I dunno. I'm not entirely convinced. What is the Head Lemur saying here?

It sounds like he's trying to create a miasma of an impression that he isn't responsible for posting about Kathy Sierra without actually coming out and committing himself with a categorical statement that "I did not post mean stuff about Kathy. That was someone who hacked my identity."

Maybe that's what he's trying to say and he's always so circumlocutious? Or maybe he just lacks the courage to come out and lie outright?

Whatever.

I don't like witch-hunts either. But I'm pretty unimpressed by the degree of whining, self-pity from the Mean Kids. I'd have hoped for them to come out and say something like "yeah, sorry. I fucked up! That was over-the-top. My bad for getting involved." I'd even have more respect if they just said "get a thicker skin. That's life on the internet, bitch!" But all this "Look how I'm suffering from that horrible Kathy Sierra and her wicked false accusations. My reputation is in ruins and it wasn't even my fault!!! Honest!" leaves me cold.

My betting is that some of the quite heavy stuff really *was* from A-Listers, getting carried away with the prank in an environment where the consequences weren't obvious. And all the equivocation now is failure of courage to own up to that.

The fact is, we can all get seduced by the internet as a place to role-play at being another person and to experiment with saying things that are out of character. We look for freedom from our internal constraints. We play at being aggressive or seductive or clever when in real life we feel ourselves to be timid and boring and ignorant. Why the hell shouldn't nice, warm, caring, respectable middle-aged men and women, want a place where they can play at being the absolute worst juvenile jerks? How glorious to get out of the straight-jacket for a while. And, yet, how mortifyingly, embarrassingly awful to get caught and called out on it. To be confronted by someone who can legitimately claim to have been hurt.

As a friend of mine used to say : "it's all fun until someone loses an eye."

Update on previous post.

Great post from Danah Boyd.

Honestly! It's pretty sad to see how the original A-list bloggers descend into a continuous round of feuding and childish behavior. Is this the future for all of us in the blogosphere?

Yeah, the Kathy Sierra story is disturbing. Yeah, at the same time, she's probably conflating several different things that should be distinguished. But where's the empathy? The woman's clearly distressed. It's not the time for RageBoy to be quibbling.

Paynter comes out well. But the feminists have the real story.

Huh? Why exactly are British troops concerned about people smuggling cars??

Hands up who's suspicious ...

I'm old-skool enough to love Newcleus. So I'm delighted to find early demos on their site.. :-)

w00t!!!!

via OrangeCone

I still haven't fixed my blogroll manager script yet, so I'll just have to add a couple of new IRL-related blogs here :

Ron's Photolog

Wasp Goddess

Wow!

Last night I went along to a club promising a Bulgarian DJ. Frankly I wasn't that enthused. Monday nights are a bit early in the week for me. And I was expecting some kind of trance. In fact, I was hoping to be out of there before midnight.

But it turned out to be a guy called DJ Kosta Kostov from BalkanXpress playing a blinding set. Possibly the best DJ I've seen to in the last 10 years. The guy's a genius. The moment he started playing I needed to throw myself around wildly to the beats 'n' brass. It was all eastern european, gypsy with electronic dance beats. Then about an hour into the set he played a track which uses the (probably much older) tune from Sabres of Paradise's Wilmot (which is another thing I used to go mad for about 12 years ago.)

Then he started going into bhangra. And klezmer. And pretty much everything I like. Couldn't drag myself away until about 2:15 when he handed over to the next guy.

Stunning! The MySpace page doesn't really do justice to the live show.