My hobby: Troll hugging.

http://pugs.blogs.com/audrey/2009/08/my-hobby-troll-hugging.html

by lupin_sansei • 17 years ago

43 26 17 years ago

pugs.blogs.com

esonica• 17 years ago

I wish I had some idea what you're talking about? Can someone fill me in with some context?

dragonquest2• 17 years ago

Audrey sometime (couple of days) ago joined the #padre channel with a username user6209 or something like that. The maintainer of Padre was both helpful and courteous to this user who was asking for some help/pointers without knowing that this was Audrey Tang, the maker of Pugs and a big name in the Perl community.

The guy in question here "asdgasd", did almost the same thing after reading that article presumably which made its rounds on Reddit and HN. However his/her talk was bordering on trolling unlike Audrey's in the same channel.

rogerthat• 17 years ago

Understood. But because the commentary is so poorly written, it would probably make more sense if the conversation from the channel had simply been printed as-is. Hard to believe this was written by someone of note in the programming community.

devin• 17 years ago

To those who are wondering, the reference to mtfnpy means: "mtfnpy totally fucking now pwns you". Traveling to mtfnpy.com in your browser will send you back to google. Does anyone have any information on what this is all about?

It almost seems like by redirecting to a search of itself in google, and referencing itself in its own definition, it created a black hole in the interweb.

dragonquest2• 17 years ago

It used to be a meme in the Perl community sometime ago. Not too many people used it but it used to come up in a long chatlog.

mst2• 17 years ago

That and we configured all the servers to cloak 'buu' as buu@mtfnpy because it wound him up.

But as Alias notes in the comments asdagd was already using mtfnpy in his whois, so it was already an in joke known to the target :)

iron_ball• 17 years ago

If someone is "really a good person," it should not take special effort to pierce through a layer of hostility and destructiveness (even such low-level hostility and destructiveness as trolling an IRC channel).

thenduks• 17 years ago

The (former?) troll was described as a 'rather likable fellow', not 'really a good person'. If the latter was the case I would agree with you :)

DannoHung• 17 years ago

This only brings me to ask: Why was asdgasd acting like a weird-boy in the first place?

jvdh3• 17 years ago

I can't decide whether this really is about troll hugging (which is what it's about in the beginning and at the end), or a shameless plug about Pugs and himself (which fills the middle of the story).

audreyt6• 17 years ago

Ah, but one does not need deciding between the two; when you hug someone, you are also fulfilling your own desire to be held. :-)

IMHO, one needs not feel shame at saying one wants to be noticed, understood or remembered; that is what makes us human in the first place, and only by communicating we can "unplug" the inhibitions that prevents useful communication.

I've been out of the blogosphere for two years, and only recently began re-familiarizing myself with the various communities formed by aggregator-forums, so naturally there will be some contextual drifts.

But I do try to form real discussions when I was involved in building the blogosphere, which involves telling part of my life-story, then listening to the other person's life-story so I can understand why they made their comments.

So... jvdh, what is your story that prompted you making that comment? I'd be glad to listen, if you would like to share.

jvdh3• 17 years ago

What prompted me in making the comment is that the title suggests your post is about troll hugging. But in describing that whole story, you do some large side-stepping, that in my mind are not related to the subject that you gave the post.

cousin_it• 17 years ago

Hello, I admire your work.

jongraehl• 17 years ago

It's interesting that you can sometimes get a troll to drop the mask and have a genuine discussion with you.

But, other than the novelty or challenge of it, why would you want to get to know such people? Is it because they're fundamentally more available? That is, an attention-seeker may be more willing to spend time with you than a less needy person.

audreyt6• 17 years ago

That is a fair question.

Usually though, like in the case with asdgasd, when they became a genuine person, they also became far less needy; the neediness is largely just anxiety at not being understood.

As for my own motives, I guess restoring balance, and prevention of disrupting folks in #padre's productive dopamine cycles, was my primary goal.

Also I guess there's some reciprocating going on here; people has treated me gently when I was young (~10 years ago) when I first joined #perl, when my English was really poor and can't communicate well.

The language barrier made some of my utterances sound close to trolling, but Elaine Ashton in particular was very kind to me, which steered me into improving my English and doing creative/constructive work. So I guess I'm just passing on her tradition. :-)

My hobby: Troll hugging.

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