As the guy behind a long-running blog devoted to, as my tagline notes, tracking and mocking some of the worst pieces of crap on the internet, I’ve come to expect a good deal of criticism from the aforementioned worst pieces of crap on the internet.
What still surprises me is that they almost never criticize me for anything I’ve actually said or done. Instead, they attack my weight and my fondness for cats. And then, evidently having run out of true things to say about me, they move on to attacking me for things they’ve conjured up in their own brain about me, most of which bear little or no resemblance to the truth.
Last week, I got an email with the urgent subject “OMG OMG ITS YOU!!!” from someone calling himself TF2leplayer. The email consisted of a rather weirdly elaborate fantasy portrayal of what, I guess, he imagines my life to be. Or, at the very least, what he would prefer to think my life consists of.
EDIT: So it turns out this dude’s email is a slightly reworked copypasta of a 4chan-related meme. Not being a channer, I’m not up on all the 4chan memes. When 4chan copypasta is virtually indistinguishable from the kind of “fan mail” I get every day, well that doesn’t say much for the originality of my assorted critics.
There he is. There he goes again
Look everyone he shitposted again! Isn’t he just the funniest guy around?? Oh my god.
I can almost see your pathetic overweight frame glowing in the dark lit by your computer screen which is the only source of light in your room giggling like a little girl as you once again type your little “MUHSOGGYKNEES” up.
I do actually have adequate lighting.
Or maybe you don’t even do that, maybe you’re such a disgusting pile of dog shit that you actually steal shit off of Buzzfeed and Polygon.
Uh, what? I guess this would be a stinging insult if I actually did steal my stuff from either of these two sites, but since I don’t it kind of falls a teensy bit flat.
So it has no more effect on me than if he accused me of, I dunno, shoplifting Whitney Houston CDs from … I dunno, wherever they sell CDs these days. Do they sell CDs these days?
Oh we all know the issue, the uh oppressed minorities isn’t it?
Uh, I thought we’d already determined that I was “typing up MUHSOGGYKNEES.”
I imagine you, little shit, laughing so hard as you as you come up with biased articles, you drop your Doritos onto the floor.
As fond as I am of Doritos, I can’t really eat them regularly. Too much MSG. Gives me headaches.
But its ok, your mother will clean it up in the morning. Oh that’s right, did I fail to mention? You live with your mother!
Ah, the classic “you live with your mother” ploy! Now, there are plenty of people who live with their parents, for assorted reasons. I’m not one of them. So, again, this insult misses me completely. And it’s pretty damn uninspired.
Kick it up a notch, dude. Why not “you live in a poop house that is made of poop and that is also filled with poop, also the furniture is made of poop, and instead of a TV you watch a poop!”
I came up with that one off the top of my head.
You’re a fat fucking fuck up and she’s probably so sick of you already. So sick of having to do everything for you all god damn day, every day, for a grown man who spends all his time on Tumblr posting about white men and trannies.
Er, what? I haven’t posted anything on Tumblr since the glory days of Confused Cats Against Feminism last year. Which by the way was quite a popular little blog in its day, though as an essentially one-joke blog it was not one destined to last. Did I mention that it got written up in like dozens of publications? T-shirts are still available!
Just imagine this, she had you and then she thought you were going to be a scientist or an astronaut or something grand, and then you became a FEMINIST.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure my mom never thought I was going to be an astronaut. Moms can sense these things. I don’t really give off much of an “astronaut” vibe.
A pathetic triggered fag of a FEMINIST. She probably cries herself to sleep everyday thinking about how bad it is and how she wishes she could just disappear. She can’t even talk try to you because all you say is “HAVE YOU HEARD OF OUR LORD AND SAVIOR ANITA SARKEESIAN?”.
It’s weird, this assumption the #GamerGaters have that being a feminist requires that one worship Anita Sarkeesian. I mean, she seems cool, her videos are pretty good, and the fact that she gets endless harassment for them is fucking appalling, but I’m pretty sure I and most other feminists spend a lot less time thinking about Anita Sarkeesian than your typical #GamerGater does. She’s not actually the central figure in world feminism.
#GamerGaters and other antifeminists spend a lot of time and energy railing against feminists, but they know so little about feminism that they can’t even get the stereotypes right.
It’s as if I started mocking Italians for their love of lutefisk and their excessive flamenco dancing. I would get odd looks, and no one would actually be insulted.
You became a parody of your own self. And that’s all you are. A sad little man laughing in the dark by himself as he prepares to indulge in the same topic that he’s done a million times now.
Again, I have more than adequate lighting.
Oh, and that’s all you’ll ever be.
That turns out to be a somewhat ironic ending to this weird little missive.
Because when I click on the email address of Mr. TF2leplayer, I am directed to a rather sparse Google+ profile. The only thing of note I find there is a conversation Mr. TF2leplayer had in a YouTube comments section a year ago.
Mr. T started off with a complaint:
And then this conversation ensued:
I’m just going to cut it off there, because it gets worse, much worse.
Now all this — what I’ve quoted and what I haven’t — doesn’t actually tell me anything about PewDiePie, video gamer and YouTube personality.
But it does tell me something about Mr. T. Namely, that he likes to go around accusing people he doesn’t like of things that aren’t true. And that he especially likes accusing people of being gay and living with their mother (not that there’s anything wrong with it). That’s not even as funny as the old standby: “You’re ugly and your mother dresses you funny.”
Seems like a sort of pointless and pathetic way to spend your life.
But what do I know, sitting n my room in the dark, giggling like a little girl and waiting for my mother to bring me another bag of Doritos?
MOOOOMMMMM!!!
DORITOS!! NOW!!!!!
An argument I had with a former friend about GamerGate had him claim that Zoe Quinn was a “prominent activist” in feminist circles, which was a surprise to me – all I knew about her was that she made a videogame dealing with depression and got harassed over it, then her vindictive and disingenuous boyfriend decided to wage a revenge porn campaign while lying it was about “ethics in journalism” right after.
Of course, he seemed to spend a lot of time looking at Tumblr and Twitter for “evidence” (i.e. personal blogs or singular posts from random, anonymous people) for this despite apparently hating everything about those places (I don’t use either, for a number of reasons, and get pretty fucking sick of seeing people complain about them on Facebook).
It really bewilders me how much energy they spend getting angry over something they dislike, almost for the sake of it, than just ignore it and be all the happier not bothering. Moreso when these same people admonish anyone enraged over a legitimate social justice issue as being “over-sensitive” and deflect it further by claiming there are “more important things going on” in the world.
Maybe it’s just me, but if mistreatment of women and ethnic minorities are “lesser problems” while fuming over YouTube videos or the Australian divisions of Target and Walmart not stocking copies of GTAV anymore (even though they don’t live there and are totally unaffected by such) – you’re priorities are all kinds of fucked up. You certainly lack the authority to go around proclaiming what is or isn’t “important”…
It’s telling that their first defense, when it comes to harassment, is to say SJWs are “just as bad” than admit harassment is simply wrong. Whenever they describe their supposed harassment, it’s so exaggerated that you can help but think they’ve obfuscated a rationally-stated argument due to a twisted perception or totally made up as a rhetorical “gotcha!” (forgetting the idiom that “two wrongs don’t make a right”). It’s weird for them to demand credence when questioned – as they have no issue dismissing victims of harassment as being falsified (even when they prove such). It is also odd that they want everyone in their group to be considered a special little snowflake (because they want validation and thus be enabled further), yet nonetheless grossly generalize everyone in a group they dislike and assume a lot of shit that’s just not true.
Sorry, I meant “ex-boyfriend” and noticed a “your” as a “you’re” – wish I could edit these comments to fix that, noticing them now…
Ugh… of all the various GG things, “MUHSOGGYKNEE” is my least favorite one that’s not also morally reprehensible. It just sounds gross.
Also why is living in the dark a bad thing? I’m a big fan of laughing in the dark by myself, personally.We hatesss the sun… we hatesssss it
@dslucia1
[applause]
Whomever said Ignatius: if i was more literate I would have assumed that was the reference the author was trying to make. Which is weird, considerig that ITR’s ideology is virtually indistinguishable from the “dark enlightenment” types.
Does TF2leplayer even lift…?
Oh my, you have another guy emailing you who thinks he’s some undiscovered literary genius. Seems the world is full of these dudes.
No kidding. I’m not a fan of his (I kind of liked his videos, but he’s kind of a one-trick pony when it comes down to it), and I’ve also noticed that a lot of other prominent YouTubers do have their slip-ups as well. We’re all human, and no single person knows everything about social justice, etc.
But, seriously, I think our dear, dear friend TF2leplayer really needs to sit down and talk to someone about all this projection and anger he’s got going on here.
He’s lashing out at people who are obviously more successful than he is. :/
Maybe he could team up with Vox Day and make a publishing deal.
Poop his house with a poop little window and a poop Corvette and everything is poop to him!
I think what Zoe Quinn did at first that really offended people was creating safe game jams. By “safe,” the events had a strict 50:50 gender ratio, they tried to be welcoming to minorities and people with disabilities, and they had codes of conduct against harassment, bragging, and not being helpful. For some reason that infuriated Libertarians (who overlap with White Nationalists, btw) in the gaming and tech industry, and (at least my theory is) someone realized getting teenagers and gamerbros on 4chan offended by Depression Quest was a good way of getting a cyber mob to come after her.
Then Eron Gjoni realized he could incite the cyber mob to get revenge on her for breaking up with him. The “ethics in video game journalism” phrase was made up so that people could plausibly deny malicious intent and claim that writing about Quinn’s personal life is legitimate criticism and not harassment. So “ethics in XYZ” is an Orwellian doublespeak code phrase for harassing people.
Given how much I laughed at the ugly/dressed funny line, you are absolutely correct about how unfunny his insults are.
You know that old saying, “possession is nine-tenths of the law”? Well, with them, it’s projection, and it’s all ten.
There’s a guy who left a company I work for under something of a cloud – I forget the exact reason, but I think it involved personally insulting the CEO over what turned out to be a misunderstanding, and by the time that was cleared up the hole that he’d dug for himself was so deep that he’d rendered himself unemployable.
You’d have thought he’d want to keep quiet about that, but for months now he’s been badmouthing the company across multiple social networks at every possible opportunity, concocting increasingly eccentric conspiracy theories as to why he was let go. To say that my colleagues and I are unfazed by this would be a fairly massive understatement – even when he started leaking private emails the only repercussions were on him, because who would hire someone who clearly can’t be trusted to keep confidential information private? (I don’t believe he’s managed to land a followup job in the same industry, although that’s doubtless our fault as well.)
And I suspect a lot of this stems from the fact that he too is an exceptionally angry individual – I still vividly remember the time he sent me a load of abusive emails (about a dozen overnight) about a situation that wasn’t actually happening, and I was struck by the fact that he made no upfront attempt to confirm this before launching into a full-on thermonuclear assault. Which is the kind of behaviour that’s always seemed utterly counterproductive to me. In fact, I suspect he sent a dozen emails in the first place because he was FURIOUS that I didn’t respond immediately – on account of it being 2am and me being asleep.
They spend so much time and energy because it works. It punishes people who say or do stuff that offends neoreactionary and conservative Libertarian types and it makes people shut up about social justice issues.
Cosigned, yet another feminist scientist. My undergrad degree was in astrophysics too; does that make me closer to being an astronaut? Please say yes.
Also, dslucia1 wins the thread. You’re getting good at that.
It’s all about projection. Bigots love to accuse their enemies of characteristics they actually possess. Not that there’s anything wrong with living in your mother’s basement or giggling like a girl or being a feminist. If that’s the best TF2leplayer can come up with, Dave is doing alright.
Well the lesson here is, don’t go off on tirades like this where all your criticism is based on shit you pull out of your ass as you go along. Because the best case scenario is, it turns out you are right about everything and they say “whoa, how did he know that?”, but literally every other case scenario is you end up looking like a flailing jackass.
I know what you mean. I <3 jacksepticeye's videos and think he's hilarious, but he lost some respect points from me when he laughed about The Fappening as if it was funny. There's other times he's made some comments that carry the scent of Red Pill but I don't think he IS one, he just needs to learn more about feminism, methinks.
Markiplier meanwhile seems to have a stellar record when it comes to SJWism and not putting his foot in his mouth. Good for him. ^^
^ugh, I wonder if I could get a moderator to edit my post so that my words (the second paragraph) are not part of the block quote.
Just accept that you have made a sacrifice to the blockquote mammoth. Katie decrees that we feed it a few times a day!
@WWTH
Weirdly enough for how often I post (I’m still boggled about being a maybe-regular), I don’t think I’ve been blockquote mammothed. I’ve messed up my blockquoting, but only in the way that makes no blockquote at all appear. Huh.
Famous last words.
I managed to evade the BQM for months. But eventually, he got me.
http://www-ghostvolta-com.zippykid.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Giant-on-a-Mammoth2.gif
@ WWTH
Would you like me to hunt that for you? 😉
@ andiexist
Oh, that’s got to be on a par with “They couldn’t hit a mammoth at this dist…”