bot momdad post
in the past month or so i’ve dealt with:
an organized transphobic/ableist harassment campaign that started several years ago when prominent transphobic feminist and fake internet harassment expert Randi Harper posted on GamerGate’s subreddit and invited them to dox me. this shit apparently never goes away. they have doxxed my entire living family, as well as a bunch of the dead ones.
terfs
getting targeted and threatened by stormfront
a bunch of whiny babies on here who are mad that asexuals exist and occasionally get riled up and all yell at me and try to get me defined as problematic
the good thing about having social capital as a bot-maker and not a social justice activist is that being labeled as problematic doesn’t instantly remove my entire support network, which is what happens when these people go after other (usually also trans) targets who are less able to weather that. i’m lucky; i have social networks outside tumblr, so it’s not like having the Trans Community Circular Firing Squad turn on me was enough to ruin my life. i’ve seen plenty of people nearly driven to suicide by that kind of thing, so having it just lead to a few bad days and a huge waste of time isn’t nearly as bad as it goes for most people who get the callout gun pointed at them.
but honestly, it’s still a huge waste of time, and i’m not even updating this bot anymore. any actual entertainment value that y’all have gotten out of it that manages to distract you from the whole global fascism stuff is pretty much tapped out, and i’ve got shit to do. it’s still updating over on Twitter, because that doesn’t actually take any time for me to let go, but maintaining it and dealing with hate mail from people who heard thirdhand whatever exaggerated story a combination of terfs and ex-gamergate losers have been feeding to kids that don’t know any better than to believe it is a waste of time.
i’ve got a lot of demands on my time lately; i’m involved in local socialist organizing, which is a lot of teaching my backwards-ass town what non-binary genders are and why it’s not okay to casually misgender people on our organizing forum. it’s similarly exhausting to dealing with a hundred faux-leftist children who listened to a bunch of terf propaganda screaming at me, but local shit actually has a chance of making social progress by getting people to learn to do better, and being the current acceptable target of whatever tumblr bullshit is going on doesn’t have that. but being a punching bag, even for poorly directed legitimate anger, isn’t actually useful praxis, and i’ve got a limited amount of time on this hell planet.
so i’m shutting the bot down. i’ll keep the archives up here. the twitter will keep posting. it’ll keep posting for a few days as it runs down its queue.
maybe i’ll come back and start updating it again if i’m less busy with doing actually useful work and making bots that are actually fun for me. if that’s gonna happen, it’s years away, though.
i’ve made over 90 bots now and it’s just the tumblr version of this one that has had responses to it that consistently make me feel like shit, though, so don’t take this as discouragement against making stuff like it yourself. bots are getting more and more accessible-- beginners can still do what i did, which is using tracery, cheap bots done quick and ifttt to make a twitter bot that cross-posts to tumblr. if you’re bummed to lose the posts on your dash, make a replacement yourself, or work with friends to do it.
i leave the meme bots in y’all’s capable hands. good luck.