troll

By Elizabeth Prata

I have always loved paper. I’m a writer, to comes with the territory! Especially since I spent half my life expressing myself on paper before computer screens were invented. When I was in Italy, I purposely made a trip to the town of Fabriano. That place is one of the earliest and most important places in the West that sparked the trade in paper. The tradesmen there in the 1200s invented vats with multiple hammers, shortening the pounding time necessary to grind fiber to a malleable state. They also invented the watermark.

With a love of paper naturally comes a love of journals. I recently discovered the paper-journal-site Archer & Olive. This is an upscale, super-beautifully designed journal site. Their mission statement says,

At Archer & Olive, we believe creativity and planning should feel inspiring not overwhelming. That’s why we create premium journaling tools designed to support your mental wellness and help you stay organized in a way that feels joyful.

Archer & Olive’s Stamp Collector Collection

Premium is right. They make stunningly beautiful designs for their journals, notebooks, washi tape, and so on. An especially exciting product is their Subscription box. Inside are a myriad of freshly designed items sent to the subscriber. Each box bundle, and each season’s release of new individual collections, is freshly and uniquely designed by the talent behind the scenes.

For subscribers, the anticipation quickens as the date nears for the quarterly subscription box’s contents to be previewed and then released to the subscribers. They sell out quickly, I understand, and no wonder. They are beautiful as well as practical for the journaler or crafter who likes to create art in such notebooks.

Last week, on September 1, the Subscriber box was released to current subscribers, and a few days later, the opportunity for new quarterly subscribers to buy one was opened on their site.

I enjoyed seeing the glimpses and previews of the new designs, as well as viewing old “unboxings” on Youtube. These designers really know their craft.

Yesterday I read a statement from Archer & Olive that saddened me. Now, the state of social media is known to one and all. You can carve out a quiet corner for yourself by making intentional follows and relentless blocking… but still, the negativity, trolling, and downright hate will be present even when you make innocuous statements or put out a benign vibe. And so it was with A&O. They wrote:

In the past week, we have been getting an unprecedented number of comments questioning our design process. We will be honest, we were taken by surprise by the sudden influx. Our team have a longstanding history of gorgeous designs, long before generative Al developed to where it is now, and we naively believed those years of designs spoke for themselves. However, as more new people find us, we understand that we haven’t built your trust yet, so here’s what we’re doing going forward.

MAKING OUR STANCE CLEAR

Our team quickly put together this page to clearly state our stance against Al-art, as well as including some insights on our design process we have shared before:

NO AI-ART POLICY- https://www.archerandolive.com/pages/no-ai-policy

This page is not comprehensive, but we wanted to respond quickly to show we are actively engaged in the discussion, and working on ways to make our stance clear.

WHAT WE WILL BE DOING GOING FORWARD?

We have plans to continue to share more behind the scenes, and we are talking to our artists about sharing more of their process. However, we hope that everyone can understand that we will first and foremost be prioritizing the privacy and mental health of our staff. All our artists are in-house employees, and after being met with hostility when personally engaging with comments, many have become hesitant to have a public presence.

We do genuinely understand the vigilance when looking for Al, but our designs are created by real humans; real people who are seeing the unfounded comments and increased negativity towards their work. If you see an error, there was a real person behind that error. Our team are amazing, many who have been with us from the early days of Archer and Olive, and some newer faces who have allowed us to expand our designs and style over the years. We only hope going forward their work can be met with the praise it deserves.

How bad does society need to be that floods an innocent design site with trolls spewing hate! So sad. Here they are, making beautiful things, selling them, enjoying their own products, wanting to help people through journaling, and along come a flood of negative nellies who are skeptical that real, live designers have toiled hard to bring these pretty items to the public. Real, live designers whose work is not only not acknowledged positively, but denied at all!

How unkind.

You know that photo of all the men saluting Hitler in the Nazi salute and one guy rebelliously has his arms crossed?

By Unknown author – arastiralim.net, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20103197

In these days of unkindness, we can be that guy. Being kind in an unkind world will stand out. It will be a balm, a breath of fresh air, a sweet zephyr of repose for those around you.

To fellow Christians, Be kind to one another, compassionate, forgiving each other, just as God in Christ also has forgiven you. (Ephesians 4:32).

Therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with hearts of compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience. (Colossians 3:12).

Kindness is a spiritual fruit. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness (Galatians 5:22).

As in like manner, kindness will also stand out in a darkening world in our attitudes and behavior toward non-Christians, too.

So then, while we have opportunity, let’s do good to all people, and especially to those who are of the household of the faith. (Galatians 6:10).

Even to those who are enemies! We should be kind. Luke 6:35 says, But love your enemies and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High; for He Himself is kind to ungrateful and evil people.

It profits no one anything to be unkind. I know I have failed myself in this regard many times. I begin each day with an appeal to the Holy Spirit to help me be kind to one and all. Fading energy, irritation, illness, are some reasons why I fail to restrain the unkindness and it comes out. But to purposely troll a business with floods of unkind negativity is beyond appropriate.

Stand out by being kind, even in the face of unkindness. Paul quoted Proverbs 25:21–22 in Romans 12:20 (ESV), To the contrary, “if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head.” As GotQuestions explains,

Verse 21 explains the idea of heaping burning coals on someone by saying, “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” Anyone can return evil for evil. But when a Christian does so, the watching world sees nothing different about our lives. It is not even clear who is right and who is wrong when we respond in kind to the one who wronged us. But, when we follow Jesus’ instruction to love our enemies (Matthew 5:43–44) and return good for evil, the contrast is stark. Our kind and gentle reaction to hatred spotlights the depravity of the one who treated us poorly and leaves the hurtful person alone in his or her hatefulness. Nothing pricks the conscience of a hateful person like a soft, forgiving spirit in the one he has wronged (Proverbs 15:1).

By Elizabeth Prata

By John Bauer – Illustration of Walter Stenström’s The boy and the trolls or The Adventure in childrens’ anthology Among pixies and trolls, a collection of childrens’ stories, 1915., Public Domain

Internet trolls have been around for a long time. Well, at least as long as the internet, lol. Before that there were “nattering nabobs of negativism” as Vice President Spiro Agnew called the media, who were constantly critical of the Nixon Administration. Before that it was naysayers, and before that gadflies. There was even a troll in the Bible, the demon-possessed slave girl who followed Paul around shouting things constantly, disturbing his work and emotions. He became greatly annoyed. (Acts 16:16-18). Constant critics are part and parcel of the public life. And the internet is very public.

And that is what makes trolling so alluring to trolls, the immediate reaction they receive from their efforts. The most prized trolling behavior among these goblins is getting the hugest reaction they can by putting in the least effort. The less effort they put in compared to the biggest reaction they can receive is the golden ratio for these corrupt people.

I’ve noticed one thing through long observation, first as a newspaper woman for 6 years receiving letters to the editor and then as an observer of blog comments and now Twitter. These debauched defects have a facility with words. Whether lengthy or pithy, they possess a satan-inspired skill to say just the right thing at just the right moment in just the right way, for maximum, hurtful damage to their target.

I’ve been the target of many critics, naysayers, and trolls for years. But there is one particular troll I must award the taker of the cake. Her degeneracy is full tilt, and I mean topped up to the brim of the cup. I’ve been wounded by her words, turned to the Lord, and gone my way. Then more words, and more, with me over time becoming frustrated, upset, then full-blown angry.

Then one day all that changed.

There is a limit, a boundary, a line that most sane trolls do not cross. Though these unfortunate pagans run their mouth, speak ill, practice lawlessness, they have a conscience. It’s withered to the size of a raisin and just as dark, but it’s there.

This particular day, my evilly faithful troll said something about me that made me drop my mouth open. I was aghast. Stunned actually. It was a decisive moment. My mouth agape, I understood that she must have no conscience. She operates with impunity as if there is no God keeping track of every careless word. And her minions chimed in with worse things to say. Very bad.

She had gone beyond the bounds. She was in a wilderness landscape familiar to evil men and beasts. Stunted trees where the most raucous of crows and ravens perch, leering. Oppressive mist, black scudding clouds, parched and wilted vegetation, bony animals drooling and ravening. That is her landscape. A William Blake hellish landscape. That is her mind. Her and her minions.

Gustaf Tenggren’s book cover for his ‘Grimm’s Fairy Tales’ (1923).

I bow to William B. Yeats’ words here, his poem The Second Coming,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Yes, the passionate intensity of the shameful fiends. That intensity never tires, does it. As John Bunyan said in Pilgrim’s Progress of the Man in the Iron Cage, “I laid the reins upon the neck of my lusts” and that is what these shrews enjoy, runaway sin, careening down into an boiling abyss from which they will never escape.

Even so, every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. Matthew 7:17

I said it was a watershed moment for me. My anger dissipated at once. I thanked the Lord for showing me the utterly evil contaminated souls these trolls are, these particular trolls I’m speaking of. The Queen Troll and her minions.

Every human being operates on earth under His restraining grace. To varying degrees, the unsaved conduct their murky works in some sort of restraint. We all have a problem you see. We are all sinners. Unless the Lord intercedes, brings us to His Light, and reveals it to us so we repent, we stumble about in darkness. Eyes do not see. Ears do not hear. Sin abounds and more and more it mounts up to the limit in which God allows. See Job 1 where God put limits on satan in his work against Job.

We know in Romans 1:18-32 that God lifts His hand of restraint from some sinners, then lifts it again, then again. We have a problem you see. Even Christians who know of sin and personally experience sin and repent of sin- we really don’t know sin. We don’t comprehend the inky depths to which sin drags us. We underestimate its power… sin’s utter absence of any light, any good, anything favorable. Sin is not only crouching at the door waiting to have us, its putrefied claws are scratching at the door, laying hold of the handle, opening it a crack. Itd deceit!

But encourage one another day after day, as long as it is still called “TODAY,” so that none of you will be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. (Hebrews 3:13)

Sin is so dark that even after being struck blind, the lust of the homosexuals at Lot’s door were unappeasable animals. Lust had rendered them into incoherent brutes in search of what would satisfy their perversion.

No, sin is powerful in its hideousness.

So why am I grateful?

I am grateful to the Lord for His patience. That he allows such unspeakable behavior for so long is a testament to His sovereign patience.

I am grateful for the test of my own talk, to withstand the temptation to speak back in ways that would give satan gleeful reasons to accurately accuse me.

I am grateful to personally witness what it is like when the Lord’s restraining grace is lifted from a person and they lay the reins against the neck and run pell mell into satan’s cauldron.

It seems likely that the bestial bevy of trolls, particularly THAT troll, has had the bonds of common, restraining grace removed from her soul, and THIS is what runaway sin looks like. The Lord is letting us see! And it is not even a millimeter forward on the scale of what is in us, all of us.

I am grateful the Lord is showing me, us, her targets and bystanders, just what sickening unrestrained sin looks like. We see by her behavior what we all are in the natural. Her depraved potential is being realized and her deepest desires are being revealed, as more and more of the common grace that surrounds her is whittled away from her with every keystroke.

What we see is what the world is becoming and what we would be without the Lord’s intervention. Restraint gone, her maniacally gleeful conflicts spurred by a degradation from which most of us are blessedly protected, are made plain for all to see. I’m grateful for the reminder that such could have been

And it is gross. No matter how gross sin is, no matter to what level a person has descended, without His restraining hand, it always becomes lower…worse…more corrupt. And so it was with her.

They continued to display their allegiance to satan this week with even worse speech against a dear brother and sister who were going through a grief laden walk. Thousands of people online were horrified at her words, her evil, the depths to which she swam. Did you ever notice that the word vile and the word evil are almost the same?

Oh, the patience of God in his dealings with such as her. Oh His patience with all of us. It is a miserable thing to hold onto sin, to pet it and carry it and think that is feels good to let it claw your mind to a point of soulless depravity.

Pity her. Pity them, all of them. And learn from her example sin’s power, sin’s evil, sin’s scope, and sin’s grip on a lost person. There but for the grace of God go I…

Many are the sorrows of the wicked,
But he who trusts in Yahweh, lovingkindness shall surround him.
Be glad in Yahweh and rejoice, you righteous ones;
And shout for joy, all you who are upright in heart.
Psalm 32:10

Further Reading

Sin’s deceitfulness, devotional

Tag: troll

Archer & Olive, meanness, and kindness

Why I am grateful for THAT troll