers they have (the fewer, the more likely to be a sockpuppet/troll account), and so on.
How do I mute? Typically these days through TweetDeck, which my most common interface with Twitter. Tweetdeck will let you mute individual users, which is usually the route I go when I mute, but will also let you mute keywords, which comes in handy from time to time. For example, yesterday, when a number of yammering blowhards “@”-ed a specific user they wanted to join into the fray. I determined that most tweets with that person “@”-ed would likely be useless noise, so I listed that user’s name as a muted keyword, and voila — bulk muting, which saved me a bit of carpal tunnel pain. Tweetdeck also saves your muted accounts and terms globally, so no matter which computer I’m using it on, it remembers who I don’t want to hear from. This is nice.
Tweetdeck’s drawback (compared to Janetter, my previous Twitter client on Desktop and still my client on mobile) is that it doesn’t have timed muting — the ability to mute for a few hours or days rather than on a permanent basis. This means that if you want to unmute someone (and occasionally you might!) you have to remember to go back in and do that manually. I’d love for Tweetdeck to introduce timed muting at some later point.
So that’s some of the philosophy and mechanics of my muting on Twitter. I encourage (nearly) everyone to make use of muting — even if you use it to mute me! — because, honestly, just because you happen to use Twitter with a bunch of yippy dipshits doesn’t mean you’re obliged to listen to their nonsense. Use the mute button and use it well.
Couple of notes:
1. This comment thread is about muting on Twitter, NOT about the GamerGate comments I’ve made on Twitter per se, OR about GamerGate in a general sense. Attempts to use the thread to talk about those subjects outside of the highly constrained context of using Twitter’s mute function will displease me and likely be Malleted. Stay on topic, folks.
2. Please note that my thoughts and use of Twitter’s mute function reflect my own personal position, i.e., for all the nonsense that gets thrown at me on Twitter (and elsewhere online, including here), I am also never actually threatened with violence, or other such joys that other people have to deal with. It’s entirely possible that some people don’t have the luxury of merely muting those who annoy them on Twitter.
As a sportswriter, the mute button is a dear, dear friend.
Dave Hogg:
Of this I have no doubt.
John, which Twitter client would you recommend and why? I’m still using the twitter website – do clients have any major advantages?
“how many followers you have (the fewer, the more likely to be a sockpuppet/troll account)”
I made a similar comment on Twitter, and was immediately flooded by GamerGate boys whinging about how I was “valuing people based on meaningless social media status”.
Yep, pretty much. It’s ridiculously easy to gather follows on Twitter, provided you’re saying something worth listening to. Low follow count? Either a brand-new (and likely sock puppet) account, or you regularly talk out of your ass. Either way, not worth listening to.
Hmmm…I use Tweetcaster on my mobile devices, and so far as I can tell, it only has Block and not Mute. I don’t do much muting, because it just hasn’t come up much for me, being just a relative minnow in the Great Twitter Stream. I have used it to mute keywords sometimes, such as during hockey season, when a large number of local folks I follow tweet stream-of-consciousness color commentary on each and every game the Sabres play.
BTW, what’s with all this “I challenge you to a debate!” crap that ALWAYS happens in instances like this? Is this the “Pistols at dawn!” of the Internets?
A while ago I sat down and worked out the numbers of how much of one’s life one would spend if one were to expend exactly one second of time with every single person on earth. The number I came up with, assuming ~6 billion people, is about 190 years. And bear in mind that this is a person spending one second with each person, one after the other, and not taking any time to eat, sleep, shower, shave, or spend meaningful time, beyond their already-allotted one second, with family and friends. Honest discussion and debate are great things, but there is absolutely no reason for anyone to spend their very limited time on this planet to “debate” with trolls and people who want to engage in these stupid arguments (using “controversies” that have been de-bunked, repeatedly, for the love of mike). I absolutely support the use of the twitter block and mute buttons as well as other features that allow for moderation on blogs and social media. Life is short, and time is too precious to waste on trolls.
John, I’m sure that this isn’t your intent (because you do use the platform, after all) but you’re certainly not doing anything to change my mind on the utility of Twitter — which, on net from here, appears to be negative.
I must admit I never knew Twitter had a Mute button, but that’s probably not surprising; I can’t seem to figure out how and why to tweet anything except my chapter or blog posting announcements.
Personally, I think anyone who disagrees with me ever is just trying to derail my truth, so I just mute everyone.
LOL. Low follower count could also mean you just lurk and enjoy the conversation. Which I suspect is the majority of most non bot Twitter users. Not all of us are celebs promoting our wares.
I didn’t know about the mute button or that it was implemented on TweetDeck, which I have and completely forgot to make use of. You talked about timed muting, does it mean you can mute someone for a certain amount of time? And can you mute certain topics from someone and not others? I need this ever since the GG debate showed up.
A Twitter lurker and enjoyerer, here :) , but the mute sounds sensible if you get a lot of unwanted traffic.
One of the reasons I’m grateful for you doing a Twitter round up on Whatever is that Twitter is very now, and if the now happens in another time zone -as it does for people on this side of the Pond- it’s very difficult to plough through stuff which happened light years ago in search of something interesting.
I have no difficulty in accepting that there are people who believe that their fundamental human rights include forcing people to listen to whatever they wish to opine, and I’m delighted that there is a way of keeping them hammering away at you. After all, whilst they are having a go at you they are not sending death threats to someone else…
Joel Short:
If you use Chrome as your browser, try the Tweetdeck extension; it’s what I use. Then you can use it regardless of personal computer operating system.
Kelly Sedinger:
The “Let’s debate!” thing in my experience is usually not about the ostensible subject, but rather about trying to score points against someone else on rhetorical trivia and/or being able to declare victory because the other, more rational person finally gets sick of talking to you.
D.C. Sessions:
Well, you know, I love Twitter. For me it’s mostly a ton of fun. It only occasionally explodes into stupidity that must be managed. I could say the same thing about here.
Ian:
It’s indeed entirely possible, which is why I say “more likely” than “absolutely.” On the other hand, if your first tweet at me is something which makes me consider muting you, that little bit of trivia won’t matter much.
Tilja:
Tweetdeck does not implement timed muting, I’m afraid. As for muting particular subjects, you can enter a keyword that is likely to come up in tweets relating to the topic and those tweets will be filtered out regardless of from whence they came (and every other tweet from anyone would not).
I suspect it’s because the only time Twitter shows up in my reading is in situations like this, where people are either complaining about it or suggesting ways of managing the unpleasantness.
Response bias, in other words. But it is remarkable that to date I’ve yet to see anything remotely tempting.
So, apparently no one has made a “Frothy Lads is my next band name” joke yet. I am very disappointed,
I think the ‘mute’ button saves us all from the antithesis of Internet: Boredom.
However horrible, misogynist, racist, homophobic, or even violent the views of these self-centred and entitled little men may be, they are predictable. You hear it once, you don’t need to hear it again.
And definitely not again, and again, and again: Boring.
As for the self-serving deceits and self-delusion – and deliberate lies borne out of malice – they, too, are all too predictable. They’re not even interesting delusions, these ‘versions of the truth’ from self-centred and privileged whiners: predictable, repetitive, transparent, and tedious. Boring.
The worst of it from GG – and much of the dismal haters out there who share their tactics – is that this tide of boring drivel has an agenda: to ‘cleanse’ the world that is visible to boring little men: cleanse it of all voices that are not entirely familiar – middle-class, suburban, white, straight, Anglocentric, skilled (ocasionally) in one technical discipline but never dangerously original; and transport us all towards a shining shitty in the Cloud in which we’re all identical in our outlook, origins and utterences to these cardboard-cutout, cardboard-flavoured, card-carrying reactionary, boring little boys.
And that agenda is, quite simply, enforced boredom for the ninety-nine percent of human beings who like an interesting internet. Who like interesting *people*, and who live in an interesting world.
So the ‘Mute’ button is the signal “You are boring, and I don’t need to be bored”, and it’s the sound of freedom.
I hadn’t thought of the distinction between Mute and Block wrt whether they can tell. I’ll have to make more use of Mute.
Also, I bet that RWNJ CHINO the other day muted me after I pointed out that Africans were her fellow people, too. So she probably never saw my actual scriptural rebuke.
Dave Hogg: You astonish me. I didn’t know the mute button WAS a sportswriter.
I block, not mute, because muted accounts can still send you @ messages. I find it horribly irritating when a muted idiot shows up in my Notifications timeline.
Also, regarding evaluating people by number of followers – yes, it’s very true that somebody with 5 followers is probably a sock puppet. However, a relatively small number of followers can indicate selectivity rather than fraud. I weed my follower list, mainly because I’d rather be followed by people than by bots. At present, Riven has about 1600 followers, but if she’d kept everybody who started following her, she’d have closer to 4 thousand.
TweetBot has a timed mute feature, and it also doesn’t show me any of those “promoted” tweets that I see when I am on Twitter itself. I’m hoping that, if Twitter starts filtering one’s timeline a la Facebook (do. not. want.), that TweetBot will save me from that as well.
Riven Homewood:
I solve that problem by using TweetDeck/Janetter and never using the Web interface. But yeah, totally reasonable.
Well – I rather enjoy their knowing I’m not listening to them, because…why encourage the stupid and bigoted to believe they have a right to spread their bile?
But that’s me….
Another vote for Tweetbot (Mac/iOS), which has timed muting for users, keywords, hashtags, domains, and even select Twitter clients. You can mute these for one day, one week, one month, or forever. I believe Twitterrific has comparably robust muting capabilities.
I would have left Twitter a long time ago if it weren’t for muting.
I have never understood how certain other people use twitter… and this post makes it evident to me that I probably never will.
Of *course* one would mute persons whom one does not wish to converse with. It’s only sensible in a medium where you are presented with information whenever someone talks to or about you… I find it stressful enough, and I block the *entire world* and only let certain people into my twitter stream… but then, I am a private citizen, who uses twitter to share soundbites and short thoughts and haiku with a select group of people who can choose to hear them or not without impacting my desire to share them at all…
Sure I grin when the haiku get shared or commented on… but that’s just bonus.
see above Re: how other people use twitter…
I just don’t see if as a meaningful method for communicating anything. It’s too ephermeral. That’s the *point*. It’s the digital equivalent of talking in a huge room with a crowd of people who are all talking themselves.
This does relate to what we were talking about earlier on another thread. There is the strongly prevalent view that women and other repressed groups are not equal human beings who have the agency to decide to whom they will give their time and attention, but instead social property. They aren’t supposed to mute, much less block anyone. They are supposed to comply when someone, anyone, wants them to listen and talk (or touch them.) They are supposed to consider that anyone who demands their attention has a viewpoint they must find valid and valuable. And if not, death threats.
So given that, and how toxic Twitter sounds often, I’m glad to hear that they have mute and block features available. Twitter is very useful for PR purposes, which is why it got big very quickly, but it can also be used to harass very easily. Of course, watching Scalzi deal with harassers is kind of like watching him play tennis with a squirrel — it’s very entertaining and never going to be an actual tennis game.
“It’s better by a long sight than Twitter’s ‘block’ feature, which among other things makes it abundantly clear to whomever you blocked that you’re not listening to them anymore — which in some cases spurs them into anger and further negative action. ‘Mute’ just… makes them go away.”
I feel like it’s worth bringing up that it does one other thing: it enables people to retain followers who aren’t judged to be worth the time it takes to listen to them. These would be folks who aren’t noisy, repetitive or offensive, but are just not at all entertaining or informative. Most such less-than-interesting followers would, I think, definitely unfollow someone who muted them (if for no other reason to be sure that they would no longer waste their own time trying to interact with that person).
I don’t think this is a problem — the system definitely needs a mute feature for all the reasons you mention. But I think some people need to understand that increasing someone’s follower count by one is not in any way a guarantee of interaction, ever. If you use Twitter, you should give people in that space attention based solely on whether or not you are interested in what they have to say, not whether they might be interested in what *you* have to say. If that’s important to you, unless they’re already following you, assume the answer is no, they aren’t interested, and just don’t follow them. If you’re looking for someone to have two-way communication with (and that’s fine), unless you already have an established audience or are willing to invest the time, effort, and failed attempts necessary to really understand how to do that using Twitter, you should probably try to fulfill that need somewhere else.
Well, almost. If her owner objects, then the two men have to settle it between them.
D.C.: LOL! I forgot that part!
I don’t always read Scalzi’s Twitter feed, but I did, in light of this post, check it out today. #PineapplePizzaGate made me feel better about the world. That is another thing about Twitter — it can be a powerful medium for joyous laughter and for communication even in hardest times.
Personally, I prefer blocking to muting. I WANT these jackasses to know I’ve had enough of them and they’ve been kicked out of my timeline. I also love sending a final “eff you” tweet and blocking immediately after.
But then again, I’m wicked like that. :)
Redheadedfemme
I agree that much of the pleasure is the possibility of saying ‘up yours’, but I still maintain that what John is doing is in fact extremely helpful for people who otherwise must resign themselves to receiving rape and death threats.
As long as the people writing that stuff are mildly harassing John, it means that the number of rape/death threats are reduced.
Which is why the mute button seems to me to be helpful…
Hee. I am reminder of the ancient time of newsgroups and killfiles.
There was a certain subset of participants who tried to make the case that using a killfile was immoral, that everyone deserved to be heard, had worthwhile things to say, etc, etc. Ha ha ha, no.
Mute is awesome.
The “ignoring me is censorship” brigade seem to always overlook the fact that the constitution not only protects you right to speak, but also you right to free association, which includes your right to not associate with whiny pseudo-guardians-of-liberty grinding their axes on twitter.
I dont know what the hell this pissing match is about and I dont care. I decided to ignore any scandal that has the word “gate” in it. So i started reading scalzis last posts with the twitter feed. I got to IRC log and lost interest.
What would happen if there was an online scandal and people didnt pay attention? Would it be a scandal?
John.. No scandal is worth paying attention to if it involves an IRC log. If i have to read a log Its too much work.
Makes me wonder if there is ever a scandal about me and I dont pay attention, if the people who are hating on me confront me and I tell them I have no idea what they are talking. Odds are they will think I am lying.
Bearpaw, and another subset who complained about people they didn’t like, flamed them incessantly, and sometimes escalated to trying to make trouble for them in real life, but when one advised them to use killfiles, they refused because that would be letting their adversaries “win.”
On a lighter note, The Frothy Lads would be an amazing name for a Celtic Punk band.
Bearpaw, BW: didn’t you love the sound of the PLUNK when you hit Ctrl-K? I did.
Lurkertype, but like muting on Twitter, it was usually best not to tell them they were being plonked. They could them rave away impotently, imagining that they were scoring points. Telling them they were being killfiled often led to sockpuppetry and other frantic attempts to force people to pay attention to them.
Yeah, put me down as another one who really misses their killfile. Wish it worked over HTTP, I really do (just imagine being able to block nincompoops on blog comment threads… or those near-nincompoops who are ostensibly “on your side” but who manage to annoy you more than the actual trolls do).
I love the mute button! It’s perfect for tuning out the white noise without the social backlash of telling people that they’re white noise. (The first landscape photo with the inspirational quote was cute; the next forty clogging up my feed, not so much.)
Am i the only one who cant say the words “gaming journalist” out loud and keep a straight face? It sound like a university of phoenix degree.
China passed the US as the worlds largest economy. Ebola may kill a million people over the next yeat. iSIS is chopping peoples hears and crucifying children. Yet we have twitter wars about video games.
Damn saying this makes me feel old.
hahaha
Guess,
Yeah, that’s what is the most absurd, and sad, that this was actually a trending topic or a large concern at all. God forbid anyone screw with our precious video games. Meanwhile, half the world is burning.
For be, blocking is where it’s at. Because I *want* those people (like GGers, for example) to know that I consider them white noise and not worth consideration or time or listening to.
Another vote for Tweetbot! Definitely give it a try. It has all those features you want. And I’m totally sharing this on twitter because it is EXACTLY how I feel about the mute button. I <3 mute. Keep being awesome, John.
@MrManny: ok I gave in and googled this garbage. Its about 10 minutes of my life I will never get back again… I did not read the endless backstory cause if you can’t summarize a scandal in a paragraph its not a real scandal. for example
watergate: nixon is a crook
Zippergate: clinton got busy in the oval office and lied under oath about it
NSAgate: nsa is watching us. The X files are real.
See what I mean? Simple.
The first thing that stood out to me with this story is… a woman actually had sex with a guywho considers himself a gaming journalist… Could you imagine a guy talking to a woman at a bar and she asks what he does for a living and he replies in all seriousness ‘I am a gaming journalist’. It would be worth going to a bar and recording this just to see the look on women’s faces. Guys who are having trouble picking up women must be thinking WTF?
I think anyone who gets all upset over this non-issue garbage is a communist. Here is my take. We are now stuck with Obamacare. Which means we are in 1 big insurance pool. Lazy people who don’t exercise have their healthcare subsidized by those of us who actually get off our butts and try to take care of oursselves(just taking a 30 minutes walk a few days a week does wonders for health care costs). So now we have all these losers sitting around all day long, eating doritos and getting all upset over this?
Apparently people think the rest of us are obligated to subsidized their chosen, ‘sit on my butt and get pissy over nothing’ lifestyle’. You are a communist and anti-American.
Guess, et al:
A reminder that I don’t want this thread to be a discussion of GamerGate, please.
Also not under consideration:
*Things people don’t care about?
*There are starving kids in Pacoima, why are we worried about ISIS when?
*Who is (and is not) part of one’s shared risk pool, before and after 2012?
*something something communism?
Muting seems safer than blocking, when it comes to particularly egregious tweet-holes to take that as a challenge and start combing their drawers for old socks.
Reading message boards and blogs (not so much here as in general, though sometimes here) has been a good education for me in developing a mental mute button/killfile. There are people and topics I can skip right on past and some whose posts require only a quick skim, and the urge to engage (“Someone is wrong on the Internet!”) has become much less strong.
I’m not on Twitter, but in sampling Scalzi’s tweet stream and those of a few other people, I can see how a mute function would quickly become a useful tool if I were, and I can see a lot of value in a timed mute, especially when there may be topics that generate a lot of short-term interest but are not something I would want to spend that much time on. Frankly, I don’t see how people keep up with things they do want to read on Twitter.
BW: yes, that was the most delightful part. Knowing they were ranting away in vain. Sometimes my friends would summarize the rants and email me a few choice phrases.
megpie: You’d think someone would have come up with an http block/mute by now. Or a series of them, say one for gravatars, one for Disqus, etc.
Wow. Suddenly: Communism. I must admit, I didn’t expect such a random (and nonsensical, yet amusing) connection to be made.
I dub this: “McCarthy Dismount”. It’s like the libertarian dismount, but from an even earlier era.
Lurkertype: I’ve not tried using it, but there is a killfile for Disqus. Here’s where it can be found: http://dtm.livejournal.com/41016.html
I’m thinking hard now – my Twitter pic is an egg and I don’t follow a lot of people…and am not sure that anyone follows me. But I enjoy Twitter for reading things, am selective about who I follow (who had the time to read a lot of extraneous stuff?), and am more interested in consuming than generating tweets…am I actually a bot? This has gotten existential very quickly…
One day, maybe sooner than I think, I’ll be The Last Person On Earth Not On Twitter.
I don’t use tweetdeck, just the plain old twitter tools. When I see someone respond to someone else and know I never want this guy to be in my feed ever, I just go ahead and preemptively block, but there is something tempting about letting them ramble on in mute without ever knowing I can’t hear them….
I like this one thing a friend tweeted, she’s got it pinned to her profile: “Mute, Turn Off Retweets, and Block, these three, but the greatest of these is block #1Twitterinthians”
I’m thinking Whee for the nominative, Whim for the objective, and Whir for the possessive. (I’d go Whizz, but that’s private. *ahem* I mean, I’d go with Whizz, but I don’t see why the set should mimick He/Him/His in all its declensions.) In any case, that’s how I’m stealing them for use on my own blog.
(I was having trouble deciding which of the existing non-gendered pronoun systems to adopt. I felt I didn’t have sufficient justification for choosing one over the other. But now I think, to heck with it, amusement and joyousness — “Wheeeeee!” — is good enough.)
(Adopting the habit of non-binary-gendered… anything isn’t as hard as the Proudly Politically Incorrect Brigade make it out to be. The phrase “all genders” seems to have replaced “both genders” in my vocabulary of its own volition without my even noticing it until I was doing the Roller Derby New Recruit Night spiel the other evening – “On skates or off, contact or no contact, all ages, colors, genders, shapes and sizes–there is a way for you to get involved!” & etc. It took more deliberate action to find a replacement for “handyman,” but in doing so I found out that there re Handyworker Programs all over the country providing free or low-cost repairs for low-income seniors, and that made my world a brighter place in addition to improving my vocabulary. So.)
Parenthetical tangent ends. Where were we? Ah. “Scalzines.” It makes me think of a flaky, salted cracker that gets served with the soup. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
…And how this ended up here in the “Mute button” thread instead of under “The Scalzi Gender” post, I have no idea. Must have lost track of my Firefox tabs. Should I repost there, or just live with it?
[Deleted for pointlessness – JS]