I touched on the ongoing appeals process for the restraining order, and how it ironically tied me to my abuser even more, and became another tool for him to control my life and send the mob after me. The detective on my case had warned me that this might be an outcome with someone as chronically abusive as he is. While I had successfully persuaded the DA to drop criminal charges because the courts involvement was making everything worse, his appeal was still going. Despite his flat out refusal to abide by it (he actually started actively siccing people on my partner at the time immediately afterward), and despite my move to vacate my own restraining order to get him to finally fuck off, he was determined to milk it for everything he could - both the attention from GamerGate, the renewed harassment against me and my family, and the money he was soliciting.
What this meant for me is that for the last year or so, despite having relocated and completely reorganized my life to keep him and his new friends away from me, I’d have to deal with the legal proceedings. This essentially turned this man I had spent two years trying to get away from into a pop-up ad in my life. This is really bad news for someone with PTSD who has to take pills to stop having nightmares about their abuser. It constantly interrupted any kind of recovery or closure I could make for myself, and a call from a lawyer about some new bullshit he was pulling, or a flood of gross links to his diatribes on Kotaku in Action from his new best friends in my mentions would hamstring whatever I was trying to do. Just before I had to take the stage at XOXO, I had to talk with my lawyers about asinine legal moves that he was pulling. I was on the other side of the country and I still couldn’t get away from him.
I’ve been in a holding pattern since the appeals court heard oral arguments on a restraining order that had not only been destroyed, but would have already expired on it’s own months prior. My pro-bono counsel was optimistic, since the courts seemed to see that my ex was using them as a talking point since he had long since had any legal relief they could have granted him. I was told to expect a phone call, probably, in the next 3 months, though sometimes courts take longer. I’ve been holding my breath ever since.
The good news is that it’s finally over. The courts ruled that I acted within my rights, and dismissed his appeal as moot. I had gone into this asking that the court drop this and let me move on with my life, and they reassured my legal right to do so. My ex wanted to use me to set first amendment case law - what happened was a ruling that reassured the rights of domestic violence survivors to modify and terminate their restraining orders if they’re causing more harm than good. This was the outcome I wanted - not just for myself, but for anyone else that’s tried whatever they could to get away from their abuser without fully realizing how the legal system might make everything worse.
Quoth the court:
“We agree with
Quinn’s argument that this rule does not apply in the sui
generis context of c. 209A abuse prevention orders. Pursuant to
statute, an abuse prevention order that has been issued can be
modified “at any subsequent time.” … This provision serves to
protect victims of abuse by allowing them to tailor the terms of
abuse prevention orders as (often rapidly) developing
circumstances may warrant… “A victim of [domestic] abuse is
in the best position to decide what course of action will
provide more safety. At a given time, an abuse prevention order
might exacerbate the plaintiff’s danger”. With the parties
having a recognized statutory right to seek modification of
existing orders, it follows that a pending appeal of a 209A
order does not deprive the trial court of its ability to modify
the order.”
The courts found the “deluge of harassment” to be “uncontested”, that despite my ex’s constant bullshit claims “nothing in the record suggests that Quinn committed a fraud on
the court”, and that my ex still has to obey court orders even if he doesn’t agree with them.
I’ve uploaded the court’s opinion here. It’s not too heavy on the legalese, and has a pretty good tl;dr of this last of the legal battles.
Naturally, his fan club is trying to spin this as a win because of a single footnote that lower courts should generally care about free speech, despite the court stating that the entire appeal is moot. I find my ex and his ilk clinging to a single footnote as a victory in a 12 page document detailing his complete failure to be nothing more an apt metaphor for his role in the last two years.
They’re trying to claim it a a loss because I’m choosing to walk away from a legal battle that hasn’t protected me, but an end to this is all I’ve ever wanted from the beginning.
I cut contact with Eron because I wanted an abusive creep out of my life, so he launched GamerGate. I didn’t retaliate against him because I wanted an abusive creep out of my life, so he invaded every digital space that I occupied to spread his hate & yell at my friends and fans. I got a restraining order because I wanted an abusive creep out of my life, so he used it to solicit funds from GamerGate while promising them more nonsense about me while “joking” in their raid IRCs about breaking into my house while I couldn’t go home. I dropped charges and gave up on having to see or hear him ever again because I wanted an abusive creep out of my life, and he doubled down in spite of that.
Now that the courts have said “no thank you”, I’m hoping that this is finally the end, and that maybe we *both* can move on with our lives. I’m hoping that I finally have the abusive creep out of my life, even if it won’t undox my friends and family, cure my ptsd, undo the harm caused to my friends and the industry, or fix the fact that to this day, strangers still claim that I fucked a writer at a press outlet that I *already had written for* simply to obtain coverage (that never existed) of a free game about mental health.
But it’s a pretty fuckin big milestone in the healing process.
By all signs, this marks the end of nearly two years of having to bag and tag my ex’s abuse against me for courts, judges, and law enforcement officers who have a loose understanding (at best) of what they’d even be looking at, and a seeming lack of resources to obtain any of that themselves. I don’t have to plan my life around court dates anymore, or get calls about what new stunt the man who ruined my life is pulling this time that I absolutely have to respond to or face legal repercussions. That alone is a tremendous weight off my shoulders. The Abusive Ex Popup Ad feature on my life is hopefully disabled - or at least this aspect of it is. His abuse is still a perpetual motion machine, and the threats and harassment is still the background noise of my life and likely always will be. I still have a way to go before I’m what I’d consider out of the woods, both in terms of unfucking my personal situation, healing the mental and emotional scars the last two years have left, and fully being able to talk about GamerGate in a past tense way. Creep Throat can still file for additional appeals, and after the last two years I’m not going to assume anything is impossible.
I can’t unfuck the last two years, not for me or anyone else he’s hurt. But this is at least one win. This is regaining control over my life and being able to finally ignore bargain bin Kilgrave. This is me being able to joke about how shitty my ex is without being afraid of how his lawyers will use it to justify what he’s done to me as they have previously. This is reaffirming the rights of domestic violence victims to walk the fuck away when they choose to. This means more energy for Crash Override and my ridiculous comedy games and the people I love.
Finally, I can move on from this ridiculous legal battle and focus on my energy on my ridiculous unicorn smut games.
i’m sure that everyone has noticed by now that the homestuck game is very, very late. boy, do i have a fun reason why!
you may remember that what pumpkin announced that the game studio “the odd gentlemen” was originally attached to develop the game, and you may also remember that they quietly moved to in house development in 2014. what they didn’t tell you: the reason they did this was that odd gentlemen stole kickstarter money and spent it on king’s quest.
If there was actual pushback against horrible things, we might not have nearly as many of the measles-infested corpses of dead children lying around as we do.
A big trigger warning for gay conversion therapy here as well as drugs. And spoilers, obviously.
So, there’s a female character named Soleil in Fire Emblem Fates. She is a lesbian, that is her actual canon character trait. She speaks about being attracted to girls and she finds men ugly, and yet you can’t romance her as the female Kamui (the player avatar), only as the male Kamui. How you may ask? Well, you’ll regret asking.
So the male Kamui drugs Soleil with a magic powder (without consent) that makes her perceive men as women, during this she begins having feelings for the player, so far suggesting it’s only because she now perceives them as a woman. When the powder wears off, she finds herself in love and attracted to the male Kamui sexually, asking him to touch her and so forth.
In her early dialogue she speaks of her lesbianism as a weakness preventing her from being a strong woman, and this is what causes the player to go through with drugging her and “turning her straight”. Once again, there is no option to romance Soleil with the female Kamui, despite her being a lesbian, you must go through with magical gay conversion therapy if you wish to romance her.
Countless people commit suicide every year due to gay conversion therapy or simply from having forced heterosexual advances pushed on them despite stating their homosexuality. Thanks Nintendo. If you wish to read the full dialogue translated from the Japanese release,here is is.
But hey, at least you can buy the “Lesbian” version of the game, right? After all, this isn’t in that version, only in the other one.
Its totally legitimate to fly the confederate battle flag to show your southern pride, just like I wear a swastika to show my love of well designed inter city transport systems
What do machines dream of? New images released by Google give us one potential answer: hypnotic landscapes of buildings, fountains and bridges merging into one.
IM3: Tony having severe anxiety about New York to the point that mentioning the wormhole can trigger him into a panic attack
AoU: a joke about how Tony won’t shut the hell up about how awesome he was for flying through the wormhole
this seems totally in character for me? Tony Stark’s coping mechanism is pretending to be a wish-fulfillment character really really hard. In IM3, he stops being able to rely on that coping mechanism as much; in AoU, he’s recovered enough that he can go back to being like “trauma? me? why would I have TRAUMA? nope you are mistaken I am totally awesome”
…you might just hang around with the wrong people :)
At least in tech circles, there are definitely people who idolise old computers and operating systems as being better designed than all this modern rubbish, that takes ages to boot up and uses too much memory etc. etc.
Windows ME was godawful. Windows 98 was functional. Which is more than can be said about anything after XP.
People please, when I talked about old operating systems I meant CP/M and the Apple II and Linux pre-multiprocessor days, not anything later than 1995 :)
My dad insists everything since COBOL is just an unnecessary ui
It is a sad failure of our society that we haven’t managed to port Doom to abacuses.
I’m one like five people on planet earth who finds Ayn Rand’s politics …questionable… but still unironically enjoys Atlas Shrugged as a novel.
[…]
Apparently, this view is much more common among older generations, at least from the anecdotal evidence I’ve received (specifically, my mother, and her elaborate social network). Cultural zeitgeist, I guess?
Computer science student Zach Anderson, 19, met a girl, 17, on the
“Hot or Not?” app. He was from Elkhart, Indiana. She was 20 minutes over
the border in Niles, Michigan. They hooked up. Once.
But it turned out the girl was really 14. She’d lied to Anderson and
also in her profile. Now Zach sits in a Michigan jail, serving 90 days.
When he gets out he will be on the Sex Offender Registry for 25 years.
Does anyone thinking treating him this way is necessary to keep kids safe? Anderson and his family certainly don’t.
Neither does his supposed underage victim. The girl readily admitted that she lied about her age, and in this WSBT-TV interview her
mother admitted that Anderson “didn’t do anything my daughter didn’t
do.” Everyone agrees the encounter was completely consensual. The only
reason the police became involved at all is because the girl suffers
from epilepsy, and when she didn’t come home as quickly as expected her
mom worried and called the cops for help.
In this excellent South Bend Tribune article, the mom told a reporter that she didn’t just ask the judge for leniency, “we asked him to drop the case.”
But court records show that Berrien County District Court Judge Dennis Wiley (who once jailed a woman
for 10 days over Christmas because she cursed while paying a traffic
ticket in the county clerk’s office) paid none of the participants any
mind. At sentencing he told Anderson, “You went online, to use a
fisherman’s expression, trolling for women to meet and have sex with.
That seems to be part of our culture now: meet, hook up, have sex,
sayonara. Totally inappropriate behavior. There is no excuse for this
whatsoever.”
i had no fucking clue until yesterday that jeb bush’s name isn’t fucking jeb those are his initials. john ellis bush. yes just like fucking GOB/george oscar bluth on arrested development good fucking god
is it not common knowledge that the bluths were… based on the bushes…. like the entire show is essentially the greatest political satire of the early war on terror years? they obviously took on lives of their own but the show had its roots in satirizing the bush family………
The sort of decay of that as a narrative concept happened due to the Bluths transcending their mere human caricature bonds and becoming Platonic ideals of upper-class-twit-itude, which is probably more impressive than anything directly intentional out of Mitchell Hurwitz’s head. (cf. Sit Down, Shut Up)
