It’s hazardous duty, writing on FreethoughtBlogs. There’s a small squad of vicious trolls waiting to make up stories about you, and the latest target of their venom is Avicenna. It’s gotten ridiculous: the myth they repeat over and over again is that he’s constantly lying on his blog. The latest “evidence” is that some of the email from haters that he has posted can also be found on public sites.
Oh, yeah, the calendar rolled around to a new year last night. All I can say is…I don’t care. 2014 was an awful year, there’s no promise that this coming year will be better, and flipping a digit on my chronometer is not a magical transition that will make everything all better.
I can say that my tendency towards increasing cynicism maintains its steady trend. Nope, no discontinuity in the pattern was observed at the stroke of midnight.
Cristina is a kindred spirit.
The latest story out of the hothouse of stupidity that is 4chan/8chan is that they’re targeting tumblr users for harassment — with the specific intent of identifying troubled young people who have admitted to self-harm, and then goading them to commit suicide.
The trolls also wrote that they plan to post gore and self-harm photos in popular social justice and fandom Tumblr tags, as well as target individual users with anonymous messages, in an effort to pressure them into committing suicide.
One of their targets is any fan of some show called Supernatural, which I have not seen (although now I’m putting it on my list of shows to check out). There may be a hint of pathological skepticism here — people who like shows about supernatural phenomena must be subhuman, and therefore are acceptable victims.
This is the lounge. You can discuss anything you want, but you will do it kindly.
Status: Heavily Moderated; Previous thread
It takes a lot to get me to try to report a twitter user for offensive content — I’m usually happy enough to simply be liberal with the block button (I block, on average, 3 or 4 people a day). But there have been a grand total of two occasions on which someone was so egregiously awful I thought it necessary to report them. One was a guy who was spamming with over-the-top death threats from multiple accounts, and taunting me with his knowledge that Twitter would do nothing about it. Another time, it was someone who was sending me explicit crime scene photos — rotting bodies, bloody suicides, decapitated or disemboweled people. So I tried to send complaints.
The Twitter complaint submission form is a nightmare — it’s a perfect example of putting up a bureaucratic roadblock to prevent people from complaining. These two cases were so extreme that I struggled through several pages of ridiculously detailed inquiries, submitted the final form, and sat back, thoroughly convinced that this was a cynical pretense by Twitter and that nothing would be done.
Members of the Morris City Council agreed with the assessment of Morris City Manager Blaine Hill: the chimes at Summit and Calvary Cemetery need to be play less often and at a lower volume to respect the rights of neighbors.
I haven’t heard the chimes this morning, or for the last couple of days. I’d fling my windows wide open and revel in the silence, except that it’s cold and snowy out there.
This is Thunderdome, the unmoderated open thread on Pharyngula. Say what you want, how you want.
Status: UNMODERATED; Previous thread
The stars are not quite right, so he has not risen…yet. Hope is not appropriate, but you may continue your pointless day-to-day activities with a slight diminution of despair, and may resign yourself to the ongoing prolongation of your existence.
I think that means the party is at my place.
Sony is making The Interview available on the internet — you can watch it for $6 on your computer screen via YouTube, which is 50 cents more than the price of a ticket at my local movie theater (yes, I know, my small town movie theater is not representative of ticket prices elsewhere in the universe).
