The Pickleball Troll
thepickler.com
thepickler.com
As my friends and I who played got older, we'd of course not be able to run up and down the length of the field all night long as much. There became a bit of a competition around nabbing the younger players when they would come to be on your team so you could get the good runners for the hail-mary plays.
So then some of the older guys who were smokers decided to start trying to get the young runners to come hang out in between matches, where they'd try to get them to smoke pot. It worked! The young runners were both inexperienced, and lightweights. This became an effective tactic to cut the advantage the other team would gain by nabbing the younger runners with more endurance.
Anyone else have this problem playing bee? It got really out of hand.
He's a sales exec now. He wouldn't hang out on HN.
After a while I started to notice that the players I respected most would kind of dip in and out of activity. They were supportive when they could be.
They never, ever played in the tournaments.
Then I played my first tournament and got absolutely smoked first round by a player who played really well, and complained to judges a lot, AND cheated every chance he got. Then he destroyed just about everybody else, and seemed to get even more angry with everybody else that he played.
This at a _pickleball_ tournament. It felt like we were moments away from somebody throwing down.
From that standpoint, I could _absolutely_ see somebody going home and deciding to mock tf out of this sport.
It's beautiful to see the craft of some of these posts though, the repeated reference to (female), the slight stretching of the possible. But I think the funniest part is the pure lack of sense of humour in the people he's trolling - that's always the best part. If I were a part of a group like that I would far prefer to allow the trolling to continue as an in-joke rather than the ridiculous move to ban him. It's like banning a Dilbert cartoon.
This isn't that. As John Scalzi said, "The failure mode of clever is asshole."
In September 2020 one park in the Portland metropolitan area had to institute a ban on pickleball, despite having just installed new pickleball courts five months earlier. Residents nearest to the pickleball courts said they were unable to hold conversations inside their homes due to the noise from the pickleball courts. Despite the ban, the next year people were still making use of the pickleball courts. In June 2021, at a West Linn City Council meeting, one resident said the noise resulted in family gatherings being, "... wrought with discord and physically debilitating stress." Some described the noise as "trauma-inducing".[62] </Excerpt>
I'm picturing boomer wojak playing pickleball. It really is a sport for trolls.
Whinge First.
Whinge Hard.
No Patience.
If you tolerate a bit of noise from them, they're much more likely to tolerate a bit of noise from you, which is win-win all around.
They live in a planned community filled with retirees (many of them former lawyers) with absolutely nothing else to do with their day than plot and scheme over ways to obstruct their able-bodied neighbors who want to get some exercise. It's the perfect sport for them (neighbor-fighting, not pickleball).
The fight is so vicious because the stakes are so small. For years, my folks would just drive past the empty courts on the way out of the development to the neighborhood a few miles away with fewer retired lawyers.
There are 500 houses in the development, two of which don't like that particular fragment of the recreation facility.
I started playing two years ago. I was worried it was a sport for old people but every age plays and matches get really competitive.
Here are the benefits I see that make it a pretty unique sport:
Open play times and venues all over my county. I can go play almost any time I want without having to coordinate with other people.
Very social sport where you meet a lot of new people.
Easy to start playing and actually have fun but it can take a lifetime to master.
There’s enough of a strategy element to the game that an experienced 80 year could beat a beginner 18 year old. (Yet speed and athleticism plays a major role between equally skilled players.)
It’s a great way to get hours of intense cardio without even realizing it.
(This is all coming from someone who hated tennis every time I tried it.)
Edit: the only surviving troll I can find is on Ars Technica:
https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=832820
Edit 2: oh, I found him on adequacy.org:
This is one he had posted to a C++ newsgroup:
Hello Gentlemen, I'm a first year programming student at an Ivy League school and I've just finished my Visual Basic classes. This term I'll be moving onto C++. However I've noticed some issues with C++ that I'd like to discuss with the rest of the programming community. Please do not think of me as being technically ignorant. In addition to VB, I am very skilled at HTML programming, one of the most challenging languages out there!
C++ is based on a concept known as Object Oriented Programming. In this style of programming (also known as OOPS in the coding community) a programmer builds "objects" or "glasses" out of his code, and then manipulates these "glasses". Since I'm assuming that you, dear reader, are as skilled at programming as I am, I'll skip further explanation of these "glasses".
Please allow me to make a brief aside here and discuss the origins C++ for a moment. My research shows that this language is one of the oldest languages in existance, pre-dating even assembly! It was created in the early 70s when AT&T began looking for a new language to write BSD, its Unix Operation System (later on, other companies would "borrow" the BSD source code to build both Solaris and Linux!) Interestingly, the name C++ is a pun by the creator of the language. When the first beta was released, it was remarked that the language would be graded as a C+, because of how hideously complex and unwieldy it was. The extra plus was tacked on during a later release when some of these issues were fixed. The language would still be graded a C, but it was the highest C possible! Truly a clever name for this language.
Back to the topic on hand, I feel that C++ - despite its flaws - has been a very valuable tool to the world of computers. Unfortunately its starting to show its age, and I feel that it should be retired as COBOL, ADA and Smalltalk seem to have been. Recently I've become aquainted with another language that's quite recently been developed. Its one that promises to greatly simplify programming. This new language is called C.
Although syntactically borrowing a great deal from its predecessor C++, C greatly simplifies things (thus its name, which hints at its simpler nature by striping off the klunky double-pluses.) Its biggest strength is that it abandons an OOPS-style of programming. No more awkward "objects" or "glasses". Instead C uses what are called structs. Vaguely similiar to a C++ "glass", a struct does away with anachonisms like inheiritance, namespaces and the whole private/public/protected/friend access issues of its variables and routines. By freeing the programmer from the requirement to juggle all these issues, the coder can focus on implementing his algorithm and rapidly developing his application.
While C lacks the speed and robustness of C++, I think these are petty issues. Given the speed of modern computers, the relative sluggishness of C shouldn't be an issue. Robustness and stability will occur as C becomes more pervasive amongst the programming community and it becomes more fine-tuned. Eventually C should have stablity rivalling that of C++.
I'm hoping to see C adopted as the de facto standard of programming. Based on what I've learned of this language, the future seems very bright indeed for C! Eventually, many years from now, perhaps we'll even see an operating system coded in this langauage.
Thank you for your time. Your feedback is greatly appreciated.
Egg Troll
https://www.inadequacy.org/stories/2002.5.10.153857.142.html
this example bit you paste is just, i suppose, a comedy. tho even with that i’m sure you could stir up someone, esp if they stopped reading to reply at first impulse
Gentlemen, the time has come for a serious discussion on whether or not to continue using C for serious programming projects. As I will explain, I feel that C needs to be retired, much the same way that Fortran, Cobol and Perl have been. Furthermore, allow me to be so bold as to suggest a superior replacement to this outdated language.
To give you a little background on this subject, I was recently asked to develop a client/server project on a Unix platform for a Fortune 500 company. While I've never coded in C before I have coded in VB for fifteen years, and in Java for over ten, I was stunned to see how poorly C fared compared to these two, more low-level languages.
C's biggest difficulty, as we all know, is the fact that it is by far one of the slowest languages in existance, especially when compared to more modern languages such as Java and C#. Although the reasons for this are varied, the main reasons seems to be the way C requires a programmer to laboriously work with chunks of memory.
Requiring a programmer to manipulate blocks of memory is a tedious way to program. This was satisfactory back in the early days of coding, but then again, so were punchcards. By using what are called "pointers" a C programmer is basically requiring the computer to do three sets of work rather than one. The first time requires the computer to duplicate whatever is stored in the memory space "pointed to" by the pointer. The second time requires it to perform the needed operation on this space. Finally the computer must delete the duplicate set and set the values of the original accordingly.
Clearly this is a horrendous use of resources and the chief reason why C is so slow. When one looks at a more modern (and a more serious) programming language like Java, C# or - even better - Visual Basic that lacks such archaic coding styles, one will also note a serious speed increase over C.
So what does this mean for the programming community? I think clearly that C needs to be abandonded. There are two candidates that would be a suitable replacement for it. Those are Java and Visual Basic.
Having programmed in both for many years, I believe that VB has the edge. Not only is it slightly faster than Java its also much easier to code in. I found C to be confusing, frightening and intimidating with its non-GUI-based coding style. Furthermore, I like to see the source code of the projects I work with. Java's source seems to be under the monopolistic thumb of Sun much the way that GCC is obscured from us by the marketing people at the FSF. Microsoft's "shared source" under which Visual Basic is released definately seems to be the most fair and reasonable of all the licenses in existance, with none of the harsh restrictions of the BSD license. It also lacks the GPLs requirement that anything coded with its tools becomes property of the FSF.
I hope to see a switch from C to VB very soon. I've already spoken with various luminaries in the C coding world and most are eager to begin to transition. Having just gotten off the phone with Mr. Alan Cox, I can say that he is quite thrilled with the speed increases that will occur when the Linux kernel is completely rewritten in Visual Basic. Richard Stallman plans to support this, and hopes that the great Swede himself, Linux Torvaldis, won't object to renaming Linux to VB/Linux. Although not a C coder himself, I'm told that Slashdot's very own Admiral Taco will support this on his web site. Finally, Dennis Ritchie is excited about the switch!
Thank you for your time. Happy coding.
Egg Troll
Basically this generations racquetball, a sport that's existed for a while getting slightly more popular but will never surpass tennis.
Stop trying to make Fetch happen, Gretchen. Its not gonna happen.
I pretty much assume every personal story on the net is fake or mostly fake. Or at least if there’s some real world effect like making people upset or concerned or whatnot.
I suppose it’s similar levels to IRL and makes me get into a “what’s real” mental loop as I expect most people randomly encountered have some projection rather than their real self.
There's no objective reality in life that matters on a personal level. Everyone has different aspects to their personality just like you do. You're not seeing a "fake side" of someone, you're seeing the part of their personality they've chosen to present to you.