Damn it Feels Good to be a Programmer

Real gangsta-ass niggas don't talk much
All ya hear is the black from the gun blast
And real gangsta-ass niggas don't run for shit
'cause real gangsta-ass niggas can't run fast 

One of the online websites I troll has a "personals" forum where lonely people try to find someone that meets their unrealistic expectations.  Most of the posts are from men, but occasionally a girl posts and is then flooded with 75 to 100 messages, most of which are pathetic one-liners.  On top of all this I've observed an unusual dynamic:  trolls.  More like...mini trolls.  Unlike their distant 4chan-style cousins, these trolls don't appear to have the typical sociopathic motivations of inciting rage and sowing discord.  They are far less diabolical but far more in number.  They descend like vultures upon most of the posts to bitch at the poster.  Sometimes another troll or the occasional reasonable person responds, and then the personal ad devolves into an irrelevant flame war.  I think a lot of people on this site are just negative.  Negative nancies (and mancies).

I came upon one of these because I saw that one of my "friends" (on the website) had posted a response.  There was one guy who was just posting over and over bitching on nitpicky semantics, and generally being a dick.  So I made what I think is a perfectly reasonable move and spent 20 minutes installing greasemonkey, learning javascript, and creating a script that would censor posts made by users that matched a hardcoded array of douchebags.  I then posted the entire script in the hijacked personal ad, with the hardcoded array prominently featuring the username of the guy who was being a dick.

I've been aware of greasemonkey for years, and it never held much interest.  I gave up javascript back when Firefox was heating up and the IE team had Microsoft had just been reactivated for more incompatibility skirmishes among the wreckage of the ancient browser wars (like Sith hunting jedi after the clone wars) because I was sick and tired of writing correct javascript for firefox, fucking it up for IE, and then trying to hack it to make it work in firefox again.  For some reason, though, the thrill of publicly shaming someone in such a geeky way was sufficient motivation for me to blow through all of these previously uninteresting technologies.

Being a dick myself was only half the reason I posted it.  In fact, I put a big disclaimer in my post that falsely stated I wasn't doing it just to prove that the fuckrag troll had nothing worthwhile to say.  No...the real reason was the hope that lots of girls would message me asking how to install the script, since I posted no installation instructions.

It didn't quite work.  A bunch of guys, and guys pretending to be girls, posted bullshit like "what a wonderful little script" and asked for instructions publicly.  The reason they were full of shit is that my script was not wonderful:  it was a hack job that used a wasteful, inaccurate, brute force but easy-to-code method, because when I spend 20 minutes learning a new language just to make a point that somebody is a dick, I don't spend another hour solving the edge cases.  So...I pasted a couple of links that those idiots could have easily googled for just to make them stop talking at me.  Then the guy who was being a dick--the one who I was targeting with this little plot--posted to thank me, saying he would find it useful.  I rolled my eyes at patted myself on the back for at least trying a novel strategy.

A single girl did eventually message me, and it did turn into a connection like I'd hoped.  She lives in Brazil.

As a side note:  I later messaged a girl in Florida to compliment her on her profile pictures.  She both misinterpreted my compliment as an insult and thought I was trying to hit on her.  I'll be directing my energy back to real life for a while--been having much more success there, but that's another story, if I get to it.  I actually wasn't going to even write this story, but at the last minute I decided that a tale of throwing code at interpersonal relations would be more interesting than me listening to There Is and recounting every first kiss with every girl I really liked.  That was my first idea.

The moral of the story?   Javascript is actually not that bad.  Seriously.  I wouldn't want to ever depend anything on it working correctly in a browser environment, but its not that bad.  Besides, when I'm at parties with geeks, I always go with this line about how which language you choose isn't that important, phrased in a way intended to make me look smarter than anyone in the room who was just acting like a language fanboy.  So I'm willing to cut the ol' js some slack.