I’m tired. Fortunately, I took an entire day to sleep and recover before I wrote this blog post, so you can just imagine what it would have sounded like yesterday.

Today, we’re going to talk about the Living Room Test. This is the era of social media. It might change later, but right now a great many people exist in a virtual convention center where they can run into various people and talk to them from the safe confines of distance.

You get the facade of being personal, without actually being close enough to someone for them to turn and punch you in the face for mouthing off.

I myself have a great many friends whom I have never met IRL, but know tremendous details about them, their career, and even their lives, because of what they have shared in the interwebs. However, if I have never met someone in person, I always have a thread of restraint about what I say when interacting with them.

Before you say it on the social medias, ask yourself: “Would you say it in their living room?”

This is a variant of the old, “Is it nice?” question. Would you come to my house as part of a cocktail party and say such things, expecting me to do nothing about it? If you were raised with any manners whatsoever, chances are you wouldn’t say those sorts of things to me or anyone else.

Other folks might throw you out of a party for saying those things to their face. I’m more likely to drag your unconscious body out to the curb and dump it there after punching you. Repeatedly. In the face. Until my point has been made. And you might require a significant amount of convincing.

I’ve used curbstomp as a verb this week.

I’m tired of people lacking the basic humanity and decency to remain polite to relative strangers on the internet. I can probably name all my my social media friends who have ever actually been in my living room, but I don’t entertain all that often, and usually only friends who are first and second circle.

I don’t come into your living room and talk shit. Or take a shit on the carpet. You should probably consider that same decency when you go to visit folks you only sort of know.

The Social Medias give you a false sense of security because I can’t punch you. It’s like when you are so drunk that you feel bulletproof.

So I’m tired. I have run out of fucks to give. People are no longer going to get any warning.

Up until now, I’ve mostly just unfollowed folks when I felt like they had maybe a radically different political view from me, but were IRL friends going back a ways. I will accept friend requests from strangers who meet a fairly stringent test of me going through their timeline and seeing what they share. How old is the account? What pictures are there? Do things pass a sniff test (has the account been abandoned and then hacked, like the 60-year-old male Thai banker named Jennifer?)?

If you can’t even behave that little bit, I’m just going to unfriend you and block you. There will be no warning. No confrontation. Nothing.

I’m just tired of you being an asshole on the internet and I don’t have to put up with it from anyone.

If you are IRL friend, I’ll even snooze you 30 days first once, but after that, I’ll unfollow the people I expect to see next year (and I’ve done that this week) and unfriend/block the rest of you.

If you can’t say something nice, shut the fuck up. Simple as that.

Wil Wheaton’s Rule: “Don’t be a dick.”

You aren’t funny. Nobody else might be willing to tell you that, but when I chuck your ass out the airlock, understand what I’m telling you.

I don’t care if you later turn over a new leaf, sober up, and become a nicer person. I’m done with you. Because you should have been an adult in the first place and that was too much.

So you can fuck off. I value my other friends more than your opinion of yourself, and I don’t want them judging me just because you have no manners and snuck in the door when nobody was checking credentials.

And with that, I will bid you good day.