She hasn't posted on reddit in 20 days, who knows, could be vacation, could be she just got tired of the endless amounts of fucked up PMs I'm sure she gets, or something more personal. Either way, life goes on
It's more than 'just silence', and I've been quite worried for some time. Sorry for the long post; I felt it worth recording details.
Consideration of SexyCyborg's recent reddit (in)activity and a pattern of deletions of some of her posts at Reddit suggests she may be in trouble with Chinese authorities. See what you think of the timeline below. Do you agree it's worrying?
Due to concern that she's possibly not even in control of her Reddit account any more, better not send anything to it. If the account is forcibly hijacked by Chinese authorities, even inquiring via that account could get her into more trouble.
But I have no other way to contact her. Only can try to find someone in Shenzhen who can contact her or her friends.
Maybe someone at the hacker & startup groups she's frequented could get in contact with her, and check?
Next thing I'll be doing is going through her post history looking for potential contact points in Shenzhen - businesses that may be able to contact her. What I'd like to do is find someone who knows her, and can determine if she's OK (or not.)
If she *is* in trouble, then how to help (if at all possible) is the next question.
I'm not seeking her direct contact details myself. Inappropriate - I'm a 60 yo guy, in Australia. But I'm definitely a SexyCyborg admirer, hence my attention. It's mainly her sharp mind and creative projects that impress me. Whether you believe that or not is of no concern to me.
I tried sending a PM to someone on Reddit who I know lives in HK, asking if they could try to contact her. No response. Not even a "sorry, couldn't be bothered."
This is the trouble with the anonymous Internet. It's all great until someone's possibly in real trouble in real life and drops out of contact. Then all this 'virtual friends' stuff goes poof. I've been looking around for other mentions of her going missing, and this thread is the first mention I've seen.
My email: guykd at optusnet.com.au
Any practical suggestions for checking if she's OK are welcome. Failing all else, I guess I'll just have to save up and go there myself.
-------------------------
Timeline (dates in YYYMMDD format)
Reddit user SexyCyborg (LED-lit skirt girl) is not normally in the habit of deleting her own posts and texts, and imo she wouldn't silently delete anything unless she had a very good reason, or was forced to, or it wasn't her.
Once she removed some text she'd included with some photos on her Imgur account, saying (in Reddit) that she'd changed her mind on the matter.
Another time she had a confrontation with a Feminazi from the Reddit 'Against Men's Rights' forum. SC had proposed a Reddit vote contest, got promptly whacked by Reddit mods, and ordered to remove those posts or be banned. Typical Reddit admin fascism and I gather it was quite an unpleasant surprise to her.
I'm not aware of any other significant deletions of her posts.
20150911
In the morning I saw a couple of new SC posts talking about the great China famine (under Mao), how many millions died, how her grandmother had watched friends starve to death, and people at the time had to choose which children would be given food, leaving others to die.
This was in a thread where others had criticized an old Chinese lady in America, who'd been selling food-aid tinned food. As SC pointed out, probably to buy more practical food like rice with the proceeds.
SC stood up for that old lady, saying we can't morally judge people who lived through those terrible times.
I read SC's new posts, thought they were extremely excellent, powerful... Then I had to go do something briefly. Came back a few minutes later, intending to save them. But they were gone, deleted. Presumably by her.
I thought oh well, understandable I suppose. She'd obviously been angry when she wrote them, and they could be considered quite political. She'd been so angry she mentioned her true age, which she normally absolutely avoids.
I'd assumed she had second thoughts about the posts and removed them soon after posting. Wish I'd saved them when I could; they were *great* - finest SexyCyborg intelligent fire.
They also reminded me of something similar in my experience, that I thought she might be interested to read. So I started writing an article to send to her, when eventually finished. No rush, only did little bits in spare moments over the next week or so.
In the meantime I still followed her general Reddit posts. She was posting as normal, for a few more days.
20150917
The last time SC posted anything. It was routine stuff, in her thread about a Halloween costume.
(Date is approximate. Reddit says "16 days ago" on Oct 2nd. Curse Reddit's lack of actual dates on posts.)
In the past SC had once gone Reddit-silent for nearly a week, so this time at first seemed like nothing. She's probably just busy with work or a project. But after over a week of silence it seemed to be getting a bit strange. Normally she posts every day.
To check for her new posts I'd look at her post history:
https://www.reddit.com/user/SexyCyborg/Her last one had been sitting at the top for over a week. It was in "[Help] Who should I be? (self.cosplay)" (costume for Halloween.) It had been about online gaming in general, and totally innocuous. She'd said something like (from my memory) "I should learn more about gaming here. People always ask me and I have no idea..."
20150926 (approximate again)
As a joke about how long she'd gone silent after mentioning learning about gaming, I added a one line reply to that last post of hers.
https://www.reddit.com/r/cosplay/comments/3l5eds/help_who_should_i_be/cvdfdtv)
"
And so she became a gamer, and was never heard from in the physical world again."
20150928 Monday morning
There'd still been no visible activity by SC on Reddit for 10 days. Today I noticed she had today deleted her last post (the one I'd replied too.) It was obviously gone, since I was used to seeing it at the top of her now static post history.
At this time I only noticed that one post was gone. I had not saved a record of her posts, so couldn't compare the present list to an archived one. It was a very trivial post and so there seemed no clear reason why she'd delete that. This was when I started to worry something odd was going on.
After that deletion her 'last post' (ie last remaining) was from two days earlier:
https://www.reddit.com/r/RicohTheta/comments/3l0cri/few_panos_from_china_flathtml5theta360/cv31qce20151001
I sent her a short PM asking if she's OK. Included a URL to more text and a photo on a private area of my web site.
Later that afternoon I thought to actually check if she'd deleted any *other* of her posts. The only ways to do this on Reddit seem to be:
- by checking your own (or others') post histories, looking for posts that had been orphaned by deletion of the post they were in reply to.
- By reading through threads in which you know the person had commented, looking for the blanks where their posts used to be.
On checking I found she'd deleted every single one of her posts in that Halloween cosplay thread - which she'd started.
This thread:
https://www.reddit.com/r/cosplay/comments/3l5eds/help_who_should_i_be/But I couldn't find any other deletions of her posts. I don't recall what thread her China Famine posts were in.
The complete wipe of all her posts in that thread, the thread topic, in the context of her long posting inactivity since soon after her one previous 'political' post and its rapid deletion, strongly hints she was being hassled by Chinese gov, for 'political' posts. Common factor in her recent deletions - mentioning things authorities would likely frown upon. Great Famine under Mao, and encouraging Chinese to adopt American Halloween. Halloween is a US tradition, and the Chinese gov is probably particularly unenthusiastic about all things American at the moment. I can imagine the phrase 'cultural pollution' being used.
(As of Oct 8th, her non-posting for 22 days also suggests something bad going on.)
20151002
No reply to the PM, as expected. But also zero accesses of the URL I'd sent. I have full admin of my site (everist.org) and can see the logs. I'd have thought she'd at least look at it, if she was able. So now I'm wondering if she isn't even free to access Reddit or the Net. In the worst case, that wasn't even her deleting her Halloween costume thread comments.
Now I'm really worried.
Poor girl. She's very young and I'd thought she might be a bit naive about political/police forces. Her view of how Chinese gov/Shenzhen authorities might act if they became upset about her activities seemed a bit overly rosy to me. Not that I'd know better than her about her own culture.
She has commented in the past that if the authorities become unhappy with you in Shenzhen, you'd just get invited to tea with the police, where they'd discuss their concerns. And that this would happen two or three times before they'd actually do anything.
Well, I may be old and cynical, but I do know 'government authority' in general, and it seems to me that if she ever got a reaction from them it wouldn't be as kind or sensitive as she'd claimed it would be. Her dress standards could easily upset some official types, she's been using a VPN to bypass the State firewall, then did the pen-testing shoes (authorities tend to have very little sense of humor about such things, *especially* when they get in major foreign newspapers), then online mentions things that make the revered Chairman Mao look like a mass murderer (I'm guessing this was the tripwire event), and then for good measure demonstrated a lack of cultural discernment - encouraging Chinese to adopt the American Halloween.
My hunch is she is in trouble. Main question is how much trouble? If they just told her to delete the posts they didn't like, and shut up for a while, then she's probably feeling shaken and pissed off, but best left alone lest attention causes more trouble. Otoh if she's in more trouble than that, well...
It's maybe also worth mentioning that the AMR (Against Men's Rights) types she made the mistake of confronting in Reddit, are not just random freaks, but rather part of an organized progressive-leftist front with deep political connections. It's not beyond the realm of possibility that event links to whatever trouble she's in now.