Jack's Blog

The link:  http://www.vicegrip.net/blog/archive/2005/11/05/1116.aspx

When you spend, say, 75% of your waking hours on an internet connected computer, you start to gain an intuitive awareness of how it functions.  It's sorta like how Neo and friends can read the green gibberish characters in The Matrix, only less gay and unrealistic.  As you observe the digitized flailings of your fellow man, patterns begin to emerge, certain behaviors repeat, and Internet Phenomena are formed.

One such phenomena is the Overly Aggressive and Incoherent/Incorrect Rebuttal, or OAIIR.  I will provide a fictionalized example of how this might go.

CRXFanDan (02/20/2006 5:02 PM)
For sure you should look into some sort of harness system, and maybe some racing seats.  You'll need shoulder harnesses to participate in most autocross events, so that's a no brainer.  As far as what else you want to do, what's your budget?

iNtEgRa_XaOs (02/20/2006 5:08 PM)
omg crxdan what an idiot!!1!  harnes????  r u kidding????  r u tryin to look stupid cause you look stpid right now for sure  throw a greddy in that hooptie steve my homie diggs got one off ebay and his shit smokes now  seriusly crxdan you need to do sum readin or sumthin cause what the heeeeellll!!!ONE! LOL laterz!

You get the idea.  This is, of course, OAIIR of the most rarified sort.  Even an internet newbie, like Al Gore, could recognize this as an example of OAIIR.  However, there are more subtle examples, such as the one contained in The Link, above, in which “a smarter guy“ takes major issue with my post about Denver's Initiative 100.

I like to use hard science to examine internet jackasses, and one helpful tool is the Textual Retardation Proximity metric, or TRP.  This is a numeric value, which is calculated by starting where the jackass has accused somebody of being “stupid” and then counting the number of words of distance between it, and the nearest spelling or grammar error.  In the fictional example above, the OAIIR actually misspells the word “stupid” itself, giving him a TRP value of 0, which is, obviously, the worst score that one can record on this metric.

Turning to “a smarter guy,” we note this passage:  “...you actually look stupid because of it. Denver can inact laws...”  This OAIIR has rated a 6 on the TRP metric, as he has misspelled “enact” 6 words after calling me “stupid.”  This score of 6 is fairly consistent with the rest of his post, which exhibits an awareness of punctuation, capitalization, but no sense of humor or irony, which also informs us that he's not being ironic when he suggests he is “a smarter guy.”

With this TRP value of 6 in hand, we can observe other elements of his post in relation to that score.  For example, his “smoking a bowl checklist,” is a good example of the sort of “humor” we can observe in the sub 15 ranges of the TRP scale.  People in this range are generally capable of giving sufficient context clues to alert a reader that they are attempting a funny, but without these clues the funny itself would be indistinguishable from their normal featureless prattling.

As an example of featureless prattling, observe the following:  “You do not realize that your comparison of a gun law and this issue is not good. In fact, you actually look stupid because of it.”  When a sub 15 TRP is trying to sound intelligent, they focus their attention on using proper punctuation, and not using contractions, and you end up with choppy, 4th grade essay material, like this.  “Your idea is not good.  It is a bad idea, actually.  I do not agree with it.”

I could actually explain to “a smarter guy” why he's an idiot, why what he's saying makes no sense, and what I was actually saying about I100, but anybody that hasn't figured all that out by now probably never will.