I mean Kathy Sierra, on the Web at seriouspony.com, in Wikipedia, and formerly on Twitter; but as of now @SeriousPony is gone. Here’s why.

Over the years she’s had loads of smart, eloquent things to say about Java and tech education and community-building and, in general, Life Online. Recently, I’ve been entranced by the awesome Icelandic-pony pix that used to be on that tweetstream. So I’m sad.

There was a kerfuffle on Twitter saying Kathy had been forced offline by misogynist trolls. Which would be shocking, because it’s happened before, her primary attacker back then being Weev, always a troll, now with a brand-new Swastika tattoo. Hey, I guess #notalltrolls are Nazis, but…

What happened · So I reached out to Kathy saying “What happened?” She wrote back and I’m passing this along, paraphrasing only by name omission.

…Even after all this there are people still determined to defend weev-the-person (not weev-the-case) to the point of suggesting I’m trolling so people will troll me back… I do NOT feel [name omitted] in any way harassed me, and that I just was tired of having that conversation, and disheartened that there are still prominent people in tech that support and believe him. That’s all. Just don’t have it in me to do this right now. I hope one day there’s a place like Twitter where the voices of these people aren’t so elevated and overwhelming.

This is really not OK · I don’t know what to do about it. But any time Kathy wants to publish words or pictures, I’ll be looking forward to reading them.