As the fungi continued their tirade of abuse, Poofball did declare, “screw this crap, I ain’t taking yo’ shit any longer.” Forsooth, she did sprout a pair of legs, and she did feck off to a nicer place, with most pleasant mushrooms.
I’m with ya, Poofball. Fo real!
I’m grateful I never have to deal with haters. Arguments online always look so pointless. On the rare occasions that they involve me (three in over 20 years of internet usage), I treat them with utter indifference.
Of my three encounters with drama llamas, one abused me for days before disappearing altogether when he realised I wasn’t the person he thought I was (lol). Another one I saw abusing other people, so I blocked and ignored him. Three months later he realised I blocked him, he kicked off and got himself blocked and ignored by people he was fuming too, about me.
The third one was back when I released Grey Moon. A minor drama where someone assumed the 100% female cast was a parody or satire of lefties. I told him it wasn’t and couldn’t understand how he’d drawn that conclusion. He wrote some negative reviews announcing I’d become too SJW. And that was that. Arguing was not going to change anything, so I ignored him. His blog has since vanished from WordPress.
Side note on that, Grey Moons cast was all female because I wanted to write a story about three characters in a pub. Fuen, Yuffie and Reala felt like perfect characters for that story. The rest of the cast were female by mistake. I just kept writing ‘she’ when referring to the penguins and llama that visited the bar.
The Lost Leeds series was all female thanks to the main characters being based on my two dogs, Lily and Sally. The supporting cast was female thanks to pun names such as Molly Cule the chemist and Robyn Banks the thief.
Brass’ cast was all female because, well, I don’t know. Nor do I care. At no point did I make a casting choice based on the gender of a character. Take any post in all of those stories 300’ish tales, and tell me what difference it would make replacing any character with a male counterpart. I can save you some time there, and say ‘none’.
The point of all that tangent being, even the reason the guy cried “Peter is an SJW,” was misplaced. Not only would me responding to the guy be pointless, but his entire argument with me was irrelevant in the first place.
Internet abuse man, it such a waste of pixels.
With all that said, I do understand some folks cannot ignore the online abuse they take. People, young and old, often don’t know how to deal with digital bullying and women get it at least ten times harder than men.
So if you’re taking abuse online and you don’t know how to deal with it, check out the Cybersmile Foundations website. Their help centre has information on everything from doxing to mental health and even legal perspectives. https://www.cybersmile.org
For parents and children, the NSPCC has some information on cyberbullying and they have people you can talk too. https://www.nspcc.org.uk/
Also, a quick shout out to Julie Reeser. A long time Fears’er who’s hosting a panel later this month on Social Media Gone Wrong. You can see her schedule HERE, her Patreon HERE and her Twitter HERE.
Not sure how to end this post, so a dog-Latin quote from the British Army during World War II.
Illegitimi non carborundum.
‘Don’t let the bastards grind you down.’
Ooo, and Poofball with some friendly mushrooms is available on my Etsy store. http://littlefears.etsy.com
Thanks to Warren for the continued $10 Patronage.
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