The New Reportage: Twitter Mining for Smears and Profit

 General, Nutters  11 Responses »
Mar 112013
 

You may have missed it but copying thousands of tweets out of context, misunderstanding, adding your own completely distorted commentary is apparently now the new gold standard in reporting! You heard it here first… Well actually I got it from this bloke on Twitter, I’m sure he couldn’t be wrong?

Given I am one of those claiming EG smells distinctly of “Obsession for Sad Haters” I guess I’d better try out this “reporting” technique and see how hard it is.

So what is rule one of this reporting technique? Seems to be pick your targets and mine, mine, mine away all day and all night. Given I value my sleep and sanity more than ElevatorGate does I’ll just give it a quick go… #Haters = Joke?

So my good old pals D4M1ON and Chassy Jeff copied me on some random tweets… (See I give up my sources, unlike EG!)

WTF does that mean? So I follow the thread of the conversation back and it seems to all start with an exchange between Elyse and Rebecca Watson…

Seems reasonable? A sarcastic comment ridiculing the position of the Reddit “free speech” crowd… No one could object to that? Certainly not the #haters who are the ones with a sense of humour… I mean “having” a sense of humour means actually understanding humour not just shouting poo as loud as you can and running away, right? Wrong…

LOL! Seems Sara is so desperate to gain some points against her targets she has a brain-ectomy and shoots herself in the foot. Oh well none of the other #haters would be as dumb? They’ll obviously set her right so she stops making a fool of herself? Wrong…

and

and

So yeah the other #haters are as dumb as pulverised brick as well. But… But… She was only having a laugh? She didn’t really misunderstand such an obvious tweet? Wrong…

The penny is well and truly dropped.

Oh dear… But when Elyse points it out they will all be scrabbling to apologise and *facepalm* and laugh at themselves? I mean the #haters always say they don’t take themselves seriously its the #ftbullies who do that and never have a laugh? Wrong…

So yeah they refuse to respond or carry on digging down to Australia!

Hmmm someone who has the reading comprehension skills of a 6yr old should really have more sense than to claim maturity. Oh wait, no they shouldn’t!

I’m no follower but I’m guessing she is one seriously butthurt #hater who in her attempts to get one over on the targets of her hate often fails miserably because she is as dumb as the now famous Reap Paden brand pulverised brick.

She has form here, I won’t go into the details but suffice to say Sara thinks its a good idea to claim “rag on” is a gendered insult! ROFL! #Haters == Joke!

Wow.. That took me all of 5 minutes. I like ElevatorGATEs new reporting method… Find stupidity (Or not doesn’t matter in his case) … Laugh at it…. Feel superior. #winning

UPDATE: Couldn’t resist adding this in, sums it all up nicely…

 

 Posted by at 11:20 am

The Block Bot is Dead…

 General  1 Response »
Feb 252013
 

So the block bot is dead… I created as a beta to see if it might be a useful service for people not wanting to get harassed by people on Twitter or even get into long boring arguments with known proponents of long boring arguments! I was surprised anyone wanted to use it, let alone the number that did or that they found it a useful tool. So a success in my book even if I failed in my attempt to be “most popular kid in skepticism” as suggested by our favourite internet kook Franc/Felch/Devils Ivanoff himself -

So its too late to add to my friends list now, you had your chance. But fear not – the block bot lives on in the guise of the A+ Block Bot… Now with three levels of nastiness and no unpleasant side effects, like swelling my ego ;-)

 

Long Live The A+ Block Bot!

Go here to read about it and sign up –> www.theblockbot.com

Now its in the hands of the serious A+ crowd here are a few of my favourite comments about the bot and how western civilisation has never experienced such a hideous device of pure peach freezing evil!

As you can imagine things started slowly as we are first and foremost a community of sceptics so no one would leap to hyperbole, right?

Wrong :-) The poor ole block bot is an “atrocity”… Sob!

Yes we really need to worship at the altar of everyone’s opinions to not be an “echo chamber”! Just like those evilutionists who refuse to listen to Ken Ham, A+ is totes an echo chamber …

That’s right report a service for spam that is not actually spamming anyone to prove you have ethics greater than A+…. And Ana above says we need to listen to these “logical” arguments from great “skeptics” in order to not be an echo chamber? Right!

Also nicely proved the bot does not cause anyone to be kicked off Twitter either given half the pit blocked and reported for spam and it is still there!

We even got a “parody” in double quick time, unfortunately lacking in the AI that makes the one and only block bot so unique.

Amidst all this rubbish are the pertinent points, how else to explain the fury at a service that allows people they don’t want to talk to ignore them?

Are we really losing that much by ignoring these Twits?

I’ve said it before, its all about the winning with these guys… Follow away, its been noted idiots often follow idiots so nothing new there.

Once they realised #professionalvictim cookies were available at the Slymepit the block bot was suddenly their best mate.

They get pretty desperate, but the bot wouldn’t take anyone this pathetic. Maybe the A+ bot will be kinder?

Secular Steve helped us out debugging the bot by changing his Twitter id over and over and over… He was a very happy camper, until…

… it sort of backfired when he lost his secular_steve handle :-D (Xanthe did give it back, eventually!)

Some people even turned over a new leaf by accepting the block bot into their lives as their personal saviour… (Not really)

It’s probably best they don’t try and use the bot as they really don’t know how it works. Reading comprehension fail! If you are following someone it won’t block them… Was it all a misunderstanding?

Nope as daft as ever… Maybe a turtle sized tin foil hat will stop us beaming A+ feminazi mind control waves at the poor little dear?

So that’s it, there were more bullshit tweets about “freeze peach” and even a blog post exclaiming the bot leads to less freethought and skepticism! … On Twitter! Yes you heard it here first, scepticism and freethought are conducted through the medium of 140 characters by idiots who express the sort of opinions you have just been exposed to….
Dads army image with character saying we are all doomed! DOOMED!

 Posted by at 10:17 pm

Is ElevatorGATE the new David Mabus?

 General, Nutters  13 Responses »
Nov 242012
 

There has been a little bit of a flurry of tweets from the usual suspects in response to a bit of a conversation about @ElevatorGATE being ‘like’ David Mabus. Now if you don’t know who @ElevatorGATE is then you are in the same boat as the rest of us as ‘he’ is anonymous and cowardly. EG is also displaying an unnerving amount of obsession for Rebecca Watson given most of the tweets are about her, the background picture on the account is Rebecca as is EG’s avatar, none of this is flattering. So to the outside observer EG appears to be a little unhinged and a potential stalker at the very least. However if you live on the other side of the fence to the ‘#FTBullies’ then EG is a brave hero fighting the evil Skepchick menace for the greater good of the atheist-sceptic movement… Or something.

There are a lot of ‘parody’ accounts vying for attention in the FTBullysphere of which EG is Top of the Tw*ts at the moment. So I’ll compare the main offenders tweeting with mine as a control who tweets a bit and PZ as another control who is a prolific pro-tweeter. Also EG compared PZ to Mabus and vice versa so it is only fair to see who is worse? I can only objectively look at volumes, timing etc, not nuttyness of the content… But is EG anywhere near Mabus? I’ve looked at the last three months as pulling tweets off using the Twitter API only seems to let me get EGs last 3K of tweets which covers just over this period. Also it is less data to work with so is trivial to analyse.

Who is Top of the Tweeting Twits?

Our comparison is with Mabus, but there are no accounts to check as they are pretty quickly marked as spam and suspended and now he has been re-arrested he is presumably not stupid enough to start again. However fortunately there are a few references to just how prolific he could be -

 His final account was created on November 1st and averaged almost 550 Tweets per day until he was arrested.  That’s some 8,700 Tweets – over half of what I’ve sent on my personal account in five in a half years.

He would spend hours at it. For example, on February 25th I found 25 separate accounts he used. Based on the timestamps of the posts, he started around 7:30am, and posted more or less continuously until about 10am. He continued somewhat more slowly until noon, when I presume he took a break for lunch. He resumed at 3pm, and posted until 9pm that night. I counted almost 700 tweets.

From, Tim Farley: http://skeptools.wordpress.com/2012/11/20/operation-archangel-david-mabus-dennis-markuze-montreal-arrested/

and http://skeptools.wordpress.com/2011/08/17/case-study-notorious-spammer-brought-down-twitter-tumblr-social-media-mabus/

Pretty high benchmark to meet in terms of raw numbers, Total of 8,700 tweets in under a month, 550 a day peaking at 700 observed by Tim Farley.

Meet the Twits

Quote from BreadGod1 to preface the meet and greet

@pzmyers When you start comparing people who disagree with you to Mabus, you deserve to become irrelevant. #FTBullies #Atheismplus

AngrySkepchick  Doesn’t mention anyone directly and never spams the skepchicks or anyone else, good parody account and marked as such (Although I agree with very little of what it tweets)
breadgod1 Does directly tweet people when they respond and also unsolicited, big fan of #FTBullies and #atheismplus. Not marked as a parody account, but it should be.
atheismplus Doesn’t mention anyone directly or try and spam them, good parody account and marked as one (I post at the A+ forum, so not really a fan though!)
GroupthinkBlogs Seems to be more of a personal twitter account than a well thought out parody, not marked as one but at times seems like one. Mostly doesn’t spam and likes #atheismplus but not #ftbullies for some reason.
TheOtherAtheist  Felch Grogan / Franc Hoggle / Victor Ivanoff … A key hater of FreeThoughtBlogs and PZ Myers. Although seems to hate pretty much all of FtBs and Skepchick, makes a lot of use of #’s all of above and ones like #pzmyers as Franc knows he is blocked by pretty much everyone!
Y_U_NO_SKEPTIC  Copy of the ‘U Y NO’ meme but used to ridicule FtBs/Skepchicks everywhere. Does spam directly and seems desperate for targets to respond even though they blocked long ago. Would seem likely there is a finite number of sentences that could start “Y U NO.. ” but this one seems keen to disprove that. Not marked as parody.
ElevatorGATE  Our target and potential Mabus, spends a lot of time blogging as well as tweeting. The focus is without doubt Rebecca Watson but anyone on the periphery will get some insults as well. Not marked as parody and seems very happy with pariah status.
ool0n  Me!
pzmyers  Popular atheist blogger and tweeter with a vast number of followers. Sometimes prone to hyperbole about people he doesn’t like, for example EG – but is it hyperbole? We will see!

Total Tweets

So the total tweets by twit over the last three months ->

So compared to Mabus’s 8000+ tweets in November alone EG is looking like a complete failure at being obsessive. However for pretty much only having one thing to say he is doing well having tweeted a lot more than PZ or pro-hater TheOtherAtheist/Franc/Felch/Victor/Soze. Out of the second-raters EG wins by a long way… It should also be pointed out that he re-tweets a lot, almost half of his tweets are re-tweets – they are not considered here as we are looking at content created by the owner not re-tweets of others thoughts. So in total he is nearer 3K tweets which is looking more Mabus like since Mabus tweeted the same thing over and over and over.

 Tweets by Day

Looking now at tweets for the days in the last three months we get the following rather confused chart -> (9,10,11 are Sept, Oct, Nov and above that are the days  when there were tweets)

For peak tweets in a day PZ and EG are rather close hitting 85 and 86 respectively, Franc came third with 66. None of these are near the Mabus peak of 700 with 550 a day not being uncommon (As per reference from Tim Farley)… Also all three have declined a lot in that last couple of months to the point of being horribly humiliated by my 30 in a day when discussing the merits of Windows 8 with @lousycanuck and @aratina… So embarrassing but not obsessed with anyone!

Not really clear that EG wins this, but why are there not clear peaks from EG when he produces so many more tweets? Well there is a simple explanation, EG sends tweets pretty much all hours of the day! There is not an hour when he is not sending tweets – ok so not every day but all hours have tweets in every month so there is no clear sleeping pattern. Is EG a plural? I hope so for EGs sake!

Tweets by Hour of Day

Here is the analysis of what hours in the day the three top twits tweet -

So there is clearly a time in the day when Franc Hoggle sleeps, good news there! Also PZ has a definite lull around 6am-10am UK time, although only drops to zero on one hour (9am UK time)..  I assume this is due to travelling since there are clear lulls some months but not others. Unlike EG, who in any given month will always have tweets in all hours, this is disturbing if EG is one person. I can only think of two options if EG is the one person he appears to be (In terms of style of tweeting, language used etc.)
South park obese lazy World of Warcraft player in basement

WoW guy, sat in his basement slowly expanding and nursing a serious case of RSI.

Up in the air film, george clooney
International jet-setter so up at all hours and tweeting constantly, even when flying… Hmm, maybe not.

There is of course the multiple person theory, but having read his tweets I cannot see it.  So EG, if you are reading here is a little advice, get some sleep! I think you’ll likely find that obsession over Rebecca Watson just seems not as important once you get some shut-eye.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/3998620/Lack-of-sleep-really-can-affect-a-persons-sanity-research-shows..html

Could it be as simple as that? All the haters need is a few Zopiclone and 8hrs straight? No, unfortunately, as usual Franc Hoggle rears his ugly head to show it is not that easy as he clearly gets his 7-8hrs a night and he is still nuttier than squirrel poo.

Conclusion

This is clearly hyperbole from PZ etc if you only take into account the volume of tweets. Other factors in the Mabus-like theory favour would be the fact that EG is obsessed with primarily one person whereas Mabus was obsessed with 5000 whining atheists so you’d expect less volume. Also EG creates more content, Mabus just spammed a bunch of links and text to everyone but EG blogs, storifies and tweets on Rebecca Watson constantly. He also seems to never sleep and no hour of the day goes past when he doesn’t want to pontificate on Rebecca Watsons merits or otherwise…

Finally I’d say David Mabus is obviously suffering from mental illness, EG is not mentally ill in my opinion, just obsessed. A lot of us get obsessed with things we feel are important so one persons obsession can look strange to an outsider. So don’t compare EG to Mabus, it does no one any good to exaggerate.

NB: If anyone is interested in scripts/tools etc I used – comment/tweet/email and I may add a bit about the method below. Suffice to say I’m not obsessed (Honest!) and my ‘l33t’ shell skills mean it took less than a hour to compile the info.

 Posted by at 11:22 pm

The Ghost that made me a Sceptic…

 General, scepticism  4 Responses »
Oct 302012
 

I’ve been inspired to write a little bit about what made me the man I am today. No not that, I’m talking about the sceptic bit… It all began many years ago in my childhood, my parents decided we would move to a house in the middle of a park in Northampton, UK called Delapre Park. Not any house but a 400 year old former dairy and larder for the big house, Delapre Abbey,  next door. I was to find out there was more to this house than met the eye…
Picture of Delapre Abbey, my childhood house is to the side, you can see the window in the attic
For one the ‘Abbey’ looks like a pretty bog standard UK mansion made for the rich of its time, however it stands on the foundations and parts are extant remains of a Cluniac Nun abbey dating to 1145 AD (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delapr%C3%A9_Abbey). This nunnery was founded by the 2nd Earl of Northampton, Simon de Senlis, who built Northampton Castle (Now unfortunately little more than a hump and some stone by the Train Station!). It would have hosted Eleanor of Castilles body (Wife of Edward I) as she made her way around the UK after her untimely death in 1290 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleanor_cross). The Nuns would have tended to the wounded and the dead in the Wars of the Roses, Battle of Northampton, in 1460 AD (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Northampton_(1460)) and those that fell were buried in the grounds….

… As a child I was very happy to learn that the dead from a battle in the Wars of the Roses were under our front garden. I was even happier to find when digging a drainage channel that a number of them were disturbed and dealt with by the local Archaeologists and clergy to lay them to rest (I wasn’t allowed to keep a skull and my Dad told me off whenever I dug too deep, spoil sport). I was ecstatic to find out that Simon de Senlis’s coffin was found under our kitchen doorstep, but his body was no where to be found… Well actually the missing body gave me the creeps so I looked it up (Delapre Abbey was the local records office so great for historical investigation).Whereupon I found my house was condemned by the Church as a desecration of the ‘Great and the Good’ of Northampton! Simon was not the only elder statesman exhumed when the dairy and larder was built, the Chuch was not happy! Eeek, so my ghost story starts like a staging of Poltergeist in Northampton with a condemned house desecrating a graveyard.

I’ve missed a bit out,  before I found out all this history I knew about the former occupant of the house, a lone man, who went a little insane. He was interviewed by the local paper as having regular conversations with the various ghosts in the house, gardens and Abbey. It was too much for him obviously. So he left. So we moved in. I was not yet a teenager and living in that house was at times scary as hell. I’d sometimes get to the bottom of the stairs, feel freezing cold, and panic and not be able to move until a call or a noise from my family broke the spell. I’d lie awake at night hearing “creak…creak…creak…creak…”, a sound exactly like someone, something, walking back and forth in the attic. If you look in the picture above at the far right there is a window on the end of our house, that is the attic window, see anything in there? I often did at night, hurrying past not looking too closely, taking the dog for a walk. Then it got worse, a lot worse.

I’d wake in the night not being able to breathe, an invisible force was holding me down… A scream of a crow and a dark shadow flying towards my face… A figure in the corner of the room and a presence I could feel as pure malevolence. I was unable to move while this went on, only able to see the figure in my peripheral vision. Then it would break and I’d run to my parents room drenched in sweat and scared shitless.

By now if you are a sceptic, you know the punchline. Sleep paralysis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_paralysis) is a well defined condition and is often brought on by stress. My childhood self with all this excitement and knowledge about the ‘paranormal’ nature of where I was living got overly stressed or who knows what. Now to counter any ‘spiritualists’ who will say I’m rationalising what was a real supernatural experience I’ll let you know what cured it, and it didn’t involve exorcism! I was reading books, magazines, anything on ghosts and the paranormal at this time, one of which, ‘The Fortean Times’ had an article on UFO’s and sleep paralysis. It clicked into place, I did more research, was convinced it was my own brain doing it and it went away. In fact I spent a lot more time in the gardens at night walking the dog rather than the hurried stressed walks I’d previously had, actively looking for ghosts and scaring the hell out of any friends who stayed.

I totally lost my fear of the dark as a result and would happily walk through the darkest bits of the woods on my own. To steal from Sagan, knowledge was my candle in a ghost haunted childhood.

But since it is Halloween… I’d hear the ”creak…creak…creak…creak…” pretty much every night I listened for it despite my new found scepticism. But unlike like idiots in horror films I never, ever, EVER, opened the attic hatch and looked up there to see what was making that damnable noise. So not quite the perfect sceptic I’m afraid. Sleep well.

 Posted by at 11:57 pm

Raison d’être

 General  No Responses »
Sep 052012
 

Not really sure why this blog exists yet…

  • Partly to see if I could install WordPress multisite on my EC2 instance and get it working with multiple domains. Mostly accomplished but permalinks don’t work, only the p=xxx style all the others give a 404!
  • Partly to collect and collate my thoughts on internet arguments on sceptic and atheist sites. I like to argue and I like to be contrarian so might as well discuss in more detail any interesting arguments I come across. Interesting nutters might also count…

Might be some other reasons such as wasting time when bored at work :-)

 Posted by at 2:07 pm