Google Alerts just recently linked me to a post made by either Chair/Pat Smith or a co-blogger in his HikiCulture blog:

Preservative Woman: An Alter Ego of “…” of Hikikomori Forum?

http://hikiculture.wordpress.com/2010/04/16/preservative-woman-an-alter-ego-o...

Personally I didn't want to reply to the post nor do I know what difference it is for the Hikikomori community to know whether a hiki has two or more accounts unless they were causing trouble. (which the post really didn't clarify)

Somehow though my name gets mentioned but I'm more pissed off at the way the author presented me as:

"They" seem to like Foolness ("they" follow his blog, Twitter, etc.) who has, or least had, a grudge towards me and HC staff, so they'd probably not reply.

For one thing I have a sensitive spot against people who misconstrue my words.

However as a person who has problems conveying his intentions, I often give people a free pass (or insist them to clarify where the misunderstanding happens) but in this case not only was I accused of having held a grudge against someone but there was no link!

This doesn't mean nothing happened and to those who missed it, all they need to do is to click on the Hikiculture tag in this blog to see what he's reffering to and decide for themselves whether I hold a grudge or not but to me throwing out an offensive accusation in a way where a reader just has to accept a blog author's "opinion" with no easy way to understand the relevance of those comments just reek of censorship and attempted revisionist conclusion.

The thing that really sets me off though was the hypocrisy.
 
Apr 06, 2010

Pat Smith said... in this topic: http://hiki.posterous.com/comparing-yourself-to-others-a-reply

Wasn't sure if you'd bother checking.

I wanted to make sure you'd see my post.

If you check that link, you'll see not only did Pat Smith from Hikiculture made a comment on a post I made and not only did I reply but the comment has nothing to do with the post I wrote so for this writer to suddenly imply that I won't say anything when according to the HC blog it was written April 16, 2010 - it just crossed the line.

It was utter hypocrisy. If I was considering commenting on that post initially, ahh... I just got so pissed off after reading it that I just wanted to ignore that post for fear that it would yet again be misconstrued into another Foolness attempting to flame Chair kind of attention whoring or something... (I didn't actually know what the accusation against me was but in the earlier Hikiculture topics, when I was asking for clarification in the hiki section of AnonIB because of the things Chair wrote, the line of comments I got was along the line of "don't make things worse" but the more frustrating thing was that when people searched for "Hikikomori StopGap" in a search engine, one of the top links would be one of the HikiCulture posts and I was worried it gave the impression that Hikikomories online bickered more against each other rather than talking about issues important to them.)

At the time though, all I was thinking about was that I was writing for Hikikomories and even if it wasn't anything major that could change their lives, that was what kept me going despite the accusations. After all, I didn't promise I could do anything major with this blog other than sharing my thoughts as an individual who is a hikikomori.

This post though, it seems minor but I'm legitimately pissed off. More so than that, I feel trapped.

On one hand, I don't think it's my business. Preservative Woman and "..." can reply to that post and even if I wanted to reply, I don't know the reality either. I don't know those two people enough nor have I talked to them enough to have a sense of whether they are the same person.

On the other hand, my silence seems to go against the transparency and openness I want readers to feel about this blog.

It's obvious that there's some indirect connection to me when the author writes:

I can't see how her and Foolness formed their apparent friendship which would have been impossible through an anonymous "Chan" board like AnonIB.

Sure they can clarify how they know me or are friends with me without my input but if it isn't clear enough, I value and emphasize looking through all perspectives of the related parties mainly because as someone who has a hard time communicating and interpreting signals back, sometimes that's the only way to receive some clarity and some semblance of "truth" especially in the internet.

So I felt trapped. Not only because this was a minor issue to clarify from my side thus silence seems unnecessary but because I wasn't going to keep readers from not knowing how the post affected me so I was obviously going to go off and make a longer post than I intended to. Worst, I get the sense that the author was merely baiting one of us three people to reply and by making a blog post rather than just a mere comment, I was increasing the popularity of said blog post.

Even though this isn't how it works and this is still a reply, I settled for the blog post because I want to feel like I'm sticking to my principles and not replying directly to the author but more to a reader who might wonder what my say in the post is.

In terms of friendship, I'm no more friends with Preservative Woman, "..." and other people than I am friends with Chair.

The reality is that I rarely socialize with them and even in terms of online conversations, the volume of back and forth messages I have with any Hikikomori doesn't compare with people I previously feel as online friends.

...and even that was way way in the past.

This doesn't mean I hate them or would ignore them but the reality is we don't talk except on occasion.

Even when Preservative Woman was in AnonIB, if the archives is still there, you'll see I rarely interacted with a specific user and made topics in general.

How I ended up meeting Preservative Woman and how she probably followed my blog was because when I left AnonIB, she was one of the two commentors on my blog.

This was when I still didn't have a Posterous blog and also the other commentor was an anon so that's how we met each other: Her replying to my blog posts.

Somewhere along that way, I got a Twitter account and she got a Twitter account and Twitter's Direct Messaging became how she contacted me privately on occasion. (Like maybe she wanted to talk to me about something not related to my blog post or I wanted to contact her, that's how we communicated.)

"..." on the other hand I met in Miu Nya's Hiki-PhpBB forum.

The irony was that we never talked to each other but I was always respected his/her posts in the forum because it was more related to Hikikomoris rather than social topics like Picture threads, favorite foods and the like.

I first primarily contacted him/her when he/she was planning to leave HF.

Ironically at the time, I was just pming "..." as a way to keep him/her from leaving HF.

I think, as far as I remember, I wasn't visiting HF for awhile and then when I was returning, he/she was planning to leave and I was sort of hoping they would stay.

He/she ended up staying longer than I did. Even to the point that last I checked the topics, you would see his/her post warning people that the forum was sort of a ghost town or something like that. (I missed the big event where apparently there was a huge argument and the community split off and many felt alienated by each other.)

That was it. We never talked to each other ever again.

Later when I was talking to Preservative Woman in Twitter, that's how his/her name popped up again. At the time, I never knew the name translated to tententen and I think it was because Preservative Woman ended up using "..." instead of tententen that I realized who she meant.

Still at that time, we never talked or followed each other. Maybe I did after Twitter lists came out where I was adding a/an English-speaking Hikikomori list and only last month (I think) did he/she started following me. (Note: Twitter e-mails you if someone follows you so it's not like I was monitoring him/her.)

Well that's pretty much from my perspective. Not alot of information but that's all the info I have of them.