Stealing Thunder

CrunchyBacon Oviedo, FL Funny thing is, it wouldn't even bother me if some black dude called me a cracker. I'd just smile and say - "you jealous of my white privilege bro?". Giving some r-tard the power to offend you, is more power than they deserve."                                            ********** The slice of irony above comes from one of the most vile trolls on Topix. I lol'ed at the advice but, even considering the source, it's true. It's just so ironic coming from one of the worst trolls on the internet.  The advice giver is Angelique770 herself, a dude that may or may not be named, John Schanahan. I gotta invoke Larry Mysteriouso here and say, "I'm not sayin'..." You find stuff out when people are stalking you. Elsewhere in this blog there is a photo of "Sam", one of the dumbest people ever to hit "reply" on Topix. He's pretty much what you'd expect in a troll.  I was thinking about all this when I read a nice piece by Ana Kasparian of The Young Turks and her decision to give up Twitter. As a journalist, Ana felt she needed to be on Twitter to stay current and keep her name out there while interacting with fans and, yes, detractors too. She finally gave up on it when she realized that life without trolls was pretty good. I don't tweet but I'm familiar enough with it to not want to get involved. I don't care about followers or following people or whether I get re-tweeted or not. I recall reading that the life of a tweet was like 45 minutes- unless you're Trump or some other idiot like that. There are waaaaaay too many people like that, like Trump.  And they're on Twitter and Topix and pretty much everywhere else on the internet. Lord knows they will find you... One of my favorite tools in life is sarcasm. I'm quite good at it. In fact, I teach it on the internet. I'll post something that falls under Poe's Law and, within minutes someone is telling me what an ignorant asshole I am. People are stupid. I appreciate though when someone *gets it* and gets me, and notes that I was probably kidding. I generally am but, as per Poe, you can never be too over the top for some people. Many people likely go on line looking to be offended and they'll run with that for the duration of a thread. The life expectancy of a Topix or Facebook post is far longer than Twitter, though subject to monitoring of varying degrees. The moderation is better than Topix though. Most Topix mods are trolls themselves and exist for that purpose. It's a perk in lieu of payment. They remove posts mostly for their friends to punish enemies.   At some point you have to realize that the people you are dealing with are seriously mentally ill. You cannot reason with them. Ignoring them really doesn't work. They'd prefer that you do engage them but, they actually believe that if you don't, they are still *winning*. It really is all about showing up for them.  Ana opted to take herself out of that equation and I certainly understand that. She tired of the death threats and vulgarities hurled at her by people she would never want to meet. Earlier today she was doing a Facebook Live feed as she hiked in the hills above LA. Some asshole who didn't seem to actually know who she is got mouthy with her and her fiance' and took umbrage at his assholiness being broadcast live to Facebook Nation. He put his hands on Ana and (I gather) tried to destroy her phone, the evidence of his assholiness. Getting molested like that is a one-off scenario but, no doubt she's experienced far too much of the verbal molestation on line and one of those chickens came home to roost. She had already given up Twitter but, the abusive trolls never give up. I don't think they can. People like that truly have nothing better to do in life than hound others, *anonymously*. They all think of themselves as Bond villains. Invincible. A few weeks ago, Crunchy John, promised to stop trolling me if I would post a photo of a gift my son recently gave me. Who makes demands like that? Mentally ill people who think they are Bond villains, that's who. No one who does something like that can ever convince me that they have an enviable life, no matter how much they post that they do. The guy admitted he's a troll and that his entire focus in life is posting to me. He just hasn't figured that out yet. He never will. Poor bastard.