a bold rant

I go on “mute-rants” a few times a week. I mute whatever in my feed needs to go, for whatever reason, no guilt. My feed keeps getting better and better, with new voices coming in all the time.

Sometimes it's, “I'm not available for this content.”

Sometimes it's, “I thought I had spoons for you, but for the past two weeks I haven't, so that's enough of that.”

Sometimes it's, “I'm feeling some kind of way and I just don't like your tone.”

All of this is ok with me. All of it seems to continue to make my feed better.

I don't expect anyone to change anything because of this little piece that few will even see, by someone with acutely unique ND sensory issues.

But I tell you, I am so close to a massive feral mute-rant for gratuitous use of bold.

It hurts my eyes and my head. It shortens my entire window of tolerance, so that I arrive with a half hour of capacity and need to leave after a few minutes.

An entire paragraph emphasized by bold text emphasizes nothing. It's useless, high visual contrast, a falsely imposed intensity. I'm having less and less of it.

And if I need to drop some really good writers because they just can't keep from bolding me into oblivion, at some point that's exactly what will happen, so that I can continue to enjoy other great writers instead of getting bold-bombed. Pretty sure my stack will continue to improve.

I'm pondering the whole larger phenomenon here of attempting to curate the reader's emotional experience through spacing, italics, and lately this increasing use of bold.

It's one thing to write in a way that defines your cadence and flow. It's entirely another thing to weaponize formatting try to control or manipulate what I feel, how much, when.

Fuck that. Kindly consider trusting me as your reader to receive from your work exactly what I am able and meant to receive--even if that's something you didn't intend to convey, because that happens for me a lot. Along with your words, I hear what's moving underneath. Conversely, no amount of formatting will prevent those who choose to misunderstand you from doing so (and reacting accordingly in comments).

IMO formatting works best when it assists the reader in orientation: organizing one's intake of the information being offered. I get squirrelly quickly when formatting is used to attempt to manipulate emotional response, or just gratuitously as when the entire paragraph is bolded. But really, for me and maybe only me, the biggest problem is the negative visual impact that catapults me straight into migraine.

Thanks for reading.