Mortaine’s Blog

For those who are wondering when the hell I’ll be changing out of the annoying pink background and style:

Next week. After BJ Day, okay? I’m not even going to be with my sweetie for Valentine’s Day, so I have to do something to be all flowery and cute.

In the meantime, I’m taking nominations for a theme for the next style I make. I also need to do a Wizard of Oz style for my sis, so if you have any suggestions for that, let me know.

I read the infamous “whose journal should you avoid” post in ’s journal today.

Wow. I was impressed by the 16 pages of comments. I was impressed by how many people hate . I even had a couple of nominations, but anonymous commenting was turned off, and I’m too much of a coward to say it publicly.

See, there are people on my Friends list who I know and like and trust. That’s actually the majority. A lot are people I’ve met in person– in general, if I’ve met you in person and no blood was shed, I trust you enough to be alone with you. There are people I’ve never met, but who are known in real life to people who I have met, or I’ve spent enough time talking with them in a synchronous medium (IRC or instant messenger) that I feel confident they’re not totally bogus. A very large part of my friends list is made up of people from Support, and there are few people there who I would really run screaming from, support drama notwithstanding.

And then, there are some people on my friends list who I like, but don’t trust. This is either because they have openly admitted to being an ass, and they haven’t done anything significant (that I can see) to change their behavior, or because of the high levels of drama on their journals (sometimes, both).

Which isn’t to say that I don’t like these people, or that I don’t want to know them. Rather, I find that, knowing that I don’t trust someone or other helps me keep a certain level of “distance” that’s needed when having a friendship with someone unreliable and prone to drama.

In any case, the issue of trustworthiness comes up very rarely. To be honest, there are very few things I post non-pubilcly. Of those, I think less than 1% are posted using custom Friends Groups. I do not have a “Trusted” filter. I have a filter for people who are local, not local, family, notfamily, notwork, etc. If I don’t trust you, you won’t be in a filter group, and when I post an entry I want to filter to trusted people, I post it with the filters enabled. If the filters malfunction, I don’t worry too much about it, but find it somewhat regrettable. I generally don’t complain about other people in my journal, so there’s very little “she said X about Y” crap to go around.

Anyway, I post filtered that way, I’m basically protecting myself from giving you more information than I think you should have. If you’ve shown yourself to be a jerk in the past, or I think you’re an especially manipulative person, I won’t want you to know certain things about me, just because I don’t always want people to be able to know where all my buttons are. If you’re in that very small group of friends I don’t really trust, it’s because you’ve done something in the past that makes me distrust you, and this is a consequence of that behavior.