A short while back, Kumiko Suzuki from Cash Quests wrote a post on how you can know you’re getting popular. As is the norm with Kumiko, she turned conventional wisdom on its head, saying that it’s when you start receiving hate mail that you know you’re getting popular. After all, if someone is emotional and driven enough to tell you how much they hate you, chances are that someone else is just as passionate about how great you are.

Even if they don’t like you, it means that they read your work. Controversy is one of Cash Quests’ strong points — I need not remind you of her view on AGLOCO — and it drives readers toward that blog. A reader is a reader is a reader and that’s all that matters, right?

Way back in March, I singled out Lemuel Jopio (”Lemmy”) for being a sell out blogger. He must have taken offense to my view, because months later, he outright attacked me via the comments on this blog. Lemmy didn’t do it openly, however, instead hiding behind several all-caps monikers like U-R-A-DOT-COM-POSER. I then followed up on this by asking, “What’s worse: a dot com poser or an e-thug?” Naturally, he got mad again.

Well, while he appears to be hiding behind a proxy and even more pseudonyms (I can’t know for sure if it’s him or someone else), it seems like the hater is back on the attack, not only posting spiteful comments on this blog, but also seeking out opportunities to badmouth me on other blogs. These three comments all originate from the same IP.

In my post on Donald Trump and a Scottish fisherman, he says this:

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Lemmy has also dug into the archives of Stephen Fung dot Net, going all the way back to when Beyond the Rhetoric was reviewed in that space. Stephen didn’t approve the comment, but he did send it to me via email:

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And it doesn’t stop there. Whether the hater is Lemmy or not, they know me reasonably well, because they hunted me down on the BlueFur blog too:

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I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. If you hate me, that’s fine. That’s your opinion. Call me ugly or say that my freelance writing sucks. That’s OK. I can’t possibly expect to please all the people all the time. I can’t even expect to please all the people some of the time. All I ask is that you come out from hiding and stop using (relative) anonymity as a safeguard. It’s almost like you think these comments bother me. They don’t; they amuse me more than anything, because I don’t think I’ve ever had someone feel so negatively about me.

Don’t let the haters get you down, folks, because in the end, they don’t matter… I can just see Lemmy getting his next comment ready now.