Slashdot Mirror
Critics Pan Nemesis
Reader NCC1701E submitted a short write-up on the movie:
"First, the executive summary: wait for the video. Now, the Gory Details, in all their splendor. I somehow received an email invitation to an advance screening to the Paramount Theater in Times Square, here in NYC. I had to wait in line for 30 minutes, and there was some confusion in swapping my email print out for a pass. But they didn't even check names against a list; it was basically first-come, first served among those who had been inveigled there through various means. In the end, there were even some empty seats. The movie itself? Basically disappointing. IMHO, the weakest entry yet in the series. Production values and special effects were excellent. And it was great to see the movie in a big theater with Dolby sound. But NEMESIS is little more than a Western type "shoot out" movie. The bad guys attack. The good guys fight back, Then, there's more attacking and more fighting back. Then it happens again. And again. You get the idea. I'm a sucker for the hokey humanism that was the hallmark of Star Trek at its best. There was very little of that on display here. In fact, there was very little in the way of a plot. Just some mildly amusing cutesy scenes, plus some murky musings about the nature vs. nuture debate re: a Picard clone. So I didn't much care for the movie. And judging by the subdued response in the theater, neither did the audience. BTW, NY audiences can be cruel. This one snickered at corny lines that weren't supposed to be funny. The phrase "derisive laughter" leaps to mind. I predict NEMESIS will be a huge box office hit. But long-time fans may be as disappointed as I was."
fp bitches!!!!
first post
Weeee!
Nemesis pans critics.
we've seen it all! What else is there to make more star treks? They should just let it R.I.P
Star Trek movies think *you* suck!
While we're at it, there's a lot of other good writing out there. Have you read Voltaire, Dickens, Bronte, Shelly, Twain, Crane, Poe, Swift, Doyle, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Morrison, Moliere, Angelou, Morrow, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, Pope, Perleman, Woodhouse, Dahl, and thousands of others writing every kind fiction, illuminating every corner of human experience. Sure, there are some great writers of science fiction, there are even some great works of science fiction that stand up well alongside the whole body of world literature, but skip around a few genres. You'll be surprised by what you get out of it, including a deeper appreciation for some of your favorite genre fiction which was written by people who read things besides science fiction.
Shut up, Ron.
--MF
From: Ceee Peee
_
To: k22320inchfan@lists.io.com
Subject: Re: [k22320inchfan] the real anne marie stood up
Date sent: Mon, 8 Jan 2001 08:20:23 -0800 (PST)
Send reply to: k22320inchfan@lists.io.com
(This is CP0017)
Please elaborate. For example, does that mean you're
lifting your k5 "no troll" ordinance?
--- John Montoya <johnsaulmontoya@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> --- Ceee Peee <cptroll@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > My intentions
> > and hopes aren't to destroy k5
>
> nahhh, fuck 'em.
>
> dd
>
> _________________________________________________
> Do You Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! Photos - Share your holiday photos online!
> http://photos.yahoo.com/
(This is CP0017)
Mr. "Quick Star" and Mr. Fake "Scott Lockwood", I have a message for you: get ready for a world of hurt. The first lesson is free.
Have you ever seen the movies Where the Heart Is and Anywhere but Here starring Natalie Portman? How about the classic Meg Ryan romantic comedies When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle? Well, THAT'S the style of Martial Arts I practice. I've perfected the ruthless and efficient OLSEN TWINS FASH-SLAP STANCE!
How about the the classic Sci-Fi cult hits Plan 9 from Outer Space and The Rocky Horror Picture Show? Well, I know the martial arts from THOSE movies too! Let me show you THE PATHETIC TRANSVESTITE ALIEN STANCE!
I've also recently started to learn the martial arts from several new movies such as Jackass: the Movie, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, and Jonah: A VeggieTales Movie. I really look forward to learning the martial arts from the upcoming movie Eight Mile starring my FAVORITE HERO EVAR, Eminem (a.k.a. Slim Shady & Marshall Mathers), so you'd better watch out for my ANGRY WHITE NIGGER STANCE!!!!
I'm also learning even more martial arts from this web page [realultimatepower.net], including the deadly KUNG-FU NINJA JESUS ATTACK STANCE! Hi-YAH!!!
I'm working to improve my rythm [klerck.org], flexibility [rotten.com], stealth skills [fartbuster.com], self-confidence [yahoo.com], and critical thinking [timecube.com] skills, so you'd better watch out, because very soon I will perfect my ultimate attack, THE LARD-LIKE ANTISOCIAL DEPRESSIVE ASSHOLE SPAMMER IMPOTENT PAEDOPHILE FELCHING FLATULENT WIGGER SUMO-SAMURAI CHILD-ABUSE RESTRAINING-ORDER UNWASHED BASTARDIZED ANAL IMMATURE CATHOLIC GOATFUCKER STANCE!!!!
If that doesn't scare you... just wait and see. You'll get yours soon enough.
As Nietzsche said, "If you stare too long into my ass [klerck.org], beware, for my ass [klerck.org] might start to stare back into you."
-- Vlad
I just LOVE Vladinator's site [olsentwins.com]. Especially the "flab" [olsentwins.com] section, where I learned to use a fold of my own stomach-flab as a Martial Arts weapon. Oh and the "aborted fetus" photos!
Of course, don't forget to read Vladinator's entrails [olsentwins.com]. Here you will find how truly difficult it is to decide what to do on the weekends... have an orgy party? A faggot party? Go to the the mall naked and get arrested for public indecency? Have a sleepover and get woken up by Nigerians on the phone?
In short, if you haven't seen Vladinator's site [olsentwins.com], you don't know what you're missing!
I just LOVE Vladinator's site [olsentwins.com]. Especially the "flab" [olsentwins.com] section, where I learned to use a fold of my own stomach-flab as a Martial Arts weapon. Oh and the "aborted fetus" photos!
Of course, don't forget to read Vladinator's entrails [olsentwins.com]. Here you will find how truly difficult it is to decide what to do on the weekends... have an orgy party? A faggot party? Go to the the mall naked and get arrested for public indecency? Try to sleep but get woken up by Nigerians on the phone?
In short, if you haven't seen Vladinator's site [olsentwins.com], you don't know what you're missing!
I just LOVE The Anti-Vlad Triad's site! Especially the "fash" section, where I learned to cut the bottom off of an old shirt to use as a hair enhancement! Oh, and the "dance party" photos!
Of course, don't forget to read The Anti-Vlad Triad's emails! Here you will discover how truly difficult it is to decide what to do on the weekends... have a LAN party? A hash party? Go to the mall to look at underage girls? Have a sleepover and call Scott Lockwood at midnight?
In short, if you haven't checked out The Anti-Vlad Triad's site, you don't know what you're missing!
From: "80md"
To: k22320inchfan@lists.io.com
Subject: Re: [k22320inchfan] Evil enemies of Liberty
Date sent: Sat, 18 Nov 2000 00:36:06 EST
Send reply to: k22320inchfan@lists.io.com
(This is CP0035)
>From: "Craig McPherson" <craig@laceyonline.com>
>
>I've heard that outside the United States, those are the only five sports
> that exist (Soccer, Polo, Spooning, Curling, and Snuckers), and I don't
>even know what the HECK four of them are.
Well, it's easy to understand why they do these things: They're undernourished, because they don't have much food out there in all the poor countries. So the average foreigner is about four foot six, maybe five feet tops, and they weigh about eighty pounds. Their teeth tend to fall out, and their bones are brittle as hell because they don't have milk. That's because their "commissars" took all their cows away. So you see, these poor "Europeans" as they call themselves, and the "Canadians" and whatnot, all these people are frail weaklings. They have no knowledge of freedom either, because they don't have a Genesis Document guaranteeing their rights, and they're given to sodomy and other degenerate practices because they've never been exposed to Christianity. Christianity is banned in Europe, did you know that? It's true. The Socialists always ban religion when they seize power. Of course, the Europeans were never free to begin with, so they don't know any better. They've always been slaves. It's all the same to them.
So their poor diet, their atheism, their slavehood, and their homosexuality have robbed them of their strength and their manhood. Therefore, they play girl games like Snuckers, Privet, and Gloon. While we eat our peas for the souls in Purgatory, they HAVE no peas. They limply push a ball around a field, with no manly, bone-crunching collisions to build their flaccid
characters. Where even our most girlish pseudomen play tennis, they teach badminton to their soldiers.
>Man, we need to get rid of those other countries. They want to abolish
>our sports and force us to play homosexual female sports like Polo and
>Spooning, whatever they are.
It's sad, but true. In fact, we'd only be putting them out of
their misery. They'd thank us if they understood.
--
80md
"Harry Browne seems to think he knows me personally --
I get a letter from him every week asking for money."
-- Craig
(This is CP0035)
From: cptroll
l k&cid=141#141).
/.
To: k22320inchfan@lists.io.com
Subject: Re: [k22320inchfan] Re: and the Troll Thesis spreads further...
Date sent: Sun, 10 Dec 2000 13:20:25 -0500
Send reply to: k22320inchfan@lists.io.com
(This is CP0002)
Actually, k5trolltalk has been more for bullshitting than for trolling
(much like this mailing list), and most of my trolls have been kept to
myself, alas. Still, there's a certain private joy in making rusty's head
spin (http://www.kuro5hin.org/?op=comments&sid=trollta
=?iso-8859-1?q?I=20am=20Troll?= <i_am_troll@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>I didn't know there was a K5 trolltalk, or otherwise I
>wouldn't have posted those links to GeekCulture here
>when they were already mentioned on trolltalk. I
>didn't even realise that you'd all left the
>trolltalk, I just thought you'd got sick of the noise
>there and started keeping your trolls to yourselves
>(like I do).
(This is CP0002)
or cow lick
From: Ceee Peee
To: k22320inchfan@lists.io.com
Subject: Re: [k22320inchfan] Last day at work
Date sent: Fri, 22 Dec 2000 19:28:42 -0800 (PST)
Send reply to: k22320inchfan@lists.io.com
(This is CP0008)
Heh, you showed more sense than I. The last time I
tried pulling a stunt like that (revealing such
affections), the object of my affection nearly drove
off the road and into some parked cars. Everything's
still fine between us, but there were those few
fleeting moments involving a high-speed vehicle and
several tons of steel which wouldn't have worked so well.
(This is CP0008)
* * * *
God help us all
by Anonymous Coward on 05:15 AM March 16th, 2000 CST (#810)
But mainly help me. I had a long, dull business trip Tues. and Wed., and as a result I wrote the following (5000 words and still unfinished) Slashdot Troll FAQ. I haven't been able to build on 80md's original due to lack of connection, but the doct. below still needs revised. Specifically, it needs to be made more entertaining. See whatcha think.
jsm
Slashdot troll FAQ
We post inflammatory, satirical or just plain weird comments on slashdot, aiming to draw attention to ourselves and to distract discussion away from the matter at hand. We use satire, wit, art and other cultural weapons to give fun to the clueful and embarrass the clueless.
A good troll is a statement designed to inflame the passions of a certain type of reader. A troll is a contrary or controversial statement, which attacks a preconception of someone who is likely to read it, causing them to suspend their normal standards of critical thinking, and to fire off a combative response, without thinking that they are being had. This is the "classic" troll, aimed at enticing someone to make a fool of themself.
Yes. The "surrealistic" troll is a piece of prose, rambling, comic or just downright weird, inserted into a discussion where it seems at once utterly irrelevant and curiously in place. The common thread linking the types of trolls is that a certain kind of personality (read - far too uptight) gets irrationally annoyed by them.
Some kinds of trollish statement have been proven to work again and again, so naturally, some trolls have taken advantage of this fact to repeat them again and again. Certain individual trolls are more or less identified with certain types of trollish statement, and thus we have the idea of a "character" - a fictitious entity which is supposed to actually hold the views which are expressed in the troll's posts. Some of these characters have distinct personalities and maintain narrative coherence from troll to troll (see the "Microsoft Linux" episode between streetlawyer and DMG); some of them show up expressing the same or similar points of view again and again (the RWM and derivatives).
The number one maximally 1337 troll character is the RWM; the most established troll, with the most solid track record behind him. Opensource man and his creations is the oldest surreal troll; gnarphlager and auntfloyd also adopt this style. Paranoid Man is getting off the ground, and DMG and streetlawyer have their fans. Mindless Bastard is more of a style of trolling than a character per se. There are lots more people posting trolls than are listed here; these are just the repeating characters.
RWM is the Right Wing Maniac, a character with a hotch-potch of (often mutually incompatible) libertarian, Christian, and Objectivist views, who typically (mis)applies the general principles of his world-view to various slashdot topics. He tends to be keen on referring to people as "socialists", particularly if they consider themselves to be conservatives. Sometimes he's more of a religious nut; sometimes it's more the free market which rings his bell. There is also a Left Wing Maniac with a yen for spouting dialectical materialism, but he hasn't done much recently. It's worth noting that it is very rare to find a RWM troll thread in which at least one participant doesn't agree with most of RWM's views.
DMG is the Dumb Marketing Guy. He claims to have been involved in Linux for "at least four years, since the very beginning", and offers unsolicited "open source" marketing advice on Linux advocacy to the members of the community. He often takes a rather hurt tone in response to the welter of abuse which is the usual response to his advice.
For crying out loud, they ought to be self-explanatory, surely to heck?
Buggered if I know. Lots of trolls mention cheese, and seem to indicate that cheese has some sort of significance. Maybe it does.
Because he had a hard life, dragging himself up from the streets to get his fucken law degree from fucken Hah-vud, OK?
Well, sorry. But really, nobody cares (see below). You're too easily offended. Now purge the post from your board, log our IP address and go back to drawing your "After Y2K" comic (which is shit, by the way).
We don't do boring, uncreative shit which just makes slashdot harder to read. We're not into denial of service attacks - they aren't very funny. We're probably harsher opponents of the spam bunch than you are, because anything which encourages people to browse at levels above -1 makes our work harder.
Nope. Nezh.
Nope. Nada.
Errrr, well actually yes we have. Both of those ongoing trolls were written by regulars on the troll forum, and you're not going to find condemnation of them in this FAQ.
Read them. Untwist your underwear, stop fulminating over the momentary interruption to your terribly important discussion about Slackware and have a look at some of these posts. Open source Natalie Portman was a fine piece of Burroughsian prose and if you don't agree that it was, then you're wrong. The whole "Naked and petrified" thing was an absolute triumph - it provoked a huge amount of reaction, entertainingly interfered with a few people's heads by sexualising the context of slashdot and is still talked about, several months after the original author stopped bothering.
Sick to you, but that was actually the guy's genuinely held sexual fantasy. He was erotically excited by the thought of women turned to stone, and was letting the world know about it. Don't pretend that you weren't interested - it's absolutely fascinating.
Nope. I was taken aback myself, but there are several sites on the Net with active discussion boards on this very subject. It's not that very different from the subject of "The Fermata" by Nicholson Baker, where the hero has the power to stop time, effectively turning women into statues. And that is quite a common paraphilia.
No, it was a petrification fantasy. Which is something rather less threatening, because harder to act out (how many people really believed that anyone could actually turn Natalie Portman to stone?)
I'm sure she's not wonderfully happy about being the subject of someone else's tawdry sexual fantasies, but it kind of comes with the job. I doubt she loses much sleep.
Opensourceman's works (including the Star Wars series and Fat-time Charlie) are available online at: Craig MacPherson has a website at: , which probably has a few things on it to do with the petrification thing.
Wellllll
Why, for God's sake?
For a variety of reasons, but mainly to puncture the self-importance of a few people who deeply deserve it. Slashdot has a lot of very clever people posting, but vastly more individuals with a serious perception/reality gap with regard to their own intelligence. People who believe themselves to be perceptive, clueful, even deep thinkers while merely reciting lists of conventional wisdom deserve to be taken for a ride. And there's the sheer Skinnerian joy of it - if somebody, or some group of people have buttons, it's inhuman not to take delight in pushing them.
In order to do it properly.
No problem. Whining about moderation is for the moderation thread. Several trolls moderate more or less frequently (and meta-moderate - be very afraid), and there is very little genuine complaint about moderation on the troll threads. Any remarks about $3 crack are meant in a spirit of fun and affection, and are usually merely cris de coeur when a finely crafted troll has been rumbled in the first few seconds and down-modded.
That was funny.
Where is there? We've had a token go or two at Nitrozac and kuro5hin, and an abortive attempt to troll some of the statuephilia discussion boards with discussions about technology, but it just doesn't feel right. If you ain't on slashdot, you ain't, basically, trolling.
That isn't even true. Several of the troll regulars have enough Karma to post with the +1 bonus when they use their regular identities, which puts them in the top decile, according to Rob Malda. And there is a definite audience for quality trolls. Have you just been trolled? Is that why you're so angry? Calm down, it'll be someone else's turn in the barrel on Friday.
To paraphrase gnarphlager, yes, we have many better things to do, but we're not going to do them.
How can I recognise a troll?
If you want to spot a troll, then you're basically entering into a game, played against us. You have to keep your guard up, adopt a critical attitude to what you read and decide whether it is plausible that someone is actually posting that view. For our part, we will intermingle fact and fiction, invent plausible-sounding references and (always) attempt to attack your emotional involvement in a topic in order to make you drop your guard. The more ridiculous the proposition we sneak under your guard, the more we win. The angrier you get, the more we win. And you? As the computer said in War Games "The only way to win is not to play".
Usually, a troll will resemble a normal slashdot post, but will contain at least one thing which is not true. A good troll will contain material which obviously couldn't possibly be true, and would not fool anyone who gave it a moment's thought. The troll will also contain an inflammatory or controversial statement, designed to make sure that nobody does give it a moment's thought. Criticism of Linux, strong or offensive political views, mockery of "computer geeks", claims about the inferiority of women/Canadians/Perl, all of that stuff. Interestingly, having experimented with using outright, Bell-Curve-like racist statements to act as the controversial part of the troll, I've found that they never offend anyone, which I guess shows what a lily-white place slashdot is.
Obviously these rules apply more to the classic satirical model of a troll, but there is a strong family resemblance in the surrealist model. Looking at the best work of osm, gnarphlager, auntfloyd et al., you pick up a strong sense of the underlying form. There is the (often highly tenuous) link to the subject matter, the building sense of cognitive dissonance and then the denouement in which the troll moves into the realm of pure surrealist prose (or "gets silly", depending on how you look at it). Typically, when reading such a troll for the first time, and in the context of the thread, the reader's reaction goes through stages.
At the opening of the troll, in which the technological subject matter is being obliquely referred to, the reader is curious. There is an unconscious assumption that what is being used is a metaphor, which appears opaque but will actually make an argument clear (in such a way the surrealist trolls subvert the category of metaphor as used in scientific discussions). Then, the tension between the what the reader wants to read and what he/she sees on the page grows, but the reader still tries to hang on to the idea that he/she is reading "News for Nerds". Finally, when the reality (that is, the unreality) of the troll is revealed, the reader is outraged at having been tricked.
Thus, we can see that the distinction between the classical and surrealist trolls is one of inversion; metaphor versus metonymy. The classical troll traps the reader in metaphor, creating the "character" or authorial fiction, which the reader takes as a metonymy for "The Other" - the fictional creature on the screen is espousing Microsoft, or Libertarianism, or something else which must be ritually reacted to, rather than read as if it were a metaphorical text. The surrealist troll appears to use metaphor, but creates no authorial fiction. The piling up of the metonymic symbols of trolldom (cheese, Natalie Portman, the Troll itself) draws the reader into the pure text, looking for a meaning (or metaphor) which is always deferred. The reader wants to create an authorial fiction, but this is denied - and it is this denial which is the source of his/her rage. The surrealist troll lets the reader down with a bump - the satirical troll, in its purest form, never lets the reader out at all, leaving him/her stuck in a world which is false, because he/she is being manipulated by the authorial fiction. Classical trolling is about the use of metaphor to create metonymy; surrealist trolling is using metonymy to create metapor.
YHBT. YHL. HAND. (Ha ha, only serious)
Pretty much so, yeah. There's been "trolltalk", "trolltalk2", "31337troll" and a bunch of others. It's good to be able to see other people's work, to discuss trolling, and on occasion to have a way of proving for sure that something you wrote was a troll, to a particularly persistent mark.
If I could tell you, I'd have to kill you. There have been a few problems with people stalking some of the trolls, and spamming the troll forums with whitespace to make them unusable. There's no big secret or anything, it's just that we'd like to think that finding the troll forum requires a modicum of commitment and ingenuity. There's one pretty well-trafficked troll forum which is listed in most of the usual indices. Look, fuck it, you used to be able to find BBSes, didn't you? This is no different.
Yada yada yada.
Welllllll
Write a nice, long post, beginning with the phrase "I'm sure this is a troll, but
The only approved, correct, 1337 way to deal with a troll is not to reply at all. Don't say anything. Just sit back and feel smugly self-satisfied that you caught the troll. Go on. People always seem to say the word "smug" as if it were a bad thing, but how can something that feels so good be wrong? Smirk. Once the troll is "dead" (once the author has taken credit for it and admitted the troll), you might want to post a message about it. You'll probably get a nice reply.
Wellllll
Then you should be prepared to live with being a laughing stock. We live off people like you, who simply can't stop themselves from pouring out conventional wisdom, even when they know they are being made monkeys of. And no, the "I'm pretty sure
Well, fundamentally, it lacks class. For one thing, you're feeding the troll while pretending not to feed it, which is dishonest. For another, you're encouraging lots of enraged people to visit the troll forum. This means that the troll forum gets spammed, the trolls move, and you now will be forced to spot trolls for yourself rather than reading them off the list, lamer. Also, the trolls can't tell who it was who brought the spammer there, so all the other people who used to enjoy reading the daily trolls don't find out where the new forum is.
How can I start trolling for myself?
"Just do it", as that noted provider of employment to Indonesian children once said. Your first trolls are unlikely to be offensive enough to draw many responses, but once you lose your disinclination to be unpleasant, results will follow. Of course, you may incipiently be a natural trolling genius like dmg, who got huge pops from the get-go. Choose a story which will get a lot of traffic, try to get an early, top-level post, etc, etc (here might follow a whole load of shit from the Karma HOWTO which I'm not going to reproduce). And, offend. You might want to start off with a right-wing maniac troll.
RWM is the source from which it all flows. Like an origami master building everything from a folded base, or a woodworker turning a chair-leg, the entirety of the art is encapsulated in this one element. It is possible to dedicate your entire trolling career to the perfection of the RWM (troll gods 80md and 70% more or less have done). If you can't write an RWM troll, you can't write a troll.
The key to the RWM troll is to realise its heritage from Usenet. Usenet trolling was all about cross-posting controversial statements to start flame-wars between different newsgroups. On slashdot, you can't cross-post, so you have to identify people who can be brought into conflict where you are. The beauty of the RWM troll is not so much that he sets rightwingers against leftwingers, but that he creates cognitive dissonance in rightwing readers, because they want to agree with his conclusions (or at least, his less obviously mad ones), but can't bring themselves to accept his reasoning (or simulation thereof). RWM also exploits the fact that a lot of people with right-wing views haven't necessarily thought out those views very comprehensively, and so are vulnerable to cognitive dissonance caused by the inconsistency of what they believe. Among the elements of right-wing mania are:
Obviously, everyone who disagrees with a RWM is a socialist, even if they don't think they are.
Further information
boo yah mofo. right on. so true. posting anonymous
You were fun when you were intelligent, now you are just stupid.
Wow, ohmyGOD, Pumpernickel told me to FOAD. I guess I'd better do what he says!! Oh, wait. There's absolutely no reason for me to do what he says, now that I think about it.
Creative material. Creative material. Creative material.
Creative material. Creative material. Creative material.
Creative material. Creative material. Creative material.
Creative material. Creative material. Creative material.
Creative material. Creative material. Creative material.
Creative material. Creative material. Creative material.
Creative material. Creative material.
Confidential material.
Confidential material.
Confidentail material.
That's just scratching the surface. I could go back further, if you like.
If you actually look, you'll see that 90% of the real spam (multiple identical messages posted minute apart in an attempt to push our messages off the page) is posted by our enemies, Lockwood and his VladeKua5y minions. Maybe you just don't read carefully.
We generate more original material than evaryone else here COMBINED, and we generate BETTER stuff, too. We ARE Trolltalk. We are what's keeping it alive despite all attempts to destroy it. YOU are one of those attempts.