GamerGate ground zero: The Something Awful post that started it all

antinegationism So I just got out of a 7 month relationship with someone I thought was just the most amazingly honest, creative, clever, morally-centered, principled (and as a bonus, good in bed) person I ever met or would meet, but -- Aug 15, 2014 STUPID (This is a long 6 part story -- there's a TL;DR on the last post; but I promise things get interesting if you read the whole thing) Act 0: Whereof One Cannot Speak, Thereof One Must Be Silent NEWBIE Sometime around November of 2013, I signed up for an OKCupid account got a 98% match with a cutie with colorful hair (cool), who was super into social justice stuff (good!), and was super into video games (neat!), and liked to make them (ah! I used to make them, that was fun times!), and by some coincidence turns out to have made a somewhat esoteric game I happened to have played a while back So I messaged her to meet up for drinks -- on my birthday. She seemed pretty cool; I didn't talk much at first, and mostly listened as she related tales of adversities she'd overcome and how they'd shaped her as a person and fueled her determination to improve the world. I was enamored, but after a while she caught herself ranting and asked about my interests and from there we discussed all sorts of stuff from art to programming to neurology to artificial intelligence to philosophy to how the "is it a game?" argument has literally been going on for a quarter century before video games even existed. At which point she showed me Tractatus Logico Philosophicus she carried around in her bag. Swoon -- good birthday. copy of Wittgenstein's That date lasted about three days. And we went on a couple more and just kept hitting it off on every point, and within two weeks we threw caution to the wind and went exclusive - facebook official, the works We'd spend hours discussing anything and everything; though the conversations often turned to ethics, motivations, and stories of her past. Among the most commonly recurring were: 1. Stories about how the grief and confusion of being raised by a pathological liar taught her to make it a point to always say what she meant, and to communicate at face value. 2. Stories about an extremely manipulative ex-husband, who would do things like refuse to stop wearing the ring from his last relationship, and make her feel terrible or insane for any discomfort she expressed -- though he was in fact cheating on her as he was making her feel terrible for being worried. 3. The pain of spending most of her childhood alone, as well as the injustice of being ostracized from various groups and communities in her adulthood. 4. Views on the ethics of infidelity. Which she maintained is inherently wrong even if the person who was cheated on never finds out, because (aside from willfully endangering their partner by way of increased STD risk) if the unfaithful party then has sex with their partner, they are doing so under false pretenses, and therefore without their partner's consent. That is, sex with a partner who doesn't know you've cheated on them is sex without consent. There were other strong principled positions, sometimes brought up for their own sake, sometimes brought up in relevant situations, and almost always tied to her past, but they didn't in any sense make up the bulk of our relationship. We'd spend a lot of time hacking around on our separate projects together, eating vegan food, flirting on tumblr, and having awesome sex Eventually she asked me to work with her on her new game, and I happily agreed. She took me to IndieCade East, and she got me a pass to see her at GDC GOC GDConf.com GAME GOC Eron Gjoni Butt Toucher Zoe Quinn Games EΧHIBITOR And seemed everything was going immeasurably well until I started succumbing to pointless and seemingly inexplicable bouts of anxiety sometime between the very end of April to the very beginning of May. We kinda broke up, but kinda not. She'd often message me to say she loved me and wanted to be with me again someday. She had eyes only for me, she said, and wanted me to say the same for her. A few months later, around the end of June, we get back together (though this time she was worried about a mole among her facebook friend's list, and so she didn't make it facebook official until two weeks into the relationship, for a carefully vetted group of, by her estimate, roughly 200 friends or so). Before you know it we're hitting on each other over tumblr again and sending cutesy couples photos whenever we missed each other. ... July 9 7/9, 12:51pm Zoe Quinn Are you here for that 7/9, 1:05pm Zoe Quinn aaaa I woke up and you're not here again 7/9, 2:30pm Zoe Quinn "sleepypout 7/9, 2:31pm Zoe Quinn 7/9, 2:31pm Zoe Quinn also just found these 7/9, 2:32pm Zoe Quinn Zoe Quinn 7/9, 2:32pm 7/9, 3:23pm Zoe Quinn talk me down I am considering going to that ramen place for the 3rd day in a row it's gonna happen am gonna noodle OD you're the worst NA sponsor ever. you with yourday job and me with my total irresponsibility in the face of unfairly delicious ramen 7/9, 3:35pm Eron Gjonl I'm sorry that I'm such a bad noodles anonymous sponsor 7/9, 3:35pm Zoe Quinn i am so glad you understood what na meant without me saying anything 7/9, 3:35pm Eron Gjonl I love you Zoe Quinn 7/9, 3:36pm I love you t00 She even flew me out to San Francisco on a last minute whim around early July (The last photo of this set is one she took of me in SF, though the goth n------ and smoke ring are both back in Boston). This was for the most part a good time -- Until I found out she'd been cheating on me with her boss (Joshua Boggs). And a few days later we have the following conversation, where I ask for her help finding and informing his wife: S---, man, what happened? mean, obviously she cheated on me (a lot actually), but why would someone violate their own beliefs on something as important to them as sexual consent? And what's with all this fear of someone aoing.nublic2 What hannened to her strona

eron gjoni antinegationism something awful the zoe post composite screenshot

Origin Entry: Zoë Quinn

Notes:

On the evening of August 15, 2014 (The day prior to the publication of The Zoe Post on WordPress at 12:42 a.m of the following day), Eron Gjoni posted his story on the forums of Penny Arcade and Something Awful, it got removed from both sites and Gjoni got banned as result.

Zoe was alerted about it by a friend on Twitter that same day at 8:33 p.m. According to her testimony, she was in a bar with friends celebrating her 27th birthday at the time of the events.

The screenshot that accompanies this text it's a composite of two screenshots from the Something Awful thread that were posted on /r9k/ on August 16 at 1:28 a.m. shortly after The Zoe Post publication on WordPress. It was later reposted on /v/ 57 minutes later. These two were the very first instances the story was posted on 4chan. While the /r9k/ thread lasted about 10 hours and 21 minutes with 605 replies, the /v/ thread suspiciously only lasted about 51 minutes after 77 replies. And that's where all hell broke loose.

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