Ask Lemmy

When I said I was a single mum I was told "Shoulda kept your legs shut, love."

I'm a widow.

racist, misogynist, pedophile.

I'm about as far from those as you can get.

I treat everyone like the equal piece of shit they are.

words don't bother me like it does other people though.

I know what I'm about and nobody can stick a label on me long enough for me to care. 🤷

words are words, and I am me.

Crazy: Years ago I sent a girl from one of those "meet people here" subreddits like 10 photos of myself because she seemed interesting from her bio and promised me photos in return. In the photos I was doing stuff like hiking and exploring abandoned buildings, and there was a badass one of me posing triumphantly on a massive rock in front of a glacier lake. What did she do? Wrote me back a nasty message accusing me of being hideous or having a horrible disfigurement because none of the photos were close-up clear shots of my face and she couldn't figure out how to zoom in on my face with her phone. I guess my hobbies and interests weren't relevant, not to mention my face was totally visible if she'd zoomed in.

I sent those same pics to another girl a few months later and six years later we're still together.

Someone called me a deadbeat father because I stopped paying child support... On my now-adult child.

Two in the same vein:

1. Someone once assumed that I used a code prettier by asking for my .prettierrc. Nope. I just write pretty code and was legit offended at that.
2. Multiple times I've been called an AI because I (checks notes) write out my thoughts in full sentences.

There's been worse, but I'm quick to block, and I don't dwell on things. It's actually pretty easy when you step back and think about the kind of person who would go online make personal attacks like that. Once you have that mental image, you quickly realize you don't give a flying fuck what that person has to say about anything.

Years ago when I was a music grad student I used to participate in several forums for sharing and discussing music. I regularly posted recordings of my work.

One morning I woke up to discover that some gentleman thought enough of me to invest what must have been considerable time and energy composing a several pages-long dissertation on how much he hated my music. I don’t remember the exact language, but I remember that it wasn’t particularly imaginative. Lots of references to garbage and shit I guess. I mean, if you’re going to put that much effort into lambasting someone, at least come up with a couple original metaphors. But apparently my music filled him with so much rage he couldn’t bring himself to do so.

In retrospect though, that music was, objectively, pretty bad. But I haven’t give up. I’m still out there making shitty music.

For saying that my governor (Michigan, USA) has done a decent job they said that she was a demon and that my dog deserved to die in the house fire that claimed her life a few years ago.