My hobby: Troll hugging. | Hacker News Reader

My hobby: Troll hugging.

pugs.blogs.com

43 pointslupin_sansei26 comments

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

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.

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.

That's strangest. I found it one of the warmest and most rewarding internet-related pieces I'd read in a long while. It made a few assumptions about your understanding of the context but, goddamit, someone is entitled to do that on their own blog!

Lack of context happens when someone isn't targetting the various aggregators in their post.

I find it refreshing actually. It's nice to read a post once in a while that eschews the preamble/genericity that typically accompanies posts that are designed to be voted up somewhere or other.

It is part of a larger conversation, and references the other parts of the conversation; blogs used to do that a lot, and the folks who've been doing it for a while tend to still do so on a regular basis. It definitely made sense to me. It can be hard to follow IRC chat logs, since there's so much said between the lines in such an environment (any insular community will tend to develop shorthand and a pidgin; IRC is probably an extreme example of that)...but I thought it was reasonably well explained, if you don't try too hard to understand all the trollish undertones and in-jokes.

If you read the referred-to posts at the top of it, I suspect it will all make more sense. It did to me, and while I -am- a perl-head I'm not on #padre

However "poorly written" isn't really a useful response - I'm sure audrey would welcome some constructive criticism either here or as a comment to the blog post itself.

I'll admit the post was rather stream of consciousness and wandered back and forth a bit, but I happen to quite enjoy that style from time to time; the trick, I think, is to remember that a discussion of personal enjoyment and social interactions is a very different beast to a technical article and adjust your approach to reading accordingly.

Seriously though, if you have concerns about the writing, elaborate - the "hard to believe" part runs quite close to the sort of attack pg's "how to criticise" stuff abhors but if you were able to make sense of it -in spite- of the writing rather than -because- of it there must be something more than "poorly written" that you can contribute on the topic ...

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.

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.

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 :)

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

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.

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. :-)

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).

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 :)

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).

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.

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.

I see. There was another half of my title, though: "My hobby" (a xkcd meme). I was trying to self-analyze why troll hugging has become my favorite pastime, so the sidesteps were mostly about those reflections.

I'll take the Judo/Aikido paragraph as an example, in an attempt to form relations between that self-plugging paragraph and the concept "troll hugging" in your mind.

The Judo meme was first introduced to me by mjd in "Conference Presentation Judo" ( http://perl.plover.com/yak/presentation/ ) -- and because Larry Wall and Damian Conway both practices Aikido, they sometime use those two memes interchangeably.

I was reflecting why I've always refrained from using Judo/Aikido to describe what we've been doing in #perl6.

During writing that blog post, it occurred to me that it's about the destination; Judo/Aikido tries to contain and then throw out incoming attacks by making the attacker lose balance, while what we've been doing is quite the opposite; it aims to restore a conversational, one would even say hermeneutic, balance.

So by writing out that paragraph I feel I understand the "My Hobby" part a bit better, whilst also trying to explain that reflection to people who joined in the aikido/judo meme circle before.

That is how the relation was formed in my mind. Hope it helps!

I see. I apologise for my harsh tone in my first response. I've been reading too much focused articles, and this stood out.

I missed the reference to the xkcd meme upon first reading (my bad! can't believe I missed that :( ) and upon rereading this does make it a lot more focused.

Cool, glad we reached some sort of mutual understanding, then. :-) hugs

By the way, Audrey, welcome to the HN community. :)

Just noted that you were new here, or at least, the account was. Enjoy your stay!

Will do, thank-you!

Gosh, I felt ancient in internet-time, and it's so nice to be a newbie in various communities again. :-)

Haha There is also another technique we practice in Brazilian Jui-Jitsu where you meet the attackers aggression by moving forward to hug him. It's called a "clench" but it looks just like a "hug". The reason you hug him is similiar to western boxing where one boxer hugs to prevent the other boxer from being able to hit him because of the distance. They call Jui-Jitsu the gentle art for a reason I guess :) One interesting fact is that the technique does not work if you are moving backwards, and its important that you are going towards him. There is a leading step kick that is just a feint so that you can get closer hehe.

Hello, I admire your work.

Спасибо. Ваши работы (OpenPhotoVR) выглядит интересно. :-)

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