0912: "Manual Override"

[A_of_s_t]

Debian has this policy, that almost every command should have a man page (man in short for manual, you type "man <command name>" and it shows all the help you need in one easy to read page using a pager like less).

Its GNU hip to do documentation in GNU info pages instead of man pages, so a lot of packages dont have man pages, they just have GNU info manuals. So what do Debian devs do? They create a dummy man page that points you to use the GNU info page for the command.

Problem is that GNU info requires you to remember 13 thousand 4 hundred and ninety two different key combinations to navigate, all including Ctrl - Left Meta (wtf is meta? I only got ALT) - Caps - Tab - Shift - F2 + the key hardest to reach while holding all those down (think emacs). Additionally, info pages are strictly hierarchal, so you are always presented with a type of Table of Contents only initially, and you have to navigate through the nodes to find the information you seek, but to do that, you must first learn the correct magic key combinations to activate a link (highlight, press space or enter - BAH! too easy! Think 5 finger key combination).

Good news, you can learn how to do this by reading the, wait for it, GNU info page for GNU info. Long story short, it ends with you swearing and turning to that other cherished unix tool for help - Google.

PS. Get over the plane crash, he's not talking about a real event, he's talking about a situation where you need info NOW, and you must content with GNU info.

+1 for explaining the joke.

[gmorganVA]

But I thought you GNU how to fly the plane...

[Asleep or Wrong]

Protip: install pinfo. Replaces the GNU info's nightmarish interface with a lynx-like.

[bigjeff5]

Rule number one of flying a plane - you pay attention first and foremost to flying the plane. From what we've seen so far, there was no reason that plane should have been allowed to aerodynamically stall. Push forward on the stick and pick up speed to keep the plane gliding.

I think this comment is a bit insulting to the pilots and reeks of armchair quarterbacking. There is a large difference between flying around in a single engine plane on a nice calm day and accidentally stalling it, and the situation here. They were flying IFR (instrument flight rules) at night in a potentially severe thunderstorm with heavy turbulence, and with unreliable airspeed indications due to a failure in the pitot-static system. It would be very difficult to tell the difference between a stall and a high speed dive when your airspeed instruments are all reading different things, in conjunction with a number of alarms. There is some speculation based on the available data that they may have been getting stall and overspeed indications at the same time. Not to mention that a passenger jet at high altitude is already pretty close to stall (see coffin corner) in normal flight, so a stall caused by wind sheer in a heavy thunderstorm is not unlikely. This is why even the heavy iron generally has to go around severe weather rather than through it.

I agree about the Buffalo crash being due to the pilots not being fully aware of the situation, though there were other factors at play there as well (i.e. fatigue).

BrianB should read the Wikipedia article on the subject (which I did after it was brought up, since I had never heard of Flight 447 either). The flight recorder indicated they were flying at near full throttle at about 35 degrees. Air speed indications were a mess - they would go from 200+ knots to less than 100 then back up near 200 again in a matter of seconds. How do you deal with that when all of your information is unreliable? The only thing you can do is give it your best guess, which is exactly what they did. Unfortunately luck wasn't on their side.

I'd really like to see an armchair pilot like Brian cope with that. I doubt he is capable of handling a little Piper, never mind an A330. If he were he'd know there are a lot more ways to stall than just not going fast enough, particularly in a storm.

EDIT: Oh and I found the comic hilarious, since I wasn't colored by any airplane incidents (there are hundreds of them, you know, don't get your panties in a bunch about just one). Finding info about almost anything in *nix that isn't easily found via Google is a real pain in the ass, especially when you need it NOW. Which was the joke. A whoosh to all of you! (well, most of you anyway)

EDIT2: I clearly misread the Wikipedia article - in the final minutes the throttle was at IDLE, not full, making my whole post pretty much wrong (though I think my last statement about BrianB's flying abilities are still probably correct, I just have nothing to base that on but a guess now). That makes the whole thing pretty confusing, honestly.

[bigjeff5]

as for the "30 feet over my head" thing, yeah, I just have to accept the fact that Randall doesn't write XKCD simply for my reading pleasure...

What's with this masochism on the part of some xkcd fans? It's as if they feel pleasure in acknowledging that Randall is way smarter, way superior and way cooler than them, so they have no right whatsoever to criticise him. What's the matter, people? If you absolutely found no humour in the comic, it may possibly be just because the comic sucked.

But it could have been worse. Way worse.

It could have been a Wikipedia joke.

I'm kind of wondering, why are you even here? From what I've seen of your posts your only purpose seems to be to insult Randall at every opportunity. Not that I'm particularly concerned, I don't even think Randall visits the forums at all, but if you hate the guy so much you would hang around on his site?

That seems like real masochism to me.

[A_of_s_t]

I'm kind of wondering, why are you even here? From what I've seen of your posts your only purpose seems to be to insult Randall at every opportunity. Not that I'm particularly concerned, I don't even think Randall visits the forums at all, but if you hate the guy so much you would hang around on his site?

That seems like real masochism to me.

Maybe he's just extremely jealous.

[tetsujin]

Its GNU hip to do documentation in GNU info pages instead of man pages, so a lot of packages dont have man pages, they just have GNU info manuals. So what do Debian devs do? They create a dummy man page that points you to use the GNU info page for the command.

The bit that really pisses me off is that if you don't have the info page installed, the "info" command will fall back to displaying the (dummy) man page.

> man xylophone
"This is a dummy man page. Full documentation is available with the 'info' command."
> info xylophone
"This is a dummy man page. Full documentation is available with the 'info' command."
> #(&*%((@!&(^&@$((*&!!!

The hierarchical system presented by "info" is a nice way to present more extensive documentation than can comfortably fit in a man page - but with HTML around it seems kind of redundant these days. Man pages work pretty well if they're kept brief, but that brief presentation could as easily be contained as the introductory section to a more extensive, hierarchical documentation. (In other words, IMO both man and info should be replaced by an HTML-based system. The main pieces missing for such a system are a nice command line interface - "help xylophone" instead of "lynx /usr/share/doc/xylophone/html/index.html" - and the set of formatting standards and conventions that would make the collection of documents more consistent and coherent...)

[plzblv]

It's okay, the plane doesn't crash. The copilot remembers he has an emergency checklist sitting next to him and looks up Manual Override. Day is saved.

(Although his airplane has at least three different, extremely simple ways to disable the autopilot, if that's actually their problem.)

[BrianB]

... There is a large difference between flying around in a single engine plane on a nice calm day and accidentally stalling it, and the situation here. They were flying IFR (instrument flight rules) at night in a potentially severe thunderstorm with heavy turbulence, and with unreliable airspeed indications due to a failure in the pitot-static system. It would be very difficult to tell the difference between a stall and a high speed dive when your airspeed instruments are all reading different things, in conjunction with a number of alarms. ...

"From there until the end of the flight, the angle of attack never dropped below 35 degrees. During the last minutes, the thrust levers were in the IDLE detent position."

They continued a nose-up attitude and moved the engines back to idle. That is not how you recover from a stall condition. Had they assumed a stick-forward and throttle-up position, the outcome may have been quite different.

[webgrunt]

I'm kind of wondering, why are you even here? From what I've seen of your posts your only purpose seems to be to insult Randall at every opportunity. Not that I'm particularly concerned, I don't even think Randall visits the forums at all, but if you hate the guy so much you would hang around on his site?

That seems like real masochism to me.

My theory is that SirMustapha is actually Randall. In my opinion, it would be congruent with his sense of humor to do this.

[addams]

So:

Title text: "I think you mean 'GNU info override'."
Sorry, Rio-Paris just too fresh in my mind. In fact almost exactly 2 years ago.

The comic was funny to me.
The words, "Manual Override" Have meaning to me.

The words Manual Override start conversations, sometimes.

"We are on Manual Override, Sir"
"Do you know how this thing works?"
"Sort of; Do you?"

It is funny. It is to me. It is nice to have someone to talk to about how this thing works. We as a population on a distant Planet are on Cultural Manual Override.

I am in the United States. There are many people that are moving at a frantic pace here. I wonder what we are all doing so quickly. There is an urgency in the air. I have seen this kind of behavior on the small scale. Frightened people are not always predictable on the small scale.
Well trained well educated persons have advantages? Does knowing how a machine works help a person? When the plane is going down, knowing how it works may take a persons mind off the obvious. Maybe. Maybe not.
Screaming helps some people. Others find it annoying.

Are you having a political discussion about where to bury the survivors? It is not that silly. If, there are survivors, then, they may want to be buried with the ones that did not survive.
I have heard of such things. There were people that wanted to be buried at one of the concentration camps in Poland. It is true. They made it out. But; Everything worth living for did not. The Europeans understand in a way that most Americans do not. Don't the Europeans know a great deal? Not every single one knows, but, many. Right?

[NotThatDork]

In terms of the grieving process, it's probably just about the worst possible time to find the wreck.

Please elaborate. It has been 2 years. Grieve on, but its been 2 years. Why is it the worst time to find the wreck?

oh, the anniversary? That is valid, I suppose, but I am very happy they found the wreckage.

Personally, since I have no belief in the soul or afterlife, I don't see any harm in raising the bodies. I think it would bring closure in the long run to families as they know the body was recovered and "put to rest"

/I'm a registered donor for the Institute for Plastination, so with any luck, I will be on display at one of those Bodies exhibits, or at least part of me.

I'll take this, and with the due respect, to say that if we look back carefully,everyday of the year must be the anniversary of a plane crash, or, at least, 60% of the days in the calendar. Yes, two years can be too close, but you can get my point.

And, please, even more respectfully, (I have studied portuguese three years with brazilian teachers, and was with them the dawn they (us) knew about the crash... and everyone had a reason to feel, at least, somber), I'll add that that particular accident had very good press coverage, maybe an unfair one if you allow me the abuse of the term. Two or three days after, there was another massive crash near India or Pakistan (if I'm not wrong), who have not had even the 5% of coverage the former had; there was only one survivor (I recall it was a kid), and the total body count was around the same as AF-447. Reasons may be obvious in some places. In fact, I live in a country who was affected since there were a couple of prominent citizens in AF-447. But even before the black box was found I've seen at least two documentaries on Discovery or History Channel babbling from pitots to massive thunderstorms, on-air desintegration or vertical shunt in between, about the AF-447 and not the slightest mention about the other anymore on any place at all. Not even the whole polish government collapsing in that infamous crash has the same coverage now!

On the light side, I found the "man" reference a lot more amusing than the original.

[cellocgw]

For those who haven't heard: Airlines are starting to roll out tablet (iPad) versions of the massive manuals covering the equipment (i.e. the airplane) and other manuals, airport maps, beacon codes, etc., that the flight crew typically lugs around in hardcopy.
So this joke is *just* what they need to throw the whole modernization plan into a panic.

[Fixblor]

My theory is that SirMustapha is actually Randall. In my opinion, it would be congruent with his sense of humor to do this.

Actually, Randall is the pen name for one Mr. Sir Mustapha ... his parents knew he was bound for an online career of infantitudes, so they named him Sir.

The character is that crying boy in a barrel in the first few strips, after that his true inner-child was lost forever to the unexpected blending of personalities.

It's actually part of his yogi guru's prescribed therapy to yell at himself after each personality-abstraction that is a comic, so as to not wander too far away from his true soul.

[BrianB]

...(though I think my last statement about BrianB's flying abilities are still probably correct, I just have nothing to base that on but a guess now)...

I admit that I am not a pilot (yet). But I am somewhat an aviation enthusiast, and regularly read aviation accident reports on Aviation Safety Network website (several dozen to date - that makes me an expert, doesn't it? [tic]). I have a technical background and understand a lot of the details.

Oh... and I just a month ago purchased my first flying lesson (yet to take). Hopefully I won't go into an uncontrolled stall.

[cphite]

as for the "30 feet over my head" thing, yeah, I just have to accept the fact that Randall doesn't write XKCD simply for my reading pleasure...

What's with this masochism on the part of some xkcd fans? It's as if they feel pleasure in acknowledging that Randall is way smarter, way superior and way cooler than them, so they have no right whatsoever to criticise him. What's the matter, people? If you absolutely found no humour in the comic, it may possibly be just because the comic sucked.

As opposed to coming here after every single comic just to go on and on about how horrible it is, what an awful person the author must be, how stupid the fans are, etc, etc... Seriously dude, if you really hate the comic, the author, the fans, and the forum even a fraction as much as you claim, then maybe you ought to think twice before calling anyone else a masochist...

[webgrunt]

as for the "30 feet over my head" thing, yeah, I just have to accept the fact that Randall doesn't write XKCD simply for my reading pleasure...

What's with this masochism on the part of some xkcd fans? It's as if they feel pleasure in acknowledging that Randall is way smarter, way superior and way cooler than them, so they have no right whatsoever to criticise him. What's the matter, people? If you absolutely found no humour in the comic, it may possibly be just because the comic sucked.

As opposed to coming here after every single comic just to go on and on about how horrible it is, what an awful person the author must be, how stupid the fans are, etc, etc... Seriously dude, if you really hate the comic, the author, the fans, and the forum even a fraction as much as you claim, then maybe you ought to think twice before calling anyone else a masochist...

SirMustapha is actually Randall Munroe!

(Ok, I could be wrong. I realize that, but SirMustapha's comments are funny and entertaining if I think he's secretly Randall rather than some pathetic troll.)

[Tova]

I don't mind jokes that I need to read up to understand, but they need to beat least funny afterwards.

Since when?

[goose9689]

Did today's QC comic cause today's XKCD comic?

[muntoo]

SirMustapha is actually Randall Munroe!

He's also [secretly] the guy behind XKCD sucks. Nothin' like a conflict to make things more interesting...

[gnoitall]

...but SirMustapha's comments are funny and entertaining if I think he's secretly Randall rather than some pathetic troll.)

Regardless of what increases your enjoyment of the forums, I'm afraid William of Ockham cannot approve.

[addams]

Debian has this policy, that almost every command should have a man page (man in short for manual, you type "man <command name>" and it shows all the help you need in one easy to read page using a pager like less).

Its GNU hip to do documentation in GNU info pages instead of man pages, so a lot of packages dont have man pages, they just have GNU info manuals. So what do Debian devs do? They create a dummy man page that points you to use the GNU info page for the command.

Problem is that GNU info requires you to remember 13 thousand 4 hundred and ninety two different key combinations to navigate, all including Ctrl - Left Meta (wtf is meta? I only got ALT) - Caps - Tab - Shift - F2 + the key hardest to reach while holding all those down (think emacs). Additionally, info pages are strictly hierarchal, so you are always presented with a type of Table of Contents only initially, and you have to navigate through the nodes to find the information you seek, but to do that, you must first learn the correct magic key combinations to activate a link (highlight, press space or enter - BAH! too easy! Think 5 finger key combination).

Good news, you can learn how to do this by reading the, wait for it, GNU info page for GNU info. Long story short, it ends with you swearing and turning to that other cherished unix tool for help - Google.

PS. Get over the plane crash, he's not talking about a real event, he's talking about a situation where you need info NOW, and you must content with GNU info.

+1 for explaining the joke.

Yes! Nice. (Bows to the person with the keyboard.) Well done.

Really? No plane crash and no hard manual. Huh?
I am glad that it is not a real event. It is only a situation. ok. I feel better about that?
Is there a difference between a real event and a situation?
How about: It is not a real event; It is a stick figure comic.

[hamjudo]

... I don't even think Randall visits the forums at all,...

Randall (or a helper) obviously visits the forums a few minutes after each comic goes live. When people notice that the comic has a technical error, it gets fixed, usually within a couple hours.

Those people who read the comic first thing, and post any errors they find, are the beta testers. Thank you. Those of us who don't read the comic until late the next day appreciate your work. None of the technical errors has ever lasted until I got around to reading the strip.

[xolotl]

Man pages work pretty well if they're kept brief, but that brief presentation could as easily be contained as the introductory section to a more extensive, hierarchical documentation. (In other words, IMO both man and info should be replaced by an HTML-based system.)

I actually really appreciate having what others might think of as over-long manpages. It's so convenient to have everything searchable within the same pager; if I have an HTML manual lumped into separate pages, a simple Ctrl-F isn't enough to find a specific keyword, if I'm not sure what section it can be found in. Bash's manpage, for instance, is relatively lengthy, but it's one of my favorite resources. For, you know, bash problems, anyway.

Perhaps that's a problem that "info" has already solved, of course, but I'm totally with the "info sucks" crowd.

[SirMustapha]

I'm kind of wondering, why are you even here?

Think Godawful Fan Fiction.

Except, instead of reading pathetic fanfiction from random nobodies on the Internet, I read the "highly acclaimed" webcomic from an icon of the über-cool nerd culture, which is supposed to be all awesome and stuff. It's like reading Twilight just for the lulz: do you get THAT worked up about folks who do that too?

That seems like real masochism to me.

It would be, if reading xkcd made me suffer.

I'd suffer knowing that there's this "awesome" webcomic running around that I would "totally" love because I'm a programmer and programmers by default love Randall, and not being able to say what I think about it.

EDIT: Now I wonder, what if I was actually Randall? You could bet that I am trying hard to sabotage my own comic, by making it increasingly, unimaginably awful and heavily criticising it here to see if my "fans" would finally get off my ankles, yet getting horrified that they STILL stick to me like flies on a turd. That makes me shudder.

[StClair]

"I appreciate xkcd, but only ironically."

Wow, you're so cool and hip, man.

[hellmitre]

Well, then, we're fucked. I never did figure out those info pages.

[SteevyT]

"I appreciate xkcd, but only ironically."

Wait, what?

[waidh]

I actually really appreciate having what others might think of as over-long manpages. It's so convenient to have everything searchable within the same pager; if I have an HTML manual lumped into separate pages, a simple Ctrl-F isn't enough to find a specific keyword, if I'm not sure what section it can be found in. Bash's manpage, for instance, is relatively lengthy, but it's one of my favorite resources. For, you know, bash problems, anyway.

It's not necessary to split larger HTML documents into seperate files, browsers can handle big pages - limits being only the browser performance and system resources. It's annoying to see a 300 page book distributed as "ebook" with over 100 seperate HTML files plus subdirectories for embedded images like fancy arrows for "previous" and "next" at the top/bottom of each page.
All you really need for navigation is a linked TOC and a "back to top" or "back to TOC" link at each section - and the search function of the browser, of course.
The bash manpage, copied from a website, is only 353 KB as HTML file. While this too big for some ebook readers (I hear some can't/won't display HTML pages >300 KB) I think anything with some more power won't have problems displaying this page - otherwise there wouldn't even be such websites.

[jozwa]

People connecting this comic to some accident came as a complete surprise to me. I don't remember ever even hearing about that AFF 447.

This has to be troll bait.

Right... Maybe it was in the news. Can't remember every disaster in the world.

[xolotl]

It's not necessary to split larger HTML documents into seperate files, browsers can handle big pages

Yeah, true, and having some internal hyperlinking could certainly be useful. I suppose the biggest obstacle is probably just that we don't have some kind of "htmlman" command which would let you launch a browser (text-based or otherwise) directly to the HTML manual for a command, without having to know its path. Right now most HTML docs just get installed under /usr/share/doc or wherever, and you've got to go browse around to get to the file you want. Would be kind of nice to have stuff installed into /usr/share/htmlman/command.1/ or something (keeping with the manual "section" conventions), and have a command to launch a browser based on a $BROWSER env var or something.

Edit: Or actually, I suppose that the real solution is to just write your docs in something like Docbook or SGML, which can then be converted and handled however anyone wants.

[silverkitty]

I'm kind of wondering, why are you even here?

It's like reading Twilight just for the lulz: do you get THAT worked up about folks who do that too?

For myself, I get exactly as "worked up about" people who read things they hate and then go to the fansite for those things and put everything down as bigjeff5 does.

"Worked up" enough to ask why - once - out of curiosity.

That's all he did. Now I'm additionally curious why you call asking a question in polite tones being "THAT worked up", but only a little curious, because I imagine this conversation doesn't go anywhere but downhill, because of the next paragraph.

Your analogy is revealing - you compared "going into a fan community and bemoaning the object of their fandom" to "reading a dumb book just to see how bad it can really be". One is an activity involving other people, one is entirely self-contained, but you put them forth as equivalencies. The obvious conclusion, assuming your analogy is really reflective of what you think, is that you have no regard for other people at all. However, I suspect you posted in haste and didn't really pick the right words.

[webgrunt]

I'm kind of wondering, why are you even here?

It's like reading Twilight just for the lulz: do you get THAT worked up about folks who do that too?

For myself, I get exactly as "worked up about" people who read things they hate and then go to the fansite for those things and put everything down as bigjeff5 does.

"Worked up" enough to ask why - once - out of curiosity.

That's all he did. Now I'm additionally curious why you call asking a question in polite tones being "THAT worked up", but only a little curious, because I imagine this conversation doesn't go anywhere but downhill, because of the next paragraph.

Your analogy is revealing - you compared "going into a fan community and bemoaning the object of their fandom" to "reading a dumb book just to see how bad it can really be". One is an activity involving other people, one is entirely self-contained, but you put them forth as equivalencies. The obvious conclusion, assuming your analogy is really reflective of what you think, is that you have no regard for other people at all. However, I suspect you posted in haste and didn't really pick the right words.

If he's really not Randall just playing with us, he may have narcissistic personality disorder.

[SirMustapha]

Your analogy is revealing - you compared "going into a fan community and bemoaning the object of their fandom" to "reading a dumb book just to see how bad it can really be". One is an activity involving other people, one is entirely self-contained, but you put them forth as equivalencies. The obvious conclusion, assuming your analogy is really reflective of what you think, is that you have no regard for other people at all. However, I suspect you posted in haste and didn't really pick the right words.

According to the original post addressing me, he wasn't questioning why I was here interacting with other people, but he asked why I was doing something he ASSUMED was a terrible pain for me -- see his mentioning of "masochism". My answer was, this isn't any "pain" for me. It doesn't have anything to do with interacting with other people or not -- I never even intended to get into that merit.

As for why I'm specifically posting here: well, by posting here, I'm making sure that someone is reading. I want my critique (or bitter jokes) to be read. Am I doing anything wrong by trying to have my posts read?

[Pfhorrest]

Do you know what I find more annoying than SirMustapha constantly repeating the same points about why xkcd isn't what is used to be in every new comic thread? (Which is, really, not very annoying at all.)

Threads constantly derailing into arguments about whether or not SirMustapha should be doing so, whether he should stay or leave, what his motivations are, etc. Those actually do get rather annoying.

Seriously people, can't you read the signs?

[addams]

Do you know what I find more annoying than SirMustapha constantly repeating the same points about why xkcd isn't what is used to be in every new comic thread? (Which is, really, not very annoying at all.)

Threads constantly derailing into arguments about whether or not SirMustapha should be doing so, whether he should stay or leave, what his motivations are, etc. Those actually do get rather annoying.

Seriously people, can't you read the signs?

That is the cutest sign. Someone will feed the Troll. Right? The poor ugly little thing. It does not know it is ugly. Is it hungry? So cute. Do they make good pets? Is a special permit required to take one home? It is a ugly thing. What if you had two and they had baby Trolls? Do they lay eggs? It looks like a live birth kind of thing, to me. What do you think?

[Feddlefew]

I didn't find this one funny. It feels like a rehash of Stabby McToaster.

As for why I'm specifically posting here: well, by posting here, I'm making sure that someone is reading. I want my critique (or bitter jokes) to be read. Am I doing anything wrong by trying to have my posts read?

As I said some time ago, you need new materiel. And less bile. Much less bile.

(There is probably a misspelled word in this post.)

[Fixblor]

Do you know what I find more annoying than SirMustapha constantly repeating the same points about why xkcd isn't what is used to be in every new comic thread? (Which is, really, not very annoying at all.)

Threads constantly derailing into arguments about whether or not SirMustapha should be doing so, whether he should stay or leave, what his motivations are, etc. Those actually do get rather annoying.

Seriously people, can't you read the signs?

http://www.xdtalk.com/forums/members/spike-albums-misc-picture2346-do-not-feed-trolls.jpg

That is the cutest sign. Someone will feed the Troll. Right? The poor ugly little thing. It does not know it is ugly. Is it hungry? So cute. Do they make good pets? Is a special permit required to take one home? It is a ugly thing. What if you had two and they had baby Trolls? Do they lay eggs? It looks like a live birth kind of thing, to me. What do you think?

Looks more like a lesser-demon or flightless imp, rather than a troll. Trolls are taller, ganglier, don't have horns, and look more peeved when they haven't been fed in a while.

No, that thing reminds me of Shatner's mile-high nightmare more than a troll. But regardless of what it actually is (maybe a gremlin), it probably spawns from something slimy and putrid. The stench would likely be the major prohibiting factor in keeping one as a pet. So, let's feed it already!

[addams]

Feed the Troll? I did some reading. They eat words. But, they like the words that hurt. The gentle words that heal, help and encourage shy people to do what needs to be done, are sometimes rejected by the Troll.
I don't keep much Troll food around.

I like the internet. It is fairly new to me. I was under a rock. So; Now that I am out from under the rock, I find Trolls. My Grandma Great would laugh.

She was funny. She wanted to know how her car worked. She was born into a world that did not have cars and inside toilets in it. She was, just, a simple woman. But, she knew how shit worked. She knew how breaks and dry ice worked. She loved poetry. We did not have any screens. No TV. There was a radio. We listened to one program then turned it off and talked about it.
It is true that the Troll is a archetype that has been with us a long time. There were Trolls in fairy tails, both from Europe and from Asia. I was told that they are not real. Grandma Great may have known a bunch of very useful stuff. But, she was wrong about Trolls. She said that they are not real. She was wrong, Trolls are real. And; Trolls are scary. Trolls do harm. Trolls frighten people. Trolls prevent best thought. We do not do our best intellectual work while we are flinching. Trolls make me flinch.
Oh! Trolls like lots and lots of attention. That is what I read. Typing about the Troll feeds it without hurting anyone.

[MikeDamrat]

addams, you are my new favorite forum member.

Not that this matters, but I felt it was worth expressing. Back to lurking!