A Possible Origin Of The Vampire Myth

Vampire mythology goes back to at least the 12th century (Serbia), according to what written records have survived. It’s likely that verbal versions of the legend extend much farther back. What could the origin be?

 

In the middle ages, vampirism, witchcraft, and other tales were believed to be the explanation for plagues. One person would get sick and die, and their “curse” would kill their families and friends. However, this was not the origin of the vampire myth.

 

Before that, there were legends of people who would feed on the flesh and blood of others. These were referred to as vampires (by various names), and many myths were created around them. I wonder if this is the true origin of the vampire myth.

 

In more primitive times, when food was scarce, one survival strategy would have been to find people who were surviving and use them as a supplemental (or sole) source of nourishment. Agronomistic societies–those who farm and organize into settlements/towns/cities–would have been likely targets. A human predator would have used the blackness of night to stumble into town, find a victim, kill them, and–wasting nothing, including blood–get what nourishment they could. Sometimes, another person would have interrupted the act and found the predator first drinking blood from the dying victim, either as a meal in itself, or as a precursor for further predation.

 

In ancient legends, vampires were commonly female. A woman who was alone and not part of a settlement, at a time when physical strength was paramount to individual survival would have been at particular risk of starvation, and more likely to attempt such a desperate act. Since such a person would likely not be able to overpower a healthier, better-fed man in a fight, seduction would have been a primary means of initially pacifying a potential victim.

 

A person who fed in such a fashion would be sickly, as there are not only pathogens to be contracted via the consumption of human flesh; but someone who subsists largely on a diet of probably-skinny humans will become severely malnourished, in time, as a result of protein poisoning. A sickly pallor, a slow heart rate, and other symptoms would have given rise to the classical appearance of vampires.

 

I submit that the origin of the vampire myth is cannibalism, primarily as a result of food scarcity.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire#Ancient_beliefs

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_poisoning#Observations

Millennial

I’m of the generation that started off in one world and then crossed into the next during my formative years.

While those before me barely understood how to use a typewriter, I spent much of my childhood building computers and typing at a rate that would put most secretaries to shame.

My generation was the first to start off talking on a phone with a 6-foot long spiral cord, and then carry around high-powered computers in our pockets as we entered adulthood.

---

As soon as we entered kindergarten or first grade–since, back then, kindergarten wasn’t required–our teachers did a little bit of math on their abacuses and realized that when we graduated high school, it would be the year 2000.  I know you think I’m kidding about the abacuses, but when I started school, that’s actually what we did math on.

Graduating high school in that seminal year somehow carried a lot of weight.

It wasn’t just a number; it meant that humanity was getting a sort of “new start”, in the minds of a lot of people.  Therefore, it was generally instilled in us from an early age that it was up to us and those born at a similar time to change the world drastically and, essentially, fix all the epic screw-ups of our parents, grandparents, and every previous generation.

The funny thing is, while we were starting to learn the world and contemplate how we might change it when we finally got all grown up, it actually did change into something that nobody before our generation could have fully expected or adapted to.

Just about every piece of academic information suddenly became free.  Yes, I know that if you want to really drill into a topic, you still have to take a free online course from an actual university; but essentially, it became the new big thing that, if you didn’t know something, you could type it into Yahoo, Excite, Altavista, and later, Google, and then…you knew it.

This was really cool, and our parents, teachers, and, once we got all grown up, our bosses thought that this was the best thing ever…until they actually got a taste of what it was like to be around someone who knew more than they did.

Not long into my adult-ness I got hired on as a Computer Assisted Drafter at a door company.  This wasn’t because I’d ever done drafting of any kind before, and certainly not because I knew a thing about wood-working, beyond a few projects in elementary school; but the boss had realized that the digital age–whatever that meant–had arrived, and all the famous ink-and-paper magazines said that it was going to make her rich if she embraced it.  Therefore, she eagerly hired the first freshly minted grown-up who knew a particularly great amount about computers to do all the computer-thingies that she and her other employees didn’t really understand.

My first task was to start learning the drafting program, and my second task was to remove the plethora of viruses and other malware from all the computers on the network so that the program would actually run.  That was cool, and dollar signs began to flash before my boss’s eyes.

My next task was to actually start drafting.  This was easy enough: plug in the numbers, draw the lines, and print it out on a really big piece of paper so the guys in the shop could build it.  Except that the head of the woodworking department, who was over me, didn’t trust anything that wasn’t written in graphite.  Therefore, my final task before I could be happily away in my new career was to learn how to teach a person born in the ignorant world of pencils and paper that computers could do things better.  We were running Windows Millennium Edition, so this wasn’t an easy task.  Ultimately, though, despite all the difficulties this entailed, the company failed for the most venerable and inane of reasons: the boss liked to play fast and loose with the books, and apparently “going digital” didn’t make that any more legal.

From this, it quickly became apparent that simply knowing how to do one’s job wasn’t enough to be successful at making money.  One first had to figure out how to deal with the obtuseness of human nature.

Funny thing: in all of our classes on learning “the theory of how to do everything”, not one class was taught on how to actually get along in society.  Stuff like “how to talk to your boss without making him mad” and “what a checkbook is for, and how to make the numbers be nice to you” just weren’t considered important.  Thusly, Millennials, for all our unique insights into what technology does and doesn’t change, and despite being the foremost experts in turning an ignorant world into a knowledgeable one, it’s become a famous fact that, as a group, we simply can’t hold down jobs to save our lives.  People are just too stupid to know when they’re being stupid, and being as how (according to everyone more than 10 years older than us) we were supposed to teach the world how to drastically change for the better, we’ve largely done what any brilliantly unwise person would do and tried to actually teach people how to stop being stupid.

Wikipedia has the following to say about the Millennial generation:

Millennials [were predicted to] become more like the “civic-minded” G.I. Generation with a strong sense of community both local and global…[Some attribute] Millennials with the traits of confidence and tolerance, but also a sense of entitlement and narcissism…Millennials in adulthood are detached from institutions and networked with friends…Millennials are somewhat more upbeat than older adults about America’s future, with 49% of Millennials saying the country’s best years are ahead though they’re the first in the modern era to have higher levels of student loan debt and unemployment…Some employers are concerned that Millennials have too great expectations from the workplace.  Some studies predict that Millennials will switch jobs frequently, holding many more jobs than Gen Xers due to their great expectations…[Some describe] Millennials’ approach to social change as “pragmatic idealism,” a deep desire to make the world a better place combined with an understanding that doing so requires building new institutions while working inside and outside existing institutions.

That last part is a real pain in the butt.  As children and young adults, we were stuck playing the game of, “Yes, teacher/parent/employer, you are older and therefore much wiser than I am.  Sure, I’ll teach you how to open your word processor…again.”  Being the lowest person on the social totem pole because of your age, and having the best insights about how to actually get stuff done in this strange new world is a really fast path toward unemployment, unless you learn to (A) forget that you know what you’re doing, and become satisfied with doing everything the stupid way–at least until your so-called superiors retire, die, or stop telling you how to do things–or (B) try to be your own boss…just like every other unemployed person.  So, “changing the world”, apparently, must first start from a position of not doing anything to change the world, or being jobless.

About that.  Changing the world, I mean.  Sitting on the fence between the world of mostly-unwilling ignorance and the world of willful ignorance means that pretty much every modern “social change” movement not created and run by Millennials looks a lot like a pipe dream created by those who grew up with a search engine good enough to avoid ever having to look at anything they don’t want to.  While the older generation could, in most cases, rightfully claim to be doing the best they knew how, based on the information they were given, the generation after us sounds a little tinny when they say that “something is a basic human right” because they read it on SaveTheWorldWithCuteCatPictures.com.  How do these people who started life with the best access to information that the world has ever seen still not realize that the kinds of supposedly radical changes they’re totally bent on bringing about have either failed or caused total economic, social, political, and governmental meltdowns every time they succeeded?

Sure, it must be a good idea to let Russia keep pushing west, through Ukraine, in spite of the treaty they signed at the end of the Cold War.  Maybe if we shake our fingers at them hard enough, they’ll march back to their own territory like Germany did in 1939.

The truly galling thing about this, though, isn’t the naivety of post-Millennial 20-somethings, but how the previous generation seems to have decided that if something shows up on the Internet when they type “social justice in Crimea” into Google, it must be absolute truth.  Did they totally forget about voting for education reforms that involved teaching HTML code to high school kids who showed any particular aptitude in computing?  It would take me under an hour to create a not-too-shabby-looking web page saying that cheeseburgers cause cancer because cows are naturally-occurring GMOs.  But I won’t bother to do that, because it’s already been done, and a lot of people already believe that cheeseburgers cause cancer because…”GMOs!!!!”…to a sufficient degree that they’re willing to start a protest in front of Burger King.  They might even bring their very-skinny-but-still-cute-enough-to-post-pictures-on-Pinterest vegan cats with them.

To put all this another way, Millennials who really absorbed and believed what they were taught in school tend not to start “blooming” until they’re in their thirties, if ever.

Wikipedia also notes that some sociologists refer to us as the “Peter Pan Generation”, and as horrible as it might seem to be called that, I can’t help but agree with this assessment.  How does a person learn how life works before the dawn of the Information Age, then learn how to be the fore-runners of that age, then learn how to avoid pissing people off by being too good at it, and then finally learn how to have a career (read: wait for the older generations to die or retire) without taking a long time doing it?  If we’re lucky, we’ll have started our careers by age 35, and not hate ourselves for the dead end careers we picked back before all the careers that were profitable and fun switched with all the careers that didn’t used to be.  Some of us are bloody lucky to land a “career” at a fast food restaurant by virtue of having a bachelor’s degree.  And our parents’ generation is all up in arms because we complain about having $50,000 of student debt and want the minimum wage to be raised.

Well, except for those Millennials who, against everyone’s wishes, didn’t attend or finish college.

Sure, there are a lot of people my age who managed to buy degrees that will eventually pay themselves off.  However, most of the people I know who were born around 1982 did what all the adults told them to and ended up with little more than very expensive pieces of paper and a few years wasted in college housing.

One the upside, additional time spent learning things means that, to an even greater degree, those who spent at least a little time studying the “cutting edge” in such institutions know more about this “brave, new world” than people who didn’t attend college, at all.  On the down side, we’re once again stuck trying to convince people older than us that we do, in fact, know some better ways in which to do things, that are different from how they’ve always been done, without getting into trouble for saying so.

It’s worth noting, however, that there is a very sizeable contingent of Millennials who have figured out how to “live the American Dream.”  Overwhelmingly, these are the people who were uninterested in, or just too stupid to understand all that new-fangled computer stuff, back in high school.  Sorry, but those Millennials who were good at these things know exactly who and what I’m talking about.  They did as their parents and grandparents did, before them, and got jobs doing stuff that wasn’t, in any way, going to change the world.  Some examples include accounting, vehicle repair, construction work, bartending, marketing, and anything involving keeping your head down in a bureaucracy.  Perhaps the rest of us realized too late that anything that has generated tax revenue consistently for a few thousand years will, by extension of a famous proverb, result in job security–even if it’s the sort of thing that only a trained monkey could totally avoid feeling suicidal about.  Surprisingly, most people who actually got into computers when Forbes was predicting that people who got into computers would get rich, currently do computer repair or technical support for close to minimum wage.  After all, how much are people really willing to spend to keep a computer running when they can get a cheap-and-crappy new one for around $300?

I’ve never met a business owner who wasn’t willing to save a penny, now at the cost of a dollar, later.  Computers are like that, and contrary to what one might expect, business owners are willing to pay more than most to keep theirs running.  That should put things nicely into perspective.

This has been a rather long rant, and what I really mean to say by all of it is that people of other generations gripe way too much about people of my generation not “hitting the ground running”, “grabbing life with both hands”, “pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps”, and all that jazz.  The fact is, we did all that, and it turned out that both the ground and life were covered in grease.  A lot of us fell flat on our faces with suddenly-ending careers, nervous breakdowns and other mental health catastrophes, stock market crashes, unrealistic expectations instilled in us from an early age, and so on.  That we’re at all willing to try–yet again–to get back on our feet in spite of how painful and discouraging our early adulthood was, is a sign of just how great this generation really is.

And we are going to change the world, damn it.

The Dreaded Blue Screen of Death

This is a poem I wrote in 2002 for my college creative writing class.  The professor hated it.  Most other people love it, or at least don’t hate it.  I’m pretty sure that’s a metaphor for college education, in general.

The Dreaded Blue Screen of Death

The archaic din of white text superimposed upon a black screen is no more.
The blinking curser and the cryptic jibe,
“Syntax error,”
have receded from the much-coveted position of
“operating system”
into the subcutaneous untreaden cave of
“MS-DOS Mode.”

Upon the release of Microsoft’s 1995 crowning innovation,
the new “Windows” operating system,
fully equipped with tranquil desktop themes
and a myriad of cheery, sound-coordinated pop-up menus,
people around the world rejoiced.

No more will the unconscionable
Config.sys errors
of yesteryear interfere with the high-profile,
high-fidelity
file management systems of modern times.

The gratingly irritating beeps
and infinite lists of “Bad commands” or “Filenames;”
the stubbornly unbootable hard-drive has given way;
techies around the world groaned
for they knew that the days of horribly stubborn operating systems had ended,
and their jobs as the unapproachable gurus of the Great OS
would soon cease to exist.

But there was hope.

For the dreaded Blue Screen of Death has been replaced
by the Gray Window of Frustration.

Woe be
to the unsuspecting user who
dares check
the internal workings of his system—
who dares click on

Control Panel > System > Performance

the windows popping up—
“cascading”—
presenting him with that
forty-two billion dollar grin of approval,

and the user,
piles of driver disks and small papers on the desk in front of him,
stares,
with half-closed eyes
at the messages:

Compatibility-mode paging reduces overall system performance.
Drive C is using MS-DOS compatibility mode file system.

Noooo!
say his unflinching, half-closed eyes.
Briefly,
he reminisces about the real operating systems of old.
He thinks,
why did they have to make this thing so dang user friendly?

The “Default”
green desktop stares back at him,
unaware of its error.
He stares for a moment longer
at those two
insolent messages,
and at the five-cent euphemisms–
the kind that make this operating system
the most widely used operating system in the world–
and explain why his computer is running so DANG SLOW!

The stuttering CPU fan blows hot air
out of its overworked medium tower.
Glaring light from the ceiling fan reflects
in the dark window behind the computer.
He stares, dazed, tired
at the clock on the Taskbar.

“I should have hired a techie,”
he murmurs as he futily replaces the yellow driver disk
with yet another version of the software.
He restarts the hardware installation program.

Windows will now search for any new Plug and Play devices on your system.
Your screen may go blank during this process. This is normal.

One pulsating vein highlights his greasy forehead
as he clicks the Next button.

Please wait while Windows searches for new Plug and Play devices.

For a few fleeting moments the hard drive activity indicator flickers its compliance.
“Mother board resources, mother board resources,” he chants,
in vain hopes of coercing the stupid machine into subjecting itself to his will.

For the next five minutes there is no activity.
His limp fingers grope around on the keyboard for those three familiar buttons:
CTRL+ALT+DELETE.

The End Task window doesn’t appear.

He sighs as he presses them again.
Then chuckles, reminiscing,

as he longingly smiles at the familiar blue screen in front of him.

The Cowardly Artist

I just finished writing this, and I performed it for the first time last night (at 100th Monkey, at 5th and Ivy in Chico, CA, USA).  Enjoy!

Update June 13th, 2013: Added hyperlinks for some of the more obscure references.

 

The Cowardly Artist

Pierce was gallant,
and Pierce was brave;
and pierce who oft dropped
all his candle-staves:

He was an artist;
he was a man;
and one day he got noticed
by his “Uncle Sam.”

“Pierce!,” it said,
in letters written by Sam’s hand,
“Get yourself off of that fat old can!

“Your country needs you,
by golly, by Josh!
And you’ll get into our army;
and we’ll even pay you dosh!”

But Pierce was a tenor,
and a carpenter by trade,
and a painter,
and a writer,
and a maker of candle-staves…

Though none of the latter typically
made it to the Pick ‘N’ Save…

…But still, his arté—
better than shoddy
(at least, when he was at his best)—
put fires into his eyes,
and bellows into his chest;
and pins under his thighs;
And he’d typically be found,
tinkering, on this wise:

“Hmph…
powder of copper oxide,
for green…
or…yellow…
ah, crap;
another one for the scraps…drat.”

…But since Uncle Sam
was a bitter old coot,
he dragged Pierce in to boot camp,
and taught him to shoot,

…And to make his shirts tidy,
wherewith his pants and shiny boots,
could be found next to his bunk, ever-tended,
and his pants be found ever-mended,
and his potatoes peeled, if ever he trended
to do any thing which was not what was intended,

Until one day,
with his bunk-sheets tight and neat,
Uncle Sam, the mal-contented, said,
“Get your sorry backsides up-ended!
We’re going to no-where’s stink-hole
because our country needs being defended!”

So off Pierce went!

Of course, old Pierce,
he felt like a clown,
with his britches still too-baggy,
yet his “aft-pants” none too saggy;
he stepped his toes fairly lively,
and for fear of becoming bloody-nosed,
he kept his wise-aching pie-hole closed.

…

Then, finally, came Pierce
to those fierce enemy gates,
with his sword in hand
(as ever he imagined it for romance sake),
and with his buckler strapped on
(though having the strength of just paper),
and his satchel by his side,
and his fake military pride in his eyes;

He approached therewith to the enemy gates
but there being a man of much “finer” heart,
he decided to choose “the better part.”

“A shield is good; and like, a sword in hand,
but I don’t fancy them much as art,
so here, I’ll go and depart.”

So, fancy-free,
and with wise old feet,
the artist man,
he beat them fleet

…To the country-side,
with his ponch much a-swagger,
he departed—“À dieu!”
to those who called him a “tail-wagger!”

…

The country-side was fine,
full of old wine,
and fat old swine;
and that foreign bacon,
with some good rib-racks
was always pulled tastily
off those fat, old hogs’ backs!

…

‘Course, the captain-fierce,
was mad at Pierce,
and said of that old ar-tisan,
“If we find him, he’ll see the “mort-isian!”

…

But Pierce didn’t care,
so he grew back his hair,
and leaned back in his new chair,
and at the ceiling began to stare…

Until one day, he thought just a little too hard,
and figured,
“What about those things we call, ‘tran-sis-tars?’
I’ll bet if I take the wire, just so,
with a fourth lead, inserted top to bottom—parallel, but in a row,
and cram in a rectifier so that the direction we could know;
then, could not this new ‘tran-sis-tar’ count to,
‘do re me fa so?’”

…

Then, were the generals a lot less irate,
and came to Pierce, saying,
“Your court marshal can wait;”
and,
“let us look here, at this, your creation;
let us not hesitate!
For you’re still needed by your nation!
Would you like to return back, again to your state?
Where you can, once again,
exist without further perturbation?”
And Pierce said…

“No.”

So, to the ire of all those generals, and colonels and captains, too,
he released his design under the name of,
“GNU:”

A General Public License,
like a thumbing of his nose,
toward those who scorned home-brew—
and used not 3D printers;
and his genius,
and his designs…rose.

But never did the generals,
nor the critics of GRU;
nor the “Rooskies;”
nor the Chinese;
nor the successors of Vargas, too

Make weapons with Pierce’s tech,
nor his body, nor his mind.
And though he was a traitor
(as it was most popularly defined),
his invention over-lasted
the guile of military minds.

…

Of course, Pierce was fat,
and still ornery,
and still cantankerous as a loon,
and still his many detractors said,
“He’s mooching off our spoon!”

But Pierce, with his inventions,
didn’t fade from moon to moon;
and his sky never darkened,
that untimely, but brilliant buffoon!

So, centuries later,
when we say the name of “Famous Pierce”
it’s the name of  one “Cowardly Artist”
that flows out,
into our ears!

–Dane Mutters, 2013

Humor: If Dogs Worked in Offices

I didn’t come up with this, but I found it so enjoyable (and anthropologically-apt, if you know what I mean) that I decided to re-post it here.  I don’t know who the original author is, but if somebody does, I’ll be happy to attribute.

If Dogs Worked in Offices

 

Secretary

Facepalm: Some Truly Wonderful Puns

I got these in an email, and thought they were sufficiently “cringe-worthy” to post here.

1.  King Ozymandias of Assyria was running low on cash after years of war with the Hittites.  His last great possession was the Star of the Euphrates, the most valuable diamond in the ancient world.  Desperate, he went to Croesus, the pawnbroker, to ask for a loan.  Croesus said, “I’ll give you 100,000 dinars for it.”  

“But I paid a million dinars for it,” the King protested.  “Don’t you know who I am?  I am the king!”

Croesus replied, “When you wish to pawn a Star, makes no difference who you are.”

 

2.  Evidence has been found that William Tell and his family were avid bowlers.  Unfortunately, all the Swiss league records were destroyed in a fire, …and so we’ll never know for whom the Tells bowled.

 

3.  A man rushed into a busy doctor’s office and shouted, “Doctor!  I think I’m shrinking!”  The doctor calmly responded, “Now, settle down.  You’ll just have to be a little patient.”

 

 4.  A marine biologist developed a race of genetically engineered dolphins that could live forever if they were fed a steady diet of seagulls.  One day, his supply of the birds ran out so he had to go out and trap some more.  On the way back, he spied two lions asleep on the road.  Afraid to wake them, he gingerly stepped over them.  Immediately, he was arrested and charged with– transporting gulls across sedate lions for immortal porpoises.

 

 5.  Back in the 1800’s the Tate’s Watch Company of Massachusetts wanted to produce other products, and since they already made the cases for watches, they used them to produce compasses.  The new compasses were so bad that people often ended up in Canada or Mexico rather than California .  This, of course, is the origin of the expression — “He who has a Tate’s is lost!”

 

 6.  A thief broke into the local police station and stole all the toilets and urinals, leaving no clues.  A spokesperson was quoted as saying, “We have absolutely nothing to go on.”

 

 7.  An Indian chief was feeling very sick, so he summoned the medicine man. After a brief examination, the medicine man took out a long, thin strip of elk rawhide and gave it to the chief, telling him to bite off, chew, and swallow one inch of the leather every day.  After a month, the medicine man returned to see how the chief was feeling.  The chief shrugged and said, “The thong is ended, but the malady lingers on.”

 

 8.  A famous Viking explorer returned home from a voyage and found his name missing from the town register.  His wife insisted on complaining to the local civic official who apologized profusely saying, “I must have taken Leif off my census.”

 

 9.  There were three Indian squaws.  One slept on a deer skin, one slept on an elk skin, and the third slept on a hippopotamus skin.  All three became pregnant.  The first two each had a baby boy.  The one who slept on the hippopotamus skin had twin boys.  This just goes to prove that… the squaw of the hippopotamus is equal to the sons of the squaws of the other two hides.  (Some of you may need help with this one).

 

 10.  A skeptical anthropologist was cataloging South American folk remedies with the assistance of a tribal Brujo who indicated that the leaves of a particular fern were a sure cure for any case of constipation.  When the anthropologist expressed his doubts, the Brujo looked him in the eye and said, “Let me tell you, with fronds like these, you don’t need enemas.”

What PC Gamers Think About PC Game Critics

I just noticed this while looking for a specific game review.  These are screenshots of the “top rated games” for PC on Metacritic(.com), as of 11:30pm on October 8th, 2012.  You’ll notice that many of the top-rated games according to the critics (such as Diablo III, Max Payne 3) are in roughly the opposite position, according to user ratings.  I’ve noticed a trend of virtually any “AAA” (large-budget) game that’s released getting “universal acclaim” from critics no matter how much users hate it.  Of course, there are a few games that the critics and users largely agree upon–but is it by virtue of good critique or just random chance?  How many such games are “AAA” titles?  Have you ever seen a Metacritic page where a large-budget game gets universal shame from the critics?  I’m pretty sure I haven’t.  By contrast, user reviews seem to “blast” any game that’s genuinely awful–with very little regard for how much money was put into making it, or how good its ad campaign was.

This has bugged me for a long time: why are the game critics so often very, very wrong? I’ve spent a fair bit of money in the past on games that were supposed to be quite good, according to game critics, only to find that they were utter garbage (recent Call of Duty titles, anyone?).  Can you enumerate the money you’ve wasted on such games?  Don’t even get me started on pre-purchases…

So, what do you think?  Are the critics somehow being paid/bribed by game makers, or are their tastes simply very biased against what most PC gamers like?

Open Letter to October2011.org and the Occupy Movement

This is an open letter to the nominal leaders of the Occupy movement.  I sent this letter via the web form at October2011.org a few months ago, but since I strongly suspect that must such web forms are shortcuts to the web/mail server’s “trash can,” I’m posting this for a wider audience–also in hopes of attracting the attention of Occupy leaders.

This is particularly pertinent, since there’s a push right now in that organization–and in the Movement–to think of and perform out-of-the-ordinary peaceful demonstrations (for the purpose of garnering better public attention).  Since I find the most recent “stunt” (I don’t think there’s a better word for this one) of dropping $5,000 in small bills out of a high window with Occupy-related information on each bill was rather stupid (and excessively expensive), I’m hoping that with the right verbal “nudge,” we can get some better ideas put into action.  The letter references a failed flashmob attempt by this same group–which could have gone off spectacularly well if they’d had a better idea of how to go about it.  Recent edits are in square brackets: “[ ]”.

The Letter

Hello. My name is Dane Mutters, and I’ve been following october2011.org
since before the Occupy movement “took off.” I’ve been participating in my local Occupy group (Occupy the Dream, in Chico, CA), and have been contributing mostly ideas for likely-successful courses of action, partly due to my chronic disability (that prevents me from being active in-person), and partly because I happen to be a skilled writer with an interest in global politics and trends.

Today, I’m writing to you in favor of further “flash mob” actions, and with suggestions for how to make such actions undeniably effective. Soon (I hope), I’ll be posting an essay on my blog regarding this (danemutters.wordpress.com
), [no, I haven’t gotten around to this yet] but since timeliness is important, I’m going to give you a “very brief” summary of how I think properly-executed flashmobs could utterly transform this movement from a global wish and curiosity (notwithstanding all the work we put into it), into a truly unstoppable global phenomenon. I hope that my writing herein is sufficiently lucid and correct to be helpful.

Before I continue, I want to show you a particular video of a flash mob performance in Cork City, Ireland. Specifically, I want you to look at the expressions on the faces of the participants and non-participants, as well as note that people attempt to join in, who apparently were not originally a part of the initial flash mob.

Please note the following:
1) The genuinely joyous demeanors of those participating.
2) The increasingly joyous demeanors of those watching.
3) The contagious nature of the event.
4) The aftermath of the event: particularly, the applause and instant sense of community with complete strangers that it created.

I’ve been trying for a couple months, now, to figure out just how such a thing could work for the Occupy movement. After all, it’s both publicity, and (more importantly) better than publicity: it creates community where there was previously isolation. It creates empathy where there was previously animosity–or at least a general sense of annoyance (due to crowds, inconveniences of city life, differences between people, etc.). The one major problem I kept running into with my “thought experiments” is this:

How can you organize and perform a flashmob amongst strongly polarized political activists, in a sea of people who may already fear us, without (1) inadvertently creating a riot as soon as the police learn of it (which they will, given the de facto infiltration you’ve already explained) [see the october2011.org web site for explanations of this phenomenon]; and (2) without creating any kind of fear among those watching. Also, the matter of getting participants who are willing to sing and dance could prove problematic, despite the solidarity of occupiers, in general.

Fortunately, someone else has solved “1” and “2” for me, already. The simplest gesture, it would seem, may well be the best: laughter. Likewise, laughter is well-known to be contagious, so long as it’s not perceived as threatening or otherwise without mirth. (The latter is probably still an issue, given the context.) Unfortunately, the most recent “laugh riot” seems to have gotten very little press–and what I’ve seen of it has been less-than-favorable. (Mostly, it seems to portray the event as lackluster, if not utterly failed or “stupid.”) So, here are my suggestions for “doing it right,” if I may be so bold. I hope you are the right people to contact about this; since the Occupy movement is fairly decentralized (or so it seems), I’ve struggled to find just who might possess a modicum of authority in organizational matters; thus far, you seem like the most likely candidates. 🙂

1) Give more advanced notice, and make sure the word gets out in a more comprehensive manner. Since police and others can hardly predict just who’s going to start randomly laughing–unless we move to a specific location en-masse–non-occupiers finding out before-hand won’t be much of an issue. Also, the utterly non-threatening nature of laughter (except for its PR effects on those being laughed at) is extremely unlikely to produce any kind of armed/violent response; and if it does, such a response will be nearly impossible to justify to the public.
2) “A la Improv Everywhere,” I suggest using cell phone messaging to organize the event as it progresses. This way, one could send a mass SMS to the effect of, “Go to the nearest crowded area and mill about in a normal fashion. Wait for further instructions.” Then, the next set of instructions might be, “Read the next SMS and laugh out-loud.” This next SMS should be a hilarious joke of a generally non-political nature (so as to produce genuine mirth, not sardonic laughter), which has been voted as the funniest joke by a large-but-not-public panel of electorates. Keeping the joke private, at first, will help by making sure that few people have heard it before (for obvious reasons). The joke should be non-offensive, but genuinely hilarious. Also, it should fit into a single, fairly brief SMS message. Alternatively, one could use an audio recording, but that would require a data plan–which may be a problem for some people. (You could also distribute audio files of the joke in advance, with strict instructions to wait until the right moment to listen to them.)
3) Then, you should make sure to have a few, selected participants present to film the sudden outbreak of laughter. Some people will surely pull out camera phones, anyway, but it’s best to plan for such publicity ahead of time–and it’s essential that nearly everyone participating NOT try to record the event, as that would reduce the contagious effect of the laughter. (It’s best for non-participants to not realize, at first, that it’s a flash mob; this seems to have the best effect, judging from the many videos I’ve watched.)
4) Post it all online, in as many places as you can manage, and try to get it to “go viral” (as naturally as possible, of course, so that it doesn’t feel contrived in any way, to the general public).
5) Finally, it’ll be essential to come up with new variations on the “Occupy flash mob,” since laughter, alone, will get old fairly quickly, as is the nature of publicity, in general. It’s important to keep these events highly energized–but utterly non-threatening–as well as “fresh” to the public mind. We want the public looking forward to(!) these events, rather than dreading them or finding them annoying.

Yes, I said “very brief.” 🙂 The issue of forming community around humor and breaks from daily drudgery is a complex topic, but for our purposes, right now, I think that the foregoing should suffice.

Please contact me ([my email address; just reply to this post], or [my phone number, which I’m not posting in public) if you think I might be onto something with this; I’d very much like to participate in a more impactful way than I’ve hitherto been able to do. (Also, I have some experience in marketing, including print layout and a bit of copywriting, which I’d gladly be willing to volunteer to the Movement free-of-charge.)

I wish you all the best in your endeavors. Again, please keep me posted on what you think of the above. Thanks.

–Dane

I look forward to reading what others think about this.

Slashdot Trolling FAQ 0.6

I just came across this on an old Slashdot (slashdot.org) comments page.  I thought it was hilarious (and pretty accurate, to boot), so I’m re-posting it here.  Since the original poster was using the “non-login,” “Anonymous Coward” (probably for good reason), I can’t cite the author…but “my hat is tipped,” anyway.  🙂

Notably, the article being discussed was about the similarities between chimp and human genomes; and the immediate follow-up comment to this one (by 403Forbidden) said, “5 million years later, and we’re still throwing poo at each other…I think i see how we’re 99.4% alike…”  How insightful!  X-D

 

The /. troll HOWTO

This is version 0.6 of a troll HOWTO, sort of a companion piece to jsm’s excellent troll FAQ. As a draft, comments and criticism are always welcome, if not appreciated 🙂

Section 1 – Trolling techniques
There are techniques used by successful trolls to elicit the maximum amount of responses from unthinking /.ers. This section is dedicated to explaining how to use these in the course of your trolls. Remember though, a great troll can break any or all of these and still be successful…

Timing
Because you’re posting as an AC, your troll will generally be ignored in favour of posters using their accounts, and so getting in early is essential. A good guideline is to get into the first 20 posts, so that people reading the article will see the troll before it is swamped out. One way of increasing the speed with which you get your troll into play is to prepare them beforehand, and then quickly customise them for the current article. This is easier than it sounds since /. typically repeats stories with small variations and runs lots of similar stories.

Note that this is why Jon Katz stories are pretty worthless as trolling material – by the time you’ve found the article and prepared a troll there’s already 50+ posts on it, most of them flaming Jon Katz anyway 🙂

Exposure
Once you’ve got your troll in, you need people to actually read it. You also want replies – /.ers are more likely to read your troll if it starts a large thread. You also want to remember that some people have set their comment thresholds to values higher than 0 – to get the attention of these you either want to get your post moderated up (see Style, below) or get a reply which gets moderated up to 4 or 5, in which case your troll becomes visible to all.

Accounts
An alternative to the time-honoured tradition of AC trolling is that of creating a “troll” account. This gives you the advantage of posting at 1 rather than 0, and slashbots are more likely to take you seriously, especially if you at least sound reasonable. If you do this, try to avoid posting stuff where it is obvious you’re a troll under the account – post it anoymously instead – some slightly more canny readers actually check your user info before they reply. Not many though 🙂

The ultimate goal of the troll account is to secure the +1 bonus, which is currently received once you hit 26 points of Karma. To get there, employ the techniques of karma whoring that we see every day on /. and watch the karma roll in. And of course once you get the +1 bonus, the world is your oyster in terms of /. Posts made at a default of 2 hit even those people with the threshold of 2, are more likely to get moderated up even further if they are at all coherent, and people tend to lose their critical thinking abilities in the face of the +1 bonus. Milk it for all it’s worth.

Layout
To get people reading it a troll needs to be easily readable. Make sure you break it down into easily digestible paragraphs, use HTML tags where appropriate (but always make sure you close them properly) and use whitespace appropriately.

Size
Generally a troll shouldn’t be too short, otherwise it’ll get lost in the crowd. A workable minimum is a couple of medium paragraphs. Conversely, it shouldn’t be too long, or no-one will bother to read it. Keep it to a happy medium.

Spelling
Whilst spelling is important if you want the troll to be taken “seriously”, key spelling mistakes can draw out the spelling zealots, especially if you mis-spell the name of a venerated /. hero, like Linus Torveldes or Richard Strawlman (thanks dmg). Related to this is the use of the wrong word, explaining an acronym as being something it isn’t or making a word into an acronym even when it isn’t.

Subject
The subject line needs to draw attention to your post without making it obvious that it is a troll. A simple statement of the main point of your argument can work here.

Style
Once you realise that most moderators don’t bother to read past the first paragraph or two, you can use this fact to craft trolls that can be moderated up as “Insightful” (note that I mean this in the /. sense rather than the real-world sense). Start off fairly reasonable, making statements that are /. friendly and not being too controversial. As the troll goes on, make it more and more controversial, building it up for the coup de grace in the final paragraph.

Linking
As we all know, a post with links is considered “informative” by the /. crowd. Moderators love it, and they rarely check the links, so be sure to include as many as possible. And make them wrong – a link to the Perl website should instead point to the Python website instead, and vice versa. The other alternative to incorrect links is “useful” links to places like http://www.linux.org and http://www.microsoft.com i.e. places /.ers could never have found on their own 🙂

Feeding
The ideal troll requires no feeding – it runs on its own, generating flamewars between clueless /.ers for your amusement. But often a troll requires some help and so you should consider feeding it. Feeding is best reserved for people making either completely clueless responses, people making responses with holes in, or those wonderful people who write a 2000-word point-by-point rebuttal of your troll.

Know your audience
Always keep in mind the kind of things advocated on /. so that you can play on and against them. This is why anti-Linux, creationist, gun-loving, pro-corporation trolls work well – the vast majority of /.ers hold the opposite viewpoints. And if a few people agree with you, so much the better – it merely validates your viewpoint in the eyes of readers.

Arrogance
Be arrogant. You, as a troll, know that you’re right. No other explanation could exist. The wronger the “fact”, the more assertively you should state it. Make it clear that you are better than everyone else – you know the truth and they are just too stupid to realise it. Use plenty of sarcasm, and use “quotes” to show it to people too dumb to realise.

Offensiveness
Being offensive in your initial troll can be counter-productive – it causes moderators to mark you down as flamebait in general. But if you’re feeding, then you can get away with calling /.ers all kinds of things. Make broad generalisations about /. readers – call them “long-haired Linux zealots”, “socialist open-source bigots” or whatever. Stereotyping is encouraged – people always want to think that they’re an individual, and will point this out to you given half a chance.

Indifference
Great for articles with a political or social bent, this kind of troll expresses complete indifference to the topic at hand, wondering who on Earth cares about it. An alternative method is to say that the topic only concerns a certain group of people – criminals, idiots, hackers (always use this instead of crackers) or whatever group you want to offend.

Sympathy
Appear to take the same stance as the people you’re trying to troll – claim you’re as much a fan of Linux as the next man, but… This way you can make all kinds of claims in the sure knowledge that you actually know what you’re talking about. A great phrase to use here is “In my experience”. Remember to act like all the things you’re pointing out are unfortunate but true.

The common touch
Always accuse /.ers of being elitist. This is an easy thing to do seeing as a lot of them are. Claim that is their grandmother couldn’t use it, then they are just into it to feel better than Joe Sixpack rather than “doing it for the average user”. This is always great for working into anti-Linux trolls – attack command-line tools and poorly designed desktops.

The 31337 touch
The opposite of the above. Claim that technology or whatever is only for the elite of society and that any attempt to open it up for everyone is wrong, an attack on intellectualism and possibly even dangerous. If people were meant to understand these things then they would, and it’s their fault if they’re too stupid to learn.

Contradiction
Never be afraid to contradict yourself, even in the space of a single sentence. The phrases “I am a top programmer who codes in VB” or “I am a supporter of open source who uses NT at work and 95 at home” will be sure to get a response from some weenie smugly pointing out the contradiction. Confuse the issue more by engaging in contradiction when you are feeding – this will confuse /.ers who will then make even more stupid replies, leaving them even more wide open for response.

Clues

If you’re feeling brave, give the reader clues that this is an obvious troll. The classic example here is dmg’s stock phrase “I am often accused of trolling (whatever that is)”, but also feel free to use phrases like “I have not read the article, and I don’t know much about XYZ but I feel I must comment”. If anyone responds to a troll with these kinds of clues in it, feel free to bask in the glow of knee-jerk /. responses.

Denial
If you’re unlucky someone will accuse you of being a troll (surely not!) and try and ruin it for you. If you don’t want it all to end there, then be sure to counter it by accusing them of being small-minded and petty, saying that it’s easier for them to say it’s a troll than to accept that people have different opinions. Be sure to say this in the subject line, especially if their subject was the infamous “YHBT. YHL. HAND.”

Claiming credit
Given that /. has its community of regular trolls (hi guys!), it’s only polite to publish your troll on one of the so-called “hidden” forums for all to see and admire. This way, you get to bask in the praise of other trolls, they get to contribute to your’s if they want to, and you get an easy way to find the troll later on when you want to check on its progress 🙂

As for when to post it, that’s a matter of opinion really. You can either post it straight away or leave it will after people start biting. Remember that the troll forum is also frequented by non-trolls, and sometimes you may get a self-declared “troll-buster” try and expose you. But remember, /.ers always post before thinking, and often it doesn’t matter at all.

There is no real current forum at the moment thanks to various spammers hitting the sids, but try trolltalk, the original troll sid started by 80md and osm way back in the day. Generally all postings are done there as an AC, with your name at the end of the post. Include a link to the troll somewhere in the text, which ideally will be directly to the post and its replies – click on the #XX link in the thread to get there.

Ending the troll
Sometimes you just get bored with a troll, or people start posting genuinely thoughtful stuff in reply (it does happen). When this happens it might be time to own up to the troll with a helpful “YHBT. YHL. HAND.” post. Sometimes people will carry on a discussion of the issue, and if you’re really lucky (and it was a great troll) they will completely fail to believe you and carry on arguing. If that happens, pat yourself on the back for writing a great troll 🙂

The cheap $3 crack
Finally, when all else fails and your troll gets moderated down to (-1, Troll) within ten seconds of you posting it, the only honourable thing to do is to accuse the moderators of smoking the cheap $3 crack (again) and give up 😦

Section 2 – Types of troll
The Maniac
Probably the most popular kind of troll, the Maniac holds an opinion on something, and won’t budge from that opinion no matter what evidence to the contrary is presented. If challenged, the Maniac will simply get more and more agitated and abusive, deriding his opponents as “idiots”, “wrong-thinking”, “dangerous” and “subversive”. Generally the Maniac takes a position that opposes the prevalent /. beliefs, but a similar effect can be achieved by taking a typical /. viewpoint and pushing it to ridiculous extremes.

Maniacs can be crafted for practically every article /. posts, although some are more obvious targets than others. Civil liberty articles, especially on things like censorship, DMCA, UCITA that really get /.ers riled up, are usually extremely fruitful grounds for a well-crafted maniac. The other obvious type of article is anything which could possibly involve religion, especially evolution 🙂

Here are some fruitful avenues to explore:

The Right-Wing Maniac
Always popular, the right-wing maniac (RWM) is a God-fearing, gun-toting, flag-waving American, and proud of it. They don’t care about the rest of the world, unless it’s to “prove” that America is better than everything else, and they cannot stand liberal whining over civil rights. They hate the moral decay of America and want it to revert into a nation of heterosexual, Christian whites like it was meant to be. Woe betide anyone that dares to suggest otherwise.

Religion
There are two ways to approach this kind of maniac. The harder to pull off is the militant atheist, but this is quite common amongst /. posters and you would have to be very offensive to get this to work. Of course with religion trolls, the argument can go on for ever once it’s started… The more common approach is the Christian fundamentalist. They are ignorant, intolerant and bigoted in the extreme. For them the Bible is the inerrant word of God revealed to man – it contains no flaws and no contradictions. Thus they are strict Creationists – mentions of evolution or cosmology will set them off on vitriolic rants. Flaming denunciations of anyone daring to contradict the “Word of God” are the way to go, and any kind of proof can always be ignored by appealing to “secular humanist brainwashing”. And let’s not forget, the USA is the greatest nation on Earth because it has the righteous power of Jesus Christ behind it.

Ideology
Pick a philosophy, any philosophy. This troll is a troll with a cause – they have found some kind of ideological truth, and are out to expose every other philosophy as a sham. Whether it be libertarianism, objectivism, communism or capitalism, this troll will point out the obvious “flaws” in any other philosophies, whilst spouting dogma about their own. And the best thing is – you don’t even need to know that much about what you’re spouting – making doctrinaire mistakes will get both sides of the argument flaming you, adding to the fun.

Software
This is an old favourite and crops up in many forms, covering the gamut from OS maniacs (Linux zealots, MS-apologists or embittered BSD fanatics), language maniacs (Pascal vs. C, C vs. C++, C++ vs. Java, Perl vs. Python, VB vs. everything), application maniacs(GIMP vs. Photoshop, Netscape vs. IE, vi vs. emacs) and also includes people who complain about how technology should only be for the 31337 hackers.

Guns
Americans love their guns, and will always fight passionately for their Constitutionally guarenteed rights to bear arms and shoot people. Even the slightest hint of criticism of this will bring down the wrath of a thousand and one enraged gun-owners on you, so it’s always a great point to work into a troll 🙂

The Expert
The Expert is someone who is “savvy” in their particular field, and is perfectly willing to give their opinion on any topic even vauguely related to their field. The Expert is most likely to be from a field which /.ers as a rule despise – the classic example is dumb marketing guy, but try consultants, lawyers, politicians, lobbyists, executives, journalists (just think Jon Katz). With this kind of troll sweeping statements with little content are the norm, along wire dire portents of future catastrophe and dark hints of “insider knowledge”.

Some possible angles to exploit:

Industry knowledge
The expert knows the computing industry from the inside – as a long-term pro, they can dispense knowledge knowing that they can “speak for the industry”. Their smug self-satisfaction is bound to annoy, as is any suggestion that things aren’t the way that /.ers would like it – saying “Linux requires the rock-solid guarantee of a trusted company like Microsoft” or “Apache cannot be trusted for mission-critical enterprise platforms” is guaranteed to get you denials explaining exactly why you’re wrong, in excruciating detail.

Helpful hints
With their tech-savvy (or law-savvy or whatever) experience, the expert is obviously the best person to point out what’s wrong with things or to give out useful “factual” information. In fact this probably works best with lawyer trolls – for all that /.ers protest “IANAL”, they certainly seem to think they could be, and any mistakes you make will send them rushing to prove themselves by correcting you.

Offtopic Trolls
Not really a “troll” in the strict Jargon File sense of the word, but they certainly should be included here 🙂 This category includes parodies, offtopic weirdness any all kinds of amusing stuff. Not really my area of expertise, this stuff is mainly done by gnarphlager and opensourceman. Thanks to gnarphlager for this section.

Offtopic trolls, like any other, come in almost as many colours as an iMac, but generally not as cute. But then again, a good offtopic “troll” can affect more people than a repulsive little gumdrop on your desk, because you need to have someone SEE your desk before they can react. Simple? Moreso than even my overblown prose could indicate. Some basic examples:

The serial troll
Write a story. Keep expanding it. It doesn’t matter what article you post it under, so long as it’s high up. If you want people to recognize you, pick a couple themes or symbols, and carry them on throughout the story. Other alternatives include back linking or including the entire story, but adding more each time. Be funny if you want. Or if you don’t feel like being funny, just be really weird. Someone will react.

The random troll
This has nothing to do with anything. Be it a stream of consciousness rant, or a description of the corner of your desk. Another favorite is a monologue, read as if spoken from any one given entity to another. The more outlandish, the better (a pair of socks talking to a mousepad, for example). If you really wanted to be artsy, work in an actual metaphor or legitimate meaning behind it, but it’s not necessary.

The vaguely related troll
Start out with a comment about the article. Have a definite opinion of it. Then, after a little while, disintegrate into randomness. All roads eventually can eventually lead to cheese (yum), Natalie Portman, cannibalism, toasters, squirrels, futons, you name it. All it takes is a little bit of creativity. Oh, and feel free to use other trolls’ motifs. Open source and all that 😉

General tips:

If it’s funny for a fleeting moment, then it’s worth posting.
Puns. Puns are only less vile than mimes, but it’s hard to mime on /. So feel free/obligated to litter your offtopic and random bits with puns. Hurt the bastards. And if they’re sick enough to laugh at them, then they’ll eventually end up here 😉
Obscure cultural references and injokes are always good. SOMEONE will get them eventually.
Several drafts of a serial or random post are common, but true elegance is being able to come up with something on the spot that still makes the top 40 posts (on a post-heavy article)
Section 3 – Useful trolling links
The following links contain background information useful for trolls needing quick quotes and “expert” opinions to include.

General purpose links

ddi.digital.net/~gandalf/trollfaq.html – How to deal with USENET trolls – learn your enemy 🙂
http://www.don-lindsay-archive.org/skeptic/arguments. html – A List Of Fallacious Arguments – Learn them and use them liberally
http://www.altairiv.demon.co.uk/troll/trollfaq .html – USENET troll HOWTO
http://www.baiting.org – Baiting.org
http://www.fieldingtravel.com/df/index.htm – Fielding’s DangerFinder – A guide to what and where’s dangerous

Religious links

http://www.godhatesamerica.com/ – God Hates America
http://www.chalcedon.edu/creed.html – The Creed of Christian Reconstruction
http://www.demonbuster.com – How to cast out your demons and do spiritual warfare
riceinfo.rice.edu/armadillo/Sciacademy/ri ggins/thi ngs.htm – Things Creationists hate
http://www.icr.org/ – Institute for Creation Research
http://www.xenu.net – Operation Clambake – The fight against Scientology on the net
http://www.hom.net/~angels/ – Citizens for the Ten Commandments
http://www.bju.edu/rcnbc.html – The difference between Catholics and Christians
http://www.geocities.com/prazske00/biblequote s.html – Bible quotes by category

Political/economy links

http://www.aynrand.org – The Ayn Rand Institute
http://www.reason.com – Libertarian site
http://www.freerepublic.com – Right-wing stuff
http://www.jbs.org – Excellent site for all kinds of right-wingery
http://www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html – Web economy bullshit generator

Crackpot science links

http://www.fixedearth.com – The Earth Is Not Moving
http://www.jir.com/index.htm – The Journal of Irreproducible Results

Cool Paper Airplane Design

This gallery contains 14 photos.

Someone on Slashdot (slashdot.org) asked for cool paper airplane designs, so I went searching on the Web to find instructions for my favorite, so that I could post a link thereto.  Somewhat surprisingly, there were none.  Since this is a … Continue reading →