Great moments in Internet Trolling

[poopgiggle]

Trolling can be loosely defined as "tormenting other people for your own amusement." I realize that many of the people here aren't very literate in the larger culture of the Internet beyond a few specific gun boards, and that your exposure to good trolling is pretty limited. Trolling can cross the line and become cyber-bullying (or real-life harassment) but that's not funny. This thread is about some of the finer (and more hilarious) examples of good-natured Internet jackassery.

The first example is what I like to call The Curious Case of Weedlord Bonerhitler

Today the National Republican Congressional Committee invited anyone on the internet to sign a petition to repeal Obamacare, then livestreamed a printer as it printed out the personalized petitions, one-by-one. The most logical thing in the world happened next: People trolled the elephant dung out of it.
It seems the "Watch Your Petition Print" livestream ran for only a few glorious minutes before it was shut down after some poor person was overwhelmed trying to pull out all the joke names as they emerged. But not before "Connie Lingus," "Detective Rex Hardbody," "Pointless Empty Gesture," "Weedlord Bonerhitler," and many, many others had voiced their support of an Obamacare repeal. Here is one collection of a few of the best, via Twitter user barfcaptain. Yeah, that's "barfcaptain." The printer never had a chance.

Update: Here's a video of the printer in action, right before it shut down.

One of the maxims of computer security is NEVER TRUST USER INPUT. And while this incident didn't lead to a security breach in the technical sense (though there is a similar case in Britain that I'll get into in a later post), directly funneling user input into a web camera did have some pretty hilarious consequences. While my favorite name is obviously "Weedlord Bonerhitler," runners up include "Piss Children" and "Bug Horse."

It's possible that the GOP knew that this would happen, and used this as a tactic to make the issue go viral. It certainly worked. Stephen Colbert has certainly used this tactic to great effect in the past.

 

[Dustin Cantrell]

That's a good one. I've found the gun grabbers the hardest to troll. Even when presented with facts that go against what they believe they ignore them and refuse to acknowledge that they were wrong about any portion of the facts.

 

[poopgiggle]

The second example comes from the online community Second Life, as reported by mediocre humor website Cracked. I'm going to quote the text without the pictures because the pictures have cartoon penises in them.

Second Life is a complete virtual environment that compliments reality by helping people who are no good at the real world voluntarily remove themselves. One of the biggest figures in this world is millionaire Anshe Chung. Real-world teacher Ailin Graef created Anshe as a Second Life avatar, but as the avatar's virtual business grew she took "Anshe" as a real name and had to start acting like her in interviews. She's basically a William Gibson character escaped into a real (fake) world.

In an adorable misunderstanding of technology, CNET attempted to film a "live" interview in the virtual world, forgetting that the real studio audiences only behave because security can flatten them, and Second Life isn't TRON so that's not an option here. The interview had barely started when Anshe was bombarded with an army of flying disembodied penises.

Unfortunately, TV networks believe their own rubbish about being able to fight hackers in real time instead of just switching the system off and cursing, so she was left at the mercy of armies of cyber-cocks. She teleported out to escape what was rapidly becoming a Japanese cartoon, then revealed that she doesn't know how virtual worlds work either. Deciding not to return to the now secure CNET studio, she invited everyone into her own home server instead. There are men hopping back into minefields on one leg with better pattern recognition than that. The cockbardment immediately resumed with mind-bending meta-porn of her virtual body attacked by pictures of her real body photoshopped to hold a fake cucumber.

The horrible rooster-mobile mindlessly pressing against fake women brought down her entire server, generated a lot of publicity for the event and gave TV executives the idea for Jersey Shore.