The Scamperbeasts Rule
Posted on January 31, 2016 Posted by John Scalzi 38 Comments
The Scamperbeasts Twitter account passed the 5,000 followers milestone today, which is a nice round number considering it’s only been around for a little over three weeks. People love kittens.
In commemoration of this achievement, and also for the betterment of the Twitter experience in general, I made the following announcement:
Because, you know what? If you’re going to be the sort of jackass whose idea of a fun time is to troll and/or insult me on Twitter, I think it’s entirely fair for me to introduce a filtering process, dictating whether or not you rate any of my attention at all, involving kittens.
Why the somewhat arbitrary choice of using my kittens’ Twitter follower number as the filtering criterion?
1. Why not? It’s not like Twitter trolls/assholes deserve more consideration than that;
2. Because it amuses me to say to myself, as I mute these twits forever, “Come back when you’re not thoroughly trounced by kittens.”
(Not that I will unmute them if they do get more followers than my kittens, mind you. It’s totally meant as a dismissive statement.)
Formally codifying this into The Scamperbeasts Rule:
If a Twitter troll/jerk has fewer followers than the @scamperbeasts Twitter account, do not engage; ignore and mute/block.
My adopting this new Scamperbeasts Rule means that roughly 99+% of all possible Twitter trolls/jerks fall into the automatic “ignore and mute” category, as the Scamperbeats have more followers now than more than 99% of all Twitter users. Which is useful because honestly I’m tempted to snark at these jerks before I mute them forever. As enjoyable for me as that can be, it ends up taking brain cycles more profitably used in other endeavors. The Scamperbeasts Rule is a time management tool for me, basically.
(And what will I do with the would-be trolls who do have more followers than my kittens? My plan is to condescend to them once and then mute them, and bask in the knowledge that they are henceforth wasting their time only, trolling into a blank wall.)
Now, The Scamperbeasts Rule will not necessarily work for everyone, but if you do think it could work for you, I heartily encourage you to employ it. Just the pleasure or looking at someone spewing bullshit at you and thinking sorry, you’ve been bested by cats before you consign them into oblivion is reason enough to use it. I’m looking forward to it being my own standard practice.
Once again, the internet is ruled by cats…
sounds perfectly reasonable to me. Also, squee, the Scamperbeasts are cute!
Well, I don’t have a Twitter account, so you won’t have to worry about me trolling you there, and I don’t particularly think that when I comment on here that I’m trolling…..(others may disagree, and that’s their opinion).
I like phrase “cosign them into oblivion” like it’s a lease they won’t be able to break, but alas, you probably meant “consign”…
Typo. Fixed.
They have such gorgeous coats. They’re cute now but as grown-ups they’ll be total knock-outs.
I am now going to follow the Scamperbeasts Twitter account solely to get that cutoff number that much higher.
Congratulations on the twitter followers! I just am getting my toes wet with this stuff! Haven’t touched twitter yet. But, I’m no troll and I adore kittens so when I do I will learn to follow and I will be delighted to follow you there also. Thanks and happy blogging and tweeting lol!
Blast it! You’ve foiled my master plan!
I have a Twitter thing that I don’t to much with. However, I am doing my part to fight Twitter trolls by adding one more follower to the Scamperbeasts.
And, having seen the way the Scamperbeasties fight, I’d back them against any common or garden variety troll they might encounter…
I absolutely plan to adopt the Scamperbeast Rule. Not that I get all that many trolls, but hey, you gotta start from some sort of baseline, right?
And the scamperbeasts are growing up. Quite a pair of young ladies you have there!
This solution has a lot going for it, including cats, of course.
But I particularly like that it has a sort of built-in Twitter-wide follower inflation adjustment factor.
Have the Scamperbeasts received any further interesting mail?
The best part is that if your Twitter behavior is not like that of a troll or a jerk, you probably don’t even need to worry about the Scamperbeasts Rule. Unless you’re having a bad day, in which case, maybe you shouldn’t be engaging OGH on Twitter anyway, which is a good rule in general and not limited to OGH…
So wait, are you saying if a troll is popular enough, you’ll let them continue? ‘Cause I know a couple of trolls (not naming any names) who have a YUUUGE number of followers.
I LOL’d
What?! The Scamperbeasts have a Twitter account?? Following! 😀
J.D. Rhoades:
Nah, as noted in the post, it just means I might condescend to them first before muting them.
Well, it’s a bit demoralizing to have been on twitter for two years and to have far fewer followers than your kittens. But as I don’t plan on trolling anyone, it’s moot anyway.
It’s nice to see the Scamperbeasts using their power for good and not evil. Just this once.
The Scamperbeats is my next band name. I think it should be a ska band maybe?
I know, too easy….
Karina, there was an Australian band back in the 1960s called “The Easybeats”, (their one-hit was “Friday On My Mind”), so why not “Scamperbeats”? ;)
The Beasts are looking more like cats these days. Which means they just aren’t nearly as cute AWWWW I COULD JUST PICK THEM UP AND SCRITCH THEIR LITTLE EARS AND PET THEIR LITTLE HEADS AND PLAY WITH THEIR LITTLE PAWSLES OH LOOK AT THE LITTLE PAWWWWSLES.
…okay, maybe still somewhat cute.
I’m confused there — are you automatically blocking people with fewer followers than the kittens, or are you doing so if you decide the person is a troll and the person has fewer followers than the kittens?
How can it be that Bested By Cats is not your next band name?
@SEF: I’d think surely the latter.
Sean Eric Fagan:
The latter. Why would I mute people who are not being jerks?
@fuzznose – that’s fantastic!
That’s why I was confused — I didn’t think you would, but it sounded like you were maybe setting up something automated.
I try to ask when I’m confused :).
It looks like they are entering into my favourite phase of kittenhood – the “teenage” part where they are long and lanky with a full-size cat’s ears. They now have most of a cat’s athletic prowess, but little of their wisdom.
“The Scamperbeasts Rule”
Yes. Yes, they do.
Seriously? You have people trolling cute fluffy little kittens? I didn’t think it was possible that people with Swiss Cheese for brains would actually troll kittens.
*takes a sad look at her 249 Twitter followers acquired over two years*
I should get my a kitten to tweet about, instead of blogging about old castles and churches. :-)
I set up a Twitter account late last year. I follow politics. Amazing how many bot-like followers I have or what seem like bots. New ones everyday. I even stopped following what are supposed to be “females.”
Trolling? Several years ago there was lots of newspeak and “concern” about the number of nonsense sites, blogs, channels devoted to insanity and disinformation on YT channels by what seemed to be delusion by and for delusionals. The latter claims were made by media centric psychiatrists. Then the subject retreated and was treated more as background noise until bullying by “teens” involved in gaming culture etc. IMO, most of this and most of the many thousands of YT channels and sites they were talking about are run by troll farms who are the opposite of insane. Which might be said to be a conspiracy of conspiracies bla bla bla.
Recent understatement on trolls by Eric Schmidt: “In Russia, farms of online trolls systematically harass democratic voices and spread false information on the Internet and on social media.”
As I said elsewhere on this site he plays host to many thousands of these same troll channels on You Tube. He might also be able to prove their Russian origination. RT is just one of many outlets sponsored by the state with $300 million dollar budgets used as a counter to the West and the US.
Then comes the question of why?
1) There are enough of these channels to have an effect on US culture, politics as well as right wing minority party’s across Europe.
2) their intention is to degrade news, objective facts and reality with enough money to create their own when convenient.
3) No powerful country on earth has an inferiority complex toward the US and the West to match Russia’s in general and Putin’s in particular. When you have former KGB MMA-like 5′ 5″ blackbelt office in a society like Russia there will be much in the way of overcompensation to make up for the missing 6″. Riding bareback and killing drugged tigers is a small part of it.
4) He manipulates his and our own news, media and the US conservative brand of paranoia through YT with the best of them. Plenty of Illuminutty news with his own Illuminati reporter to get the goods on the British who’ve been investigating Putin directly. This stuff is designed to enrage the impressionably young and trigger happy of all ages.
5) Putin’s favorite very rich former RT censor and Minister of “Truth” died recently in Washington DC of all places with the FBI and FSB both breathing down his neck. Nothing to do with Russia’s Olyimpic scandals which broke days latter last year. That was probably the least of it.
“My plan is to condescend to them once and then mute them”
Ah, but what if they mute you first, so you’re the one talking to a blank wall?
But what happens when the Scamperbeasts start trolling you, as they inevitably will, being cats? I think you’ll agree that it’s pretty unlikely that they will have fewer Twitter followers than the Scamperbeasts.