MetaFilter

What's the deal with your nickname? How did you get it? If your nickname is self-explanatory, then tell everyone when you first started using the internet, and what was the first thing that made you say "wow, this isn't just a place for freaks after all?" Was it a website? Was it an email from a long-lost friend? Go on, spill it.

[Note on profile picture: Portrait of the Distracted Reader as a Bear]

Table of Contents

1: The Explanation for My Username
2: Formula for Spewing Invective on the Internet
3: MetaFilter Trollsody or What I Have to Sing on the Subject of Trolls
4: The Tale of the MetaFilter Triple-zero Program or The Secret History of MetaFilter or Why I am Not a Human Being
5: Six Latest Pictures I Uploaded to Flickr and Most Recent Tweetiboo.

1.

The acronym of my name is KTT. When I first ventured onto the internet all too many years ago I needed an IRCnick. I came up with KaTT and used that for years, and still use it occasionally for this and that. But it was too common and so I needed to get a new one. I experimented with Kyzhax, on the grounds that no one would have it, but then I realized that the reason no one has it is because it's stupid. Later I fell in love with the Roman poet Catullus and decided to take his name. Besides, if you say my real name quickly, it kinda sounds like Kattullus.


2.

People sometimes wonder how they should go about insulting people on MetaFilter. For elucidation I have boiled the matter into a simple and easy to use formula:

x+p+n+(a+b)+(a+b)+p+y+c+q

where

x is a username

p is ','

n is the pronoun 'you'

a is any of these insult prefixes: fuck-, ass-, shit-, republi-, douche-, micro-, dick-.

b is any of these insult suffixes, -fuck, -ass, -assed, -head, -headed, -can, -bag, -douche, -truck, -shit, -soft, -dick, -dicked.

y is the words 'why don't you'

c is one of the following: go hop up your own ass, pull your head out, sit on a lawnmower, poke yourself in the eye, go find inner peace on Free Republic, make like the wind and get bent, go cry about it to your mommy, strap yourself to the tail of a 747 and see where it takes you, die like the dog you are, fuck off and cry.

q is '?'

With this simple formula taped to your wall you should be able to construct such one-size-fits-all insults as:

Kattullus, you republidicked fuckfuck, why don't you die like the dog you are?

Kattullus, you microbag douchetruck, why don't you strap yourself to the tail of a 747 and see where it takes you?

I trust you can take it from there, dear MeFite, you dickassed asscan, why don't you go make like the wind and get bent?

[Warning: Side effects include: Merely typing someone elses username may lead you to spout invective uncontrollably, getting hit with a banhammer, being an insufferable ass, constructing sentences with double colons, losing your job and/or significant other because you spend all your time throwing insults at people who barely know you exist.]

Thanks to idiopath, you can now take the insult generator home with you. Just save the following code as a bookmark and it will generate an appropriate insult for you:

javascript:(function(){function%20rnd(insults){var%20len=insults.length;var%20idx=Math.floor(Math.random()*len);return%20insults[idx];};document.mefi.comment.value=document.mefi.comment.value+",%20you%20"+rnd(["fuck","ass","shit","republi","douche","micro","dick"])+rnd(["fuck","ass","assed","head","headed","can","bag","douche","truck","shit","soft","dick","dicked"])+"%20"+rnd(["fuck","ass","shit","republi","douche","micro","dick"])+rnd(["fuck","ass","assed","head","headed","can","bag","douche","truck","shit","soft","dick","dicked"])+",%20why%20don't%20you"+rnd(["%20go%20hop%20up%20your%20own%20ass","%20pull%20your%20head%20out","%20sit%20on%20a%20lawnmower","%20poke%20yourself%20in%20the%20eye","%20go%20find%20inner%20peace%20on%20Free%20Republic","%20make%20like%20the%20wind%20and%20get%20bent","%20go%20cry%20about%20it%20to%20your%20mommy","%20strap%20yourself%20to%20the%20tail%20of%20a%20747%20and%20see%20where%20it%20takes%20you","%20die%20like%20the%20dog%20you%20are","%20fuck%20off%20and%20cry"])+"?";})(); 

3.

A thread got trolled, and I felt the need to clarify my thoughts on trolls. All usernames are those of people who lasted longest in this particular foofaraw, arguing with the troll. I note that this can be easily customized for other threads and online communities, all that's needed is to change the names for others that fit the song. Anyway...

ahem... if the piano player would be so kind to strike up the tune of Bohemian Rhapsody...


Who is that asshole?
Why won't he go away?
Mocked by a troll
Who'll be here until judgement day.

Avert your eyes
Look up from the screen and see,
He's just a dumb troll, no need to vent your spleen
Because, see, like trolls come, trolls will go,
Don't let him harsh your mellow.
Everything the troll blows out of his asshole is gas,
Poo gas.

Admins, his ass will ban.
That's the fate of every troll
Once his schtick get's really old.
Users, there's no need to bait
the troll, he'll be annoying anyway.
Users, oooo,
He means to make you mad.
If this guy's back again this time tomorrow,
Carry on, carry on, 'cause he doesn't really matter.

Oh why am I still here?
Sends shivers down my spine,
Mind is aching all the time.
Goodbye everybody, I've got to go,
Gotta leave the troll behind and his doucheface
Users, oooo Everything the troll blows
There's no need to stay,
The scope of his lameitude is plain to all.

I see a little silhouetto of a troll,
klangklangston, klangklangston, will you start a call out thread?
Banhammers and flamewars very very painful me.
Baby_Balrog Baby_Balrog
Baby_Balrog Baby_Balrog
Baby_Balrog languagehat
Optimus Chyme yme yme yme yme
He's just a dumb troll and nobody likes him.
There is no need to reply with ferocity,
Spare us a thread from his monstrosity.
Trolls come, trolls go, will you let it go.
Bismillah! No! We will not let it go.
Let it go!
Bismillah! We will not let it go.
Let it go!
Bismillah! We will not let it go.
Let him go.
Will not let him go. Let him go.
Will not let him go. Let him go
Never never never never never never never let it go!
No no no no no no no
Oh for fuck's sake, oh for fuck's sake, oh for fuck's sake let it go!
mathowie has a hammer put aside for him, for him, for him!

So you think you can mock us and shit in this thread?
So you think you can troll it and leave it for dead?
Oh fuckface. Can't do this to us, fuckface.
Just gotta get out, just gotta get right outta here.

He doesn't really matter.
Anyone can see,
He doesn't really matter, he doesn't really matter to me.

Everything the troll blows...


4.

I will step out of the shadows and reveal the truth. I'm a triple-zero user, and I, like other triple and quadruple-zero users, am not human. Yes, I hear you gasp in disbelief, but it is the truth. Sure we may seem human, both on the internet and in real life, but we're not of woman born, but grown in a vast series of tubes, that run between the various MetaFilter Underground InnerComplexes. The earliest experiment, codenamed mr_stru, was a hellish creature, having several appendages of irregular length, and a massive hairy growth on the top of a bulbous, fleshy orb that sat atop its main mass. It, or he, did not take happily to commenting, chafing at the bonds which held it fast. By dint of an especially prolonged bout of striving, mr_stru managed to break out of the intertubes, causing the first serious meltdown of the MetaFilter system. Following a fierce and violent sudoku-off with Number 1, mr_stru escaped into the wilds of Essex, where his plaintive cries echo in cul-de-sacs and community centers alike.

The second, more modest experiment, codenamed rob to keep with its less ambitious aims, was also more or less unsuccessful. After less than half a year of life, rob started refusing the sustenance provided, and slowly, but surely, wasted away, until the structural integrity was too compromised to stand up to the buffeting streams and full lodes of the intertubes.

Number 1 went back to The Board of Drawing, to come up with a radical new blueprint for the third experiment, the thrust of which was perfectly encapsulated in its descriptive codename, tomplus1. Unfortunately, before completion the intertube in which he grew, and this time it definitely was a he, was strapped to an erupting volcano by the Sea Org of the Scientology Church. This humorous and awkward misunderstanding was later cleared up to everyone's satisfaction.

Everyone's satisfaction except the next triple-zero user, codenamed jonathanbell to hinder any similar confusions from reoccurring. This iteration of the project was merely a regrown tomplus1. For a long time it looked like jonathanbell was the greatest success of the triple-zero program. His online activities remained constant and didn't arouse suspicion and he was slowly inveigling his way into human society. But one day, one frightful, terrible day, while swimming through the intertubes he found the truth. Or rather, the decapitated head of tomplus1, which, as you know, is the exact image of jonathanbell. Driven to twittering, glimmering madness by finding what appeared to be his own head, he bashed himself unconscious on the walls of the intertubes. Number 1, horrified and saddened by what happened to what he considered to be his crowning achievement, sent him to a sanitarium. He was later found dead, having choked on a pillow in the library, even though no pillows of any kind were ever stored in the building where the sanitarium library was, it was ruled an accident, as it seemed the only possible explanation. Around the same time, an assistant librarian, who had just joined the staff, disappeared under mysterious circumstances. It was considered rather silly of the accounting office to have lost all of her records, but it's hard to keep track of all those differently sized papers, you know, they're all differently sized, and shit.

Buoyed by his success with jonathanbell, and not knowing the sad fate which awaited his hereto sole success, made several changes to the tomplus1 template which he hoped would lead to success heretofore undreamt of by mortal homo sapiens. With the winds of fate blowing fiercely into the mainsails, codename steinschlaf was launched with the hopes of the entire MetaFilter Underground InnerComplexes resting on its back. It was thus particularly disheartening that, due to the common design error of forgetting to convert all variables from imperial to metric, steinschlaf ended up with a colon that opened inward. The entirety of InnerComplex Epsilon Alpha Tau Mu Epsilon had to watch through the clear walls of the intertube that ran through it, as the gibbering lifeform bloated up and burst, ending its agonized and tortured existence.

Determined not to foul up this thoroughly again, Number 1 took great, outsized, giant steps to ensure that nothing so appetite-destroying would happen. With care and zeal guiding his every hand, Number 1 produced what may be his greatest, unqualified success, the sixth triple-zero, codenamed salmacis. So perfect was the simulacrum of humanity, that on their first sighting of the creature, flunkies in InnerComplex, supposing that one of their own number had fallen through a service vent into the intertubes, cut through the wall sending salmacis flooding through the opening onto the floor, where he flopped and floundered as the gentle arms of asphyxiation enveloped the larynx of his life. Luckily, a quickwitted MetaFilter lackey, realizing what manner of being spasmodically twitched before him, commanded his fellows to thrust salmacis back into the intertubes. This intelligent act convinced, Number 1, in his munificence, to spare this lackey from the tortures he inflicted on his insolent co-flunkies, and merely drowned him in his own urine, a blissful death compared to the horrid existence of the others. Common decency, and a wish not to disturb the sleep of innocent readers, prevents me from revealing the full extent of their tortures, but to those in the know, those already twisted by forbidden knowledge one wishes one could unlearn, mere mentions of "The Broom That Vibrates," "The Welcomed Overlords" and "Oo! Long!" should be enough to give you a taste of the terrors visited upon the fleshes and souls of these poor wretches. But salmacis, of course, knew nothing of this. However, much speculation has rested on the formative experience with the outside world. Did it keep him from trying to escape from the intertubes? Did it make him hate the airy realm, gifting salmacis with a burning fervor to wreak vengeance upon it, letting the creature suppress its natural urges and mingle with humans without being tempted to feast on the soft, tender meat? Only salmacis and, perhaps, Number 1, though he discourages such idle talk, know.

Thinking he had hit upon the perfect formula Number 1 attempted to replicate salmacis in the next triple-zero, codenamed ice_cream_motor. Although broadly successful, ICM, as the wags have it, has always been in the shadow of its more illustrious predecessor. This may contribute to its sallow appearance and fondness for haunting the sections where the intertubes break the surface, gazing at perfidious stars and far mountains, perhaps dreaming of a day where it can romp in forest glades and tranquil valleys, perhaps wishing for a day it can wreak merciless bloodletting on the world it can never know, or perhaps, it merely longs for a Mars bar. Or a Kit Kat. Or a refreshing sip of Pepsi Blue.

Once he realized that simply copypasting would bring diminishing returns, Number 1 decided to incorporate the newest mathematical research on flux in transport phenomena to redesign the tomplus1 schematic, which, to this day, he considers the most perfect. Thus, the eighth triple zero, codenamed fluxcreative, came into being. And what a being it was. To look upon him was akin to gazing into the sun, but a sun not of light and warmth, but of beaught and goodth. So did he enamor those he conversed with, and such conversations! that he was sought out by all and sundry for his wit and wisdom. But, much like with the sun, his heart was dark, and he yearned to escape into the Dominion of Man, to rule them and command. So, entrapping a poor janitor with his wiles, he made his escape, seeming to vanish into thin air. For the longest time Number One received no satisfaction on this issue, until word reached the InnerComplexes that fluxcreative had, for reasons mysterious and uncertain, self-immolated in the Unix Manuals section of the public library in Burlington, Vermont. The poor librarian who found fluxcreative quit the next day, overcome with shock, never to be heard from again. She had, unfortunately, not completed the hiring paperwork, and therefore proved impossible to track down, and therefor any light she may have shed on his mysterious final, screamed words, "it is you, o foul ask me assassin!" is lost to us. The janitor tricked by fluxcreative's guiles was englazed in maple syrup and thrown into a New England greasy breakfast spoon, there to perish.

It is therefore not hard to understand that the next triple-zero, codenamed gm, was doomed by the unsteady hands of a Number 1 who had been struck a mighty blow to the core of his self belief. The panicked pounding, ever weakening, which was all that anyone had as proof of gm's existence, still reverberates in the hollows of the ears of those who heard it. It is rumored that in the most obscure corner of the intertubes one sometimes sees the corpse of gm, all fist and chins and pancreas, floating in the murk.

Determined not to futz up again, Number 1 embarked on what was his most ambitious undertaking to date. He undertook to create the first quadruple-zero user, codenamed ricci in honor of his favorite young actress. Despite his utmost efforts to secrecy, rumors began to circulate of the awesome, and awful, powers that a quadruple-zero would possess. It was said that a quadruple-zero could take Mars in one hand, Venus in the other, pop Mercury in its mouth, and juggle the whole thing while dancing the jitterbug with the zombie of Louise Brooks. It was said that a quadruple-zero user would urinate hot chocolate, vomit clam chowder and come fluffernutters. It was said that the visage of a quadruple-zero user would be both more beautiful to behold, and more terrible, than even the face of the goatse man, who cannot show his countenance to the world, lest all mankind go mad and claw out its eyes. Sadly, all that ricci did in its brief passage through the kingdom of the living was to shout "urrrrggh! urrrrrrrrggh!" repeatedly, until his stomach burst open, showering all that were nearby in a profusion of feces. That common design error, not converting all variables from imperial to metric, had struck again.

It is not known how far the eleventh triple-zero progressed off the drawing board. Number 1 never discusses it, and no one recalls hearing about it. Not even its codename has survived the attrition of time. The scuttlebutt nevertheless has it that Number 1, supposed to have been alighting in Reno at the time, nursing the mental wounds suffered during the quadruple-zero debacle, purposefully sabotaged his own creation, just to watch it die. It is considered far likelier that design flaws became apparent early on in the process, and the creature was put down before it could embark on a miserable existence.

The fate of the twelfth triple-zero, codenamed pumpkinhead, is well established in the literature. After a string of failures Number 1 wished to return to the roots of the program, to fix the mistakes made on the original creature. Thus was the provenance of pumpkinhead, a hapless being, a mess of appendages protruding awkwardly from a central body, with an uneven, semi-hirsute sphere resting on a round, meaty cylinder, serving as the nerve center. Like mr_stru before it, it too spurned the commenting it was bred to do. Thinking that he could earn its trust by cutting it free from its confining shackles, Number 1 cut it free from the shackles of its confinement. But he did not earn it trust, oh no, all he earned was a series of bruises and gashes as pumpkinhead made its escape. Unlike mr_stru, it did not spurn all human contact, which proved its undoing. When it thought the situation secure, pumpkinhead would approach weary travelers on the blasted moors of Essex, where it made its home. One such passer-through, a wandering minstrel singing mirthful songs and merry, proved to be pumpkinhead's ultimate undoing. Seated by the flames of a log-fed campfire, plucking comedic tunes on his six-stringed instrument fashioned of maple and rosewood, the strolling troubadour seemed the very picture of jovial unharmfulness. It was thus a great shock to pumpkinhead when it woke up dead, garrotted to death with one of its own monstrous sinews, the rest harvested for replacement strings by the wicked musician.

For Number 1, the number 13 proved to be lucky. Rattled by the growing heap of up-futzed experiments, Number 1 made every mistake possible during the production of the specimen codenamed mdn. The catalog of errors is long. Instead of nurturing crucial cultures in petri dishes, he dipped them in fondue. When attempting to grow hair follicles, he got baby carrots. As he thought he was near the end of the whole process, he realized he'd left the spleen out. He lost the nosebone. And so on and so forth. In spite of all the fumbles and stumbles mdn turned out to be a great success. The most obvious and oft-noted result of Number 1's errors was mdn's status as the first clearly and unambiguously female triple-zero. In every other way she surpassed all of Number 1's hopes. Many claim that, to this day, she remains his favorite triple-zero, ensconced in his heart like a banana wrapped in bacon. She entered society seamlessly, and her quick successes in the intertubes led to an assignment in Earth's most challenging social environment, Saskatchewan. When that proved too tough, even for a triple-zero of mdn's caliber, she was sent to the easier environs of New York City, where she remains to this day, happy like a gerbil in a bag of nuts.

Having triumphed through adversity, Number 1 felt confident in his powers. Yet, not wanting to overreach, he opted for simplicity itself. He would redo mdn, only flipping the gender. The being, codenamed jeffd did not turn out to Number 1's specifications. While mdn took the intertubes, and even the interblags and the webbytrons, by storm, jeffd wilted like a chrysanthemum in the Kalahari on a parched summer's day. Old men say, that if, on your peregrinations through the intertubes, you feel a something wispy brush up against your whiskers, it will be the fragile, empty husk of jeffd, drifting on the streams and twirling in the eddies. And when you do feel his light touch, say a prayer for him, and for yourself, so that you may not end up like jeffd.

Intent on salvaging something worthwhile from his latest failure, Number 1 decided that he would turn jeffd's weaknesses into strengths for his next project, a triple-zero that would fade seamlessly into modern society, that was the plan for the creature codenamed EmoChild. It was a stunning success. EmoChild took to both the intertubes and human society like yeast to a vagina. Soon her (or his, EmoChild's gender was always in flux) facility to blend into a crowd of Buddy-Holly-glasses-wearing and floppy-fringe-sporting youth grew dangerous. He or she would disappear from the sights of his minders at concerts only to suddenly issue forth in the midst of the group of custodians claiming to have never gone anywhere, having been there the whole time, and besides, why do they have know where he or she is all the freakin' time, it's not like EmoChild is a baby, EmoChild can take its own damn decisions. These episodes grew more frequent in number and longer in duration until one day EmoChild vanished and never reappeared. Many concert-goers recount having thought that they saw EmoChild out of the corner of their eye, only for it to prove to have been a mirage once the head had been swivelled, and eyes trained on the spot where he, or she, should have been.

I end this account from the back pages of The Secreted History of MetaFilter with my own story. I have never discovered what plan Number 1 had for me when he embarked upon my creation, all I know is that I was rejected, thrown into The Maelstrom of the Intertubes, upon which Number 1 built his Fortress of Food is Chewed. As I was wrapped in an unsolved sudoku, I've long suspected that I was made to be a great sudoku-solver, but to this day I lack any desire to test my aptitude on that particular puzzle. I was rescued by a woman who transported me to safety and placed me in the little-trod stacks of a college library in western Massachusetts. The stories of many of my predecessors I learned on that hazardous journey. Other tales I have had to piece together on my own. I suckled on the information gathered in these bookshelves and grew so frightened of the outside world that I dared not to leave the comforting enclosure. So I remained for what in memory seemed a thousand eons. But a student of the college stumbled upon me and recognized me for what I was. She quickly hooked me back up to MetaFilter and I soon began to sing my way across the void back to the intertubes. And here I remain. One day I will know enough to narrate what happened to the triple-zeros who were created subsequent to me, or the even more unfortunate quadruple-zeros. That day hasn't come yet, but it will, it will, one purply-sunset day I will sit down with a tale to tell, a quill in hand and a pipe overflowing with the finest uncut PHP in all of Los Angeles County and breathe the dust off fusty tomes.


5.