(no subject)
There's this video game I play called Minecraft. It's very blocky and creative and stuff, but that's not really important to the point of this entry. There's a guy who makes videos of him and his kids playing this game and posts them up on YouTube. Mostly it's just him explaining how to do some of the more complicated things in the game, but he also posts up videos of his sons or his daughter playing with friends in the game or giving tours of the little world they've built up together. I've been watching these videos pretty much since he started doing them months ago, and something happened in one of them last night that made me wonder if he's regretting his decision to let his kids be so publicly "exposed" despite none of us ever having seen one of them.
The video in question was one in which his daughter, who I think he's previously said was about 10 or 11 years old, is playing with a friend in this game, and all you know of the people themselves are their voices while all you see is them in the game. YouTube, like most every site on the Internet these days allows for comments to be posted. Some fucking dickwad started spamming up the comments with "i want to fuck you." Now I'll admit to sometimes having odd, twisted, even dark thoughts about the various things I see online, stray thoughts that zip through my mind with nothing real behind them, very few of which I ever expose for public attention, and to some degree we all do, before silently chiding ourselves and moving on, but this was just over the line. It takes a special class of shitbag to post comments like that, on a video that is posted by the girl's own father, who has already said that he gets a little creeped out by some of the interest from and questions asked by netizens concerning his children.
Now I remember when he started doing these videos, and I thought to myself at the time, 'is he sure he wants to put his kids out there like this?' I've been online since I was about 12, and I remember being shocked at some of the things I saw and heard online when I was that age, and none of it was being directed at me. I can't begin to imagine what it would be like to be so young, and have people saying those sort of things to me. Hell, I don't think at that age I even knew what 'fuck' was aside from a dirty word that I would say in hushed tones on the playground.
Even if she did have an inkling of what this guy was saying, and this is even assuming that she saw that comment since it got reported and deleted pretty quickly (he posted it at least 3 times that I saw) and commenting was disabled on the video today, I can only imagine she'd be terrified. I have no way of knowing what goes through the mind of a little girl, but to have some random guy on the Internet threatening to assault you in such a personal way can really fuck with you, particularly at the age where an individual's attitudes and perspectives on anything and everything sexual are about to start forming and being shaped. Maybe that's a little over-analytical on my part, but she's not on YouTube asking for this sort of attention, and I know her father sure as hell isn't putting her in the spotlight to get those kinds of comments.
Whatever results from this, I really hope that this doesn't result in him ending his videos. He put up another video today, one in which his daughter did not appear at all, and similar comments popped up on it too. If this is some kind of harassment campaign, I think it's really pathetic that they have to basically threaten his family to do so, and if it's not, then the guy should keep it to himself, because nobody else wants to see it posted to a fucking Minecraft video.
The video in question was one in which his daughter, who I think he's previously said was about 10 or 11 years old, is playing with a friend in this game, and all you know of the people themselves are their voices while all you see is them in the game. YouTube, like most every site on the Internet these days allows for comments to be posted. Some fucking dickwad started spamming up the comments with "i want to fuck you." Now I'll admit to sometimes having odd, twisted, even dark thoughts about the various things I see online, stray thoughts that zip through my mind with nothing real behind them, very few of which I ever expose for public attention, and to some degree we all do, before silently chiding ourselves and moving on, but this was just over the line. It takes a special class of shitbag to post comments like that, on a video that is posted by the girl's own father, who has already said that he gets a little creeped out by some of the interest from and questions asked by netizens concerning his children.
Now I remember when he started doing these videos, and I thought to myself at the time, 'is he sure he wants to put his kids out there like this?' I've been online since I was about 12, and I remember being shocked at some of the things I saw and heard online when I was that age, and none of it was being directed at me. I can't begin to imagine what it would be like to be so young, and have people saying those sort of things to me. Hell, I don't think at that age I even knew what 'fuck' was aside from a dirty word that I would say in hushed tones on the playground.
Even if she did have an inkling of what this guy was saying, and this is even assuming that she saw that comment since it got reported and deleted pretty quickly (he posted it at least 3 times that I saw) and commenting was disabled on the video today, I can only imagine she'd be terrified. I have no way of knowing what goes through the mind of a little girl, but to have some random guy on the Internet threatening to assault you in such a personal way can really fuck with you, particularly at the age where an individual's attitudes and perspectives on anything and everything sexual are about to start forming and being shaped. Maybe that's a little over-analytical on my part, but she's not on YouTube asking for this sort of attention, and I know her father sure as hell isn't putting her in the spotlight to get those kinds of comments.
Whatever results from this, I really hope that this doesn't result in him ending his videos. He put up another video today, one in which his daughter did not appear at all, and similar comments popped up on it too. If this is some kind of harassment campaign, I think it's really pathetic that they have to basically threaten his family to do so, and if it's not, then the guy should keep it to himself, because nobody else wants to see it posted to a fucking Minecraft video.