> I responded with my own message correcting his grammar ruthlessly and telling him to get a life, but I am still shocked.

Unfortunately, this is one of those things you have to put up with when you have a public web site. There is a minority of people out there (at least, I would hope it's a minority) that seem to take a sadistic delight in investing time out of their own lives to explain, in exquisite detail, exactly why you suck.

Racial stuff is a particular hot button. It's all the more enraging when people play the race card against truly inoffensive things, because it drowns out legitimate cries. Moreover, it's disturbing when people suggest that even *legitimate* racism, deplorable though it may be, is reason enough to curtail one's freedom of speech.

This kind of email -- snooty and holier-than-thou -- is very familiar to me. The jive dialect on The Dialectizer inspires a bit of email, though none recently now that I think about it. More absurdly, I've gotten hate mail in response to "How To Be Persuasive" from representatives of two separate nationalities: one complaining about the portrayal of Canada in one of the sample mock arguments, and another complaining about the portrayal of Australia in another. The latter threatened to involve the Australian government, although what they would have done about it is beyond me.

These objections are, of course, absurd. These people lack the analytical skills to understand the least little bit about how to comprehend the written word. Your flame mailer shares the same incompetence. That email is just brilliant with logic: in order to avoid racism and stereotyping, you may only represent a group of people by depicting its majority. GREAT!! As if that weren't reprehensible enough in itself, more so is the offense taken. Is he saying gypsies are inferior somehow and therefore unworthy to represent Romania? It seems unlikely that "teo c." would have emailed you if he thought gypsies a *superior* race, and even if he considered gypsies on equal standing and was merely interested in technical accuracy (or his warped perception of it, since Romania does, after all, have a gypsy population), he wouldn't have had such an itchy temper behind his words.

The trick to dealing with these people to laugh it off. You'll drive yourself crazy if you comtemplate too hard on what makes people SO gleeful about tearing people down, and what makes people get offended about such ridiculously superficial things. Vent a bit, maybe, but after that, try to back yourself away from the matter emotionally, and I think you'll find that it's really quite funny. I mean, seriously. "Miss Roma"!? "I will REPORT THIS SITE"?!?!? This is the kind of thing we take into RinkChat and start bandying around at each other for fun, and it takes the sting right out of it. I don't know if you got the reference in the reply to Mina I just made, but that also came from a bit of hate mail I got. I forgot what it was about now -- the guy wasn't worth doing the honor of remembering -- but I remember that he threatened to report me to "the computer community" that he allegedly had lots of "connections" into, and I was going to be blackballed or something. Great stuff.

Above all, though, do NOT let nonsense like this change what you do with your site, what you put on it, how you promote it, or anything. This...

> All I know is that I won't be posting links to my dolls for just anyone to see anymore.

...is a supremely bad idea, for a number of reasons. Whoever sent you this email is not worth consideration. He's *certainly* not worth acting upon. But changing your mode of operation is handing him the victory. You're sending out the message that you can be bullied into submission. You're depriving yourself of an aspect of the inherent joy you take in your work, depriving others of the chance to enjoy it too, and letting truly absurd, lunatic attitudes of people who don't matter shape the course of your life. None of that makes any sense at all. Keep up your web site. Keep posting links. You do what you want to do with it. Don't let yourself be shouted down by people not worth hearing in the first place.

> I would never have thought that someone (especially from around here)...

I wouldn't personally jump to this assumption. Nothing is ever truly "buried" on the Internet. No matter how low your traffic levels might be, you're still only one hop from Google to anybody in the entire world with Internet access. Unless there was a really random person in chat at the time you posted those links, it seems rather improbable that it was anyone here. If you'd like, though, and think it would help with your peace of mind, memo me the email address, and I'll see if I can match it up with anything I have.