Today, I’ve laughed more deeply and at greater length than I have in a number of years. As a one-time IRC junkie, I thought the quotations on the top 50/100 of bash.org’s website were absolutely phenomenal. Stuff like the following is just such geek-humor you can’t help but appreciate it (#9501):
<AgentSmith> It seems you have been leading two lives, Mr. Anderson. In one life, you are Robert Anderson, assistant cook at a Jack in the Box in Mesquite….in the other…you go by the chat alias "Randerson"…spreading homosexual propoganda, lying, and being a generally immature pest…
<AgentSmith> One of these…has a future.
<Randerson> LMAO OMFG where’s the phone, I have to tell Dean about this
<AgentSmith> How can you use the phone when you cannot…speak?
*** AgentSmith sets mode: +m
I mean, come on folks. The great thing about them all is that they’re so ridiculously geeky (if sometimes unfortunately a bit sophomorically crude or grotesque, as is to be expected from IRC by in large I suppose) that you have to know a little something about networking, hardware, software, Linux, UNIX, and computer science to “get” them. For instance, take the example above. At the most basic level, you have to understand that IRC is the precursor to all other kinds of “chat rooms” (real-time discussions involving nicknamed individuals congregating virtually) today, like AOL and all the other ridiculous Java-based web chats that followed, and as such, you have to know that the two individuals here are nicknamed computer users talking on-the-fly across the Ether to each other–being just utterly ridiculous. You have to be able to infer from the fact that “AgentSmith sets mode: +m” that he is a channel op–and exactly what implications that fact carries with it. (So this doesn’t become too redundant to the folks that understand these concepts I’ll try to abstain from going into all the inner workings thereof here. … Though I may have to put up a HOWTO or something to sate my now-burning desire to explain these things.) You have to know what it means to set mode to +m (changes the state of the channel, or “chat room,” such that only operators can talk). You have to have such a working knowledge of the 1999 box-office smash The Matrix that you can immediately put the two and two together quickly enough for this to have the brilliance of impact that I’m sure it did for the others that were fortunate enough to be in the channel at the time.
In other words, you have to be a tremendous geek.
Or take, for another example, the following (#25464):
<kow`> "There are 10 types of people in the world… those who understand binary and those who don’t."
<SpaceRain> That’s only 2 types of people, kow.
<SpaceRain> STUPID
Let’s take a moment to note that–if you don’t know what “binary” is–if something looks this obviously incorrect at first glance, let good Solomon’s widsom still your tongue and let someone else say it first. But what poor SpaceRain didn’t know was what binary–or “base 2″–notation really is. To sum it up, in decimal–or “base 10″–notation, the number TWO is written 2, or 02. We recall from elementary school that this says that there is a TWO in the ones’ place and ZERO in the tens’ place, yes? Well, in binary notation, what we say aloud as “TWO” is written 10: there’s NOTHING in the ones’ place, and a ONE in the twos’ place. If that doesn’t make sense, don’t worry, this is just shorthand for the larger concept. ANYway, other than the fact that SpaceRain exposed his/her own ignorance of the matter in such a blatant fall for kow`’s (incidentally-often-quoted in Geekdom) assertion, what makes this quote hilarious is that this sort of thing happens all the time in IRC. Anyone who reads through this site with a bit of experience under his belt is probably going to be able to identify and, thus, will find himself ROTF, as it were.
- Learn more about IRC.
- Learn more about binary numbers. [A quick Googling reveals that the authors of most pages that go into detail about binary numbers assume you’re a comp.sci student at their univerity, and perhaps even under their tutelage, and refer to arcane texts through shorthand documents that are no clearer than my own shorthand explanation. I’ll explain the binary system on my own in my (ha!) free time.]
