The Troll Void

[karlhenning]

Further on the subject of Sean, this thread exemplifies the above self-quotation:

http://www.good-music-guide.com/community/index.php/topic,5579.msg134118.html#msg134118

Note how he traces his hatred of organized education to the following incident:

. . . Primary school 1974-81: was doing really well until about seven when was drawing a tree one day the teacher asked me to do something with it without explaining properly.

Yeah, it was the "tree incident" - screwed him up for life, apparently.

God, not without explaining properly! The horror, oh, the horror!

[Renfield]

It does sound like this fellow (not Sean) really was someone to experience!

Sadly, my non-GMG experiences of forum trolls mostly amount to people whose inflammatory rhetoric hardly goes beyond 'stfu nub', or at best the term 'elitist', employed as a single-word indictment. Though like Scarpia, I don't include venomous quasi-educated egotists in my definition of 'troll'.

(Not to say any one of the former GMG members brought up qualifies as all three.)

[ibanezmonster]

Is it true of only this board or all discussion boards in general that it's impossible not to have a resident troll active at all times? It seems as soon as one obnoxious personality is either banned or eventually tires of continually subjecting others to ridicule, condescension, and/or gutter talk, another soon arises to fill the void. It's as if there are "trolls-in-waiting", or latent trolls -- usually posters who are already here -- just drooling for their chance to step in when the reigning agitator takes his leave -- (but not right away, of course, in case the alpha-troll is only in hibernation and suddenly reappears from under the bridge.)
  If the crew from Criminal Minds had the job of profiling the troll, what would the description emerge as? Definitely male. I've yet to encounter a female troll, or at least an openly female one. Older hen-pecked husband or younger loveless geek? That might account for their feeling of powerlessness in the real world, which drives them to enter threads with the sole intention of soiling what others might value. They act somewhat like a graffiti vandal who devalues the walls of others, but in a much more cowardly way since there is real danger in the tagger getting caught while the troll remains safe in his anonymity. So where does the thrill come from, then, for the troll? Does trolling give him a feeling of power in an otherwise impotent life?

This pretty much explains youtube comments and bullies in general.

"When you are miserable, you need someone even more miserable than yourself."

http://www.youtube.com/v/heLjTX1VksE

[MishaK]

Further on the subject of Sean, this thread exemplifies the above self-quotation:

http://www.good-music-guide.com/community/index.php/topic,5579.msg134118.html#msg134118

Note how he traces his hatred of organized education to the following incident:

Yeah, it was the "tree incident" - screwed him up for life, apparently.

That thread also has some vintage M. 

[(poco) Sforzando]

Hehe, speaking of ridiculously anachronistic language, Sydney Grew was fun while "they" lasted.

But we were not a troll, were we, what?

[Luke]

Re Sydney Grew - I found him deeply annoying at times here, until I stumbled upon another forum of which he is webmaster, it seems (I haven't explored enough to know, precisely). Here's the thread I found; it goes without saying that Gerard has to be our own Mr Grew

http://artmusic.smfforfree.com/index.php/topic,59.0.html

Reading through this my confusion and annoyance turned to hilarity and a certain admiration. Turing up here, as he did, out of the blue, with that pretentious persona, just put the hackles up. But on the other site, it is very clearly understood that the persona it is all, literally, a joke, and that understood, it's a very funny one.
Reading that thread again now, and chuckling merrily... e.g.:

Two items to-day; first a Stravinsky lollipop: the first British performance of his Elegy for J.F.K. dates from 1964. (The initials J.F.K. are those of a Northern American politician.) ...
The second item is Schönberg's Six Pieces for Male Chorus...for some unstated reason they omitted the fifth song of Schönberg's six. A year or so later I managed to hear it; its name is "Landesknechte," meaning farm-boys or agricultural labourers, and there certainly are a lot of animal noises to be heard....
To-day I would like to discuss in quick succession three items from northern America, that far-away land of which we know so little...

The admiration comes from the fact that on that thread he shows himself to be knowledgable, well-listened, and generous, with both his posts and the links he provides.

[Szykneij]

Re Sydney Grew - I found him deeply annoying at times here, until I stumbled upon another forum of which he is webmaster, it seems (I haven't explored enough to know, precisely). Here's the thread I found; it goes without saying that Gerard has to be our own Mr Grew

http://artmusic.smfforfree.com/index.php/topic,59.0.html

I just checked that forum out. I never knew it existed. I was the "one guest" visiting with "0 users". 

It was a bit scary being there alone, so I'm glad to be back here with good company.   

[karlhenning]

Re Sydney Grew - I found him deeply annoying at times here, until I stumbled upon another forum of which he is webmaster, it seems (I haven't explored enough to know, precisely). Here's the thread I found; it goes without saying that Gerard has to be our own Mr Grew

http://artmusic.smfforfree.com/index.php/topic,59.0.html

Reading through this my confusion and annoyance turned to hilarity and a certain admiration. Turing up here, as he did, out of the blue, with that pretentious persona, just put the hackles up. But on the other site, it is very clearly understood that the persona it is all, literally, a joke, and that understood, it's a very funny one.
Reading that thread again now, and chuckling merrily... e.g.:

The admiration comes from the fact that on that thread he shows himself to be knowledgable, well-listened, and generous, with both his posts and the links he provides.

Thanks for this enlightenment, Luke. What fun! Goes to show once again that context is everything (or if not everything, such a great deal).

I just checked that forum out. I never knew it existed. I was the "one guest" visiting with "0 users". 

It was a bit scary being there alone, so I'm glad to be back here with good company.   

Gosh, Tony, we like you, too! (And how about that Scotch sometime?)

[Archaic Torso of Apollo]

Re Sydney Grew - I found him deeply annoying at times here,

Frankly, I don't know how anyone could find "Sydney Grew" annoying. He was an infrequent poster; he never went out of his way to antagonize people (at least that I saw); and his whole shtick was so obviously a put-on persona that the only appropriate reaction was to laugh and play along with him. (FYI, my favorite Sydney-ism was the way he insisted on distorting names - Stravinsky becomes "Strawinsci," for instance. That, and his use of the royal "we".)

BTW, who was that bearded guy in his avatar? (Looks a bit like Brahms, but I wasn't sure.)

[Lethevich]

Frankly, I don't know how anyone could find "Sydney Grew" annoying. He was an infrequent poster; he never went out of his way to antagonize people (at least that I saw); and his whole shtick was so obviously a put-on persona that the only appropriate reaction was to laugh and play along with him. (FYI, my favorite Sydney-ism was the way he insisted on distorting names - Stravinsky becomes "Strawinsci," for instance. That, and his use of the royal "we".)

I still can't dislodge from my mind his claim that RVW's 1st symphony was a better choral piece than anything Mahler wrote

[CD]

Probably because it's in English

[drogulus]

I still can't dislodge from my mind his claim that RVW's 1st symphony was a better choral piece than anything Mahler wrote

       Our Pluralness cannot agree that the Seas Symphonies outshine the mighty Symphonies of Two Thousands.

            

[eyeresist]

I can't help but feel that limiting the definition of "troll" to "one who is deliberately provocative" excludes a great many nut-jobs who rightly deserve the term, but don't have conscious intent. What other epithet is there for these people?

[Scarpia]

I can't help but feel that limiting the definition of "troll" to "one who is deliberately provocative" excludes a great many nut-jobs who rightly deserve the term, but don't have conscious intent. What other epithet is there for these people?

Nut-jobs.  Specificity is the cornerstone of an effective vocabulary.
 

[Scarpia]

I still can't dislodge from my mind his claim that RVW's 1st symphony was a better choral piece than anything Mahler wrote

If I invert that and say that all of Mahler's Choral pieces are worse than RVW 1, it sounds sensible to me.   0:)

[Lethevich]

I can't help but feel that limiting the definition of "troll" to "one who is deliberately provocative" excludes a great many nut-jobs who rightly deserve the term, but don't have conscious intent. What other epithet is there for these people?

Forum kooks and cranks

High in this list would be Contrapunctus, who constantly praised Glenn Gould in every context he could find (including using ridiculous honorifics such as "high lord"), until disappearing, briefly returning and announcing that he liked other pianists just as much now (possibly the most surprising u-turn I've ever seen on this or related forums). He didn't seem to have a bad bone in his body, nor malicious intent - he was just obsessed with that pianist and brought it into as many conversations as he could, derailing things severely

If I invert that and say that all of Mahler's Choral pieces are worse than RVW 1, it sounds sensible to me.   0:)

I definitely think the piece is highly underrated for many reasons, both musically and technically.

[Luke]

High in this list would be Contrapunctus, who constantly praised Glenn Gould in every context he could find (including using ridiculous honorifics such as "high lord"), until disappearing, briefly returning and announcing that he liked other pianists just as much now (possibly the most surprising u-turn I've ever seen on this or related forums). He didn't seem to have a bad bone in his body, nor malicious intent - he was just obsessed with that pianist and brought it into as many conversations as he could, derailing things severely

Oh Lord, CP was just incredible, wasn't he!? The amount of time and energy expended by him on his Gould fetishism, and by some of us trying to convince him that e.g. Chopin might just be a half decent composer despite the insuperable barrier of not being the honorable GG or the GG-ratified Bach... wish I'd kept some of his posts!

[CD]

Whatever happened to Pelleas et Melisande monomaniac Pink Harp/Operahaven (and various other pretentious names)?

[knight66]

PH never annoyed me as he did many here. I felt that off the Forum he was lonely and probably quite kind. He would occasionally make forays into non-musical topics. Prostitution was one where David W and I went 15 rounds against his opinion that it was always merely a career of choice. Eventually this brought out some strange revelations. There had been an encounter in Europe and a legacy from it of the regular arrival in PH's post box of almost warm soiled underpants in a jiffy bag from a tart with a heart.

Reading through this thread took me to the Mozart Fraud thread and the external one linked by Philo. A guilty pleasure.

Sydney Grew used to annoy me with his bizarre locutions; the invented word 'Homosexualist' clearly made him smack his lips.

There was also a mysterious member called ' who, though not a troll; had a deeply irritating habit of making perfectly good and sound contributions to involved discussions, then to disrupt them by deleting all his posts. I often wondered what prompted that behaviour.

Finally for now, Michel. He shot across the board like a comet. Although he believed a lot of what he said, he definitely tried to find the most offensive way of expressing it. He also went for specific posters who annoyed him. He had to go. A shame; as I got to know him well and am still in good contact with him. He is busy with his career and gets married next year. Pursuits include ice-climbing. But music was a passing pleasure for him and the staggeringly large CD collection he assembled in double quick time was suddenly junked.

Mike

[Philoctetes]

PH never annoyed me as he did many here. I felt that off the Forum he was lonely and probably quite kind.

He was both of those things. He sent me a book and Karajan's ring.