ObviousGuy's Journal: Some parting shots

Paradise Slashdot

Let me out
of this banned IP
Where my words ain't heard
and my speech ain't free
Mod me down! Yeah yeah

Let me out
of this banned IP
Where my words ain't heard
and my speech ain't free
Oh won't you please mod me down!

Bill Gates bashing
is the game on the street
I gotta first post
today that's three
I'm a +2 poster
so my trolls are easy t'see
I'll catch you at another time
This account's been taken offline.

Plus to minus posting in a day
I got an IP ban
that doesn't go away
Trolling's fun and games
'til they take it away
posting ain't a capital crime
but everybody's doing their time

Refrain

Cramps in my wrists
Sending emails to pater
Why I'm blocked
I can't quite remember
The lameness filter says I'm OVERUSING CAPS
Now isn't that just a load of crap

Refrain

Pink pages I see
Pink pages I see
Pink pages I see
Pink pages I see

CmdrTaco's become a foe
Now I'm a freak of this site's top troll
It doesn't matter cuz my comments won't post
I won't be mailing to banned
Ain't it grand?
Taco's flushed this site down the can. Yeah.

Refrain 4x

On Trolls

While trolling takes on many forms, many of them merely being nuisances (crapflooding, goat links, page widening, etc) you'll find the vast majority of trolling occurring in posts similar to posts such as your original. On Slashdot, well-thought out and reasoned posts have become indistinguishable from trolls. This is made all the more obvious by the dimness of the moderators who would mod you down -1 in a heartbeat if not for the length of your post (as if that were the measure of an argument).

I too am a troll, much along the lines as you (though perhaps you don't realize yourself as such yet). I used to post, IMO, well argued posts and was consistently modded down by the Slashdot groupthink moderators. This is not to say that I didn't eventually hit the karma cap, but that along the way it was painfully obvious that my pro-Windows, anti-GPL opinion was not tolerated here.

Upon the realization of that I had my epiphany that pearls are not to be given to swine (this seems to be the same satori experience you are having now). Pigs deserve slop, and now that is all they get from me.

In any case, I'm not one of the nuisance trolls as I listed above, but one of the provocative trolls such as yourself (please do not take offense, this is not an insult as it may first appear).

The Slashdot feeding frenzy that follows any post that attempts to support Microsoft or attack Linux or posit Creationism is a wondrous thing to watch, much like a thunderstorm or a supernova. The one difference is that you, the troll, have total control over the experience, much like a god who views his masterpiece from another dimension.

This is not to say that Slashdot is void of intellectual content. On the contrary, you'll find quite a bit of interesting information in the Science and Developer sections. You will find *no* intellectual content in the YRO section.

It's a travesty that a good idea like Slashdot, allowing users to create their own content, has succumbed to the mindless pursuit of mental masturbation of FSF zealots.

So while this may be the end of your Slashdot infancy, I think you will find your maturation into a Slashdot provocateur quite fulfilling and fun. Isn't that why you joined the technology revolution in the first place?

On Badges

On Collecting Badges of Mao Zedong's Portrait

      As the most well-known man of a generation, Mao Zedong had accomplished
remarkable achievements during his lifetime. As the product of this generation,
the badges with Mao!'s portrait (simplified as the badges in the following)
have long been the most heating objects scrambled by collectors. They have not
only become important in the historical study, but also reached kind of
artistic summit, evaluated from quantity, assortment, craftsmanship and
quantity. I have collected 20,000 or more badges including more than 3,000
different types, and of 16 kinds of materials these badges are made.
      In my opinion, finding a reasonable and scientific way of classification is
quite necessary in badge-collection. It surely can help the collector fulfill
the job much better, especially when the amount of the badges increases day by
day. The way I employ is to classify the badges according to the characters on
their backs. At first, sort out the badges on which the characters mean the
same thing and put them together. Secondly, put together those on which the
characters are at the same part of the badges. Thirdly, put together those on
which the characters are of the same form. Then you will find it is easy to
distinguish set-badges from thousands of others.
      Badges made during the year 1966 to 1976 are called badges of the Cultural
Revolution. No other kinds of badges can be compared with this kind in terms
of quantity, assortment and quality. During the Cultural Revolution, people
who were mostly dependent on politics made these badges with the finest
craftsmanship chosen from the Centrality to the locality, from military units
to factories. People used the best machines and finest raw materials to make
the badges; that's why they can be called as the super badges in the world
. The badges of the Cultural Revolution initiated some new forms such as
the set-badges. This freshness greatly excited badge-collectors.
      The badges can be divided into three categories according to their
functions. The first category is the badges for wearing; it occupies the
largest part and constitutes 95 percent of the total. The second category is
the badges for hanging, which were only made during the Cultural Revolution
. At that time, some people thought the bigger the badge is, the more love for
Chairman Mao they would show. So the badges they made became too big and heavy
to be worn, but can only be hung. Only a few of this kind can be found, they
constitute 0.5 percent of the total sum. The third category is the badges for
decoration, it has two basic patterns: one refers to the badges that have bases
or can stand by themselves; the other refers to those that cannot be laid out
without the provision of stands, such as porcelain plates, bricks, etc. Besides
the above-mentioned three categories, there is another kind!abusts or
full-length statues. These large badges only have simple forms and are not at
all large in amount.
      There are four categories of the badges according to their forms. The first
category is single-badges. These badges are independent by themselves; each one
has its own style and content. This category constitutes 85 percent of the
total sum. The second category is pair-badges. The two badges of a pair always
have internal relationship with each other. Generally speaking, they have no
time order, and this category constitutes only 3 percent of all the badges. The
third category is group-badges, which means a group of badges (no less than 3)
expressing the same idea. They were made by the same people and had the same
characters. They only constitute 2 percent of all the badges. The fourth
category is set-badges. We name it this way because they came out as a set in
conception, design, manufacturing and publication. There are numbers on each of
a set-badge; the numbers are fairly standard, just like those on stamps. For
instance, if there is one set-badge including ten individual badges, the
numbers on them are 10-1, 10-2 !- 10-10, respectively. This category of set-badge constitutes
10 percent of all the badges. I summarize six criteria for judging the
set-badges, listed as the following:
1. A set of badges must be about one special idea, such as badges of nine
revolutionary sample Beijing operas, badges of Mao Zedong!'s poems and
verses, badges of Mao Zedong visiting some sacred places of revolution,
and so on.
2. Set-badges must have 5 common grounds. They are the identical publisher, the
identical content of the characters on the back, the identical type and at the
same place on the back, and also the identical marks on the back.
3. Set-badges must have the same style of making. For example, some badges all
have the sun behind Mao!'s head; some all have protruding secondary pictures at
the lower place; or some all have a sentence quoted from Mao!'s poems, and so
on.
4. Each badge of the set must be relating to each other by means of
supplementing and reciprocal explanation. For example, the set includes 5
badges about Mao Zedong visiting some sacred places of revolution, they are
arranged in a strict chronological order, the five places are Shao-shan Town,
Jing-gang-shan Mountain, Zun-yi City, Yan-an City and Tian An Men Buding.
5. A set must include at least 2 badges.
      As for some sets, if they match all the above criteria except the second
one, that's nothing serious. However, a standard set must go with at least
three points of the five in the second criterion. In the recent years, I have
made a careful arrangement of my collection according to the six items. The
collection and arrangement of set-badges have long been emphasized because it
means a higher level of badge-collection.
      About the materials for making the badges, I am afraid no one can tell
exactly how many kinds there are. In the years when the badges were widely
spread, people at least have found ten kinds of materials to make the badges.
According to my collection, sixteen kinds of materials are used in
badge-making. They are: glass, bakelite, stainless steel, lead, zinc, copper,
bamboo, porcelain, enamel, hard plastic, soft plastic, luminous powder,
chromium, iron sheet, ploxiglass, aluminum, etc. By collecting the badges made
of all kinds of materials, I get to know the measures and scale of their
manufacturing at that time, and further to have some knowledge about the
craftsmanship in different areas of the nation.
      The collectors themselves shall decide how to arrange these specially titled
badges. In my point of view, there are two ways. One is to collect according to
the pictures on the frontages; such as Mao!'s waving hands or making inspection
or wearing straw-hats or setting off Go to An-yuan Coalmine. The other is
to collect according to the characters on the back, such as those commemorative
medals signed with the Revolutionary Committee. And also badges made by the
military commands and factories that produced badges and medals. In short,
these specially titled badges have recorded the history of that time from
different aspects; they not only enrich the content of collection but also
provide evidence for historians.
        I have also collected more than 1000 books about Mao Zedong or about Mao's
badges or about the Cultural Revolution,I finished my manuscript more than
150,000 words for the badge. In 1997 I published the first CD-ROM of China
about Mao Zedong's badges by a company in Beijing.
        I'm looking forward to cooperating with you for showing the badge to the
world, public saleing the badge, publishing my book or my CD-ROM and so on.

        You can contact with the following adress:

Zhong Xiwu
Longxili, Baidi Road, Nankai District, Tianjin, PRC
Tel#[phone]
Email:[e-mail],
            [e-mail]

MS Theme Song

1
We build the future piece by piece
The world depends on us
Never can our endurance cease
In our products they must trust

Refrain:
We dream our dream of dominance
Microsoft, we lead and the world follows
We put the computer on every desktop
And each one runs Windows

2
Our battle is arduous
And our enemies are fierce
But the battle belongs to us
Only we can persevere

Refrain

3
With eagle eyes we see for years
With cheetah speed we race
Our code is Business' gears
And Windows is its face

Refrain

From BASIC to DOS to Windows
Our empire grows ever strong
Microsoft will take the blows
And return them right along

Refrain 2x

Star Wars troll I never got to post

Truly, the amount of verbal masturbation that went on over this stupid film is way more than a toilet like /. could handle. Not only this movie, but films like LoTR and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon have generated so much noise amongst the faithful here that it looks as though any sort of independent thought is incapable of happening.

Let's look at the facts. Star Wars was a pretty lame movie. Well, that's an exaggeration because it was actually okay. The effects were fairly decent and the story was a good, old fashioned cowboys and indians romp. It's really a wonder that any sequels were ever made (Lucas didn't think it'd make it either). The only good movie ever to make it through the Star Wars/Lucas shit filter was the Empire Strikes back. Finally, Lucas gets around to telling a real story, one that isn't simply a shoot em up. Then came RotJ. Who could possibly think this was any good? Who would think that Lucas could direct another movie of any quality after watching this piece of dreck?

Lucas blew his wad on ESB and hasn't been able to get it up since.

The came the prequels. Is there any among you who think TPM was a good movie? Did it offer anything but fancy CG? It didn't even have realistic foreign languages, for god's sake. It had bad acting, bad characters, and no plot. We know what happens to the little kid who can't act, he becomes Darth Vader. So we spend 2 hours sitting watching something coming that isn't going to surprise us hoping for some glimmer of hope that Lucas can spooge another great movie. Nope, we are all disappointed yet again. Not only was it bad, but it was the worst of the bunch thus far.

Star Wars isn't getting better, it's getting worse.

So here we sit on opening night of the 5th edition of Lucas' wankfest. What is the attraction anymore? Lucas has proved time and again that he simply isn't up to the job of recreating wonder and awe. He's up to creating stupid characters with stupid names who do stupid things.

Anakin Skywalker died years ago. Can't we just let it go?

Mod guesses

[Com2Kid]

That badge post would be +2 insightful minimum if posted under the correct story (though if somebody recognized it as plagiarized it would be modded down in a hurry, that is a rather, err, heh, random chance happening though) and the microsoft song would end up +1 funny, though it could do a bit better job of demonizing them.

For the record, I have only been modded down 4 or 5 times for saying pro-MS or Anti-*Nix stuff. In general the key is to avoid calling people:

Wankers
Faggots
{insert any racist term here}
Guys who will never ever get laid
Cumsuckers
Ass babies

or so forth.

Avoid that and you can pretty much post damn nearly ANYTHING on /. and get modded up for it eventually.

Really the key is just to maintain a passive voice in your writing and not get too much on the offensive until later on in the discussion. :-D After the third or fourth nested level nobody reads the shit except for the person you arguing with any ways.

I have found that if you are polite and kind about it that most /. users will be more then willing to admit the shortcomings of {whatever}, and hell bashing George Lucas is likely the only activity around here that can compete with bashing Microsoft.

(and it is not like the various *nixs don't get bashed all to hell either, yeesh. Not to mention the various open source 'personalities' that tend to be visible within the community.)

Damn :(

[Xerithane]

I'll miss you. I enjoy reading what you have to write.

P.S. Went to Akihabara. Damn it was cool. I was going to post and see if you wanted to get together for a lunch or something in tokyo, but wasn't able to get on a computer. It would have been nice to speak some english while I was over there :)