chess and hostility on the internet

i play chess online a lot. today i happened to play somebody, ten_yrs_old, who profoundly upset me and it was kind of amazing. probably because i play chess online a lot a username like ten_yrs_old looks truculent to me, it's a person pretty intent on having how good they are acknowledged. so if one says ones ten years old you've got some automatic accolades. it's like the commenters on youtube who announce that they're just 13 and yet they like bruce springsteen which is some kind of miracle! not one of the "kids these days"!

so i started playing ten who promptly started chastising me for playing too slowly. "i can't take this." "like my grandma." "i'm gonna leave and make you wait, see how you like it." i found all this super distracting and it made me pretty anxious. it also said something about ten because, well, on yahoo if somebody just leaves a game you gotta wait ten whole minutes before they have officially forfeited. this matters because it raises your rating and that's nice. later in the game ten hounded me pretty constantly, he just called me "1465" rather than my username or something because thats what i was and this person could not imagine the possibility that i'd do anything other than wait out the ten minutes and officially win and get the points. in retrospect ten was probably bluffing.

and then he just kept calling me stupid! he called me stupid over and over and over again! he typed "hahahaha" when i made decent moves! when i put him in check ten'd type "WOW BIG CHECK" and "SO YOU THINK YOU'RE SO GOOD 1465" and "YOU'RE THE STUPIDEST PERSON IN THE WORLD" and this really got to me! it was extraordinary! those screaming characters had me quaking with self doubt and anxiety. it's kind of a horrifying validation of the power of digital vitriol, that despite the anonymity and fundamental cheapness of the hate (for is not typing so easy?), that stuff is HUGELY affecting. i also lost the game. but ten_yrs_old had me beat by the 12th "STUPID."