Amateur Hour at the Internet Troll Open Mike Night

I have been working on a blog post for some time that took some serious gestation because it's about things that took me a long time to think out. Not all blog entries are like that. Sometimes I get distracted by temporary, but immediate concerns that are not only worth considering, but are frivolous enough that I can punch the keys and have this thing done in an hour. This is one of those times.

I followed a guy who was in the recommended section of Twitter after I followed another guy, and things seemed nice enough at first until this escalated.

This isn't everything I could grab, but apart from me as an autistic man calling this dude out on his ableist bullshit, the stupidest thing is this isn't even why he yelled at me at first. I'm a hardened veteran of the flame wars. I served in the trenches of many of these. My skin is thicker than most autistic people starting out in their first baptism of online fire. The sad thing is this dude started to diss me not just on the basis of me defending the disabled, but because my avatar was allegedly ugly. No, really. This guy's argument was that dumb. And he didn't even bring that amateur hour trash talk to the table until I attempted to discuss with him whether Kevin Smith and Joss Whedon counted as Gen X directors. An issue I'll add, has little or anything to do with how ugly my Twitter avatar may or may not be.

As you can see, his opinion of me just devolved from there. I was willing to let it go if he didn't escalate it, but he continued to call me a faggot without bringing anything else emotionally scarring and hurtful to the table. The stakes of this flame war were lower than Limbo Night at Van Helsing's place. I may need to give some personal history for context, but essentially, this dude is the epitome of amateur hour when it comes to trolls I've met online. I've seen people post image macros suggesting that "Aspies need curing with electroshock therapy!" that people spent hours in Photoshop creating this Fallout-style retro PSA graphic to hurt people's feelings with. I've been stalked online for four years once by a guy who threatened to letter bomb my house. In the words of Walter from The Big Lebowski, "This is not a worthy adversary." - in the ranks of Disney villains, this guy wouldn't even be in one of the Disney Animated Canon villains people know and love, fear and respect. The guy who threatened to letter bomb my house is like the Judge Frollo from Disney's The Hunchback Of Notre Dame of internet trolling, while this dude's the really vain guy who kisses himself in the mirror in Disney's The Hunchback Of Notre Dame II. I shouldn't really have to explain why Judge Frollo and the guy who threatened to letter bomb my house were way more intimidating. If you're gonna be a creepy asshole you're really gonna have to sell it, with charisma and a sense of conviction about why you decided to torment one's victims. This guy was just a guy spewing ableist and homophobic slurs at me in a sad, pathetic attempt to get a rise out of me. So I did what I do to most people like him who do this online. I bring up the fact that I might not be gay, but I have kissed a dude, and the experience was still more enjoyable than interacting with him. I did this not just to try and throw some Roger Ebert The Brown Bunny feud wit in there, but knowing this guy somehow assumes that asserting one's opponent in a debate is gay is the worst insult he has, throwing the fact that I've kissed a boy on the table is gonna leave him lying awake at night weirded out by this information. Even though I blocked him afterwards, I left him that nugget of doubt that his homophobic slurs had any effect, or that being gay was something insulting at all. And with this last response, I blocked him:

It makes me sad that modern internet trolls of the younger generation just don't put the effort in anymore. Internet creeps of yore used to pursue and humiliate a victim for months or even years. They were cyberbullies of myth and legend, a quality of dickhole so dedicated to their evil that they transcended mere douchebag and became a genital wart, just above the dick hole, on an uncircumcised penis so when the foreskin rubbed against it it got even more infected and gross. This quality of villainy still exists online, still bulling gay teens and not gay teens alike into what they hope will end in suicide, but a lot of these young ruffians of the internets just don't have that commitment to quality hatred. And I lament the decline in quality my own grandchildren will suffer through in future generations if trash talk fades from clever wordplay into lazy slurs.