The votes are in and the winner of the highly coveted Man Boobz Troll of the Year Award for 2012 is … MRAL!
Wait, you say, he wasn’t even on the ballot?
Well, no. The troll that got the most votes from you, my dear readers, was the verbose anti-Man Boobz crusader known as Steele — also known as Mikhael Varpole and, briefly, as Torvus Butthorn. Indeed, Steele cruised to victory, getting 47% of the vote, as compared with the 33% received by Tom Martin, his only real competitor. (Dr. Pell came in third, with a mere 6% of the total.)
But as it turns out we’ve been played, big time. The troll we know and love as Steele turns out to have been MRAL all along.
Yes, that MRAL – the long banned commenter who cannot seem to walk away from this blog. We’ve uncovered and banned many of his previous sockpuppets, but somehow he managed to slip his boldest sockpuppet right by us.
Oh, sure. I and others here often wondered if Steele was for real; it seemed pretty clear to me that he couldn’t possibly believe everything he said. But it wasn’t until I went back to some of “Steele’s” earliest comments here, in preparation for this post, that I discovered how justified these suspicions had been. Turns out that one of “Mikhael Varpole’s” IP addresses matched one used by an earlier troll, Scooby Doo on Zombie Island, who had been outed as MRAL a couple of months earlier.
D’OH!
“Torvus Butthorn” really should have been a dead giveaway. But otherwise the highly dedicated MRAL did a masterful job of keeping his troll character consistently ridiculous yet plausible enough to not be an obvious phony, and of hiding his particular obsessions in such a way that he didn’t give himself away.
So, congrats, MRAL, and you’re banned again.
After this, the rest of the results are a bit of an anticlimax.
Sunshine Mary wins the Special-est Snowflake award for Female MRA Trolls, with 52% of the vote. Driversuz comes in second with 32%.
Tom Martin easily wins the Worst Human Being award with a stunning 73% to David K Meller’s 22%.
Some Guy Bored With Your Schtick wins Most Tiresome with 58% of the vote; Diogenes is a distant second with 24%.
And JudgyBitch wins Most Pathetic Vote Beggar.
I hope they’re not all MRAL too.
Man Boobz: Come for the mockery, stay for the animal husbandry and compost tips! 😉
And the moment of squee: Guinea Pig and Butterfly
Chicken Manure is really high nitrogen, it makes a good soil/compost amendment. To get a hap started (and really cooking) is to add some fresh horseshit. The digestive bacteria are still active, and will attack any cellulose.
We added ours to the heap, because we bedded the coop with straw, and that makes it less effective as a soil amendment; both structurally, and because the straw breaking down is a nitrogen thief, so the gain is offset.
I miss having a small farm.
That said, my etrogim are recovering from being a bit water-starved and light deficient (it is too active a tree to do well in the very low-light the garage gets). I’ve moved them into the house, so the window is a veritable greenhouse, the olive, the pomegranate, the etrogim). Being a citrus it just treated it as a drought, and there is now new growth. With luck these will be slightly smaller leaves. I’ll probably split them into to pots, since this is pretty tight, and they will start to suffer. Probably in March/April when I want to move them back outside.
Next year there won’t be a couch in the downstairs hall and I’ll get some growlights,and see if I can keep them from taking over the living room.
RE: CassandraSays
I’m deaf on one side. I HATE wearing headphones, for precisely the reason you describe. (So far the worst offenders have been ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and ‘Robot Parade.’ GAAAAAAAH.) It is much to my frustration now that I kind of have to wear them, just to block out the sound of folks around me while I work. (Our room is too small to hold a desk, so our workspace is in a common area.)
How I imagine Pecunium’s house
LBT: And older versions of Windows used to have a mono option (so your headphones would output the same thing on both sides), but they took it out! Their help center just says “Stereo is the standard, so why would you want to listen to mono?”
katz: not anymore. We had them in Arcadia. I’d mow the mallow, the grass, etc. (in the dry season we’d use bermuda/alfalfa) and cover them.
So it was 2-3 cu ft. of fresh greens. They would be invisible. Three hours later, no green to be seen.
We’d also move them into portable enclosures to let them crop, but not for long. They were smart; and much more energetic than one might think. We had a male (Tweed was his name; he looked like the one in that photo I linked), who was able to get from the male side to the female/juvenile side). We couldn’t figure out how; the divider was a two-foot tall wall of cinderblocks. Then I saw it one day.
He would run, like blazes, around the perimeter, then he would aim at the back wall, leap up and carom over the lip.
So we make the entire thing one brick taller.
Hmm, I should get piggies and put them in our back yard to eat the weeds until we get a chance to establish a proper garden.
RE: katz
I KNOOOOOOW! I can’t make ANY of my music go to mono now, and it’s SO FUCKING MADDENING AAAAAAGH. At this point, I’ve just gotten used to it and learned to turn my headphones around or hallucinate the music I’m missing. Still….
And this is why I still own a big bulky stereo the size of R2D2.
You can also get a stereo to mono headphone adapter.
First, I’m a Mac person. More importantly, I think they just moved it (and I know their tech support sucks!) — http://imgur.com/KuWId
“With no file loaded in VLC
Tools –> Preferences
Change the “Show settings” checkbox at the bottom to All
Under Audio -> Filter select “audio filter for stereo to mono conversion”
You could also try a dedicated music player, for example both WinAMP and Foobar 2000 (that is also portable) both offer the option to convert to mono.”
VLC is basically my favorite thing ever, their support doesn’t suck and it can handle all sorts of video and music.
RE: katz
I didn’t know such a thing existed! I must investigate this.
RE: Argenti
Due to technological complications (my work comp has no Internet access) I have only an old version of VCL, which doesn’t seem to be able to do this. Also, that version is LOUSY for music playing; selecting a bunch of songs at a time just means it tries to play them all at the same time, rather than make a list of them.
katz: If you do, make sure the enclosure is secure to the ground. We had some excitement when we realise how little a gap was needed to let one escape. We recovered him (it was Tweed). Get them fixed too. They live longer, and you don’t get babies (which are TOTES TEH CUTE! They are precocious, and they remind me of foals.
And they cheeble. 🙂 You can feed them weeds when the garden is up and running. Sigh, now I wish I was in Calif, it’s time to put lettuce seeds in the ground.
LBT — I think Winamp can do it too, but it’s been a decade since I used it, sorry!
Pecunium, I’m more concerned about other animals. They wouldn’t fare so well in a scrap with a cat or raccoon, and we’re close enough to the mountains that even a coyote is theoretically a possibility. (Suggestions?)
It’s actually hilarious that MRAL played all of you like that. Get use to it.
Yeah get use to it, idiots… :/
“Re: Dave, ohhhh yeah. I love human names for animals, the more jarring the better. And standard Poodles are cool.”
Dave’s only the second standard poodle I’ve met. The other’s Ruby, who’s a big favourite at the cafe I go to of a morning. She’s not as tall as Dave, but boy is she heavy when she leans on you! She’s a darling, very solemn-looking (her mind’s on getting treats from the cafe owner). She’s clipped neatly all over with a bit of a topknot, and purple nail polish. 🙂
We always give our kitties human names. I’ve never gone in for this Spot or Tiger or those sort of descriptive names. Mind you they get called by innumerable nicknames more than by their real names anyway!
… Aaaaaaaaaaand Fribs is committing biological war crimes in the kitty litter, must dash!
I wish we could ‘get use to it’. The Steele / MRAL deception was kind of amazing. It kinda sucks that all we have nowadays are trolls that spout off a one-line generic comment and then run for it…
Kinda like you.
Ah well.
And of course it’s not like MRAs have ever been trolled by guys pretending to have some dreadful injustice done (things like, oh, being required to pay child support), watching the shitstorm and then saying they’d actually made it all up.
Ah… permanent outdoors? You want to have at least half a dozen (they are fairly sociable, and like to huddle/cuddle.
We used cinder blocks, for walls, and used chain link gates as lids. We weighted those with stones. Inside we had pallets to let them run into/under, as well as rocks to climb on. The pallets also made it easier to know when to move the enclosure, because the packed pellets look like bare earth.
I must be spending too much time here – the night before last I dreamed I was reading comments and someone new showed up called “Justin Buttworm.” We were all trying to get them to out themselves as Mr. AL/ Steele when my dream changed.
Later I saw this at the book store and almost fell on the floor laughing.
@clairedammit
I can’t get the link to work, but my browser sucks so it might just be me. 🙁
What is it, please?
Ditto, the link isn’t working for me and INQUIRING MINDS MUST KNOW!
Ah, I broke my HTML, here it is.