Have I unfriended you?

[nancylebov]

andrewducker just contacted me to ask why I'd unfriended him, and whether it might have been a accident. It was an accident, and I've re-friended him.

I'm concerned that it might not have been *my* accident, since I don't see any obvious way I could have done it by mistake. On the one hand, I can be kind of spacey, and on the other, computers can get things wrong without the non-experience of being spacey.

I haven't unfriended anyone for a year or more, so please let me know if you've been unfriended from this lj. Also, let me know if you're heard of lj spontaneously unfriending people.

NonOBSF*: Robert Sheckley's Dimension of Miracles (1968)-- a human wins an alien lottery for which he is not eligible, and the computer explains that it's constrained to get things right almost all the time, so making the occasional very rare error is the only free will it's got. This was supposed to be funny, but I don't think the joke was the idea of a computer which almost always got things right. In those ancient days, people had *no* *idea* how hard it was to get computers to be even reasonably reliable. Nobody thought there would be shelving units full of books to help the general public wrangle their computers.

*On usenet, there was a group called rec.arts.sf.written, and as might be expected from sf fans or possibly even from humans in general, there was a lot of topic drift. As a result, there was a custom (not enforced) of having an OBSF with a little something about SF at the end of posts which weren't about sf.

Comments

Gloss

[thnidu]

For those not familiar with Usenet or similar environments, the abbreviation means "OBligatory SF". The construction "Ob___", variously capitalized, was used all over, with the blank filled many different ways according to context, need, and whim.