NYT Feeds the Trolls

[Heradel]

From the Times:

One afternoon in the spring of 2006, for reasons unknown to those who knew him, Mitchell Henderson, a seventh grader from Rochester, Minn., took a .22-caliber rifle down from a shelf in his parents’ bedroom closet and shot himself in the head. The next morning, Mitchell’s school assembled in the gym to begin mourning. His classmates created a virtual memorial on MySpace and garlanded it with remembrances. One wrote that Mitchell was “an hero to take that shot, to leave us all behind. God do we wish we could take it back. . . . ” Someone e-mailed a clipping of Mitchell’s newspaper obituary to MyDeathSpace.com, a Web site that links to the MySpace pages of the dead. From MyDeathSpace, Mitchell’s page came to the attention of an Internet message board known as /b/ and the “trolls,” as they have come to be called, who dwell there.

/b/ is the designated “random” board of 4chan.org, a group of message boards that draws more than 200 million page views a month. A post consists of an image and a few lines of text. Almost everyone posts as “anonymous.” In effect, this makes /b/ a panopticon in reverse — nobody can see anybody, and everybody can claim to speak from the center. The anonymous denizens of 4chan’s other boards — devoted to travel, fitness and several genres of pornography — refer to the /b/-dwellers as “/b/tards.”

Measured in terms of depravity, insularity and traffic-driven turnover, the culture of /b/ has little precedent. /b/ reads like the inside of a high-school bathroom stall, or an obscene telephone party line, or a blog with no posts and all comments filled with slang that you are too old to understand.

[stePH]

/stePH wonders how many years it has been since the New York Times was relevant/

[Heradel]

/stePH wonders how many years it has been since the New York Times was relevant/

I don't think it's never not been relevant, though it has been slow on the internet subcultures (mostly because they only hire reporters with a few years on them, so very few people in that building are of the internet generation). It's a good piece though.

[stePH]

/stePH wonders how many years it has been since the New York Times was relevant/

I don't think it's never not been relevant,

So you're saying it's always been irrelevant?

[Heradel]

/stePH wonders how many years it has been since the New York Times was relevant/

I don't think it's never not been relevant,

So you're saying it's always been irrelevant?

Arg, typo. I don't think it's ever not been relevant. It's the newspaper of record (with WSJ, WP, LAT, BG, CT, USAT and others closely behind).

[Planish]

I dunno. 

From the sidebar:

Virginia Heffernan talks to the existence of trolls, mad scrollers and all matter of Internet denizens.

That makes as much sense as "John shakes hands with the probability of rain", or "John dances about architecture".

[Russell Nash]

I dunno. 

From the sidebar:

Virginia Heffernan talks to the existence of trolls, mad scrollers and all matter of Internet denizens.

That makes as much sense as "John shakes hands with the probability of rain", or "John dances about architecture".

"Talking about music is like dancing about architecture."

The one decent quote from a crappy chick flick my wife made me watch.

[stePH]

"Talking about music is like dancing about architecture."

The one decent quote from a crappy chick flick my wife made me watch.

You didn't include it in the "Good lines from bad movies" thread ... or is it not quite good enough to qualify?

(what movie?)

[Russell Nash]

"Talking about music is like dancing about architecture."

The one decent quote from a crappy chick flick my wife made me watch.

You didn't include it in the "Good lines from bad movies" thread ... or is it not quite good enough to qualify?

(what movie?)

I didn't think about it until Planish said part of it.  I think it was called "Playing by Heart"

[IMDB]

Yeah, that's it.

[/IMDB]

[Planish]

"Talking about music is like dancing about architecture."

The one decent quote from a crappy chick flick my wife made me watch.

Variations of that line go way back before that movie, at least 1983.
I first read it used by Laurie Anderson in the mid-'80s,
and she said she heard it from Martin Mull.
See http://www.pacifier.com/~ascott/they/tamildaa.htm .

[Tango Alpha Delta]

One of my favorite quotes (I use it as a teaser on Facebook to get my friends to read my music journals.

I knew it as an Elvis Costello quote (http://home.pacifier.com/~ascott/they/tamildaa.htm) though some have attributed it to Frank Zappa.

[Russell Nash]

It'll be great to tell my wife that the only good quote from her crappy movie was around for ages before the movie was.