There are no happy endings, because nothing ends.

OHH THIS IS SO HARD BUT

Every (non-pandemic/on fire) year in Estes Park there is a Fiber Festival for all manner of natural fibers- cotton, bamboo, silk, flax, and every animal you can get wool from- all manner of sheep, chashmere goats, angora rabbits, yaks, bison, llamas, Alpacas and the Softest Pettable Animal Known To Man, the Paco- Vicuña :

Now, I have to specify “Pettable” up there because the actual Softest Animal is the Wild Vicuña, skittish and rare cousin of the llama and alpaca, but it does not take to being ranched from it’s high-strung prey animal temperment.  People have herded and shorn them since the time of the Inca, but the process involves several hundred to a thousand people spread over a massive and unforgiving mountain range herding the animals into funnel-shaped paddocks to be shorn and released, but this is rather stressful for everyone involved and only producess about a pound of wool per animal, which is a... very small harvest for the effort.  Prior to the hybridization of the Paco-Vicuña though, Vicuña wool was worth significantly more than it’s weight in gold.

So some Vicuña were cross-bred with the much more personable and fluffier Alpaca, to create the Paco-Vicuña, who has only slightly less soft hair and is MUCH more chill. The wool of the  Vicuña and Paco-Vicuña is firstly, incredibly fine with an average hair diameter of  12μm (micrometers). For comparison, a human hair is about 80-100μm, and a red blood cell is about 7μm.  Now, chinchillas have probably the finest individual hairs at 1μm, but I rate the  Paco-Vicuña as Softer because of the way the hairs are distributed on the animals-

Chinchillas have the finest hairs, but also the densest coats, with about 20,000 hairs per square inch, so petting one has an extremely distinctive texture to it, ridiculously soft but almost chunky like breaking up a moss clumps because the hairs compact so tightly in places to protect the animal.  It’s a marvelous texture and I highly reccomend petting one if you ever have the chance.

I felt like I needed to clarify some things before we could continue any more conversations on this godforsaken website.

And they will do things like start you with premises you can easily agree with, such as “I respect anyone who respects me” and “you should be able to be proud of who you are” and slowly, half step by half step, lead you places like “people who don’t respect me deserve violence” and “there’s nothing wrong with white pride”. 

Or they’ll start infighting among groups... they might have an account pretending to be black and keep re-posting a couple of pictures of mexican business owners making sure their businesses don’t get damaged during BLM protests... trying to make it look like mexican americans are “on the other side” to drive a wedge and overshadow the reality that uncountable mexican american protesters stood in solidarity with the BLM movement.

They might get real sneaky and have an account pretending to be bi, and then use that account to advocate for the inclusion of pedophiles in the LGBTQ community, using false equivalencies specifically to create a backlash against bi people or make people associate bi folk with pedophilia. Some 37 year old cishet dude might pretend to be a 23 year old lesbian and start blogging untrue fear mongering about how ace people use up resources meant to protect lesbian and gay people... because if they can get real gay and lesbian people arguing about it, that fractures a group that should be strong together, and alienates people who should be adding their strength to that group.

These are all the kind of thing that happen every day here on social media. ALWAYS do your best to talk to real life members of a community in person to round out your world view, and lean toward inclusion, compassion, and support when faced with someone online presenting a point of view that is trying to convince you of negative things about specific kinds of people -- especially people you would naturally identify or ally with.

Be suspicious of accounts that seem to be saying your enemy is the person next to you. Even if that account is who they say they are, who is the account next to them, whispering propaganda and rhetoric into their DMs?

An account with a photo of a pretty black woman, calling itself coolblackgirl followed me out of the blue. I've been tweeting a lot about the election and RT-ing BLM stuff, but nothing likely to make me look like a good source of info myself.

It wasn't followed by anyone who followed me (another red flag - why would it have seen my tweets?) and its profile and tweets mentioned nothing about science fiction and fantasy, book publishing, feminism, or disability - the things I tend to tweet about. Another red flag.

It had a lot of followers, and it did interact with them, but its interactions felt stock and artificial to me. Not necessarily a bot, but the kind of vapid empty things people tweet when they want to build followers but don't actually care what the followers are like as people.

In short, it looked like a trap for liberal/left-wing people who WANT to be followed by a cool black girl, a pretty black girl, and would congratulate themselves on winning such a follower without asking how or why.

So I didn't follow back. I rarely follow back these days - I follow over 700 people on Twitter and I bet quite thoroughly to avoid following people who might cause drama with me.

I didn't block the account - it hadn't done anything actively offensive yet - bit neither did I follow it.

AND THEN (this is what pissed me off) it unfollowed me and then followed me again.

This is a technique to specifically try to make someone follow back. It's designed to make the notification that you've been followed pop up again, in case you missed it the first time.

People who are genuinely interested in following you because they thing your tweets are interesting don't do this.

That was when I knew for sure to was trying to catfish me - likely so it could feed me misinformation at some later date when I had forgotten how and why I followed the cool black girl.

That was when I knew I was actively being catfished, and I blocked the account.

Also? Cool black girls don't call themselves coolblackgirl, they have a cool handle that reflects their interests or sense of humour like everybody else.

Anyway, I resent the way these shots waste everybody's time and energy, even when we DO successfully protect ourselves from them.

And that little unfollow and unfollow trick really pissed me off. Like it was dangling a treat in front of me it thought I missed.