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@weit_im_westen
It's funny, I really can't recall asking for your input beyond tooting a poll with a finite number of possible responses, none of which, for the record, are, "This is too long for my sensitive feelings and I'm apparently too lazy to turn on the setting which hides toots which are longer than the average slip of paper in a fortune cookie," so I'm not sure why you think that showing up in my mentions to chide me about your shortcomings is warranted. The irony of your subsequent response being utterly lost on you as well, I find myself wondering just what I did to deserve such bounty.

Maybe I did a good deed for an old man in the forest who turned out to be Odin in disguise. There he was, sitting in the forest just waiting to be discovered by a wandering youngest son, and instead I bumped into him and gave him half of my Snickers bar. Maybe that was it. Except I don't trust old men who hang around in forests, so I probably would have run screaming. I can't see Odin rewarding me with a delightful correspondence with such a learned scholar of fedi lore as you for running screaming from him.

Maybe it's a repayment of my debt from a past life. The karmic wheel turned and shat me out into this rancid sewer of a life, but by way of apology it decided to drop you in my mentions to tell me just how much you enjoy my ability to string more than two words at a time together. Surely that must be it. Except if that's the case, I would expect you to be very different. You're less a karmic reward than a nemesis, a righteous infliction of divine retribution.

I could go on, and in fact I will.

Let's narrow down which deity I might have offended greviously enough to incur their wrath in your delightful person. The Christian god is a likely suspect, but while I'm cheerfully blasphemous at all times I can manage, he's more likely to send me disappointed notes via the Holy Spirit. The Jewish god might smite me, but let's be frank, it's been a long time since he's smitten anything. The Muslim god is supposed to be the same as the other two, and anyway I would expect burning bushes from any Abrahamic deity worth his salt. Unless there's something you're not telling me. Is there painful itching and burning somewhere you don't want to talk about?

Be that as it may (and it may, oh yes, it may), nemesis is really more of a Greek god sort of thing. I could list Greek gods until the cows come home, but you and I both know that I've been faithful in my burnt offerings to them all. I've sent up great gales of smoke from the fat and bones I've burned. There's no one who is more devout in their worship of the gods of Olympus than I, I think you'll agree. At least, as far as you know.

So we must return to the problem: what can I have done to deserve such a lovely and erudite conversational cohabitation as you?

And I'm afraid here I must admit that I'm not a very nice person. After all, if I were, would I be heaping derision on you thusly? The answer is no. No, of course not. Were I a nice person, I would probably have gone on making light fun of the fact that you're so oblivious as to toot a series of screenshots at me to prove some point about brevity. And you would probably have gone on being obtuse. I'm afraid you're terribly obtuse. That can't be helped, I suppose, but the facts are there.

So, being as I'm not nice, not nice at all, one might posit that you are punishment for my sins, as it were. You've been sent to teach me some kind of object lesson in humility, or brevity, or niceness, or indeed one of countless virtues which I clearly don't possess. Sadly for the grand galactic plan that spawned you, unheralded and unwanted, into the world long enough ago that you really should know better by now, I'm not nice enough to take my punishment.

No, instead, I will teach you a lesson. Sit down, this might sting a little.

No one cares.

No one cares about your tiny little objection to my humor. Hell, I don't care. You might ask yourself why, if I don't care, I am wasting my precious time writing this, and the answer is that my time isn't precious and no one cares about me either.

No one cares about anyone. Life is unending woe and death is a horror waiting to be unleashed when you least expect it. You're born, you suffer, you die, people forget you if they even knew you to begin with. We're all dust and lies, and the biggest lie is that we matter. None of us matter, you least of all, as, in the hierarchy of the modern Dante's Inferno that is the internet, annoying reply guys are right above trolls and are less mourned when they vanish into the ether from whence they came because at least trolls inspire a palliative spurt of anger which fights off the cold clutch of oblivion for one more instant.

What's worse is that, while you don't matter, since I don't matter either, your objections to me are doubly pointless. No one needed them. No one was waiting for the perfect moment to read some shitlord trying and failing to rain on the parade of pathos that is the eventual heat death of the Universe. You're less useful than white noise.

But I think you know that, even as you blunder about like an enormous, obtuse water buffalo in an ill-fitting tuxedo, vaguely aware that you're ruining the party but unable to grasp just why. I think you know that you don't matter, which is why you scream into the void. You long for connection, but the sad truth is that you don't know how to communicate except by asserting your own futility. It must be lonely in there.

And as you know this, you will construct walls to keep my truth, that we are all shit smeared in the underwear of life, from touching your forbidden knowledge. You know that if you allow the cognitive dissonance to dissolve, your existence will shatter. You won't be able to continue your sad, dreary life. And if there's one thing we can all be sure of, it's that one of those walls you've erected is an over-inflated sense of your own self-worth. Why else would you think that I wanted to hear you vomit up other people's vapid points about brevity?

But you know, deep down, that it's a lie. You know that I don't care. You know that no one does. That's the grim truth we hide from our children until it's too late. Until they've all built their own walls around it, just to survive, to scrabble pointlessly in the muck, covered in filth and bruised from all the times someone else climbed over them to get just a little bit higher on that muddy slope. Because we've convinced ourselves that there's an apex, a grand pinnacle, where if you just climb hard enough and shove enough people down, you'll stop being a shit-covered gibbon with delusions of sentience and instead be Important!

So you have to prove that I'm wrong. You have to show up unasked to prove just how much you matter. Not to me. Not to others. But to yourself. "I matter," you scream impotently, for all the world like a small child who has just discovered that other people exist. You have to crawl up and up, building wall after wall around that horrible truth at the center of it all.

But unfortunately for you, I don't buy it.

And that must grate at you a little, my arrogance in presuming to hold an opinion contrary to your own. How dare I be allowed to express myself in ways you don't approve of. So you set out to put me in my place. And instead we find ourselves here, because you're not very good at it and I'm not a nice person.

Oh, if I were nice, this wouldn't be happening. Even if I were slightly less nice than perfect, I would have enforced my boundaries and blocked you, rather than being cruel and offering you this poison pill. There's a decent chance you're not reading this anyway, so why do I bother? To prove my own point? To crawl over your smoking husk and squirm one slimy step closer to the top?

No. Frankly, I gave up on you about two paragraphs into this. Now I'm just talking. Just killing the time that I should savor, except it's ashes in my mouth. Because I don't matter. Nothing of this matters. Our interaction is ephemeral and is already fading into the background radiation of the internet.

So I could block you and move on. I should. You've done nothing to deserve any more than that. And you wouldn't learn anything from that, sure, but you're not going to learn anything from this either. If you suffer any psychic damage at all, you'll quickly reassure yourself that I'm just an asshole who talks too much, which has the convenient benefit of being entirely accurate. You'll reassure yourself that you do matter. And then you'll find the next person to latch on to like a tick, burrowing into their skin until you strike a soft target and you can achieve whatever satisfy can be had by inane chiding, unwanted interaction, and annoyance in the service of dominance.

But if you or anyone else gets this far, know this: every time one of you lizard-brained reactionaries gets butthurt about my sense of humor, I do it harder. Because I'm not a nice person. I am fueled by spite. That's the only thing which keeps me going. So in a way, I'm grateful for you chucklefucks who foolishly believe that I welcome your criticism. Without you, I wouldn't be able to keep my own walls strong, to burn out the hurting places, cauterize them with cold anger until I feel nothing.

Maybe that's why I'm not going to block you. Maybe it's in recognition of your usefulness to me as an object lesson. "Don't be this dipshit," written in big red letters across your profile. "Think before you speak." "Are you wanted here?" You fuel my defenses and you also bolster my self-doubt. Truly, it's an amazing thing you do.

But in the end, I think it's probably a sad reflection of the current world that I feel the need to go on writing this instead of doing something useful. Because there is nothing useful. We're all dust and lies, and in gyrating around each other, we just forestall the inevitable.

And so, in the vulgar parlance of the time, the argot of the moment, fuck off, pedant. I hope you never find the validation you so desperately seek. You wouldn't know intelligent discourse if it crawled up your urethra and laid spiky eggs in your bladder, a consummation devoutly to be wished, I might add. When you leave a room, people breathe a sigh of relief. My life has been lessened by you to such an extent that I'm pretty sure the state of California should ban you like all the other carcinogens. Get fucked, continue getting fucked, may you never cease getting fucked. Your presence on fedi is sufficient for me to wonder whether any of it is worth it. I'm almost rooting for Facebook at this point, you utter bellend. I would exhaust the remaining characters my instance so generously allots me to further denigrate you, but the words fail to accurately describe your awfulness. Have a terrible day.