Boycott Boffo

My abstinence from Skype was a three-day, non-newsworthy event. You may recall I went off-line as I had another in a series of annoying, disjointed, less-than-stellar mornings. Although I take ownership that I wasn't at my best game either (symptoms: quick to anger, whiny, alternately not caring and being too concerned), when the game of 'pay no attention to that group of voices or those people walking behind me, it's only you and I here' comes from supposed old friends (also not putting best foot forward), it is time to reassess.
And after 3 nice days, I returned, put up my profile photo, changed my profile message (which no one reads it seems) and went through my contact list.

And began pruning.

Removing someone as a contact is really doing nothing more than just that. Time passes, people come and go, you lose the momentum of keeping up. And you have people who disrespect your wish to IM before calling, those who don't know what the fuck they're doing with regards to using Skype (9 people is about all a group conference can handle, not all 123 names on the list you just made up, doofus. And I feel an obligation to myself to eliminate the reminder of a bad experience. You might expect that I should also let the other person know why I'm dropping them, but why try to be reasonable...and if they aren't logged on when you are, the message goes into a queue until you both are on simultaneously.

There are a few who I know are on a break or I've not seen in awhile, haven't replied to my messages (as I just said, Skype IM's only transmit if both parties are on line at the same time, you know), or I just don't want to drop them.


I just don't like it when people aren't upfront with me about camming. And I'm not the only one. A few days ago, I was on Skype and the call dropped. My fellow Skyper sent me an IM that read 'I'm getting an error message saying 'cannot view playback': are YOU recording this?" 
"No, but maybe you are, "I replied. I didn't need to tell this person that if he is concerned about his image winding up on the internet, he needs to either a)stop appearing naked and high on cam or b) retire from the public sector and perhaps consider plastic surgery and a change of hair color as a bonus. I suppose he could invest in some masks or other gimmick.
Another caller had poor video quality. This is caused by having too many applications running at once (or being wireless and having a bad connection.) He told me he had closed everything out...just as the familiar bell sound of NKP's chat room came through. It's not that I'm trying to get your attention on me, but if you can only see pixels instead of a penis, it's kinda dull. Rorschach testing this ain't.

Rorschach! not Horshack!