[The original post was apparently lost in the shutdown, so I’ll try again]
What kind of online looneys have you been personally associated with? Anything
from rabid self-proclaimed scientific experts to inveterate trolls who keep going on
and on like the Energizer Bunny, to online stalkers and other weirdos of various
sorts. Here’s two to get started, both from Usenet tho I hardly hang around
there anymore:
Koos Nolst Trenite. He was once a member of Scientology, but apparently went
off the deep end at some point (through their fault or something else), and turned
into one of those crazed Internet activists, campaigning against any and all things
Scientologistic, with special emphasis on L. Ron Hubbard, whom he often compared
to the Devil (with the Devil coming out of it looking good in comparison). Usually
would post very long-winded messages on Usenet, cross-posted to dozens of
groups at once. I saw a post last night over at rec.arts.sf.written which appeared
to be one of his sock puppets (exact same kinds of rantings), so looks like he (or
one of his disciples) is still at it.
“Roger L. Maynard” (plus various pseudonyms, all with “RLM” as the initials).
Unrepentant troll in rec.sport.baseball, ranting against anything remotely smacking
of sabermetrics (Bill James et al.). Been at it for almost 16 years now, and he
still manages to get more than his quota of fish in his net-people either too
ignorant or too stupid to refrain from trying to debate him. Current moniker over
there is “Realto Margarino”…
Ed “Man as Old as Coal” ConradPhysical evidence currently exists that proves man inhabited the earth while coal was being formed, shaking the very foundations of who we really are and how we really got here. An assortment of human bones and soft organs, transformed to rock-like hardness, has been discovered between anthracite veins in Pennsylvania. Since one of the golden rules of geology is that coal was formed during the Carboniferous – a minimum of 280 million years ago – it means that man has existed multi-millions of years before the … insectivore from whom the evolutionists claim we eventually evolved. However, the scientific establishment has wielded its powerful disdainful influence – deceit, dishonesty, collusion and conspiracy – to prevent evidence of the most important discovery of the 20th century to be documented as fact and, therefore, keep us from learning a monumental truth about ourselves."
– Ed Conrad’s statement when he first joined the Internet in March 1996Note how Ed refers to himself in the third person.
I’ve been a fan of Winston Wu ever since he graced our boards for about two days before being banned.
Bobby Lee and his fun-filled guide to the ten commandments used to give me a chuckle with all the ranting about atheism and homosexuality until he stopped updating it for some reason. Maybe he tragically choked to death on Nathan Lane’s semen at a Marxist cell meeting or something.
I don’t visit Ann Coulter’s house of horrors much anymore. Is it me or do all her columns sound the same now? Maybe the webmasters started using the Coultermatic Column Generator[sup]TM[/sup] to cover up the fact of her tragically choking to death on Al Franken’s–errr, maybe not.
Can’t let this thread go without mentioning Phred and his merry band of closet cases. Seriously, could they be any gayer? Don’t arrest them, for Christ’s sake. Just put them on a flatbed truck, drive down to New Orleans, and watch them sweep the Mardis Gras float contests.
ALEX CHIU and his immortality device. I love that guy. I have more than once thought about buying his rings just for a laugh. But each time I get down to it, I just can’t bring myself to do it.
Arindam Banerjee, who among other things, claims that you can move an object without applying any external force to it. He wandered into rec.games.frp.dnd back when I was still reading it actively, and immediately struck me as the Net.Kook of which all others are merely shadows. He’s very nearly all of them - crackpot physicist, racist, religious nut, self-published-author, and general troll all in one.
I saw that guy in person once! King was on the lecture circuit, and spoke in San Francisco. During the Q&A section, this dude stood up, clutching a paper bag full of loose leaf paper, and demanded that King admit that he colluded with Jimmy Carter to kill John Lennon.
This was a long time ago, and unfortunetly, I don’t recall what King’s response was, or even if he had one.
There is a poster known as RedDog (and various socks) who inhabits a handful of the binary newsgroups on usenet. He was apparently one of the founders of the alt.binaries.models newsgroup, and at some point in the past he decided he didn’t like the way the group was being run.
For at least three years now, he’s done everything he can to destroy the newsgroup. His primary tactic is to flood the group with off-topic JPEGs, usually of remarkably unattractive women in various states of undress - material that nobody in that newgroup especially wants to see. I’m talking upwards of 10,000 photos per day, every day, for the last three years or more. He’s also fond of using a sock to request specific copyrighted series’ of photos from one Web site or another, and then reporting the subsequent copyright violation, should somebody fall for it, to the relevant Web site owner.
This guy is either independently wealthy, retired, or chronically unemployed, seeing as how he has time to flood the group with tens of thousands of photos on a daily basis. Mind you, he’s committing massive copyright infringements himself through his actions, but has enough technical skill to hide his true IP address so that nobody can report him. His posts contain so many different spoofed IP addresses, phony e-mail addresses and variant names (frequently using the names of legitimate posters) that it’s literally impossible to killfile him.
The guy clearly has some sort of mental problem. I can’t think of any other explanation for his single-minded, long-term dedication to such asshattery. I can only imagine the astronomical amount of bandwidth is being devoured by his floods propagating across usenet!
OMG, what a complete and utter whacko. Our resident alt.atheism nutbar for many years (and other newsgroups as well.) I managed (through no fault of my own, other than poking him with a stick once to often in a.a.) to get into a protracted, ever weirder e-mail war with him. Fortunately, at a throw away address. I checked the addy a year after and he was STILL e-mailing me. Whatta weirdo!
Also, the guy who’s name I now forget, who was another of our resident nutbars. Claimed to be a born again Christian, the standard “you’re all going to hell…and let me tell you what fun prizes await you there!” kinda guy.
We discovered him posting in alt.sex-strippers. So I adopted quotes from some of his jucier posts for my rotating .sig. My favorite was about foot jobs! He posted, calling me a deranged harpy, which I then took for my own .sig. Which made him nuts. (Deranged harpy, what fun, I loved it!)
Sadly, he left not long after, just when he’d become fun to play with. They always do.
Yeah I had some dealings with him. Usually he would seem rather sober-minded, but then he would take umbrage at some real or imagined slight and go off the deep end.
Nick Kaffes, who posts as Kansan1225 to conspiracy-related newsgroups, especially those concerned with Freemasonry, and who is — to put it mildly – obsessed with Heidi Klum. I can declare that at least one of the responses his rantings have received was not the product of his fevered imagination, as said response was submitted by me.
I tried to have a discussion with Robert Merlin Evenson, who runs something called The Church of Ouzo - he’s a genuine dyed-in-the-woll nutcase who thinks he is the messiah, or something. My debate with him was limited to a disagreement on how to parse a response letter he had received from a guy at something called the Spiritual Counterfeits Project (now defunct, I think). The letter says “What can I say? Your argument is fascinating, tightly-reasoned for sure, but I have to wonder, is it true? And a further question comes to mind, if it is, so what?”. Robert has deluded himself into thinking this means “Wow! Everything you said is true!”. Barking mad.
Then there was Glenn Laird, who goes under the screen name novagaea. His home page is here. To sum up, his contention is that the earth’s continents all fit together to form a much smaller sphere than our earth, and that (within human history), the moon popped out of the Earth through the pacific ocean, causing the remaining hollow Earth to inflate like a balloon, spreading the continents apart. by dubious pattern-matching processes, he claims that the Earth’s surface delaminated to make this possible and that various surface features (such as coastlines, or mountain ranges, can be found duplicated all over the place, where the layer underneath the mountains slipped out and went somewhere else on the globe, but retained the contours of the mountains it was originally under.
Finally, Duane Ertle; who posted all sorts of ‘Einstein was soooo wrong’ stuff on a creation/evolution message board; claimed he could ‘collapse a gravity field’ but squeezing a lead block with car jacks, but had fundamental problems even understanding the difference between speed and acceleration. Compared himself to Galileo more than once; scored highly on the crackpot index, as I recall.
SeeThruArt Believed that NASA faked the moonlanding by using pictures of the moon taken through telescopes. The proof of this was the images of an advanced lunar civilization seen next to Armstrong and the other astronauts.
Justthink Was constantly talking about suicide booths and the need for suicide booths in society. He was banned under suspicion of being a bot. His posts were generally confusing and nigh incomprehensible.