More interesting coverage on the WisCon troller

Various developments in the saga (actual property of being interesting not guaranteed).

Extra bonus advice for our young, foolish troller included at end!

• Jezebel (more interesting for the comments than for the original article)
• Angry Black Woman is really pissed off (reader comments also interesting)
• Troller herself, said recently to be sorry, is not (unfortunately both links I intended to link to are now dead/screened). But I can attest to reading one comment where she appeared to sort of apologize (in that way people do when they don’t really mean it but someone is making them) and then about a day later she posted a longer comment where she made it clear that she wasn’t sorry at all, except maybe about involving someone’s child in her original Something Awful post and comments.
• A response to being targeted, by one of the targeted.
• Later comments (starting around 30 and going down the page) in the widely-linked Alas, a blog blog entry, where Kate Harding of Shapely Prose and Sheana of the Seeworthy blog post comments, are interesting in that at least Sheana seems to think the troller was quite intentional about her betrayal of trust built with Sheana in a similar fashion, sort of befriending in order to get troll-worthy material.
• At Seeworthy, there’s a post that includes the troller’s e-mail address. Go geeks!

Further comments from yours truly:

As I have said in some LiveJournal posts’ comments and other places, this troller clearly knew what she was doing and put a lot of effort, if not planning into this trolling raid.

As a veteran troller myself (retired), I can only say that if you do go to this extent to go find trouble, and you find that trouble, and upon finding it, feel that the responses your behavior engenders are too intense or inappropriate, you really have only yourself to blame for that backlash.

You have only yourself to blame for thinking you were strong or hard enough to take it and not ending up being quite so strong or hard.

You have only yourself to blame for inviting that backlash and ending up not really ending up being able to take it.

If you are going to go on an extended campaign to start trouble with real people who you intentionally get really pissed off and you are not smart enough or wise enough to do so anonymously, then you get to learn an important lesson about the reach of angry geeks on the Internet.

If you are surprised at the intensity of the backlash you went so far out of your way to create, then you were foolish or stupid. If it was just foolish, I’m sorry you had to learn the hard way with such an enormous fuckup.

If you are stupid, I’m not sorry. You’re stupid. Go get less stupid. I understand you are in grad school, so maybe there you can find some opportunity to cure the stupidity.

If you are surprised that some of these angry people will take their complaints to your workplace, to your boss, to your employers, then you are stupid or arrogant or both.

Pretending that the folks you just poked with giant sharp sticks are the problem for overreacting is a tactic doomed to failure. You cannot ever count on sympathy from the folks you just poked, who caught you with the poking stick in your hand, and an evil grin of glee (edited – looks like the original was deleted, but the Google Cache still works – for a while) on your face.

Apologies at this point are pretty difficult to take as genuine, even if you actually do mean them (which you clearly don’t).

My hard-earned advice? Stop responding. Go into hiding. Wait the years it will take for some of these folks you pissed off to forget.

Instead, try to think about the situation you created for yourself this way:

Could be worse. If you had instead chosen to go poke hibernating bears with sticks and had underestimated your target, you’d be dead/food by now, and you wouldn’t be able to read these words.