November 28 Bucket o' Links: "(Un)reality" Edition
Welp, some weeks I just sit on the linkwrap for an extra five days. Plan is still to throw another one up this Friday, by which I mean, tomorrow... urp.
Blah blah blah blah Reading Feed blah.
Sometimes, when we're interacting with people on the internet, we forget that, on the other end of a digital pipeline, there's an actual human being.
...and so, sometimes the right way to deal with internet trolls is by letting their mothers know what they're up to:
Sometimes young boys on Facebook send me rape threats, so I've started telling their mothers. pic.twitter.com/0Cbs81eXiE
— Alanah Pearce (@Charalanahzard) November 28, 2014
Alanah Pearce, student and sometime-game-reviewer, is quoted in The Guardian:
"A while ago, I realised that a lot of the people who send disgusting or overly sexual comments to me over the internet aren't adult males... It turns out that mostly they're young boys and the problem is they don't know any better, so responding to them rationally didn’t resolve the situation. And it got to the point where their comments were starting to make me feel really uncomfortable."
When Pearce sat down to figure out the best way to resolve the situation, she concluded she was best off contacting the boys’ mothers directly, "especially as most of them write to me through their personal Facebook pages. It's shockingly easy to find out who their families are."
Also, we're not going to talk about #gamergate, because Pearce is on the record saying she doesn't want to make it about #gamergate, and that's enough for me.
At the other end of the