One year and eight months after writing a tell-all blog post designed to ruin his ex-girlfriend’s career (if not her life), Eron Gjoni has made it clear that he is not moving on. In a recent update on his extremely boring intrigues with the Massachusetts appellate court, Eron Gjoni seems prepared to litigate against his ex for the remainder of his natural life, provided he’s given sufficient cash to do it by his #Gamergate backers.

Even though he restraining order against him has been lifted and the criminal charges pending against him have been dropped, Eron persists in suing his ex Zoe Quinn. He seems to have two fairly nebulous goals, 1) to “clear my name a little” and 2) “try to make case law protecting other people (in Massachusetts anyway) from being unconstitutionally subject to similar orders.”

Going through qrios/Eron’s recent postings in KotakuinAction, these court dates seem more like an exercise for Eron’s ego. He takes court date selfies for his #Gamergate fans, and at least once brought a date to court. His lengthy updates/retellings about what exactly Gamergate was and why he needs to keep litigating Zoe Quinn are so distorted and unreliable that reading Eron Gjoni at this point is like reading Humbert Humbert.

Dude, Eron, it’s painfully obvious you’re not over her. Nothing screams “I’m not over this relationship” like continuing to litigate your ex-partner *after* the restraining order was vacated. Nothing says “I am not over this” like complaining to the Daily Dot that you think orders of protection “are kind of a golden ticket you can get in about 5 minutes with pretty much no evidence whatsoever”, and that “the order ZQ opted for is notorious for its potential to be misused as a means of subverting the First Amendment.” But my question is this: Were your 1st amendment rights ever even curtailed?

I mean, think about it. Eron Gjoni has gone on – at length – about Zoe Quinn for a year and eight months now, restraining order or not. In fact, he violated it several times, and never spent a night in jail (or faced any other real penalty) for doing so. What the hell more could Eron want out of his free speech rights? It seems to me they have gotten a lot of mileage.

I am not sure how Eron expects to “clear [his] name a little” by litigation and posting on Reddit when to date doing these things just made his life worse. The court can’t change public opinion, or rule that that Zoe Quinn totally deserved to have The Zoe Post written about her. Nor can they award Eron with the book deal or the movie deal or restore the robotics job he used to have, but lost after publishing The Zoe Post.

It seems like Eron’s life is all about Gamergate now, that he’s prepared to keep holding on to whatever he can to stay relevant and e-famous in those circles, even if it means treating Massachusetts courts like his personal reality TV show. I only hope that his backers figure out eventually that the only people profiting off this circus is Eron and his legal team.

My treasured readers may have noticed I have not written blog posts this past month. I have never published according to a set schedule (it’s part of the “idle dilettante” thing) but in the past month I didn’t post any, and my blogging output is likely to remain much reduced until at least mid-May.

As some of you already know, I’m currently a Master’s student in Biology at CUNY, having been accepted to the program Fall of 2015. As of 1/25/16 I accepted a job working in the Structural Biology Lab – chiefly in protein chemistry, but my work there also involves some crystallography and other tests. The research specifically focuses on proteins involved in processes of nucleotide excision repair – in plain language, the processes by which DNA heals itself from everyday wear-and-tear caused by exposure to water, oxygen, or UV rays. It’s a critical function to life – without it, DNA would not have sufficient fidelity to transmit genetic information.

That said, the new job can be quite taxing. Obtaining a sufficiently pure protein solution from cell lysates requires about 14 hours of active work – and that’s just to get the protein, without doing any experiments to it. The work is time-bound as well – just like a steak in your fridge, protein in our cold rooms becomes unusable if purification isn’t completed within a few days. I estimate that I spend about 30 hours per week in the lab, which doesn’t include time spent preparing for classes required to complete my degree, or time spent applying for grants & fellowships (so I can receive additional compensation.)

Work in the lab is mind-intensive in addition to being time-intensive. I personally still have a lot to learn about the science and techniques of protein purification, as well as the microbiology techniques my supervisor uses to create the bacteria I destroy in order to get protein. I come home from work tired, and yet I lie awake at night thinking about the laboratory, about what I left to run overnight & what needs to happen tomorrow.

Which brings me  to this blog. This update isn’t a resignation letter – if PZ Myers can find the time to blog, surely I can too – but a heads-up that my dilettantish blogging schedule is likely to become more dilettantish for the remainder of this semester. I have responsibilities to uphold with CUNY which simply take precedence over entertaining Sargon of Akkad’s & his fans’ complaints that Nightly Show writers may read and link to my previous posts. (Or that this high-profile RT might get the attention of staff at Patreon.) These things haven’t escaped my attention, but I’m too busy with these proteins to do much more than Tweet about it.

So, if you’re wondering where I’ve been, and why no blog posts throughout the month of February, that’s the reason. I am, of course, still reachable – per email in every case (mpless@gm.slc.edu) and via Twitter if you’re cool.

Sincerely

Margaret Pless