Blog Archives

Can’t we just go back to this?

They were ALWAYS under construction!

Remember when the Internet was just a place to wait for poor-resolution pictures to load? Where you could go to find out about every glitch ever in the original Pokémon games, and even some that never worked, but how would you know?

I never found anything under that truck.

Maybe it’s because I was a kid then, and I didn’t know where to find the hate speech or the misogyny or the trolls…

I’m so tired of all of it.

Last month, we reported on a story of an American feminist video blogger named Anita Sarkeesian launching a Kickstarter project to fund a video series that examines the roles of women in video games.

Not a second of video with respect to this project was even recorded, not counting the support video on her Kickstarter, and she was subject to hate speech and death threats. Violent language for daring to be a woman talking about wanting to talk about something.

The latest in the Sarkeesian Saga is the posting and subsequent removal of a “game” called “Beat Up Anita Sarkeesian.”

I’m not linking to it, nor am I linking to news stories about it. They carry the pictures and the pictures are terrible. The 25-year-old boy who made it is from Sault Ste. Marie. A Toronto based blogger found him out and told the Internet.

And who’s the bad one here? Is it the manchild who thinks a flash-game based entirely on inflicting grievous physical harm upon an image of a real person is okay?

No, it’s the woman who told people about it.

And that appears to be the popular opinion. This isn’t just a few people!

Sarkeesian linked a number of media appearances of hers and her story on her website. I looked at how Canada handled this story, she has links to both Macleans and The Globe and Mail.

Everyone in those comments sections should be ashamed of themselves.

This is just one story. There are an untold number more.

How many people have been silenced? How many have left the web entirely because of these spiteful trolls?

The world may never know. You don’t exist if you’re not online.

Stop the Internet. I want to get off. Let’s hit the reset button and go back. Back to a simpler time of animated flaming skull gifs and horrible background MIDI files you can’t turn off.

Here’s some puppies.

(that last one is my favourite)

-Ted.