In which I become angry with a writer for the Washington Post

I just sent this letter to the author of a piece called PSP: A Real-Life Pause Button

Dear Robert,

I read the first page and a half of your item called PSP: A Real-Life... and gave up. I would have stopped at your snark that read:

The PSP also caters to hardcore losers of the adult variety

if it were not for the fact that I was trying to figure out why you would say something so nasty.

How is your story better because you were cruel?

If I were to classify a group of people as losers I would choose the ones who don't care about anything. The apathetic ones who can't be bothered to think, feel, or vote. To mock someone because they have a passion that you don't share, to mock them to gazillions of people, to mock the very people who are attracted to your title is baffling to me.

I got the impression that these gamers should just step away from the technology and pick up a good book. We are strong readers in my family, I read at least a book a day, my kids read quite a lot, my middle son read the Hitchhiker's Guide series before he started first grade, I am a writer but that doesn't mean we don't play video games. We do. We play a lot of them and we play X-Box Live so my kids can play with friends who live in other states.

I bet quite a few of the gamers you mock are big in the geek/techie/skiffy communities and I bet they do quite a bit of reading both on and offline. I utterly fail to see why you want to alienate them and make them feel rotten for their excitement and happiness.

Maybe you explain all this in the end of your piece but frankly I will never know because my dismay at your callousness and harshness was too strong for me to finish reading.

Sincerely,

Georgiana Lee

Member CBLDF, SAG

Edited to add

Robert wrote back to me and said that he saw my point and eventually we ended up talking about books. Funny how most of my correspondence does that.

When I answered his first email to me I got a little more insight into why I was so upset by the loser designation and I told him:

It was kind of you respond so nicely to my email. I suspect I am being an "oversensitive chick", as a friend of mine calls me, right now when I see the word loser. I've seen quite a lot of talk about how the shooter in Minnesota at the school was a big loser. I think we have enough disenfranchised people who don't feel validated and I think it's important to help people feel less like losers. But that's just me and I'm sure if I had read your story two weeks ago I would have just rolled my eyes and moved on.