Know Your Meme: The Fine Art of Trolling

This past weekend, we attended a surprise party for one of our friend's 30th birthday. We had a great time eating grillables, drinking and joking around. It was between those last two things that one of the revelers started to try to get Colin's rage on. The problem with this is that Colin doesn't really get his rage on. Ever. He's pretty reserved, he just starts to look uncomfortable and awkward. When it got to that, I asked the guy to ease up on him a little, and he replied "I'm just building up his troll resistance!"

'Trolling' is the term coined by the internets for the act of saying or doing something online to cause some emotional response, drama or controversy. The psychology alone behind trolling is profound - there are actually published studies on this stuff.

Allow me to get deep for a moment, if you will...

Basically, we act as human beings within a larger social context. This is made up of everything from where and when we grew up to the family we may or may not have, our economic standing to our sense of self. Our interactions with other people, what we can and can't do, say and sometimes feel, and our own internal thought processes are shaped, in no small part, by these social cues and mores.

It is when these things are removed from the overall social interaction equation that things start to get interesting. Think of it: the internet, for most intents and purposes, is anonymous. Sure, there are ways to track people down, but most people don't have the knowledge and means to do so. Even people with the knowledge and means to do so usually will be put off by just how much of a pain in the ass it can turn out to be. Some places on the web make this anonymity very easy, if not the standard, way to communicate with everyone else on the site. (Warning - Those links may or may not be NSFW, and will more likely than not cause your brain to leak out your nose if you spend too much time on them... You've been warned...)

In other words, you don't *have* to be you. You can be a smarter, wiser, wittier you; well, as much as your own intelligence will allow. Definitions of economic stature fades; while it's assumed you have something since you're seated at a computer with an internet connection, there's not much more that can be garnered about you that you don't volunteer. No one needs to know your name, your weight or size, the clothes you wear, your religious or spiritual views, who you're related to, who you know or who your friends are - and you most certainly don't have to let on to anything. You don't even have to be honest about it. It's amazing what can happen to confidence levels when you're just as likely to be a fat slob as a gorgeous knockout. Take this from a guy who played as a catgirl in an online video game for over six years.

And it's this absence of social context and relative anonymity that promote more uninhibited social behavior. People say and do things online that they'd never do in real life. Combine this with the innate desire for entertainment and an active and, many times, all-to-willing audience to respond in an equally uninhibited manner, and you have a perfect storm for trolling.

Once a troll has been recognized for what it is, the drama is sometimes continued by the person countering the original troll with an attempt of their own. This usually leads to a situation where the original topic is completely derailed, causing much rage on the part of the people who actually wanted to discuss the topic while the trolls go back and forth between themselves.

Welcome to The Internets. Check your sanity at the door and take a seat, please.

In the end, it was all in fun, though. Once Colin was on to our friend, and a conciliatory fist bump was had, it was game on between the two for the rest of the evening.

Weekend Intelligence: Squirrel

I had started a blog for the long Memorial Day Weekend, but work and general lack of anything substantive over that weekend made it difficult to talk about. I spent most of it cleaning the house and getting some long overdue maintenance done while the rest of the family was in El Paso. The house looked immaculate for a whopping 48 hours after they got home. -.-; Such is life. This weekend was much more interesting anyway. So, in typical weekend intelligence fashion, here are the highlights!

Let me take a step back by a few weeks. Early in the morning in early May, during one hell of a rainstorm, a hired hand van visited the home on the corner in our neighborhood. In a few short hours, the cars were towed, all possessions that could be liquidated or had outstanding loans were confiscated and all the rest was tossed out into the front yard. I remember seeing those two children that lived in that house, for the last time, that morning. They looked more than a little in shock; their tired, blank expressions barely masking a fathomless sea of questions; no doubt they were bewildered at what they had experienced that morning and at their parents inability to do anything about it.

The family never did come back for the few things they could have salvaged from the rain. Some of the things had not been on the ground for half a day before some of the neighbors began to pick through it, finding in the rubble some trinket, appliance or tool. Something of value. The pile was pretty thoroughly trash by the time Waste Management came by 3 days later to pick up the remains and toss it in a truck. The only thing left behind at the end of it all was a ruined front lawn, an eerily vacant house, and a small, sleek white house cat with a big bushy black tail.

She sat there for several days after the trash had been removed, patiently waiting for them to come home. After about a week, she started to get hungry and finally, leaving her corner on the patio, began to hunt insects around the neighborhood. It was not long before she caught the vicious eye of some of the children in the neighborhood, who began to terrorize her with shouting, throwing sticks and chunks of brick and rock at her. I even witnessed grown adults in the neighborhood attempt shoo her away with water shot from pressure nozzles.

She didn't act like the ferals in the neighborhood: those nasty, screeching, demonic animals that ambush people as they walk in the evening. No, many times she didn't even really run, just took cover in some bushes until the people got bored and moved along. It was one such day that I was out grilling some burgers, and I saw this pathetic excuse for a kitten in the rock bed next door, eyeing me and what I had on the plate. Her coat had become scraggly and she had lost considerable weight, but the one feature that she still had was that tail of hers.

It's true what they say: don't feed a stray cat unless you want a new cat, but I just couldn't help myself. I cut a small piece of hamburger off and called out to her, "Hey, Squirrel Kitteh! You can has cheezburger?" She shyly made her way over to me, and once she came as close as she cared to, stood up on her hind legs (again, reminding me of a squirrel) and in one swift move, snagged the bit of meat from my hands with her forepaws, crammed it into her mouth and disappeared into the bushes.

It wasn't long before we saw her again. She decided to take up semi-permanent residence in the next-door neighbors bushes during the day to escape the sun. I set a bowl of water out for her in the shade during the day, and at night, she'd hunt the junebugs that bothered us while we sat out and smoked. That worked for a little while, but it became clear that she remembered what it was like to live inside, and wanted to return to that life. So after a little saving up, this past weekend, we trapped her in the garage so we could take her to the vet and get her caught up on all her shots and tests.

I'll tell you, I spent a good couple hours trying to get her into that cat carrier, and still didn't succeed. She did NOT want to go into the box. I asked D for some help. She agreed, and after 2 minutes, single-handedly lured, caught and placed the cat in the carrier. When we arrived at the vet, the receptionist asked us to fill out some initial paperwork. After I had filled it out and gave it back to her, she took one look at the cat and laughed. "Squirrel..." she said with a smile, "Yeah, that about says it, don't it?"

Today, that house still sits vacant, its large, uncovered windows showing off the cavernous inside and empty walls in the light of day. And that front yard is still messed up. It'll need some serious TLC from whoever eventually moves in there. But that cat will, from now on, have her fill of food and water, a comfy place to nap atop a carpeted cat tree, and never again have to worry about children's sticks and stones, the blazing hot sun or the driving South Texas rains.