She has spent far too much time on the internet over the last ten years, with only a couple of bouts of abandonment of it, fed up with the influx of the slebs and plebs who have overshadowed much of what made the internet marvellous with their idiocy, inane truisms and dull gossip (oh, there’s a huge grumpy post on THAT somewhere, just waiting to burst like a boil).

On the surface, she is relatively pleasant and inoffensive, with a big stupid grin and big stupid shoes, drawing and writing bits here and there to amuse herself and sometimes others. She appears to spend plenty of time away from her computer, phone and tablet, out in the countryside, taking photographs of clouds and beetles and dead badgers, painting oddly coloured landscapes and cooking oddly coloured food

This is not the whole story, however.

An unhealthy number of her hours are really spent quietly reading comments and tweets and forum postings by repellent people and fools. She follows conversations that get out of hand on twitter, conversations between celebrities and jealous twits, or between bigots and non-bigots, or between the fairly clever and the incredibly stupid. She reads the comment boxes in The Daily *ail and *ky News websites, fonts of the truest moronity (it IS a word).  She braves the comment boxes in the Graun and the Torygraph, where the most bilious and ragesome find their fun.  She sneaks into the forums/fora to witness the righteous nerds and ubersnarks either battling it out between themselves, or smiting their mutual lessers.

At the end of a long day at the idiotface, she meticulously (if ‘meticulous’ can be used to describe sloppiness and wild generalisation) draws and describes the new specimens she has found, just like a 19th century botanist (if 19th century botanists had content management systems and the internet and electricity and electric paint).

Why does she do it? Warning less weary web-dwellers of the perils of engaging with the irksomes brings her true satisfaction. The possibility of maybe, just maybe, one day, one obnoxious twat recognising their own behaviour from the catalogue and desisting keeps her striving to continue. What brings unbridled joy in this pursuit, however, is labelling all these annoying internauts as species of the genus TROLL, because there is nothing a real old style troll hates more than our labelling as trolls these new form internet pests who aren’t exactly what THEY regard as trolls,(trolls as described in MS-DOS a hundred-and-thirty-two years ago).  They don’t seem to understand that language e.v.o.l.v.e.s.

That, and that she’s just a horrible old misanthrope who likes to take the piss.

I have to come clean and say that there is one kind of troll that does make me laugh. Although he is a bit of smarmy git, and may start to believe that his fame ON the internet (which is considerable) equates fame OFF the internet and gets a bit carried away with it all, Smug-o (his handle since he was six years old, because he’s been on the net for longer than YOU) does DO funny internet.

He’s a total geek, but a geek with fairly good looks, charm and a reasonable amount of self-adulation.  He will insist upon wearing unbearably smug tshirts and annoying flat caps and those glasses, though, which make many of us want to hate him.

He tries to only troll people who deserve it.

This is the troll who, upon numerous callouts on a student forum from lazy students who can’t be bothered to read the book for English 101, posts a fake précis and sample questions in the forum for them to crib from.  If the set text was “Of Mice and Men”, the précis makes George an evil mobster and Lennie his glamourous, machine-gun toting girlfriend, on a rampage through 1930s Wyoming, who realize, during a prolonged murder spree, that buddhism is what they’re missing in their lives.  He lies in wait for the resulting enraged emails from the twits who followed his précis, once they’ve failed their paper and been kicked off the course, and then posts them for our amusement.

This is the troll who responds to a request by a large corporation for payment of 25p (that arrived franked as first class, in a very expensive envelope and printed on luxuriously thick paper) with something ludicrous as an offer of payment… maybe a first class stamp or a packet of sweets worth much more than the 25p, all of which will certainly be rejected.  If he can get a correspondence going in which he can act the jackass and suck some poor sucker in and reduce them to gibbering wrecks, he will publish it… for our amusement.

He WILL make you laugh.
He IS still a troll.
You’re just going to have to live with that.

“Cool Furry Octopus” will be the name of his first child.

I could barely paint Captain Vague. He/she says so very little, that I can’t formulate the slightest idea about him/her, so very very vague he/she is, like a puff of tepid air in the internet ether. The only thing I know is that Captain Vague wants to make you feel uneasy and less cocksure… you and your hubristic blog…

Captain Vague interrupts interesting conversations and threads, just to stick a spanner in and bring the blogger down. He/she isn’t really sure about his/her own opinions on very much of anything, but does like to think that he/she is very wise.

He/she leaves the vaguest of remarks on your blog or thread, things such as “you would say that”, “Oh, you think?” or “ha. ha.” and the blogger is left in plenty of doubt about what the hell Captain Vague is trying to say.

If the blogger retorts, having understood that “ha. ha.” as sarcasm, there are SOME Captain Vagues who will try to increase the blogger’s discomfort by pretending that no, that “ha. ha.” was intended as a genuine belly laugh, and that he/she is left feeling horribly slighted by the blogger’s lack of faith in this ardent (never heard of before today, though) fan. This brings him/her the most enormous pleasure. He/she loves to bring bloggers — we selfish, arrogant, stuck-up, deluded fools — down a few pegs.

Captain Vague is the easiest of all trolls to ignore.

If you haven’t been following, read these for some viewpoints:

• http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/laurie-penny-a-womans-opinion-is-the-miniskirt-of-the-internet-6256946.html
• http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/helen-lewis-hasteley/2011/11/comments-rape-abuse-women
• http://carolinefarrow.com/2011/11/06/its-not-just-the-men/

read the following one if you want to be enraged (or not) by a woman who appears to be without empathy, without imagination, who has never received a threat of any kind on the net (lucky lady), who (she has tweeted) would “fall about laughing” if she ever did:

• http://www.annaraccoon.com/politics/female-bloggers-cry-rape/

Well, I think it’s all glaringly obvious, so I shan’t harp on.  Here are some bullet points.  I’m liking the bullet points this week:

• Being a misogynist doesn’t preclude one from being a woman.
• Being a misogynist doesn’t preclude one from being a miseverythingelseist.  In return, this doesn’t lessen the effects of misogyny.
• If one trolls a woman with suggestions of sexual violence and/or use language related to specifically female anatomy, that’s overtly misogynist.
• If one trolls a woman without suggesting sexual violence and/or use language related to specifically female anatomy, one might be a misogynist, or one might just be a dickhead.
• Women who don’t like being threatened with rape/murder/stalking/violence and speak out about it are not “whiney bitches” and shouldn’t “man up” or “get out of the kitchen”.  Oh, just imagine it; a whole internet entirely populated by stone-hearted ladies who could laugh off all threats of violence, while we furry-hearted liberal fools simpered and whimpered and cried in the corner, having handed the whole internet to them on a big pink plate.
• If a man was threatened online with having his great big heterosexual penis cut off, it would be misandry and equally bad.  Also, that doesn’t happen very often, does it?

I  do have one more thing to add:  EXPECT the TROLLS.  They will come.  It might be once a year, or every day, but they will come and TRY to ruin your day.  If you expect them, they don’t hurt as much.  Also, remember, they are not going to hurt you.  They are just small, stupid, lonely people who want to scare you.  It’s easy to say this, but TRY not to let them.

He is an unintentional troll who totally misunderstands the idea of a. the internet and b. free speech.

His head, with its semi-permanent beetroot colour, is usually 30 seconds away from exploding. His tie is always tied tight and his neck veins always bulging a little over the top of his collar. His face is decorated with the regulation eyebrows and moustache of a retired RAF Commodore who flew and commanded in the war, and is remarkably agile for a man who must be in his late 80s by now.

That is because he is not in his late 80s, he was born in 1948, entirely missing the war by three years. He relies on the well known fact that young people these days are very stupid, so when he shouts “we went to war for you to wear your damned trousers round your ankles!” at the youth, they can’t work out that he is far too young to have fought any of those old wars. Of course, they can; they just can’t be bothered.

His online life consists of thoroughly reading newspapers online (by thoroughly, I mean all articles about the young, the “ethnics”, the “gays”, the benefit scroungers, political correctness, all wars going on, all economics going on) and be outRAGED by most of it. He comments anonymously as “The Commodore”, instantly contributing to his troll status, because he wouldn’t want anyone in real life to see him reduced to writing to these people in a digital form and not in the proper manner; green ink on paper to the editor.

His responses are predictable, of course; too much immigration/too little respect/trousers too low/didn’t fight the war for this to happen/in my day blah blah blah … and very second he notices that someone has responded to him (which might be a while, as he doesn’t get that the internet doesn’t require a tea and biscuits half way through the morning) he goes all Dambusters and drops bouncing bombs of bombastic, jingoistic, ageist crap on them, getting into massive rows with anyone who can be bothered to react.  It usually ends in a very ugly manner, his misogyny and homophobia (for anyone disagreeing with him must, he thinks, be “a silly woman” or “a dreadful queen”) being expressed in ripe language that ultimately gets him kicked out of the comment boxes by moderators.

Tomorrow he will return as “Rear Admiral”.

By day he is a normal looking mechanic, mild, dirty-joke-telling, inoffensive, one of the boys.

By night he is a right little nationalist. He belongs to a couple of neo-Nazi and sod-neo-we’re-full-on-Nazi forums, where he gets himself wound up into an idiotic rage by the other brain-lites (and by a nerdtroll in California who is pretending to be a racist baboon just to see how easy it is to wind up the stupid for a thesis he is writing). Most of the time, the forums are where he begins and ends his internet experience, but sometimes he ventures out into the wilderness of the net, filled with all its people of all different colours, nationalities and sexualities, a place he doesn’t like at all…

He may read a story in a newspaper about a sleb of one colour marrying a sleb of another colour. Well, THAT’S not right, he thinks, and piles in with some offensive, idiot-bashing-keyboard comment about it…. and he’ll be on a roll. He’ll find a story about “the gays” playing football. … NO!!!! says his tiny shrivelled brain, NO! and bashes some nonsense out on his keyboard. He finds a woman living in his country who comes from another country, who writes about his country in terms that wouldn’t work well in a travel agent’s brochure and leaves messages such as “go home to your own filthy country” and “I know where you live and I will come and get you if you don’t stop writing about MY country” *

It’s quite a long list of things that offend him. He tells his mother sometimes, about his list of “the unacceptable”. She tries to gently talk him out of it, to no avail. She’s mystified about where this idiot came from. Then remembers the boy’s father. His list of “the unacceptable” who deserve to be constantly slated and abused online (and, he wishes, in real life) includes:

• Funny coloured people
• People with funny accents
• People who don’t speak his language (including people who don’t live in his country)
• People who don’t live where they were born (his auntie doesn’t count, because she couldn’t help being born in France)
• People with posh accents
• People with posh accents who claim to have something to protest about
• Anyone in the media, even if not posh
• Mixed race marriages
• Mixed nationality marriages
• Non-mixed sex marriages
• Europe, EU, the euro, the French
• Homosexuals
• Transexuals
• Bisexuals
• Asexuals
• Intellectuals (that includes anyone with A levels)
• Politicians (except the members of his beloved nationalist party)
• Foreign food… except Indian
• Intelligent women and funny women
• Intelligent, funny women

She is an auto-didactic latecomer when it comes to good food. Since she realised that food was ‘cool’ in her mid twenties, she has read all the books, obsessively follows the trends in ‘modern cookery’, reads all the restaurant reviews, visits all the foodie blogs, though, like most trolls, she doesn’t deign/dare to blog her own blog. She boils with envy when she discovers that a food blogger has won an award for food writing, or has a big and active audience. She is outraged when her favourite (cliquey niche show offy) chefs are criticised in bad restaurant reviews. She seethes when she sees people talking rubbish about food, without having consulted her. Why? Because it is she and she alone who knows everything about food. Everything. She is an uber-foodie, she thinks.

But she is a size 6 (UK6, US4, EU34 etc.,… what I mean is that she’s a bloody stick insect… I’m trying to keep the bitterness out of my voice, I hope you understand, but hey, eating IS more important that getting into clothes, isn’t it?) and this squarely and completely rules out her status as any kind of foodie on any scale. Agreed? Agreed. She cooks all this food, and barely eats any of it apart from tasting it while it cooks.

Her trolling consists of anonymously raining down hell (and devil’s food cake) on ‘bad’ cookery ideas in forums, loudly stating facts like “anyone who has ever used a stock cube in their lives is an idiot and a fraud of the worst kind”. When her favourite chefs are lambasted, she gets out her turkey baster of bilious crap and accuses the reviewers of lying because they are jealous of the chef’s success. When someone she likes invents a pretentious dish of stewed rubbish, she will nod quietly and copy the idea for next week’s (unbearable and overwraught) dinner party. When someone she doesn’t like invents a pretentious dish of stewed rubbish, she proclaims it so all over the internet, seeking out people who dare to say that they like that particular chef/cookery writer/tv sleb and telling them they are idiots. She intentionally seeks out badly written recipes on recipe sharing sites, follows them to the letter so that she can complain in snippy tones to the original recipe poster that their recipe didn’t work, and why didn’t they use butter instead of margarine, because that’s how I do it and it’s much better. ETC.

Viva the good cookers and the good eaters!

This is a professional troll. He is in media or showbiz of some kind; he may be a shockjock or a writer of pretentious schlock. Here, for today, he is a comedian who has based his career on being quite edgy, a bit near the knuckle (where the knuckle is the bounds of decency). He has been doing standup and TV for a few years, to small and niche audiences, who love him for his humour that they understand to be clever and subversive.

One momentous day, he gets on mainstream TV. He tells a joke. It is a very tasteless joke. The live studio audience goes wild. The joke is funny, it is edgy and it requires a little bit of thought. The broadcaster leaves it in for the broadcast. The recorded home audience go into reactionary meltdown (as they probably should, the joke really is THAT tasteless) and it is at the moment that the comedian realises something about himself.

He finally understands that he doesn’t do his edgy comedy to be subversive and try to get people to think about an idea. He does it because he loves the frisson of the reaction. All that attention makes him shiver. In a small room above a pub, it feels like subversion. When the reaction is nationwide, facebookwide, twitterwide, it feels glorious and nothing to do with sticking it to the man. It is more attention than he has ever received for anything and he is going to revel in it.

Instead of waiting for his next natural opportunity to get on the mainstream telly again and tell another repulsive joke — he needs his next hit of hate-adrenalin — he gets into twitter and starts spewing pure mad-bile through it, with strange delusional ideas of doing horrible things to famous people, using language that would make your quite sturdy granny faint, while all the time visibly laughing smugly with his unholier-than-thou avatar staring out of the screen at you.

Every time he tweets something deliberately awful, the response is tweafening (sorry, I couldn’t resist) and he laughs and laughs and laughs at the twitter mob calling him a c*@t (my mother reads this), a shithead, a bastard, a foul little creep, then he throws his head back and laughs some more. He regards this as the next step in his career and he becomes (in his head) a professional troll, realising that sales of his horrible gobshitey memoir spike every time he causes a furore online.

His trolling gets worse and worse, but many of his old fans still stand up for him in front of the new haters, and so his trolling continues.  They don’t know what to think, unsure if this is an act, a subversive and edgy act or if he’s actually just an enormous twat.

He doesn’t care, not because he’s being edgy and subversive but because he’s getting all this attention; more attention than he ever dreamt possible.

But he does care, and after a good laugh (on his own in the dark) he cries and cries and cries (on his own in the dark) until he falls asleep with his head on his desk, dribbling onto the single A4 sheet of (edgy and subversive) jokes he has spent the day writing.  He is dying inside.

“Oh, bog off, the pair of you”

A couple of days ago, for the first time in my internet life, I was rickrolled. Rickrolling is the act of luring a clickering internaut to a site of interest, where they will find not the useful educational film on prairie dogs that they expect, but a Rick Astley video from the 80s. I got half way through the video, absent-mindedly marvelling at how old fashioned the 80s look now and waiting to see the film trailer I thought was coming, before I remembered that this being Rick Astley (who I couldn’t stand the first time round) meant that I had been rickrolled. I told my computer screen a light sarcastic “oh very funny” and closed the window.

Rickrolling (derived from blogroll, the list of links to other sites on a blog, which in turn, I hope, but doubt, comes from bogroll) is somewhere on the trolling spectrum, probably only “Trolling 101″.  ”Trolling 102″ introduces the “trollface” face, which is the face of the troll, presumably saying “nyeugh nyeugh nyeugh nyeugh nyeugh!” and how to copy and paste it (the ugliest and worst drawing ever made, and if you googlewikipedia “trollface” you will discover its roots in a character called “Rape Rodent”, which is nice, though I’m sure the entire trollface story is one big trollingfest of bollocks).

This is the kind of trolling done by the kind of troll who gets annoyed by me calling everyone else in this catalogue a troll. For this troll is a self-proclaimed hero joker whose online goal is to wind people up for fun, to pretend to be stupid to make people argue with him, to lure them to look at something only to give them something radically and irritatingly different and it is he (as he is constantly telling me) and his ilk that do TROLLING, and they do it on purpose so no one else can be called a troll EVAH.

He is a first year student of something not very useful, and in real life doesn’t have too many friends (1), social skills (1) or interests (1). He thinks that trolling is an art. He thinks that “Jackass” was the best show ever invented. He spends his spare time, between a game of GTA and making cheese on toast for dinner, thinking of the next way he is going to purposely annoy someone online, just for the fun of it and to show it to his equally sadly underoccupied fellow online trolls, who enjoy the mild suffering or humiliation of others. It is essentially pranking, but pranking in the dark, with an escape wormhole so that no one knows it’s him doing the pranking, and no one can punch him on the nose.

He arms himself with stock phrases and arguments that he can leverage in a forum dispute, which make him seem cleverer than he is. He isn’t clever enough to be a hacker, only has bad photoshop skills and the ability to make a page redirect to somewhere else, but this is enough to make him a real pain in the arse online.

In real life, however, he wouldn’t dare even talk to you. He would run away like a tiny mouse if confronted with irritated people (who he had irritated).

Whenever you meet someone really idiotic online, imagine that it is this little eejit, because it probably is. Then ignore him.

It is a graduate from a low-grade university with a low-grade degree and very few ideas. It is as well read as a mole and far less interesting. Its moral compass was broken in its back pocket after a sitting incident.

This is the creep who wants to get on quickly through the ranks of journalism, but doesn’t like going out much and getting its little creepy shoes wet. It can’t be bothered to go and look for real things to report, thinks it is beneath it to report on good things that happen, or small things, resents being sent to the WI cake stall and the opening of a new car showroom. It has been doing that for a whole year already.

It sees better, experienced journos having to traipse round the world to get their stories, get shot at, work hard at writing stories or being brave, or even just thinking very hard about what they do. Well, none of that is going to get it to the top, for no great writer or thinker is this little toad, it is merely a cast off from a local radio station. This lifewreckingbadjourno doesn’t care about the content, it cares only where the content gets him.

It senses redundancy in the air. It is desperate, and staring at its computer screen, it has a minor braintrickle…. the INTERNET has STUFF on it. It will find some of the stuff and write it up.

What’s this it sees? There is swearing on the internet? There are people with non one-dimensional lives? Bloggers who anonymously write about sex? Teachers who swear and make jokes with their friends? Anglican vicars who are homosexual? There are people who have different interests online than they might let on in the day time to their friends, but don’t actually have anything to hide, because there’s no shame in being a rounded person with different views, personae, ideas, moods? WHAT?

Little evil journo troll’s cold little beady unseeing eyes glow a little colder, for this is gold. The reactionary fools who read his rag will lap this up, and after the troll has had a good read of the of the dirty bits, with one hand, resolves to make these revelations news.

It picks on one hapless victim who has a responsible job by day and lets her hair down by night (“lets hair down” meaning spending some time on twitter and the rest, talking to friends, being herself, being like quite a few of the rest of us, a bit sweary, a bit of a gobshite, sure in the knowledge that people have a modicum of intelligence and understand that we’re not all robots, preprogrammed to perform our lives in keeping with the pattern laid down for say, a teacher as deemed respectable by the Daily Mail) and writes an “exposé” about the “depraved online life of teacher/ woman!”. By “writes” I mean copy/pastes her tweets, the ones in which she had put swears and rude bits, or even dared, as a woman, to make a funny. The troll tops and tails this with “Look! It’s a moral outrage! Teacher should lose job!”.

Moments before it files the “story” it emails the victim to tell her that her face will be all over the tabloids tomorrow, so if she wants to say anything, now’s the time — this is the troll lying to itself that is an ethical reporter.

Hopefully, the internet, real world and school all stick up for the much admired teacher, and her life returns to normal after the few days of utterly needless torment.

Hopefully, the troll gets what it deserves… what might that be?