Comments on: Nerdgassing: I Coin This Word In the Name of Humanity

By: Zoo World Cheats

Zoo World Cheats — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 10:08:29 +0000

loving your site – wow what a collection of Zoo World Cheats information! fancy a link trade? thumbsup from me!

By: Mark

Mark — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 17:12:37 +0000

Stumbled over this while searching for something else, so don’t know if anyone even comes back to check for new comments. But….
…this all reminds me of a little-appreciated movie called “Last Action Hero”, which many seem to think was the first chink in the armor of action hero Arnold Schwarzenegger. I thought it was a pitch-perfect nailing of all the over-the-top cliches of the action movie genre, cover many of the things brought up in these comments. (One of my fave moments: the movie villain, having moved to the real world, realizes that cops do NOT show up within a few seconds of gunshots being fired.)

By: wds

wds — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 18:43:24 +0000

@codswallop:
“Far from being “daring,” it is in fact devoid of meaning. As any nerd worthy of the name SHOULD know, a parsec is a unit of distance, not of time. This is comparable to saying that some technology is “light-years ahead” of what we have now. In other words, meaningless.”

Note that the person you were replying to was responding to exactly this criticism and meant ’shortest’ as short in distance, not time. Nerdgassing is, aside from being occasionally annoying, often also wrong.

By: Jean

Jean — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 00:17:50 +0000

What a great word! I can see a lot of use for it. I thought a lot of that sort of nitpicking was just people showing off their knowledge on a topic, though I do know some people who actually get stressed about mistakes in films, TV shows, books… just like some people get stessed about misplaced punctuation and the like.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 17:34:46 +0000

I know everyone’s probably finished reading this, and has moved on to productive other things in life, but Chris – poster #1 – your friend might like this:

http://www.imfdb.org/index.php?title=Main_Page

The Internet Movie Gun Database

Oh, the gungeekery, it is strong….

By: LAN3

LAN3 — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 05:31:44 +0000

Anti-Nerdgassing, as you call it, Mikhail, is what the original USENET trolling about. It was trolling as in fishing, the fish (who sometimes played with the bait, and in the case of the best nerds, would leap into the boat and filet themselves) were generaly newbs. It was invented in the alt.folklore.urban, where it got so out of control that it was violently repressed by the old guard of that newsgroup. Nonetheless, it was great fun having a gang of co-conspirators who would go on at length about how ATMs print the money they dispense, or that James T. Kirk’s middle name is “Timothy,” while people then, as now, could not bear the thought that someone, somewhere on the internet, was wrong.

Trolling as she is now know is what was then called Flamebaiting, and this has surprisingly specific origins, which deserve telling: Before USENET, in the NetNews days (in a nutshell, USENET before it was on the internet), articles could take several days to propogate across the country because there was just one backbone and it was based on dial-up, so it dialed at night when the rates were cheaper. It was also said you could read the whole newsfeed in a day, if you desired.

Bell Labs employed a man named Rich Rosen (see wikipedia) who posted prolifically to netnews groups, much of it inflammatory, inspiring loads upon loads of followups. I have read the rant of a newsadmin who hated Rich Rosen because the Rosen rantings and followups often made up 70% of the traffic sitting on his stunningly huge 80MB hard drive (which cost thousands back then). Other people speculated that Rosen was some sort of primitive AI whose job was to inspire more postings, because more postings = more followup, and more followup = longer backbone phone calls to exchange messages, and longer phone calls = bigger phone bills paid to… Bell. By comparison, modern trolling seems woefully unsophisticated.

Point being, anti-nerdgassing does have an important place in life, but, well, nerds are but the easiest targets. If someone’s taking something to seriously, sometimes you’ve gotta put a valve on them, and classic trolling/anti-nerdgassing can often do the job. Just don’t back them up too much, or the unreleased gas will cause them to explode.

By: Codswallop

Codswallop — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 20:14:12 +0000

OK, here’s my own personal passing of the nerdgas:

On 03 Jun 2008 at 2:37 pm, MikhailBorgon wrote:

“There are many possible paths of the Kessel Run, but the shortest paths are the most dangerous. So completing it in under 12 parsecs is an act of great daring.”

Far from being “daring,” it is in fact devoid of meaning. As any nerd worthy of the name SHOULD know, a parsec is a unit of distance, not of time. This is comparable to saying that some technology is “light-years ahead” of what we have now. In other words, meaningless.

Now THAT’s what I call a nerdgas attack!

By: John

John — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 20:04:01 +0000

I think the complaint about firing guns in space is about the physics involved. A person firing a gun would be flung backwards with force equal to that propelling the bullet forwards. This happens on Earth, of course, too, but in space there is no air or ground (through contact with the feet) to help absorb that force. Thus, the person firing the gun would be propelled backwards with a velocity proportional to the mass difference between the person and the bullet.

By: Champion Bishop Catsu Sandoval, Hunter of Frogloks

Champion Bishop Catsu Sandoval, Hunter of Frogloks — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 13:00:05 +0000

First example of Nerdgassing [early 1960s]

And my dad and i were watching this show where some photojournalist gets a phone call “if you want the pic of your career, goto this corner at this time”. So he does and he hears a sound, looks up to see someone being pushed off a building, takes the pic of his career and my dad and i look at each other “would probably work better if he took the lens cap off”.

(re: the name. ya ok, so i seem to be over identifying with my latest MMO toon – so sue me)

By: Autumn

Autumn — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 05:03:14 +0000

I love that in Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid the film makes a point of showing everyone reloading their guns time after time, just so we can suspend our disbelief of the final scene, where the heroes fire their guns about thirty times before reloading.
I still, however, nerdgas about it.