Nicks

Stardate: 16th Feb 2007
Listening to: Legal Sprinkler
Build Queue: T-minus 24 hours
Cynicism: 45%
Naming Convention: 80%

Well, another exciting week in the White Collar Sweatshop that is my place of employment. As usual, at least a few hours every day was dedicated to preserving Tossed Salad's employment by rigorously scouring the Internet proxy logs and deleting any reference to the online gambling and pr0n surfing which constitutes the bulk of his "working" day. So, as Friday came and I was relaxing with my 4th Pale Ale at after work drinks, I received an SMS from the She_Admiral advising that it was now less than 24 hours until the "due date". She attempted a smilie again, but being a non-nerd, she typed in 8c) so she's either still not really got the hang of it, or she's channelling Freman. I texted back "And it's less than 4 minutes until I start my next beer, heh heh!" thinking I'd brighten her boring day of sanding and painting the toy box she'd been hammering together during the week while I played "From Russia With Love" on the XBOX. She didn't reply; I expect she was out topping up the radiator with coolant before coming to pick me up since one of the radiator hoses has a slow leak and she hasn't had time to fix it yet. At least I hope that's what she was doing - it was a scorcher today!

Anyway, after impressing my colleagues with my catalogue of musical burps, I wandered back to my office and fired up the forums to see what'd been goin' down in IGN forum-land. "The Quality of spam" was the obvious answer. With disgust, I saw the extend to which this sacred thread had been defiled, chiefly by members of the venerable TEA clan. They say "shite happens" but I disagree. Outside of EA-authored brownware, I've never seen shite just appear. I maintain that shite comes from arseholes, in nature and in life. And as usual it was the case with the poo coughed into this thread by my sometimes CoH pseudo-challenger, GoThiC SAMurAI. Or is it GoTHIc SaMURai. No wait, goTHIc saMuRAI. I've never understood the alt-caps or random-caps phenomenon. How a nick can be enhanced by hitting the shift key randomly is beyond me. Maybe it harks back to the eary days of CS where you could publically demonstrate the finger nimbleness required to circle-strafe while reloading, bunnyhopping, typing "ura fag!1" and spray painting your titty-tag on the nearest wall by punctuating each rapidly typed key with a machinegun-like peppering of the shift key.

What do I know though, so I consulted the online oracle that is wikipedia:

Alt-caps is an Internet phenomenon born from the days of online gaming infancy. It is widely believed that the practice began on early gaming networks by Internet gaming pioneers who adopted the practice of deliberately mistyping words, or using debatable grammar as a means of attracting the attention of self-styled "grammar nerds" who were appearing online during the same period. As the logarithmic expansion of the Internet's popularity saw a corresponding influx of new participants, these early adopters sought a means by which to preserve their place in the social pecking order, a status generally measured by the frequency and quality of contact with which they engaged in online interaction with members of the opposite sex. With a few notable exceptions, grammatical acumen is more frequently the female domain[citation needed] and thus poor grammar, whether intentional or not, generally resulted in some form of attention from a female who, armed with an elevated command of correct grammatical usage, would inevitably endeavour to communicate with the offender. Contact made, the poorly punctuating protagonist was then able to slowly introduce endearing qualities into the online interactions during the infancy with the aim of securing further interaction. A popular ruse was to claim membership of an obscure, marginally fringe demographic, with care taken to appear neither too mainstream, or too outlandish. Often these extremes could be forged into a suitable medium, by claiming to be aligned with two opposing lifestyles, which would mitigate the extremity of each, and still leave a lingering intrigue. Successful examples of this are well documented[citation needed] and include examples such as "Insurance Salesman and Gun For Hire", "Organic Chemist and Geriatric Chauffeur" and "System Administrator and Punk Lighting Technician". Once hooked, the female grammatacist was said to be in the "ports open" state, and was thus susceptible to further social massage by way of introduction of further endearing traits, such as an affection for small puppies, and self-depreciating banter generally relating to the physical attributes of the instigator. The last point is an important one, since having laid a solid groundwork of intrigue and quirkiness, the last area of risk would generally be the chance of physical interaction at a later date. The nerd chromosome[citation needed] found in 98% of online gamers has been proven to be at the expense of the attractiveness gene, resulting in an inevitable trade-off between useful technical abilities such as being able to remotely reboot a gaming server from a deserted island using half a coconut, a piece of fishing line and a small triangle of aluminium foil, and not being somewhat physically flawed. It was thus a common psychological practice to overemphasise the physical shortcomings prior to having them confirmed either visually or via tactile means by their target female. Thus, online personas such as "FatSalad83", "DumbGoth`" and "UglyFunk" would appear online. The female psyche, more attuned to mental rather than physical examination, was thus in possession of the fact that their online pseudo-suitors were intriguing in a logical sense, but somewhat undesirable in a physical sense, and with the exception of a few exceedingly shallow cases, the former overruled the latter. As the online courtship reached its zenith, invariably a physical meeting would be scheduled, subsequent to the obligatory communication via a voice medium, and with astonishment, the female would realise that the physical deformaties implied by the self-depreciating nick had in fact been exaggerated, which served a dual purpose: to incite feelings of relief that their grammatically challenged puppy-lover was not an Elephant Man clone, and to further foster the feelings of chartable empathy that were elicited in the opening stanza of the interaction, where the initial revelation of having only primary school level literacy skills was further reinforced by the vulnerability of the implied physical self-image complex. The net effect of this sequence of events was that social contact was established on both the logical and physical levels. Invariably, nerds would attempt to characterise their female interactions with reference to the OSI-Layers model, likening acceptance of a lift to a LAN party as an OSI-4 Transport Layer interaction, or meeting the parents as an OSI-6 Presentation Layer event, but this only served to depreciate any likihood of any OSI-1 Physical Layer interaction taking place.Well, there you have it, another lacklustre posting effort by Goth, and let's face it, a fairly bland response from the supposed Bayls acolytes. Like Sakata Shapes and sex with a condom, it was tasteless and unfeeling effort by all concerned. With the exception of Bladerunner, everyone was able to spot the hidden sexual agenda of Goth, and in fairness to Bladey, he hasn't been preconditioned to what is the opus of Goth's contribution to humanity so far - a 560 page series of disjointed, random words, generating all the interest of a test pattern re-run and all the intelligence of a lobotomised amoeba. Still, the game needs to be lifted. It's time to take the posting game upstairs, to go to the armoury and bring out the big guns, to put in the special "go really fast key" and take it up to a zipper-busting 407km/h in the Big Red posting truck. It's time to pull down the pants and wax the buttocks to a hazy sheen that's shiny enough to reflect the depths of your inner soul. The tyre kicking is over, the playing perspex-encased XBOX 360 with a controller glued to 30cm of PVC pipe in Myer are behind us, the days of surreptitiously scoffing handfuls of new season's grapes and then claiming you don't speak English at Coles are gone; it's time to commit, to break out the "My Little Science" kits and perform some forum alchemy, turning the mountain of poo that is spam into a mountain of gold that can then be melted down and used to cast an immense golden statue of [i][edit by Slaine - you know you can't say that, sorry mate.][/i], that will vacuum all the trite, banal vagaries that Goth epitomises back from whence they came, and restoring balance and correctness back into the spam forum universe.

So it seems that alt-cap nicks and bad typing are subtle ploys to win the hearts of grammatically adept internet vixens. It's almost crazy enough to work! It also means that Goth's dumb nick may not be the result of retarted motor coordination, or the effects of a semen-encrusted keyboard so much as an attempt to lure some grammatically skilled forum-bunny into his salacious online lair. Disturbing as this is, even more disturbing to me personally is the influx of willing male suitors, buzzing like flies around the text-turds that Goth insists on depositing into this thread.

Let's analyse each of these assaults on Goth's stupidity in turn, using the International Grammatical Correction Index of the Grammar Spice icon:

Siddles: Face it Goth, you don't know what Admirals talking about. Succinct, cruel, accurate. No falling for Goth's "date me because I can't type a coherent sentence" trap.

Todes: I am afraid to type too many words in this thread, I'm afraid i'll make a grammar or spelling mistake that will surely lead to my horrible twisted end. Corrected someone else's typos so has ignored Goth's output completely as per Internet best practices.

Madbomber: I am afraid to type too many words in this thread. I'm afraid I'll make a grammar or spelling mistake that will surely lead to my horrible twisted end. Corrected someone who corrected someone else's errors. Probably Kevin Bacon's cousin thrice-removed.

Soz: A cookie to the first person who can spot the grammar nazi. Ignored Goth - well done. Showed solid grasp of the thread content. Probably still affected by the imagery of the "RIP Giraffe" thread.

Sathias: Do you mean apart from the person whose blog it is? Precise, accurate observation, completely bypassing Goth's cowpat of a post. Obviously has the "Beret of Superior Comprehension +6" helmet equipped.

Zebba: [Paid out Hadders] Again, completely ignored Goth. Brilliant!

Bladerunner: Where to to begin? I've bolded the obvious spelling errors and I'll leave the rest of you to spot the 6 grammatical errors in the above segment of an error-riddled post. Oh dear. Has fallen for the cry for help that was the dollop of forum guano embedded by Goth. Needs to pull back and resist the urge to begin a sordid online liaison with the typo-tard before it's too late!