Not to mention the calibre of their attacks on him; in this case you have on the one hand Ryan Estrada, world traveler, bon vivant, endless creators of [web]comics, films, podcasts, radio drama, nonradio drama approximately legitimate theater, and all-around cool guy.

On the other hand, a bunch of whiny you’re oppressing me by trying to be a professional artist instead of giving me what I want for free and anyway it’s totally simple and I could do better than that but I don’t wanna chuds.

Estrada has been holding this mindset up to general ridicule for several years now via the For Exposure Twitter account, where he is scrupulously careful to attack the behavior, not the person. Everybody that demands art for free and berates artists for (gasp!) wanting money for little things like groceries and rent has their message shared, but carefully anonymized; Estrada doesn’t want the internet mob to form, and has stated he’ll close down For Exposure should that happen.

I think he might be reconsidering the policy:

The person(s) behind the scraper site, perhaps not appreciating the irony in asking for money to fulfill the holy mission of punishing artists that ask for money in exchange for their labor, has/have proved to be unreasonable; creators that attempt to follow legal processes to assert control over their copyrighted material find their emails posted for griefers to spam for months. Lacking anything better to do, they’ve decided that Estrada is the World’s Worst Person¹ and subject to their most withering insult.

Ah, yes. Cuck. The opprobrium of choice for GamerGaters, pseudoironic alt-righters, and outright white supremacists. I suspect that Estrada is so cut to the quick that he has retreated to a closest in shame, wondering why his wife prefers those specimens of obvious genetic quality to him.

Oh, no, wait, he’s working with PayPal to get their accounts suspended. It’ll be a game of Whack-a-Dipshit, but once it happens, others will join in. There will always be somebody pissed off enough in future to make a complaint to the financial providers, and the malefactors may learn the hard way that getting a PayPal account revoked for being a massive internet jerk carries over into other parts of their existence. Plenty of legit creators have had their PayPal accounts frozen or seized outright because of overzealous policies that misconstrue freelancing with nefarious endeavours; I can’t wait to see what happens when people are found to be engaging in fraudulent behavior.

And because Estrada deserves far better than to be associated with these bottom dwellers, let’s end on a positive note. As mentioned previously, Estrada and his wife Kim Hyun Sook are writing a graphic novel (to be illustrated by @kevin9143, whose actual human name I am not able to locate) about her experience defying South Korea’s military dictatorship by reading banned books.

A new Twitter account, Banned Book Clubs, will follow Estrada as he reads all the banned books she read back then and adding sassy commentary on them. So far: What Is History by EH Carr², The Iron Heel by Jack London, and Two Treatises Of Government by John Locke. Just the sort of thing any aspiring dictator would want to keep the populace from reading; not saying that there’s a pressing need for any USAians to start skimming, but maybe not the worst idea, either.

Spam of the day:

DATE BEAUTIFUL RUSSIAN WOMEN

Pretty sure one of those women you’re promising I can date tonight is a Kardashian, and another is Denise Richards in the role of the worst Bond Girl ever, nuclear physicist Dr Christmas Jones. Try harder, scam-mongers.

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¹ He’s not; I’d be willing to bet that in the competition for that title, Ryan will be coming in last, tied with Mr Rogers, Tom Hanks, and Mr Rogers again.

² Per Estrada: 22 people were arrested, beaten, tortured and imprisoned for reading this book in the Burim Book Club case.