I once thought about registering multiple ID's from an address I had in Cardiff, and then engaging Barbelith in a campaign of ontological terrorism
Pappuce and Harrison Ford conducted a campaign of terror/annoyingness four or five years ago - most of which was posted from my computer while I was at work.
There was Douglas: stupid as fuck, impossibly naive and totally believable. Douglas would become incensed at the slightest slur and, for no apparent reason, accuse everyone of calling him racist. Cue head scratching and bemusement and a rush to douse the fire with cries of "no-one's calling you racist, Douglas".
There was Dassie: an excuse to post pictures of a ridiculous collie dog all over the board. Essentially a spam-suit, but it appealed to my juvenile sense of humour.
I'm Coming For You Twart: A stalker who followed a particular poster (can't remember who) around the board making vague threats. Not particularly nice and not particularly funny.
Smiling Friends: Absolutely inspired and probably the most controversial suit of the set. A combination of stalker and spammer. The guys found an impressively nasty image of a very unpleasant man smiling out of frame, dubbed it Smiling Friends, and proceeded to PM a large number of board members. The PMs would usually contain a Smiling Friends' image and a short poem, going something like.
In the darkness I watch you sleep.
You are warm.
But you are dry inside.
Needless to say, this freaked a lot of people out, and caused a big kerfuffle.
I'm sure there were a few other suits but for the life of me I can't remember them. What I do remember, however, is how they cleared the it up.
After Smiling Friends the whole thing seemed to be getting a little out of hand, but incredibly very few board members had put the pieces together. Each of the suits was viewed as a troll (with the possible exception of Douglas), but the notion that they were all related crossed almost no-one's mind. In response to this, Pappuce and Harrison composed around twenty posts offline, created a thread entitled something like The Investigation and attempted to solve the "mystery". The idea was to implicate all the joke-suits in a murder, which would be solved by the legendary Columbo (a suit created specifically for the purpose), and, by doing so, reveal to Barbelith that it was a gag all along.
Watching them log in and out, flinging up post after post was something to see - they were trying to make sure no-one posted in-between the joke-suits. It didn't entirely work - I think a couple of other posts got through - but on the whole everything went according to plan.
Was it a good idea? Well, I regret the fact that Smiling Friends caused genuine distress. Personally, I found Douglas, and the ensuing shitstorms, hilarious, and the process inspired me to the start the Joy of Trolls (purged, I'm afraid) thread: an attempt to question whether Trolls can benefit online communities.
What I know for sure is that Pappuce and Harrison are both very funny people IRL, and that half the fun was in watching them create a bunch of monsters and engage in a solid bit of situationist japery. |
