Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Hang in there, Kathy Sierra

Please take a moment and do the Kathy Sierra poll you see at the top of the sidebar on the right. Thanks. Poll results can now be found in the Updates (Final) post above.


Don't do it, Kathy Sierra. Don't NOT blog anymore. She has mentioned that she may not continue blogging anymore. And all because of some heinous and intense death threats! And coming from, she says, from a source [made up of many] calling itself "meankids". Now isn't that a dead give away? Mean kids. And that's the crux of the reason why I say, "Hang in there, Kathy."

Blog Bullying takes place all the time in the blogsphere. Many, many blogs "close down" from the pressure and challenge of conflict. And I'm not talking about the pressure and challenge of being an author and "saying something relevent and exciting, etc., etc." to keep the blog alive. I'm talking about caving in to being personally offended and afraid of (or horribly frightened about) what others out in the blog world say "right up front to your face". Don't chicken out, Kathy.

It seems to me that someone (or someones) is trying to run Kathy Sierra out of town. Or trying to indoctrinate her into a death cult or a BDSM fun group. Perhaps they're waiting for her to bite, after she's had "the messengers and messages" live inside her brain long enough.

In this situation, she's doing the right thing right now. She's telling as many people as she can what is going on with her. But one thing she shouldn't do is be afraid. She should hang in there.

Or is Kathy Sierra turning victimization into an art?




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20 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm put off she has ennuendo all along her title bar... sex lives, passionate, users, head first... and that look the girl gives on the cover of the book like she's going down on whoever looks at the book.

Anonymous said...

Yeah, Kathy Sierra's situation is a drag but hardly worth the hysteria. I'm female, live in a gang-infested neighbourhood, have had my car blown up, been attacked, etc and received tons of threatening notes worse than I can print here. Is she sheltered, yes. Attention seeking, yes. Calm down everyone. Nothing will happen. I think Ms. Sierra goes off the deep end when she is not universally admired, all the time. Keep posting, continue what you're doing Ms. Sierra. Or you will feel like a fool...come live on my block for a week and see what real life is like for some of us...oh, and my cat just got killed in retaliation last week. She was 14 and it was sick and cruel. You gotta stand up, not turn on the hystrionics, girlfriend! So, please, you Friends of Kathy, give her some better advice!

Anonymous said...

The blogosphere too much of a self-absorbed mutual admiration society. This stuff happens to people in many different types of jobs and life circumstances; they quietly deal with it using the proper authorities. It is not unique to the internet, nor is it caused anonymous speech - it is an unfortunately part of society in real life.

Can we please let this go and move on to something else that might help prevent the next generation of people from coming up through a world that breeds the social-psychologial disorders displayed by Kathy's tormentors?

Anonymous said...

KS was like this in high school, too. she told on others when it suited her. when she tried to be class prez she did her best to discredit her competitors. but she never became our school prez.

Jesse said...

you mean the kathy sierra from javaranch.com??

it's all result of our culture, the "superstructure of filth" as amiri baraka says.

so, why do i love you, flic?

Anonymous said...

dark
side of fame...

not saying it's right
or acceptable, but what do we expect by having our face and name out there in public view -- we want the beautiful people to notice, but expect the ugly ones to ignore us?

you're famous -- great -- so get a body guard

/t.

Anonymous said...

She will crash in flying colors. She's in deep, she won't get out. She's getting what she asked for, attention. So much she won't know what to do with it. She couldn't handle it, she just wanted to handle it. Hopefully she will learn the basics. I hope the best for her.

Kirsten N. Namskau said...

I think we all meet a blog-bully one or another time. It is how we react on it, that makes the bully continue or not,
I have one on my site too. Whatever I write about, positive or negative post, he has only insulting comments. But he is like this to everybody, not only me.
I have tried to be patient with him, but finnaly put him on "spam."

I think that is the best to do in situations like this. Don't wait until the threatenings of murder starts to come.
Never answer them, or try to justify yourself. No need of that.

In my case I rejected all his comments. Then he wrote a letter to me and excused himself. (Can you imagine?)Because he is an old confused man, that really believe that he IS God. I let him "inn" again.
But for how long time could he hold himself???

I have now got messages from other of my friends, saying that they too feel uncomfortable by his comments, so now he is out for ever.
POOR MAN.
But the case is ... That he is dragging in other, young bloggers to continue HIS insultings.
Whatever kind of manipulation method he is using, he is turning young, beautiful bloggers into demons of harrasments.
We can not allow these demons to win, by getting afraid in the daily life.
I think it is something like am internett-police too, one can rapport these kind of abuse to.
I had an website to one of these web-polices, but that was for bloggers in India.

Do USA have the same ???

bloggin the Question said...

Never heard of Kathy Sierra. Trolls are scum. Please don't try and whip it up into an excuse for government sensorship. Sticks and stones and police harrassment are not justified by name calling. If builders shout leering comments at me when I walk under scaffolding LET THEM! Its not a police matter, its just them being pricks. There is NO excuse for getting the police involved on a blog because you can just delete any comments you don't like. Constant vigilance is the price of freedom. That means criticizing anyone who wants to bring statefunded bullyboys in to settle childish namecalling squabbles

carrie said...

not so sure i agree with helga tho i see her point.

cyberstalking can be quite distressful and is a form of harrassment. the burden of proof is on the victim.

the thing is you can't send written threats on paper, so why is it okay to do it in writing online?

why is it okay to publicly humiliate or defame someone just cuz it's only online and they can delete it?

i have been facing a similar situation myself on my blog and when i banned the harrassers, they launched a smear campaign against me on their own blogs.

flic said...

I'm beginning to think that this whole situation has been some kind of a set-up by Kathy Sierra as a way to "test the waters" for some future plan that she has in mind. I'm curious to wait and find out what the full plan is all about. I'm also curious to see if this plan will be carried off successfully, fall short of intended purposes, or have some kind of unintended reverse effect. As these are the three basic possible outcomes plans generally have after being implemented.

Smartie said...

Stumbled across your site thanks to your posts on the Sierra Soap Opera. What a strange eruption that was! I'm inclined to think that she's making a mountain out of a molehill over it all.

For one thing - the 'threats' she claimed to have received, were posts on a joke forum she participated in, not sent to her blog. But the blog world have gone bonkers defending her right to blog. What has her blog got to do with it?

Anyway, I really like your site, I've found your other posts fascinating reading. Thank you!

flic said...

smartie- Hello, and thanks for the kind words.

Yes, and I'm inclined to think that she's making a mountain out of a molehill over it all, too. Yet I'm curious enough to wait and see where all this is leading to. It seems the key players in the fiasco (especially Kathy) have some kind of hopeful idea on where they'd like the whole thing to lead to. We'll see.

What do you think her motivation was?

Smartie said...

Hiya,

well I am not familiar with Kathy's work or blog, so I have nothing to compare it to.

Perhaps she's just generally someone who gets a bit hysterical about something that 50% of the population would ignore? Like the person who gets angry or offended over a crude but lame joke that 7 out of 10 people would laugh at?

And saw this utter watershed of reaction, and thought 'hey, look at poor little me, I'm SUCH a victim and everyone loves me because of it, so I'll just sit here and bask in the glow of victimhood'. When I first read the post I was of two minds, but the fact that she never responded to ONE post on there tells me she's allowing things to get out of hand with the mob mentality. Some of the posts on there advocated violence in different ways, towards the 'bad guys'. If I was in that position, I would have step in and moderated the comments with a 'although I was the victim, hurting others will not solve things'.

But I could be completely wrong :)

flic said...

smartie- You said, "the fact that she never responded to ONE post on there tells me she's allowing things to get out of hand"

That's a very good point!

Smartie said...

Have a look at the amount of posts on the original blog and then the follow up one, recommending she take the law into her own hands by getting a gun?

And not a word from her to say 'No, that's not the way to handle it'

Incitement by complacency?

flic said...

I think I might be posting a personality profile on Kathy Sierra, after all.

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