An obvious troll, which I took the bait on. I responded thusly:
So far, pretty typical exchange between us. But the clincher is this follow-up:
Not that it wasn’t abundantly obvious in the past, but since this is essentially a confession I figure that feeding the troll one last time by calling it out publicly might take care of the problem once and for all.
For my part, lissener, there has been no pleasure in interacting with you, and not at all to my dismay it will not be happening in the future. Jerk other people around, since you seem to like to do that sort of thing. In fact, do it as often as possible. That way if we’re fortunate, we won’t even have to trouble ourselves to separate the wheat from the chaff. The admins will do that for us, like they do with all the other losers that go out of their way to troll the SDMB. Goodbye.
Geez, dude, cut him some slack. His feet are killin’ him from slaving away at the video store all day, helping ignorant sheep find shit movies like Die Hard and *Elf *when he just *knows *if they’d take the time to rent Showgirls and pay some fucking attention to it, dammit! they’d understand what a goddamn genius Paul Verhoeven is.
Oh, cut lissener some slack. He’s still hurting from being picked last for dodgeball in third grade, and this trauma manifests itself as irrational hatred for all sports, be they watched or participated in.
Oh, piffle. The admittedly rude, thread-crashing lissener named no one specifically, and the OP not even in a general sense, as he hadn’t entered the thread to that point. So of course this has to end up as another Pit thread, because just one leaves insufficient room for the egos involved.
Airman, the fact that you could be baited by a nonsensical verbal brickbat like that is more than enough evidence that…well, that your reflexes are a bit too highly attuned to certain esoteric stimuli. Lots of our many prolific and cherished posters have a propensity for picking and prolonging fights now and then. Lissener’s effort shouldn’t be criticized because it’s trollish, it should be criticized because it’s gibberish. Apparently he intended to say “sports is not important enough to warrant HDTV technology,” or something like that, and mucked it up. The double use of “retarded” is merely an intensifier, and doesn’t rehabilitate the fact that “oxymoronic” doesn’t have a meaning that can sensibly be inserted into his sentence: there’s nothing about a broadcast technology that inherently contradicts the broadcast content. So far as I can tell, “ludicrosity” is his own invention, so I won’t presume to offer a definition for it.
lissener’s first post was a tad rude (certainly no more than average for the pit), poorly expressed, and if it’s meaning was intended to be something like “it’s stupid for bars to invest in HDTV to broadcast sports anyway – they’re not worth the expense and trouble,” it was on the edge but IMO not quite off-topic. I doubt that a search would find a whole lot of lissener posts contradicting this viewpoint, so sincerity probably isn’t an issue. The “dance, monkey” follow-up (in my view) isn’t so much a confession of trollery as it is an incredibly impolite diagnosis of your inability to ignore a rudely-expressed opinion on what he thinks is a hot topic for you: I can’t remember, Airman – do you care at all about sports?
In short, Doors, it was wrong of lissener to call you a monkey (at least it gets no points from me for either content or style), but, anyhow, quit dancing.
This is not at all about my ego. This is about someone who trolled and then announced that it was, in fact, a troll.
So, in other words, I’m upset because of who it was that posted, not because he disrupted a thread with what you concede to be utter nonsense. You spent an entire paragraph trying to parse a sentence that makes no sense except as an insult in an attempt to divert attention from the fact that it was exactly that.
Yes, I do care about sports. The funny thing, though, is that the thread wasn’t about sports, it was about HDTV, which I am not a fan of. Why would I want to spend hundreds, even thousands of dollars to see greener greens and redder reds? That is not particularly germane to the discussion, however, because someone had a legitimate complaint, to wit: why would you spend a fortune on HDTVs only to have the picture look like hell? For those of us that have to go to bars to watch their favorite teams regularly little things like distorted pictures matter.
I’m done dancing, right after this thread evaporates into the ether. To quote myself from the OP:
I work with television as part of my job in the ANG. I know that it’s more than just what I said, but for the average person it’s not much more than that. Great, it looks spiffy, but that isn’t worth the hundreds of dollars in price premium to me.
I also think that Showgirls was a piece of garbage.
Well, there’s your problem. Lissener wasn’t talking about sports, per se. He was calling “sports on HDTV” an “oxymoronic ludicrosity.” And he’s right!
Sports on HDTV aren’t really sports! They’re a 2D construct, a representation, an image. Can you smell the dirt and sweat of the players on HDTV? No! Can you feel the slap of the dodgeball upside your head? No!
Sports are meant to be experienced: smelled, and felt, and tasted. The pale construct represented on HDTV isn’t “sports.” It’s a ludicrosity.
Well me and the millions of people who watch sports on TV must not have picked up on this. I’ve played many sports and enjoyed them. I’ve watched many sports on TV and enjoyed that (maybe it was the beer that made it enjoyable). And I really like football in HD on TV. (I need to check to see if maybe my beer is high def)
But one thing was clear, lissener’s post was condensendingly rude.
By the same token, *Showgirls * on HDTV is as much of an oxymoronic ludicrosity. Can you *smell * the funk coming from Gina Gershon’s nethers? No! Can you *feel * the slap of Elizabeth Berkley’s funbags upside your head? No!
I don’t know which is worse, lissener’s obvious trollery or your long-winded, pedantic analysis. At least lissener’s comment was kinda funny, in junior-high kind of way.
I am convinced that people like Lissener will, eventually, drive the development of new technologies. Technologies which will, in time, allow you to punch someone in the mouth via the internet.
