I can feel my DNA changing. How are my other FSTDTers afflicted by the eclipse doing?

Continuing the primary election after religious fundie and right-wing moonbat of the year, here’s the ballot for Moonbat of the Year:

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motherLover - https://fstdt.com/VVV6BM_P4_K89 - they’re calling for gassing teh joos, and they’re doing other anti-semetic stuff, and they might become violent, but they’re totally not anti-semites guise

Kim Jong Un - https://fstdt.com/W.Z$9HY3HM.$K - Best Korea embracing child labour and death-by-overworking to fight against bourgeois decadence!

Front for the Defense of the People’s Struggles of Ecuador - https://fstdt.com/5J9RRBCKC763D - hero-worshiping eulogy for a wannabe Stalin

Robert F Kennedy jr - https://fstdt.com/ZC3Z33.YKB$69 - he thinks vaccines and chemicals cause transness

Karim Ibn Rashid (1) - https://fstdt.com/6L4GRSYNLVP9H - sexual symbolism seen in political icons, with Marxism-Leninism as the “ONLY heterosexual ideology.”

Karim Ibn Rashid (2) - https://fstdt.com/RBS.B$NK.02VH - Islamic Communist Theocracy propaganda

Milton8 - https://fstdt.com/T5.TCNN67QDXD - when Hamas commits atrocities, it’s Israel’s fault

pojexali - https://fstdt.com/FF9.LRZMVVK2J - mass murder apologia

Mustang19 - https://fstdt.com/6NJQLVBQMNSPB - "Capitalism will collapse on September 17th 2026" (put it on your calendar for the Chicken Little Award in two years)

minisoc - https://fstdt.com/CZF49J559LHP6 - censorship apologia

Haz Al-Din 🇷🇺 - https://fstdt.com/.HVCR6$_CQZF4 - rejecting gene theory in the name of “deteritorialization”

Gearóid Ó Colmáin - https://fstdt.com/P4LLDD.V4Q3D - anti-semetic Zionist banking thing with particular points about the 20’s

Edit: The top five were: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Donald Trump (1), and various commenters from gab with 4.40 points, and Bolsonaro supporters with 4.33 points, and Tyler Russell with 4.00 points.

Continuing the primary election after the choice of religious fundie, here’s the ballot for Wingnut of the Year:

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Andrew Stiles, Washington Free Beacon - https://fstdt.com/TV66C3_X4SJRB - Washington Free Beacon Alternative Style Guide for Reporting on Issues of Controversy (ASGRIC): the 2023 edition of the Wingnut Word Redefinition Project

Mike Stone - https://fstdt.com/FTQ6LTHQL8Z_ - Whining about how difficult it is growing up as a teenage boy in todays world

GodlyPatriot - https://fstdt.com/XG2QWMWZMDF9K - Crowing about former president Trump’s wisdom

Darth_Aurelius - https://fstdt.com/5SD5DSPJM3S_D - An incel that thinks Nazi Germany was awesome

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene - https://fstdt.com/8_4QS9NN9P8_K / https://fstdt.com/FSX8VGY_$Z66H - The congresscritter that gets heckled by the right for not being right enough and fact-checked by the SPLC at the same time.

Donald Trump (1) - https://fstdt.com/X7FCX6HGQNJGB / https://fstdt.com/H4XNRGRPX9NB3 - Confused about the number of World Wars and his opponent in 2016 and proclaiming his intention to be a dictator on his first day in office, all to the backdrop of a sustained incoherent meltdown about his trials

Tyler Russell - https://fstdt.com/K75ZV4WW7$4SH - Got the “At Least He’s Honest” award for wanting a Trump Reich

Feynman and Coulter's Love Child - https://fstdt.com/GWZWGG_JRRQDJ - Thinks that, if someone deserves to be killed, they must be a communist

various commenters from gab - https://fstdt.com/JRYD2.FPNLWV6 - Not being allowed to lynch people is, supposedly, oppression

Donald Trump (2) - https://fstdt.com/7YL3N.87S8R_J - ALL CAPS SCREED ABOUT THE BORDER

V Pas and Gary E Hoff - https://fstdt.com/P7MPDHLBXC$_D - Thinks low gas prices are a worthwhile trade for a dictatorship

transnazi - https://fstdt.com/DBMN95WY4XXN3 - Trans Nazi thinks Hitler was enby

Drew Dorans - https://fstdt.com/RCC46_BL_N32K - Calls OSHA and the USDA fascist

Louisiana State Senator Stewart Cathey Jr. (R-Monroe) and Peter Rykowski - https://fstdt.com/9MPSDZ3J5LQS7 - Introduced a resolution “affirming Louisiana’s right” to determine whether a federal act is constitutional, and to “nullify” it if they think it is

Luis Miguel - https://fstdt.com/T$HL.KH8N.WV3 - Declares secession to be constitutional, even though it’s not in there and “no government ever plants within itself the framework for its own demise”

Joe Wolverton, II, J.D. - https://fstdt.com/7K4.TF6J2Z42J - Fourteenth amendment conspiracy theory about it not being legitimately ratified

Georgian Southern Nationalist - https://fstdt.com/X9W6PH47233Y6 - Wants Georgia to secede from the Union again

Bolsonaro supporters - https://fstdt.com/.RWJ4XQDWSFRD - Mob attacks the capital of Brazil, making unfounded accusations of election fraud and spreading literal shit over the place

Look.

We can’t have twenty-six fundies of the year. We’ve got to filter them down first.

For this first phase, we’ll do a month-long poll of just the religious fundies. The top five will be kept for the final round. Then we’ll move on to the other categories with more than seven entries and do the same. Then, finally, we’ll do a reasonably-sized final round that won’t be eaten alive by ballot fatigue.

Edit: The top five were: Rev. Paul Mackenzie (score=5.0), John Piper (score=4.75), Kathy Schroeder (score=4.75), Timothy, Tina, and Damian (score=4.40), and Mohammad Ismail Zarei (score=4.25)

————————————————————————————————————————————

Javad Larijani - https://fstdt.com/YNSNGN5$XY$JK - Muslim Iranian conservative politician wants to stone adulterers.

Aram Wedatalla et al - https://fstdt.com/$4G232BTXC7C7 - Muslim student files a complaint when their prof showed a medieval painting depicting Prophet Muhammad.

Sure Foundation Baptist Church - https://fstdt.com/HJ3HNS6HLHPSB - Christian baptist wishes death on an atheist.

Indian Government - https://fstdt.com/BR.W8CLB.G_N4 - India cuts the entry-level education beyond the bare minimum.

Brian Niemeier (1) - https://fstdt.com/WN5BJJXZFPYBK - Mammonist Catholic thinks the Ouija board is real.

Brian Niemeier (2) - https://fstdt.com/KT36DDNDN$6QC - Mammonist Catholic is anti-progressive and thinks modernism is going to end in mass death.

Mike Johnson - https://fstdt.com/Y7Y$6LPM2BNPF - Speaker of the House compares himself to Aaron and Moses.

Wayne Allyn Root - https://fstdt.com/657DHMJ6YLHXK - WAR JAQs off about the Democrats taking orders from Satan himself.

Timothy, Tina, and Damian - https://fstdt.com/27ZMLNLDXR5RB - Fundie adoptive parents have their kids beat each other when they fail to memorize their Bible verses.

M.L. Nowlin - https://fstdt.com/D2R35CX6L9GPC - Twitter user thinks the founders only wanted Christians to have religious freedom.

Kagman - https://fstdt.com/6_W$MCPG2WYGD - Pseudonymous fundie wants to blow up all the Muslims in the name of God.

Eric Hovind - https://fstdt.com/GM2_$GD3C569K - Fundie is explicitly anti-science.

John Piper - https://fstdt.com/ZPL$8DJR5VMLD - Apologist for Biblical genocide, rather than explaining it away, explicitly supports genocide.

Patriarch Kirill - https://fstdt.com/7LN2YZ57ZZ.D8 - Orthodoc leader defrocks a priest for opposing the Russia/Ukraine war.

Pastor Rick Morrow - https://fstdt.com/6HYMHBB8955WH - Pastor thinks autism is caused by demons.

Rev. Greg Locke - https://fstdt.com/JL3K5WY9M72X7 - Reverend hinks people in wheelchairs don't have enough faith to be healed by God.

Rev. Paul Mackenzie - https://fstdt.com/B7Z$F$6N4QWC5 - Bodies of the members of a now-dead starvation cult are found.

u/AnotherRichard827379 - https://fstdt.com/H$W33P_5MZRG - Redditor doesn't believe in human rights.

Ken Ham - https://fstdt.com/5Z$59TJJX$KCD - Fundie points out that atheists and Hitler both believe that children are the future.

Mohammad Ismail Zarei - https://fstdt.com/YST7GVW8KJ3.F - An Iranian government official rewards the American who stabbed Salman Rushdie, the British author of The Satanic Verses.

Charlie Fuqua - https://fstdt.com/H4NRMRFD8K9Q4 - Arkansas legislative candidate endorses death penalty for rebellious children.

Benjamin Netanyahu - https://fstdt.com/MJ5_B8BBMG9NF - Israeli Prime Minister compares Hamas to the Amalekites, who were all killed in Deuteronomy.

The Taliban - https://fstdt.com/LLLPD6P.3T_VJ - Islamic fundies think contraception is a western conspiracy; intimidate and attack anyone who has them.

Abdul Hakim Sharaee - https://fstdt.com/8.C2SP.B5684J - Afghanistan’s hard-line Islamist Taliban rulers have banned all political parties, saying there is "no justification" for them under Shari'a law.

Kathy Schroeder - https://fstdt.com/$5YH6WY3.X368 - Thirty years after Waco siege, a participant still supports self-styled "second coming of Christ" David Koresh.

The Rev. Steven Roland - https://fstdt.com/L6MVM$Y$8ZT.J - "Simply Christian" writer thinks K-ON is evil.

Just wishing a very Merry Christmas and happy holidays to my fellow FSTDTers! Hope you have a good one!

It’s time once again for the Fundie of the Year awards, the part of the year’s end where the fanatics are ranked, compared, and scored for our amusement.

As always, our first step is a nomination round. Leave a comment on this blog post to nominate someone for an award, and second the nomination by starring it. Put in some justification, plus a link. For example, if I wanted to nominate schwa for best sound, I’d write this:

@pyro

[b]Best Sound: ə[/b]

Very soft-sounding and one of the most common sounds in English. The name is also inherently funny sounding, at least to me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwa

If you’re having trouble finding stuff, might I suggest the shiny advanced search function? You can search for stuff based on text, fundie name, tag, and date range.

The categories

The following categories will almost certainly be used in the election round. You can nominate other awards that you want, just like you nominate candidates for these awards. If others propose candidates for your award idea, we’ll put it on the ballot.

People:

- Religious #fundie of the year
- Right-wing #wingnut of the year
- Left-wing #moonbat of the year
- #conspiracy theorist of the year
- #ableist of the year
- #racist of the year
- #sexist of the year
- Grifter <#mammon>-worshipper of the year
- Heteronormative Crusader Award for #homophobia, #transphobia, #biphobia, #interphobia, and #kinkshaming
- #forced-birth advocate of the year (be aware that this is a new tag, and older quotes haven’t necessarily gotten it retroactively applied; I recommend searching for “abortion” if you’re having trouble finding one to nominate)

Quotes:

- Vogon Poet Loonerate Award for word poem or song
- Jack Chick Memorial Award for worst piece of art
- Dr. Nick Riviera Award for dumbest piece of quack medicine
- Magnetic Crank Award for quotes with more than three #tags
- One-liner of the Year: two sentences and 280 characters max
- Funniest quote
- Most disturbing quote

Special Awards:

- Chicken Little Award for predictions that didn’t come true. As a special exception, you can nominate quotes from previous years, where the prophesy was supposed to come true by 2023 and didn’t.

Other nominations:

- Website of the year
- Quote submitter of the year
- Commenter of the year: please click the #12345 number to get a link to just the comment
- Troll of the year: a special award for fundies that show up in the comment section

As you have likely already heard, former US First Lady Rosalynn Carter passed away on Sunday. She was a very passionate mental-health and caregiver advocate, and those are both things that are close to my own heart for reasons that hit home for me. I’m posting this to pay my respects to her and ask you to keep the Carter family in your thoughts.

We don’t just want to call it pro-life, because that’s a low-information, politically-positive name.

I’m going to close this poll on October 31.

* The “Please read before commenting” link at the bottom now has the more descriptive name “BBCode instructions”

* Tracking data at the end of Twitter URLs is now automatically stripped off new submissions.

Just posting this to wish my fellow LGBTQ FSTDTers and allies a happy pride month! I know things are rough for us right now, but they will get better. Progress always wins in the end.

This Thursday was Ascension Day, a public holiday in Germany, and my brother was home for the extended weekend. In the evening, he vomited profusely, and afterwards, he was suffering from loud-groaning pain in both the back and the stomach, as well as sweating intensely, so much that my mother drove him to the hospital. We were, of course, extremely worried, but at half past two, it was found to be just a bad lumbago and he was prescribed painkillers.

The next day, my mother drove them to the general practitioner so that he could get sick leave and reclaim the vacation day for the friday. Over the day, his pain was somewhat diminishing, but still great and moanful.

On Saturday, the pain was again a bit better, but he continued to be sweaty, and his eyes painful as he was unable to sleep. He had not eaten in this entire time, so my mother thought he may be hypoglycemic and used my glucometer on him. However, on the contrary, it was too high to measure. She called the ambulance. I had been going for a walk earlier and my mother had not realised that I was back, so I only heard from my room snippets of my mother talking about diabetes and telling my brother not to worry because it is very treatable nowadays, and at some point, the direction of what I overheard and the fact that my mother had gotten an immediate ambulant appointment for diabetes on a Saturday caused me to look what was going on and saw my brother in a gurney - I later learned that he had collapsed. My mother would afterwards drive to the hospital separately.

At the threshold of the hospital, he suffered a metabolic collapse. He was machinally resuscitated, but likely already suffered brain damage. At half past eleven, it was clear that it was extremely unlikely that he could be saved. My mother left me free whether to take a taxi or stay at home - after much agonising and many calls, we agreed that there would be nothing I could do for my brother, my mother or myself, so I stayed at home.

Tonight, at a quarter to two, he expired at only twenty-seven. He had been suffering from pancreatitis that had been going on for quite a while, but did not display the tell-tale labour-like pains. He had also apparently inhaled vomit.

I am thoroughly shaken and grieving, and I feel so alone and worried about my own health and burdened by being the only one left. My mother, of course, is absolutely broken, wailing and screaming in unutterable misery, and for the rest of her life, she will be asking herself if there is something she could have noticed, that she could have done to save him.

My brother was far from an easy person to get along with - untidy even by our standards, a picky eater, loudly arguing with the television, more than neglectful of any chores, seemingly unfazed… it is strange how strongly and how quickly even the things that annoyed us in life can become painful reminders of absence. But deep in his heart, he clearly was a good person, and recently, he had gotten a new job with much better perspectives where he had prospered - tragedy once against striking my family when things look to be going upwards.

The polls for many of the elections are closed, and we’re doing a runoff election to resolve the ties.

Religious fundie of the year

This year, Kerrie and Jason Struhs, and The “Saints” who tried to pray diabetes away are tied with the Assam lynch mob that hanged someone for dating outside the faith.

Both winners seem intent on putting their religion into action, either through ignorance or malice. Next year, maybe the winner will do it to themselves instead of some innocent victim.

Right-wing wingnut of the year

The winner for wingnut of the year, by overwhelmingly popular demand, is former President of the United States Donald Trump.

Because of course it is. He might not actually be the most unhinged wingnut we’ve ever had on here, but he was definitely the most notable, the most powerful man in the world, and yet somehow kept the wingnut persecution complex alive. And he’s also a total gaffe machine; very quotable.

Left-wing moonbat of the year

This year, North Korea officials Ri Il Hwan and Han Chang Sun—of the country and ideology that’s totally not a cult—tied with the Communist Party of Great Britain simping for Dear Leader Putin’s Glorious People’s War.

The dictators in question have not published a statement on whether they’d be interested in having Western tankies supply them with blowjobs.

Conspiracy theorist of the year

The conspiracy theorist of 2022 is Jerry Derecha, the Adrenogate blogger who’s too smart for Q and knows that the “Q Clearance Patriot” is actually a quantum computer run as a psy-op to identify and neutralize all the dissenters.

In a sense, I’m actually relieved to see this. Q probably is being run by some propaganda outfit, and it’s good to know that they haven’t totally mastered their marks. Still a conspiracy theorist that thinks sharing a first letter with Quatzecotal must mean something, which is why the award, but still.

Ableist of the year

The winner is Galit Distel-Atbaryan, the abusive mother.

It was a neurotypical parent of an autistic child last year, too. Narcissistic autism parents are the worst.

Sexist of the year

The unanimous winner, with a score of 5.00, is Imaniceguy, the father-daughter incest apologist.

The incels are making a big deal out of nothing. There’s a reason why this quote has a higher fundieness score than the actual murderers that tied for FOTY; at least they have the excuse of being trained from birth in their toxic culture. The incels made up this idea of ten-year-olds being sex material from scratch (arranged marriages were not usually consummated, because that’s cruel and stupid).

Racist of the year

For racist of the year, it’s a two-way tie between Prussian Society of America (2)—the Nazi fans who Dunning-Kruger their way through biology—and Gregcyber—the Confederacy fan who Dunning-Kruger’s their way through biology.

I know the “Prussian” thing is also COVIDiocy while the Gregcyber thing is anti-interracial-breeding, but still, both are great specimens of pseudo-biology in addition to being hate-filled racist screeds.

Mammonist grifter of the year

The winner is Aleks Svetski, the Bitcoin shill.

Some people would think it’s inappropriate to compare cryptocurrency with racism and murder-by-faith-healing, and on its own I guess it is. But a lot of Bitcoiners aren’t “just” Bitcoin shills; they’d be wingnuts worthy of posting here anyway even if they weren’t trying to get other people to buy their bags.

Heteronormative crusader of the year

The winner is Dalton Clodfelter, the bullying apologist.

Could’ve also been tagged for ableism and bodyshaming, which I guess makes sense. A lot of transphobia is just that with an extra dose of fear mongering.

Magnetic crank of the year

The winner is Cobra, from “The Portal”, a blog that mixes space aliens from another dimension with wingnut talking points about “woke ideology” and global warming.

L. Ron Hubbard wants his shtick back.

Jack Chick memorial award for worst art

The worst artist in 2022 was officially Ileana the Star Traveler. It’s this thing:

image

Quack of the year

The fake doctor of the year was Irène Grosjean, the pedophilia advocate.

It’s almost like the voters don’t like it when you hurt kids. What is it with that?

One-liner of the year

Anonymous Coward #80402537: “Is a man a homosexual if he has cats? Yes he is.”

Chicken Little Award for failed predictions

The winner is Sherri Tenpenny, who predicted that everybody who got the COVID vaccine would develop AIDS by the end of 2022.

Didn’t happen.

Website of the year

The winner is ovarit.com, a TERF site so prolific, the mods rate-limited it.

As an example, here’s their version of the ”penis as a fucking weapon” quote.

Submitter of the year

The submitter of the year is the very prolific @rabbirealm.

Commenter of the year

The commenter of the year is the consistently on-point @Zinnia.

You should’ve been nominated last year. In any case, you’ve kept up the high quality. Thanks.

Troll of the year

The troll of the year is the sock puppet master who’s obsessed with The Virgin Mary: @foxtrot / @Kingselyda2nd / @R2 / @Sweetcake.

And it’s time to vote on the Fundies of the Year 2022.

As per the new normal, visit the permalink to cast your vote between 1 and 5 stars; the fundie with the highest average score wins. If you have any trouble using the voting system, please contact us by posting a comment or reaching out to the Discord chatroom.

This poll will remain open until April 6. In the event of a tie, the runoff election will run until May 1.

Fixed the Next button on advanced search pages to not drop before/after date filters.

Tweaked the Reply button CSS to use a more consistent icon on different platforms.

Implemented a tighter rate limit on replying to a single discussion thread, to prevent people from making dozens of replies in a row and dominating the conversation.

It’s the 2022 Fundie of the Year awards, that time of year when we’re grateful for the insufferable fanatics in our lives and in the wider world.

As always, our first step is a nomination round. Leave a comment on this blog post to nominate someone for an award, and second the nomination by starring it. Put in some justification in the form of a link. For example, if I wanted to nominate Maltose for best sugar molecule, I’d write this:

@pyro

[b]Best sugar molecule: maltose[/b]

For best taste and best method of production.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maltose

If you’re having trouble finding stuff, might I suggest the shiny advanced search function? You can search for stuff based on text, fundie name, tag, and date range.

The categories

The following categories will almost certainly be used in the election round. You can nominate other awards that you want, just like you nominate candidates for these awards. If others propose candidates for your award idea, we’ll put it on the ballot.

People:

- Religious #fundie of the year
- Right-wing #wingnut of the year
- Left-wing #moonbat of the year
- #conspiracy theorist of the year
- #ableist of the year
- #racist of the year
- #sexist of the year
- Grifter <#mammon>-worshipper of the year
- Heteronormative Crusader Award for #homophobia, #transphobia, #biphobia, #interphobia, and #kinkshaming

Quotes:

- Jack Chick Memorial Award for worst piece of art
- Dr. Nick Riviera Award for dumbest piece of quack medicine
- Magnetic Crank Award for quotes with more than three #tags
- One-liner of the Year: two sentences and 280 characters max
- Funniest quote
- Most disturbing quote

Special Awards:

- Chicken Little Award for predictions that didn’t come true. As a special exception, you can nominate quotes from previous years, where the prophesy was supposed to come true by 2022 and didn’t.

Other nominations:

- Website of the year
- Quote submitter of the year
- Commenter of the year: please click the #12345 number to get a link to just the comment
- Troll of the year: a special award for fundies that show up in the comment section

Add new “since” filter to the Top posts page. That way, it actually changes sometimes.

Add a way to have a user’s posts all be moderated, while their comments go straight through.

Given that I’ve been a regular here for many years, and that I intend to make a certain change, I thought it would be good to explain things in a blog post here.

As several of the FSTDT regulars have already known, I'm transgender — a trans woman. I had decided to hold off telling the rest of the community until I came out to my parents… which I finally did just a couple days ago.

They took it pretty well, and are accepting. I was afraid of how things might go, but fortunately, my fears were misplaced.

There are still some friends I've not yet come out to whom I plan on telling, and then — some time later — it'll be time to get things going regarding the path to the more physical and legal aspects of transition. This is Croatia, so that will be difficult, and there's no guarantee I'll be able to make it past the gatekeeping. But I certainly plan on doing what I can.

You might also note that my nickname here turned out to be very ironic 😄
Yes, I'll change it, and I had thought about what the new one might be. Since I've been here for a long time, I'll try to keep some name recognition. Somebody once suggested replacing 'Vman' with 'Voman', but the cringe there is through the roof :P

I'll go with 'Vgal', at least for now. It's similar to my erstwhile nickname, and I don't hate it :)

So yeah, that's another one added to the already absurd number of trans women around here <3

This August, the mod team voted to require an account for submitting quotes. This way, anonymous submitters can be contacted via private messages, which makes things a lot simpler.

If you still don’t want your name attached to your quote, there’s a checkmark at the end of the submission form to hide it. The mod team will still be able to see your username, so we can contact you if something’s wrong with the quote, but it won’t show up for people who don’t have mod privileges.

Redesigned user profile comments page with a few improvements:

* There is now a way to reach the specific comment instead of just the whole page. Click the comment number, or the permalink button in the menu.

* The buttons from the post page are now shown there, too.

- Slightly increased the font size of UI elements. Post text is still about the same as before.

- Fixed a stupid bug in the “Reply” function where unnecessary <brackets> surround usernames.

- Fixed a stupid bug in domain nav causing the Top link to break.

The other mods and I have come to the consensus that the pedo tag needed to be deleted. Most of the submissions didn’t really fit what we saw as fundie. Just because something is bad, doesn’t mean it’s a form of bigotry, fanaticism, or ignorance, so how can you say it’s fundie? And while there were a few hilariously bad pedo apologetic arguments, they really belonged in /r/BadWomensAnatomy.

The other tag we’re considering removing is #psycho. We haven’t done it yet, because it’s useful for filtering, but we are going to ask a favor: don’t submit something with just that tag. Fundieism isn’t just being evil and sick: it’s fanaticism and willful ignorance, and good submissions to this site are blatant about it.

The results of the new-tag poll are in, and #senpai_noticed_us overwhelmingly won! It’s now a tag available for use on submissions that mention FSTDT. Thanks to everyone who voted!

The other mods and I have come to a consensus that we need a tag for quotes that mention or are about FSTDT itself. We don’t know what to call it, though, but we have a few ideas. You can help us choose by voting on which tag names you like the most/least for this! Also feel free to comment with your own ideas for the name ❤️

Someone pointed out that I haven’t been as consistent as I should be with publishing patch notes. Sorry about that. It ends now.

I just pushed a new version of the FSTDT software. Here’s what changed in the last :

- The HTML templates have been converted from handlebars to askama, and refactored to use separate struct definitions for each page. If you aren’t technically inclined, just read it as “faster and easier to maintain.”

- The “Edit” button on comments has been pulled out of the More menu, so it is instead shown directly alongside the “Reply” button. This change only affects large screens; smartphone-sized screens will still put the Edit button in the menu, but only show it on top.

- When showing a score on a poll results page (that’s after a poll is closed), it will show only two decimal points, instead of showing the whole 64 bits of precision that are used while calculating it.

- The “Documentation” link at the bottom of the page has been renamed “Please read before commenting,” to make it easier to find.

- On the advanced search page, you can now exclude tags. Just start it with a minus sign.

All things must eventually come to an end, and that includes the cut-off date for these polls: the FOTY 2021 run-off, and the proposal for adding two new phobia tags.

As the two results with the highest average scores, the public sentiment is clear: #biphobia and #interphobia tags have now been added.

Naveen won the religious fundie award, David Barton won the wingnut award, Death to Western Imperialism won the moonbat award, Generation Zed won the WTF award, the unnamed Italian Anti-vaxxer won the quack medicine award, and the literal shit-flinging domestic terrorists won the Jan 6 insurrectionist award.

The polls for many of the elections are closed, and we’re doing a runoff election to resolve the two-way ties.

Religious #fundie of the year

This year, Naveen and the Purnea mob are tied for first. Neither of them are really the darndest things that fundies say, as they are things that fundies do.

I kinda want to laugh at the guy who sacrifices himself to God as an offering for giving him a job. Makes you wonder how he planned to work it.

But the other group, the one with the witch hunt, is a lot less funny. By the way, there are specific laws against this, with a conviction rate around 2.4%. Freaking caste systems.

#wingnut of the year

For right-wingers, this time there’s a tie between David Barton, the one that claims citizens should be allowed to own nukes, and Slavery Advocate, the slavery advocate.

There’s something deeply silly about someone who’s so caught up in their ideology that they completely accept the idea of giving wealthy people private ownership of weapons that could level a city. This is the kind of thing that lead to FSTDT getting political in the first place: is there really a difference between this guy, compared to the fundamentalist that condemns babies to hell and plans to kill everyone and let God sort them out? In what way has David Barton not made the invisible hand of the free market his god?

The Slavery Advocate is probably just a teenage edgelord that thinks all the attention is funny. And they’re not even good at it, claiming to be the only pro-slavery website on the Internet when they clearly aren’t.

#moonbat of the year

For left-wingers, there’s a two-way tie for first between maseisbigsexy, the one that thinks Joseph Stalin was an objectively better human being than Barack Obama, and Death to Western Imperialism, the historical revisionist that denies the Jewish Holocaust and the Uygur genocide.

Because nothing says anti-imperialist better than carrying water for Communist empires.

#conspiracy theorist of the year

We actually have a single winner for conspiracy theorist! Jerry Derecha’s first quote, the one about the COVID vaccine containing the rabies virus. Of course, you can trust Jerry Derecha when it comes to vaccines, since he’s the same guy that thinks drinking adrenalized blood is a good way to get high. It’s not. It’s a plot point from a movie.

Putting rabies in the COVID vaccine makes about as much sense. There’s no real motive for doing it on purpose, and since the COVID vaccines are 3D printed, it’s unlikely to happen by accident.

#racist of the year

The “winner” for racist of the year is Israel_is_Apartheid_, the one that wants us to hear both sides about Nazi Germany, specifically claiming that you can’t hear any version of history except the “Jewish-approved one.” This is, of course, false. If you want to hear Hitler’s side of the story, archive.org has a copy of “Mein Kampf” translated to English.

As I said on the post itself, it doesn’t make sense to assume that, just because Israel’s creation was a human rights violation, it should be assumed that the Holocaust never happened. After all, why should the Palestinians have to pay for Germany’s crimes?

#sexist of the year

The sexist of the year is Adil Khan, the pedophile.

He’s raped children, and claimed it wasn’t a big deal.

#transphobia of the year

The award for heteronormative crusader goes to Blackpillapologist, the one that says Hitler was probably “a tranny.”

Their reasons for saying this is nonsense, the whole “question” is irrelevant anyway, and the whole thing is filled with the usual “incel” gibberish rhetoric.

#ableist of the year

Ableist of the year, by .7 points, is AspieMom.

Because of course it is. It’s so short, pithy, and any parent who turns their back on their child definitely deserves .7 asshole points just for that.

#mammon of the year

This year’s award for being a con artist goes to Tim Tony Stark Rifat’s first quote, the one selling a Soul Augmentation Service.

If you want to know what happens if you don’t buy this, I suggest watching the documentary ”Bart Sells his Soul”.

#crackpot of the year

This year’s award for being an ignoramus goes to Unveiling Them, the one who literally claimed that Jesus spoke Elizabethian English.

You know, that thing KJV-onlyists said was a strawman version of their beliefs? This guy actually believes that, and makes arguments for why it’s true. The arguments are obvious nuttery to our resident linguists, but still.

#psycho of the year

This year’s award for being evil goes to Sweaty-Lawfulness-46, the redditor that enjoys watching people cry over dead children.

It’s kinda amazing that they actually managed to make the grade without even engaging in actual bigotry. It’s really just being an ass. But at least the story has a somewhat-happy ending: their Reddit account is suspended.

Funniest quote

The officially funniest quote for this year is H2ElectricBoogaloo’s post. The one about birthing baby Jesus by ejaculating on New Year’s midnight.

WTF award

The WTF award is another two way tie, and, as such, will have a runoff vote below. On the one side, it’s Generation Zed, the guide to harvesting alien livers, and it’s Jerry Derecha’s fourth quote on the other, claiming that 9/11 was a ritual to stop time.

For the rest of these quotes, I’ve tried to add some other comment to truly capture what makes them profound and worthy of an award, but this just makes me speechless. Alien livers? A ritual to stop time?

One-liner of the year

The one-liner of the year award goes to hitman, who thinks Amazon Chasers are gay.

In retrospect, it’s weird that hitman wasn’t a candidate for “heteronormative crusader.” They probably would’ve been competitive in that category, since that’s clearly a heteronormative quote.

Magnetic Crank award

The magnetic crank award for tag intersections, by a razor-thin margin, goes to Dominic Valanmahal.

This guy is definitely an religious fundie at heart, tying the whole thing together by blaming everything on violations of Gawd’s Way. It’s a reminder of why religious fundieism is a problem: it closes your mind to… everything. This guy’s view of godliness is only big enough for the neurotypical, the prudish, and anyone who’s unlucky enough to need medicine to function.

Jack T. Chick Memorial Award for Worst Artist

This year’s award for bad taste goes to Lena Ruseva.

I would want to give her the “Golden Calf” award, too, but we already gave that one out to someone more deserving.

Dr. Nick Riviera Award for Dumbest Quack Medicine

We have a three-way tie between aficiomaquinas (the starving cancer one), the unnamed Italian Anti-vaxxer (the one who works so hard to avoid getting his shots), and Chris Penelope (the one with the holy spirit fart).

Honestly, in spite of the small number of candidates, this has been a year with a lot of quack medicine. It’s just that these are the ones that stood out from the crowd. Any one of them would deserve the award, but it’s not much of an award if everyone wins.

Chicken Little Award for Failed Predictions

The award for failing to predict what 2020 would actually be like goes to LIBERALITY Comics. By a good margin, too. They clearly deserved it. As if the United Nations is even close to taking over the world.

Here they are in the Internet archive, claiming to be the “publisher of the first conservative comic book.” They’re not, by the way. Not by a long shot.

January 6 Insurrectionist Award

The best insurrection quote, according to our voters, are a two-way tie between the Oregon Republican Party and the literal shit-flinging domestic terrorists.

Fundies doo the darndest things.

Kinslayer of the Year

The award for killing people close to you goes to Shobha Mote, Sanjay Mote, the ones who beheaded their sister.

They didn’t even just kill her. They bragged to the police about it?!

Commenter of the Year

Congratulations, @Spacewyrm. You won!

Comment of the Year

Individual comment of the year goes to @kuyohashi #88302.

Taking down a stormfronter concept, especially one as stupid as a racist dating site, deserves it. It’s kinda shooting fish in a barrel, but at least it’s thorough.

Website of the Year

This award goes to Voyages of Light. The “channeling” woo blog. Want to pretend to be Chief Eagle Feather? Aliens? John F. Kennedy?

I’m not sure how many of their readers actually fall for it, but if they really think it can be done, there’s plenty of people who’ll offer millions of dollars to anyone who can channel a pre-agreed-upon password across the void.

Dear FSTDT members, we have something to discuss!

We've been having requests to add tags for biphobia, and if I recall correctly, also intersex phobia (interphobia) at some point. What do you think should be done about it?
There are several possibilities, and they have their positive and negative sides.

The original requests, if implemented, would result in new tags being made to cover particular sorts of bigotries and prejudices that might not align neatly with the existing tags (#homophobia and #transphobia).
Obviously, there’s the aforementioned #biphobia and #interphobia to add, but further tags might be called for if need be (like #enbyphobia for bigotry against non-binary people).

Now, on the plus side, this would be a pretty precise way of labeling these bigotries; it would also be more inclusive and prevent a message (even if unintentional) that we don’t care about the groups of people affected by them.
It’s not just that these bigotries exist; it’s also that bisexual, intersex etc. erasure does as well. That means that these groups of people often get overlooked in the discussions about the LGBTQ+ community and the problems its members face. And when such a lack of visibility and care by others are a daily reality for you, seeing it apparently happen on a site and community that matter to you can be hurtful and tiring.

On the other hand, one frequent submitter noted that they’re concerned about tag bloat, that is, an excessive and rising number of tags. Indeed, if you look at the tags we already have, there are quite a lot (22 as of this moment), and if there are too many, it can make submitting quotes more difficult, especially for our most prolific submitters. You might also remember that the previous version of our site had just three categories for years (‘fundie’, ‘conspiracy’ and ‘racist’), which got extended to four when ‘sexist’ was added.
There’s also the fact that there have thus far only been a few posts that would specifically qualify for the new proposed tags.

A possible alterative solution, one which the mod team is currently most in favor of (but let us know if you disagree, nevertheless!) is to unite all these tags (the two existing ones, as well as any proposed ones) into a single #queerphobia tag (another name is possible, for instance #heteronormative).

The good aspects of this choice would be that it prevents tag bloat, and that it would sidestep the need to introduce new tags for different strains of queerphobia in the future (as they’d be included in the new super-tag by default).

The problem is that, while neat and simple, that solution would kind of go against the spirit of the requests that prompted this discussion in the first place. What was requested was more recognition and precision, not less.

Also, while many of the fundies we quote aren’t very discerning in their general bigotry against LGBTQ+ people, there are those who only target specific subsections of it and not others — examples of that include many TERFs, or those members of the LGBTQ+ community who target other groups within that umbrella (e.g. there are gay & lesbian transphobes and biphobes, or enbyphobic transgender people). A single #queerphobia tag seems somewhat inadequate to cover that sort of nuance.

In essence, it seems that here we have a conflict between different needs and aims: on the one hand, user friendliness and simplicity — but on the other hand, better precision and the recognition of the identities and struggles that people, some of whom are our members, hold dear and are affected by. Thus, we decided that this is not something the moderators alone should decide on, but something that concerns the whole community, and that everyone should have a voice on.

Please cast your votes in the poll, and feel free to discuss the options (and propose new ones if you think they’d be better). Both the poll and your responses in the comment section will be considered when the final decision on the solution is to be made.

And, it’s that time again! Not just for another set of broken New Year’s Resolutions, but also for voting on the Fundies of the Year 2021.

First of all, a notable farewell to Cambria Will Not Yield, Wordpress blogger, COVID-19 denialist, Ebola denialist, anti-democracy pro-theocracy Trumpist, white supremacist, and overall magnetic crank. If you are right about heaven and hell, then hopefully I go to hell, because I would not like the company in heaven.

Bennett Lee Ross, as the only contender, wins the award of Poet Loonerate by default. Roosh V. wins the award for dumbest religious conversion, @Dialgatime321 wins troll of the year, and @rabbirealm wins submitter of the year, for the same reason.

As part of the new voting system, you can now cast your ballot by point and click.

Just posting this because I hope everybody has a happy, safe, and Merry Christmas!

It’s the 2021 Fundie of the Year awards, that time of year when we recognize the fundies that stood out the most.

As always, our first step is a nomination round. Leave a comment on this blog post to nominate someone for an award, and second the nomination by starring it. Put in some justification in the form of a link. For example, if I wanted to nominate My Mother The Car for best TV show, I’d write this:

@pyro

[b]Best TV show: My Mother The Car[/b]

For its clever writing, progressive values, and believable premise.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Series/MyMotherTheCar

If you’re having trouble finding stuff, might I suggest the shiny advanced search function? You can search for stuff based on text, fundie name, tag, and date range.

The other major new thing going on here is a bit of much-needed election reform. The previous FOTY awards were done by posting comments saying who you were voting for, and manually counting votes. This was annoying, for many reasons:

- It discriminated against mobile users, who had trouble filling in the ballots.
- Since you picked one candidate to vote for, you got vote splitting. Doing it in multiple stages lessened the effect, but does not eliminate vote splitting entirely. This not only messed up the outcome, but would also influences who gets nominated, because everybody intuitively knows about it.
- Manually counting votes is work. I don’t like work, so the announcements got delayed.

All of these problems are solved by the new implementation of score voting, which you’ll get to use once the nominations are done. You give each candidate a score from 1 to 5, and the candidate with the highest mean score wins.

Now, if only we could get score voting implemented in elections that actually matter…

Anyway…

The categories

The following categories will almost certainly be used in the election round. You can nominate other awards that you want, just like you nominate candidates for these awards. If others propose candidates for your award idea, we’ll put it on the ballot.

People:

- Religious #fundie of the year
- Right-wing #wingnut of the year
- Left-wing #moonbat of the year
- #conspiracy theorist of the year
- #ableist of the year
- #racist of the year
- #sexist of the year
- Grifter <#mammon>-worshipper of the year
- COVIDiot of the year
- Heteronormative Crusader Award for #homophobia, #transphobia, and #kinkshaming

Quotes:

- Jack Chick Memorial Award for worst piece of art
- Dr. Nick Riviera Award for dumbest piece of quack medicine
- Magnetic Crank Award for quotes with more than three #tags
- One-liner of the Year: two sentences and 280 characters max
- Funniest quote
- Most disturbing quote

Special Awards:

- Chicken Little Award for predictions that didn’t come true. As a special exception, you can nominate quotes from previous years, where the prophesy was supposed to come true by 2021 and didn’t.

Other nominations:

- Website of the year
- Quote submitter of the year
- Commenter of the year: please click the #12345 number to get a link to just the comment
- Troll of the year: a special award for fundies that show up in the comment section

Preparing this for the 2021 FSTDT awards, though it can also be used for other stuff, I’ve added a polling function that mods can use to collect public opinions. It’s based on score voting, a voting system that’s very simple, while neatly avoiding the really bad problems like the spoiler effect.

Here’s a sample ballot, to try it out:

Today, my grandfather died.

After staying lively long into his seventies, in the last few years, he had finally started to grow old, requiring at one time surgery for cataract, on the other
Last year. he had to be hospitalised for a blood cyst in his nasal cavity, and he developed dementia.
Two and a half month ago, a month before the start of my rehab, he had to be hospitalised again due to a fall, there were many complications including kidney congestion. His dementia grew far worse and he had to be moved to a nursing home. They also found cancer at his bladder that was apparently considered likely something he would “die with, not die off”.
During these times, my mother and I had intended to travel down to my grandparents, with my brother to take care of the Feline Overlord, but each time, sudden changes in my brother’s work schedule foiled that, and I did not have any other times available.

On Monday, he was hospitalised again, with a catheter infection with a sepsis, and there were agreements to limit the lengths to which they would go to keep him alive, for when it would be better to let him pass on then let him continue as a vegetable.
Very early this morning, my mother drove down to my grandparents. In the early afternoon, she visited my grandfather at the hospital, where he was in sedation. I happened to call her during this visit, and she set her telephone to loud so I could say something that he might hear, although whether anything managed to come through to him, we will of course never know.
When my mother returned, she had a phone call with her brother, and they were talking about how his sons and perhaps even my brother and I (the cousins dwell closer to my grandparents than we), may come to visit to see him one last time, and his telephone notified him that the hospital had tried to call him. And then, that was when my mother and grandmother got the call that he had died. I myself received her call (by the time I post this) about three hours ago, shortly after 7pm.
I cannot remember having seen my mother as distraught as in the last few days, and when she called, she was even worse - indeed, I had to call her back a bit later for a clearer talk.
He had a long and fulfilled life, and in the end, it was probably the better outcome, but that does little to reduce the impact of the loss.

My grandfather was eighty-two at the time of his death and had been married to my grandmother for sixty years. He was a farmer, a meat inspector and an outdoors person. I remember how he took us on drives around the landscape with the tractor, how he would often do repairs when he came here, the bows and wooden swords he made for us - one of which I still have -, how he at times told us stories of his childhood set “after the currency” (the introduction of the German Mark on 21th of June 1948).
Soon, my brother and I will have to travel down to the Taunus by train for the funeral, although we obviously do not know when yet.

- Bastethotep

Your post advocates __________, a

( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting fake news. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won’t work.

( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else’s career or business

( ) Assumes that you can use textual metrics to determine if a claim is true or not

( ) Assumes that pictures can’t be faked

( ) Assumes that popularity equals truth

( ) Assumes that you can tell whether something’s true by where the web server hosting it is located

( ) Any social network that tries to adopt it won’t get used

( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once

( ) Requires fake news to opt into additional scrutiny

( ) Requires mind reading

( ) Puts additional strain on already underfunded and understaffed organizations

( ) Big Tech won’t put up with it

( ) ISPs won’t put up with it

( ) By the time you took it down, the damage would already be done

( ) Good luck finding a neutral third party on major political controversies

( ) Would just move the problem from Facebook to Signal

( ) “Trust No One” is not a solution

( ) The surveillance state already has more data than they know what to do with

—

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Readers failing to notice “this is a joke” disclaimers

( ) The existence of Schelling points other than the truth

( ) Black Hat SEO tactics

( ) “Residential IP” proxies

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it

( ) Legitimate disagreement

( ) Context

( ) Bias

( ) Asshats

( ) Dog-whistle politics

( ) Jurisdictional problems

( ) Linguistic drift

( ) Asymmetry of information

( ) Asymmetry of available resources

( ) The time it takes to verify a claim being far longer than the time it takes to write it

( ) New information coming out after a story has been published

( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches

( ) Extreme profitability of fake news

( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who literally believe in magic

( ) Technical illiteracy

( ) Hacking

( ) Astroturfing

( ) People with valuable information, but no capital

( ) Laziness

( ) Dishonesty on the part of fake news pushers

—

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

( ) It would violate Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

( ) Technically, that’s how it already works

( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical

( ) Fake news was already a problem before Facebook; we called it “chain mail”

( ) Outlawing The Onion would be stupid

( ) Post ranking algorithms should not be the subject of legislation

( ) Any countermeasure that involves outlawing end-to-end encrypted private communication is unacceptable

( ) Any countermeasure that involves spear phishing is not going to work more than a couple of times

( ) We should be able to talk about the letter Q without being censored

( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually

( ) Who gave you the right to decide whether something is true?

( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem

( ) Anonymity does not destroy all class and power differences, and makes bad-faith participation more common

( ) The distinction between “political” and “apolitical” is not always clear-cut

( ) The distinction between “private” and “public” is not always clear-cut

( ) The distinction between “fact” and “opinion” is not always clear-cut

( ) People who can’t afford lawyers would be de facto excluded from the internet

( ) People who can’t afford bodyguards would be de facto excluded from the internet

( ) Your scheme would have made it illegal to share a video of police brutality without consulting the very institutions that benefit most from police brutality

( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

—

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

( ) Sorry, but I don't think it would work.

( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.

( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!

—

This is a very, very old meme. Here’s a few older versions of it.

❤️ https://qntm.org/calendar

❤️ https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt

The votes for fundie of the year are in! Here are the top minds from around the internet that made this year such an interesting time:

Religious Fundie: Church of Cyprus (6⁄11)

This whole year has been following a theme. It’s a Coronavirus quote, showcasing the typical danger of having people run around thinking magic is real. And, no, this isn’t the only church that thinks this way.

Wingnut: Donald Trump (4/11)

You know it’s a special time when the President of the United States is wingnut of the year. Either we’ve gone off the rails, or he has. And he’s the one who recommended you inject disinfectant and UV radiation to cure the Coronavirus.

Moonbat: Adunaiii (7⁄11)

North Korea apologist? You want to be in a work camp? Who’s stopping you?

Conspiracy: JerseyPine (4⁄11)

It’s an anti-vaxxer, with some stuff about turning boys into girls with genetic engineering. You know, reasonable criticism of the satanic healthcare industry.

Ableist: Nobodysfool777 (3⁄11)

Uh… no. Just, no. That just isn’t done.

Racist: Spartacus (5⁄11)

Passerby did a great breakdown of the basics that are wrong with this. Let’s just say it’s a bit historically tone-deaf. And also ethically tone-deaf.

Sexist: goydivision (3⁄11)

Our typical incel take on amputation, of course, only talking about the most extreme case because nothing else is edgelord enough for them.

Mammon worshiper: Krana Rajan, Parvathi and Kumaresan (3⁄10)

Literally sacrificing people to mammon. Only the most peaceful religion in Tamil Nadu, folks!

Psycho: Raye Johnson (4⁄11)

You paid to have your daughter kidnapped? Where’s the part about what your daughter thought of the experience?

Homophobe: Six unnamed Jakarta vigilantes (5⁄11)

At least this one actually ended in an arrest.

Pedo: Lolimon (7⁄10)

I, personally, abstained from voting on this one, because ew.

COVID: Henry Makow PhD (7⁄10)

Also in the running for Drama Queen of the Year, because I have seen the future, and it is way over-the-top reactions to minor inconveniences.

Funny: David J Stewart (6⁄11)

“I'm not some religious nut, I'm a normal person.”

Sure you are.

Worst Artist: Aubrey Huff (6⁄10)

I’ve seen better stick figure drawings.

One-liner: Donald Trump (6⁄11)

“President Trump has done many great things (biggest tax & regulation cuts in history, Space Force, rebuilding our military, fixing the V.A., the Wall), but perhaps the most important of all will be what he is doing now, exposing the massive corruption in our Electoral Process.”

Yeah, he sure showed everybody how weak the checks and balances in the US government are, didn’t he?

Magnetic Crank: Based Frog (6⁄10)

”Opression of most people is actually good.” I wish most quotes had that sort of opening line. It’s so generally awful that I think even most conservatives (because of course based frog is an alt-righter) would recognize how crap it is. And, in any case, the opening line and the name make it clear how to categorize this. It’s a wingnut quote.

… and also has parts that are elitist, ableist, racist, sexist, nationalist. About the only thing it doesn’t do is claim that the present social order is literally handed down by God, and that God doesn’t change and neither should we.

Website: pro-rape.com (8⁄11)

Speaking of opening lines that tell you everything you need to know about the contents, I present the site Pro Rape Dot Com.

Submitter: <@Why?> (7⁄10)

Because you’re so prolific, that’s why.

Troll: @Nomates (6⁄10)

I guess if it helps you sleep at night, you can imagine FSTDT as being run by a bunch of failures. I can’t stop you.

Commenter: @Passerby (6⁄9)

I mean, you wrote the takedown of Spartacus. One of your speeches would earn this award on it own, and you’ve posted a bunch of great comments.

Thanks, and here’s hoping next year will be different.

And, it's that time again? No, not for the ice capades, but to vote for the Fundies of the Year 2020.

To vote, just copy the following list of categories, paste it into your comment field and fill in the blanks:

Religious fundie of the year:
Wingnut of the year:
Moonbat of the year:
Conspiracy theorist of the year:
Ableist of the year:
Racist of the year:
Sexist of the year:
Mammon-worshipper of the year:
Psycho of the year:
Homophobe/Transphobe of the year:
Pedo of the year:

COVIDiot quote of the year:
Funniest quote:
Jack Chick Memorial Award for worst artist:
One-liner of the year:
Magnetic crank award:

Website of the year:
Quote submitter of the year:
Troll of the year:
Commenter of the year:

It’s that time of year again: The 2020 FOTY awards. A special recognition for the most heinous, ridiculous, silly, and memorable quotes and sources of quotes for this year.

Anyone with a doomscrolling addiction has had no shortage of content to feed it, so let’s revisit the contributions of the quacks, racists, and conspiracy theorists that made it truly interesting.

For the first step, we’re going to do a nomination round. To nominate a fundie for an award, leave a comment on this post saying who you want to nominate, and for what award, along with some justification (quote links, in particular). For example, if I wanted to nominate Visual Basic for Applications for the Best Programming Language award, I would write this:

@pyro

[b]Best programming language: Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications[/b]

For introducing tons of people to the world of authoring their own malware, and being perfect enough that no new features need to be added.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Basic_for_Applications

You can second someone else’s recommendation by starring it.

Categories that don’t receive much attention will be culled, since they’re not much fun. I’d like to leave most of the categories up to the community, but we’re probably doing these ones:

Fundie of the year

* Religious #fundie of the year
* Right-wing #wingnut of the year
* Left-wing #moonbat of the year
* #conspiracy theorist of the year
* #ableism of the year
* #racist of the year
* #sexist of the year
* Grifter <#mammon>-worshipper of the year

Quote of the year

* COVIDiot quote of the year
* Anti-BLM quote of the year
* Funniest quote
* Most disturbing quote
* One-liner of the year: two sentences and 280 characters max (you know, the length of a www.twitter.com post), ideally less
* Magnetic crank award: best quote that falls under more than three #tags

Other nominations

* Website of the year
* Quote submitter of the year
* Comment of the year: please click the #12345 number to get a link to just the comment
* Troll of the year: a special award for fundies that show up in the comment section

The votes for fundie of the year are in! Here are some of the folks who made this show impossible:

Religious Fundie: Lady Checkmate (11/17)

She’s no longer a public figure, but she will always live on in our hearts and memories for her for her extreme censorship, troll paranoia and homophobia.

Go forth and conquer, fellow sockpuppets of Peewee.

Wingnut: Rabbis For Hitler (8/17), Monarchieliga (8⁄17)

This one was a draw between these two.

I’ll just let the phrase “Rabbis for Hitler” stand on its own. I have nothing to add to it.

As for the monarchist movement? I’ll just link to the anti-reactionary FAQ if you want to see it debunked. Or, if you prefer, I’ll just declare myself king and order the monarchy to be torn down, like the end of Magic Knight Rayearth. That show managed to be though-provoking and fun at the same time in a way that TV rarely manages.

Moonbat: EmmaRoseheart (7/17)

Alternatively, she could earn the “Hitler Ate Sugar” award for concluding that verisimilitude, being a root characteristic of fascism, is therefore fascist. A classic “there is no world outside of literary criticism” moonbat.

CT: Jacob Wohl (6/17), Deep State Exposed (6⁄17)

Two anti-feminist houses, both alike in insanity, come to another draw. Wohl pulls a bizarre concept where teh femenists somehow hate locked briefcases for their manliness, while Deep State Exposed takes “transvestigation” to it’s illogical conclusion and decides that the First Ladies of the United States were all trans.

Racist: Cuyen (9/17)

But incels are just a support group. Nothing problematic at all about sex tourism, and using your white privilege and money to extort sex. No, sirree, bob, nothing but a support group.

Ableist: Judith Newman (11/17)

You know how most bigots lighten up when it gets between them and their family, and you sometimes make fun of them for being hypocrites? I’d rather Judith Newman was a hypocrite.

Grifter: Sandra Porta (8/17)

wut

Mary Sue: Caamib (7/16)

Nobody takes you seriously, caamib. That’s probably a bad thing, considering the chance that you might shoot up a school or something, but your beliefs are so far outside of the norm that other self-identified incels aren’t sexist enough for you. In spite of others’ doxxing you and digging up newspaper articles about you, there’s a part of me that refuses to believe that you’re for real.

Funniest Quote: DJS (Pillowfucker) (10/17)

I voted for the “seven elements of a crime” one, but the masturbation guru one is pretty funny, too. Davey also comes across as not-for-real, but at least he has the excuse that he was born into Christianity, rather than coming to it on his own like an incel must have.

Nightmare Fuel: Rev. Ronald E. Williams and Patti Williams (9/17)

This is actually a third-party article based on a boarding school that has been in FSTDT’s Top 100 for over a decade. And it thoroughly deserves being reposted. This isn’t just evil, it’s kind of dumb, proving that anyone who does it is so twisted that they not only don’t act charitably towards infants, they don’t even act in their own best interests any more. Seriously, what the hell is wrong with you, Mr. and Mrs. Williams?! And why aren’t you in jail?

Magnetic Crank: Sherry Shriner (8/18), Victor Justice (8⁄18)

One more draw. Sherry Shiner combines “New Age” quackery with Christianity, both, by name. She seems to think that the New Ages are right about everything, while simultaneously thinking they’re in league with the Devil. The post is borderline keyword-stuffing with its talk of DNA strands, androgyny, lizards, and gold.

Victor Justice, at least, seems to at least follow recognizable tropes of wingnuttery, and everything seems to follow from there. He just wants to discredit the environmentalists, and will do anything else necessary to pull it off.

Board: Daily Stormer (9/16)

Andrew Anglin desperately wants to be The Joker. Maybe he can follow Heath Ledger’s example?

Movement: QAnon (8/17)

A warmed-over version of old Satanism hate, combined with political conspiracy theories, and turned into a dumb meme. Truly, it is representative of the pinnacle of the decade.

Submitter: Bastethotep (9/17)

My friend, and fellow moderator. You have been around here longer than I have, and every sign shows no sign of stopping any time soon. You are truly a constant in this ever-changing world. Thanks.

Comment: Skidie(1) (6/17)

Dang, you can be harsh. But what’s better, unlike several commenters and most fundie OPs, you’re also completely fair. I just hope your optimistic view of the future really does come to pass.

Hey Folks!

It's finally time to vote for the Fundies Of The Year 2019!

To vote, just copy the following list of categories, paste it into your comment field and fill in the blanks:

I bolded the names of the quotees, use that to fill in your ballot. In cases where there's two quotes of the same author I marked them with (1) and (2).

I used a great deal of link embedding but fear not, ALL LINKS IN THIS POST GO TO SOME PAGE ON FSTDT. I want to encourage you to take a closer look before deciding.

Now, without further ado, here are the nominees!:

Fundies Of The Year:

* Religious Fundie Of The Year:

Lady Checkmate for her extreme censorship, troll paranoia and homophobia.

biblicalgenderroles for articles like “8 Biblical Differences Between Wives and Slaves”

Abd Al-Aziz Al-Khazraj Al-Ansari for praising the Qu’rans “mercifulness” in telling men not to hit their wives in the face when beating them.

Roosh V for completing his journey from PUA arsehole to fundie arsehole by embracing the “Godpill”

* Wingnut Of The Year:

Rabbi Eliezer Kashtiel and Rabbi Giora Redler. The Rabbis for Hitler.

NRA lobbyist Marion Hammer for fighting for 10-year-old girls' rights to own assault rifles.

Some /pol/ posters for glorifying Nazi officer Oskar Dirlewanger.

SendixBunny for their dehumanising Pinochet apologism.

Monarchieliga, a German Monarchist Movement that wants to drag Germany back to the Middle Ages. Literally. If you're still doubting this, here's an excerpt: "Restoration of freedom of mind, thought and speech via the establishment of a strict censorship office that is part of the Imperial Church"

* Moonbat Of The Year:

EmmaRoseheart, who claims worldbuilding is colonialist and Science Fiction is an innately fascist genre.

Aimee Terese, for breaking through the glass ceiling and becoming FSTDT's first brocialist woman.

AmbiguousSalt, who thinks Social Democracy is a variety of fascism.

Korean Friendship Association USA for their apologism for Kim Il-Sung.

Georgiy, who made an uncomfortable discovery about his "king", Stalin.

amethystuf. "telling people not to smoke or drink alcohol while they’re pregnant is ableist and classist as fuck and it needs to stop".

* Conspiracy Theorist Of The Year:

Annie Jacobsen: Roswell was a plot to create US panic, orchestrated by Stalin and Mengele.

Jacob Wohl's "feminist conspiracy" theory about locking briefcases.

Deep State Exposed®: "Merry Christmas to Melania Trump. The 1st female First Lady In U.S. history. Thank you Jesus!!! #MerryChristmasEve"

* Racist Of The Year:

Incel Cuyen, who wants to get a "password" to Africa to sexually exploit Pigmy women.

Shlomo: Everyone and your dog is a Jew.

This n-mania user, for his blatant ignorance of biology.

* Ableist Of The Year:

Judith Newman, for exploiting her autistic son for her book, which includes her arguing for a forced vasectomy after he turns 18.

I like to also nominate Whitney Ellenby, a similar beast, who forced her son into a Sesame Street show.(I know the quote is technically from 2020, but eh.)

Nobodysfool999 for his sickening view on autistic people.

Various incels on Fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva

Manly-Chicken for their denial of legitimate mental health problems.

Incel PM_ME_STRIPPERS, who "envies" disabled people for their alleged lack of sexual drive.

* Grifter Award (#mammon):

Sandra Porta for her offer to literally shit in the woods for a week for 450€.

Karin Tag of the Seraphim Institut, where you can Become a Crystal Skull Warden or just generally Buddha Your Life some.

Fostac AG, a Swiss woo company that basically openly admits to being a fraud.

Apotheke am Bahnhof for their ”Spagyrical Spray Protection against CHEMTRAIL”, sold at 15.35€ for 50 mL.

Melanie Missing for her 14 Unicorn Essences!

* Mary Sue Of The Year:

Tim Rifat, Master Magician.

Shifting SubliminalsHD, Dog Shifter.

Caamib for proudly portraying himself as a Villain Sue that makes incels look good in comparison.

Quotes Of The Year:

* Funniest Quote:

The quote that granted David J. Stewart(1) the honorary title of "Pillowfucker".

Anonymous, who thinks "Japanese girls have melanin receptors inside their vaginas".

Edo Nyland's bizarre crackpot "etymologies".

David J. Stewart(2) explains the Seven Elements of a Crime, which include lesser known ones such as See Also, References and External Links.

* Nightmare Fuel Award (most disturbing quote):

Caamib: "[Penetrating a 12-year-old girl] must be the most heavenly feeling on Earth. Like hot knife through a butter. Your dick must be in heaven”

Rand Paul: “I’m not arguing vaccines are a bad idea. I think they’re a good thing, but I think the parents should have some input. The state doesn’t own your children. Parents own the children, and it is an issue of freedom.”

Members of the Disciples of Jesus Christ sect, who whipped a nine-year-old boy to death.

This chilling account from the Hephzibah house involving child abusers Rev. Ronald E. Williams and Patti Williams.

Mikemikev aka Michael Coombs: "What's wrong with murdering innocent children if it's for a good cause? And it is a little bit funny."

* Magnetic Crank Award (Formerly Beyond The Trifecta):

Laura Eisenhower, the "Global Alchemist, Researcher and Intuitive Astrologist

Sherry Shriner, who takes a rather complicated way of saying "energy drinks make you gay".

Victor Justice's weird "Little Greta" screed.

Other Nominations:

* Board Of The Year:

Raping Gurlz Is Fun: The name says it all. Run by our special fiends, openly would-be incestous Paedo sickos Nathan "Leucosticte" Larson and Caamib.

The Daily Stormer: As long as it's still there, right?

* Movement Of The Year:

QAnon, which we didn't cover much, but when we did, oh boy...

German Right Wing Party AfD

Ohio Republicans for passing into law that facts don't matter in classrooms and ordering doctors to perform medically impossible procedures.

* Quote Submitter Of The Year:

JeanP

JustAlongForTheRide

Bastethotep

* Comment Of The Year:

Passerby(1)'s takedown of Nathan Larson.

JustAlongForTheRide's dissection of CKR's 100 Truths.

Skidie(1), draining the swamp that is the police force.

Bastethotep's overview over Eukaryont systematics.

Skidie(2)'s rant addressing fschmidt.

Another one of Passerby(2)'s masterpieces.

And that's it! If you have questions send a message to me, SomeApe. Have fun voting!

It’s that time of year again: The 2019 FOTY awards. A special recognition for the most heinous, ridiculous, silly, and memorable quotes and sources of quotes for this year. As always, you need to make an account to vote.

For the first step, we’re going to do a nomination round. To nominate a fundie for an award, leave a comment on this post saying who you want to nominate, and for what award, along with some justification (quote links, in particular). For example, if I wanted to nominate African Cichlids for the Best Fish award, I would write this:

@pyro

[b]Best fish: African Cichlids[/b]

Because these fish are beautiful, and they can be raised in fresh-water tanks. Salt-water tanks are painful to maintain.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cichlid

https://www.fishkeepingworld.com/african-cichlid/

You can second someone else's recommendation by starring it.

Categories that don’t receive much attention will be culled, since they’re not much fun. I’d like to leave most of the categories up to the community, but we’re probably doing these ones:

Fundie of the year

* Religious #fundie of the year
* Right-wing #wingnut of the year
* Left-wing #moonbat of the year
* #conspiracy theorist of the year
* #racist of the year
* #sexist of the year

Quote of the year

* Funniest quote
* Most disturbing quote: formally referred to as “nightmare fuel”
* One-liner of the year: Two sentences and 280 characters max (you know, the length of a www.twitter.com post), ideally less
* Beyond the trifecta: best quote that falls under more than three #tags
* “HUH?!” of the year: For quotes that appear to be fundie based on a few key words, but what the poster actually intends to say is a mystery

Other nominations

* Board of the year: may be fundie, racist, conspiracy theory, etc.
* Movement of the year: “Grassroots” attempts like #WalkAway, It’s Okay to Be White, and Drop the T.
* Quote submitter of the year: Don’t nominate @pyro. I don’t submit nearly enough.
* Comment of the year: Please click the #12345 number to get a link to just the comment.
* Troll of the year: A special award for fundies that show up in the comment section. Don’t nominate @pyro. That kind of thing is only funny the first time.

Looks like that wasn't my last Shy Says post. This is a real-time progress update for some unexpected FSTDT code changes. This one truly warrants discussing, and so does the template system in general. Will hopefully do later.

GOAL: Invoke the template engine on the Page.PreRender and Page.Render events and do just-in-time template interpretation. That way, I can insert template fragments in Response.Output.Write() calls for processing just before page rendering, i.e. the complete opposite of what it usually does: 'compiling' and caching its output and inserting it into a dummy control on PreInit so it will be available for rendering later in the lifecycle.

REVISED GOAL: Make a reusable solution to a one-time problem. Take a collection of tasks that plenty of other software, frameworks, etc. already exist to do, and do those tasks together, combining them in a useful and original way that the other existing stuff doesn't.

DONE: Preliminary adjustments to /Ysml/Ysml.vb, /Ysml/InlineCode.vb.
DONE: Created /Ysml/JitInterpreter.vb skeleton.
FUCK: Don't quite understand the ASP.NET page lifecycle as well as I thought. But does anyone truly completely understand this complex overwrought mess? Doesn't mean I can't do what I wanted, just that I'm going to need to go about it a little differently.
IN CONTINUING PROGRESS: Researching lifecycle wharrgarbl.

FACT: This template engine was not intended for use with WebForms, and one of its primary purposes is actually to re-implement equivalents of WebForms' useful parts and improve upon them for when I don't have WebForms anymore. That obviously means there are already much easier and better ways that exist to accomplish much of what I'm doing with the template engine in the current code. It also means making it work with WebForms is a PITA. However, I won't have WebForms anymore in the 'rewrite,' so I'm sort of pre-implementing and testing it in advance.

DONE: Reworking Lexer.vb.
TEST: The parts not specific to working together with ASP.NET successfully work with FrankenLanguage and compile into JS without an issue.

FACT: The way I am doing this and going about making the new version of FSTDT (i.e. coding almost everything — like, literally, almost everything — yourself right down to a programming language) is not a practical or even remotely sane way to do a web development project. Only do it if you're like me and want to exercise and improve your programming skills and knowledge (and hopefully — if you're really lucky — unwittingly take a few unusual or new approaches to doing something that you'll want to share because other people like it and want to use it too).

ABANDONED: Automagical approach to this problem. Plan B: Make a Response.Output.Write() wrapper that takes template code as an argument, generates the appropriate output, and passes it to Response.Output.Write(). Still, I learnt from this that just getting that much to work with the template engine is more feasible and less work than I originally thought. Even better: I see the solution I devised as potentially very useful for more than just the one-time problem it was intended to fix. Using XHR requests and responses to dynamically generate, parse, and modify templated content, much?? Aha moments like this are why I decided to take the batshit-insane route of making much as I could of the new version of FSTDT from scratch.

UNDONE: Abandoned changes
DONE: ParseToOutput()
DONE: Numerous client-side YsElement constructors
DONE: General round-o-testing
DONE: Targeted testing 1: XHR Request -> Dynamic Templating -> XHR Response

IN PROGRESS: Break to work on the original task of getting SSTDT ready.

This'll probably be my last Shy Says post here. After this, they'll have their own separate blog hosted on the site.

Also, I typed this up more or less stream-of-conscious, and afterward I put aside tags around the parts where I strayed too far from my original topic. I haven't done anything resembling proofreading any of it. But I'm letting it stand as it is for now.

Something I really want to do but don't know how to go about even figuring out where to start is making public all of the statistics that I've collected from what the comment filter evolved into. Funny how The Frog thought he 'won' because he made me waste my time making that filter. In reality, I love statistics, especially corpus statistics, and I obviously love programing, so it should go without saying that I legitimately enjoyed making the filter, so much so that it's morphed into something well beyond its original purpose. It now analyzes comments in other ways besides detecting Le Frog and other trolls and even does the same kind of analysis on quotes too. Unfortunately, it ain't easy to put all of the data and statistics together in a user-friendly form that's easy to read, browse, and manipulate so you guys can explore and have fun with it.

That's not to mention the problem of organizing the code and getting it into a form that can even run on the current host. For the curious, the filter started its life as a well-organized and structurally coherent set of three VB module files and one C# class file. The C# class was later translated into VB when the quote comment page was, since it is closely tied to it. It originally intercepted comments with unusually high, low, or average troll scores and sent a copy of them to my FSTDT email so I could add them to the corpus of training material. It would then discard comments and perform a progressive IP ban if they had a high score, or returns comments back to the quote-comment page code to be posted as normal if they had a low or average score.)

Now it's become a disorganized, ad-hoc set of seven VB modules, three Object Pascal* unit files (compiled in either Delphi or FreePascal depending on the operating system I'm compiling on), one Ada file mostly written by my BFF / modly minion Mikey, and two JavaScript files that I wrote to run in Node.js when I was testing out how well it worked with databases (the verdict on that: comme ci, comme ça). Code in three two of those languages won't even run on the current host. I could probably get the Object Pascal to compile with Delphi.NET after some adjustments. The code only started branching away from things like "written in one language" and " organized structure" after I started analyzing comments for fun and the whole thing was taking on a life of its own. Around that time, it also somehow began to take on a secondary role as personal playground for experimenting with programming languages.

[aside]*I'm using Object Pascal here in the sense that a lot of Pascal-dabblers nowadays use it, i.e. to describe a modern and quasi-standard dialect or "style" of writing Pascal code that can be compiled by at least both Delphi and FreePascal, and possibly other Pascal languages (e.g. GNU Pascal) if you adhere to a stricter subset of "Object Pascal" in this sense. Confusingly, Object Pascal is also originally what Borland called the last couple versions of its Pascal compiler for DOS (whose very last version also apparently had a hilariously bad, half-assed Windows port). Indeed, this old-school Object Pascal is essentially Turbo Pascal with object orientation (or a ridiculous attempt thereat in the case of the Windows port). Aside from their core syntax and lexicon, that Object Pascal and "Object Pascal" in the sense here are dramatically different. Most code more complex than "Hello world" written in the latter is not compatible with the original Object Pascal in any useful sense unless it was intentionally written to be. And that's your programming-language history lesson for today.[/aside]

In addition to being written in as many languages as your average Dutchman can speak, another fairly major hurdle to making this little pet project public is that both the quotes and comments I've fed it to analyze (originally "train") and the interesting parts of the analyses thereof are stored on my private server in an SQLite database. Our current host Does Not Allow Using SQLite, despite their terms of use saying nothing to that effect or even suggestive of it. Apparently SQLite is Too Forbidden to even do that. TIL SQLite is Lord Voldemort.

Only the word and word co-occurrence probability data needed for the filter to run was stored and updated here on FSTDT in a secondary SQL Server database. (It still is, but hasn't been updated in a while and isn't currently being used.) This probability data is basically just how likely (or unlikely) certain words and co-occurrences of words are to occur in 'good' and 'bad' comments. These probabilities are the product of other statistical and meta-statistical analysis stored in the external SQLite database.

Getting the probability data used by the filter requires collecting statistics about a corpus of training data, the larger the corpus the better. Those statistics are stored so they can be subjected to statistical analysis of their own, and then those statistics are subject to further statistictaal analysis. That's two layers of meta-statistics. I originally decided against storing this latter data on the FSTDT server because I vastly overestimated the amount of space that would be required to store statistics about statistics pertaining to statistics of statistics about tens of thousands of words and the frequency they co-occur with other words. (How could you not??) Yo dawg, I heard you liked statistics, so I gave you some statistics collected from your statistics about your statistics...

We call this madness naive Bayesian filtering. To be a "non-naive" Bayesian filter, you must venture even further down this metastatistical rabbit hole.

TL;DR: Bayes Theorem is postmodern statistics.

Anyway, I think the corpus in the training database is a good representative crosscut of the actual FSTDT database. There's tons of cool, fascinating, and just plain weird stuff to gleam from it, like the fact that the fundie index of a post and the number of times the word 'when' appears in it appear to stand in direct correlation. Why?? Anyone wanna fathom a guess? Quotes also have way more hapax legomena (words that occur only once in a corpus) than comments do, but I don't find that nearly as interesting, because there are already a couple of very likely explanations. One, certain fundies absolutely love to invent "words" like abortuarydeathscortagandistism.* Two, a whooole lot of fundies just can't spell. Perhaps they try to hide that fact with word puree like homocommunofascofemininazis?**

[aside]*Protip: English is a mostly Isolating language, so we Anglophones generally prefer to create names for novel concepts by compounding existing words together into phrases instead of creating new words by adding prefixes and suffixes to other words or word roots. For example, to describe the practice of treating medical problems with things that actually exist in reality (as opposed to quackpot woo-woo), we coined the term evidence-based medicine instead of inventing a completely new word like vercomadhealancy (ver-com-ad-heal-anc(e)-cy, lit. "truth~reality | with~using | from~by | heal | having the quality of | the activity or state of"), no matter how much cooler and more phonoaesthetic vercomadhealancy sounds.

If that gloss is incoherent to you, read it backwards: "the activity or state of | having the quality of | heal(ing) | by | using | reality." In English, the order that a word's morphemes follow is generally a mirror image of the order that words usually follow in clauses and sentences. In linguistic parlance, English clauses and morphemes branch in opposite directions: clauses are head-initial (branch to the right of their head), while words head-final (branch to the left of their head). Oh, and only one morpheme of that word, heal, can stand alone, while all three of evidence-based medicine can. And that's your linguistics lesson of the day. And this is exactly why I love corpus statistics: it fuses my three favorite subjects: linguistics, mathematics, and in the modern age, computers.[/aside]

[aside]**True fact: I'm also a terrible speller, but I actually heed the little red underlines that tend to pop up a lot in the things I write.[/aside]

Let's talk about the site and other things!

Post feedback, issues, random comments, death threats, etc. here like in all the other Site/Off-Topic discussion threads.

(I'm typing this up in a rush right before work, so pardon any errors. I'll fix them when I get time. Holla @ me if you notice anything wrong.)

Big thanks to Pharaoh and pyro for getting me off my ass to finish doing the awards even though the original setup I had for partially automating it was lost. And another big, big thanks to pyro for finishing up counting the votes! Also thanks to everyone who nominated and voted!

A couple other things before I get to the winners:

First, I took some liberty with the conspiracy theorist of the year category and chose Alex Jones. He was already neck-and-neck with the quote that was voted to represent the Anonymous Cowards at GLP, and that quote technically isn't a conspiracy, anyway. Plus, the Anonymous Coward hivemind were last year's winners. (And you know deep down in your heart that Alex Jones' quote is funnier.)

Second, one of the winning quotes (#106783) wasn't from 2016, but I technically never said that nominations for the 2016 FSTDT Awards had to be from 2016; it was just taken for granted. ;] Plus it slipped by us unnoticed entirely too long to disqualify it.

Now, without further ado I present to you the winners of the 2016 Fundie Awards!!

Fundies of the Year

Religious fundie of the year:

"Now they claim they can use this hadron collider to bring forth the Devil and all his fallen ones." – kingjameswriter1965

Right-wing fundie of the year:

"Punish Trump haters with your cock: Besides the punitive element of withholding your cock from a Trump hater, we can also look at it from a time-saving perspective. If you are masculine, you simply won’t connect naturally with a feminist who hates Trump." – Roosh V

Left-wing fundie of the year:

"They believe that [...] you are able to send lightning to strike someone. So, can you explain that scientifically" [Response: "It's not true."] "What you're trying to do is collapse the space and make it antagonizing, which we will not allow. This is a progressive space for people to say their opinions." – University of Capetown Students

Conspiracy theorist of the year:

"I’m pro-human so I say, black people, especially, stop killing your kids and get them in church, whatever, take them away from Beyoncé, who wants to eat their brain with the CIA, literally." – Alex Jones

Sexist of the year:

"If the definition of rape is stretched so far to include women who have not given consent, then I am absolutely a serial rapist. So, too, is every man I know." – Vox Day

Racist of the year:

"The jews say Adolf Hitler ordered a 'Final Solution' of extermination of the jews. But Hitler, a humanitarian, a vegetarian, an artist, did no such thing — although, again, he should have." – James Laffrey"

Single-issue wonk of the year:

"This perverted screenshot of Miss Swift to the right only appears in this 3:54 minute video for ONE SECOND TOTAL!!!" – David J Stewart (Taylor Swift obsession)

Vulture of the year:

"Someone may ask 'Why are you using this tragedy to promote your ebook?' The simple answer is because it saves lives! Hate to say I told you so, but had those who were partying read my ebook, they most likely would not have been there in the first place [at the Oakland warehouse fire]" – Mack Major

Batshit-insane person of the year:

"His sword cuts through what NEEDS to be TRANSMUTED by Lord Zadkiel of The Violet Ray which is the Ray OF TRANSMUTATION AND MERCY AND ALCHEMY. Lord Michael comes along FIRST and TRANSFORMS IT (IN EASIER TERMS ,CHOPS IT ALL UP (NOT RIGHT TERM) AND LORD ZADKIEL LAUGHED WHEN HE SAID LORD MICHAEL LEAVES HIM THE "MESS TO CLEAN UP WITH THE SWORD OF VIOLET FLAME HE WIELDS OF TRANSMUTATION.WE ARE IN THE VIOLET RAY AGE RIGHT NOW. THE AQUARIAN ONE. IT'S THE 7TH RAY." – my man Joe Eigo

Quotes of the Year

Funniest

"We will use your leaning tower of pizza to throw off homosexual" – Abu Abdullah Britani

Nightmare fuel

"Recent discourse on child pornography falsely portrays it, like child sex in general, as a disaster for the child. [...] Yet there are many children seen in child pornography whose words, facial expressions, body language, and orgasms show that they thoroughly enjoy the sexual activity, sometimes enjoying it immensely." – BoyWiki

One-liner

"Beware the beast Hildabeast Clinton and her Vagenda of Manocide" – Gulf of Maine Gunsmithing

WTF?!

"Of course, [FSTDT commenters] are all socks of Valri, so the logistics are not too difficult. :-)" – WorldGoneCrazy

Incel

"The pussy of females can be used even 2 days after their death. Their sexual resources get wasted with the current system and people often die because there aren't enough organ donors." – Saint Elliot

Other Categories

• Commenter of the year: Hasan Prishtina
• Board of the year: /r/Incel
• Troll of the year: TimeToTurn
• Conspiracy theory: PizzaGate

...aaand that's all, folks!

I am posting this from my phone, so please pardon any terseness or errors. So was my last post, and it is awful. I swear to God I was not drunk. I just couldn't see more than three lines at a time. I usually don't write things like blog posts in complete sentences until after I have an outline of what I want to say, otherwise I will inevitably forget something. You can see how I forgot being coherent in the last post. (Edit: Back on my laptop. Now you can't see it much anymore, because I edited it. I'm cool with letting funny near-incoherence stand, but there was one part where I couldn't even remember WTF I was trying to say and couldn't make any sense of it.)

But I wanted to officially go say the FQA forums are back with us again and a part of FSTDT again!! They're still an independent part of FSTDT, though. I'm not a mod there — I just can't handle the forums and main site at the same time — so plz put questions about the forums there. Also be sure to behold the spiffy new logo.

I haven't forgotten about the FSTDT Awards. I've just been busy with other things too mostly work. I've also been babysitting my parents' dog and she's the most adorable thing. She won't be fucking still long enough for me to get a decent picture though. >:( Anyway, I'll verify the votes for the last round of the FSTDT Awards and announce winners either tomorrow, or barring that, some time within the next couple days after that.

image

http://forums.fstdt.net/ !!

FQA is merging back with with us and will be the FSTDT forums again! It'll take us a few days, but we're making this happen, When everything is ironed out, I'll be adding a forums link back to the top of this page. Contacting whoever owns the Reddit now and telling them we don't want it anymore, if none of you object to that.

In other news, I've got stack trace error pages back on. Stack traces basically say what code was being executed and what was stored in relevant memory locations at the time an error happened. Useful for figuring out what happened and fixing it if necessary. So if you catch an error, do kindly select everything on the error page and copy it, then paste it in an email and shoot it my way at admin@fstdt.org I will very much appreciate it. For a while, I had the server and FSTDT code set up to set up to automatically email me stack traces, but that got annoying real quick and was sending me stack traces frivolously.

[aside](Yes, I double checked to make sure I didn't compile a debug build of the code. That would flood me with even more frequent and detailed errors, and the debug symbols used to provide this extra information slow down performance pretty heavily. The FSTDT code running on the server now is a Release build with stack traces in enabled, something admittedly unusual but it is useful and worth the slight hit to performance.)[/aside]

I've been letting my modly minions handle approving quotes and moderating comments for the past few days because I've been spending the couple of hours I can allot to FSTDT-time a day working on a change to FSTDT that you can finally actually see and use: a private-messaging system! This whole idea developed out of the need for a convenient way for my modly minions and I to keep in touch, but I figured why not let everybody use it?

Right now it uses a separate SQLite database to store messages, partially to ease the burden on the database server if I use the SQLite database when the PM system goes live, but mostly to simplify testing and a massive performance increase. The finished product will obviously still use the user-accounts table in the main database, but if everything works out, I will keep the SQLite database for messages, because SQLite is extremely fast, can be made secure with a little work, and this is exactly the sort of 'light database' SQLite was intended to handle.

[aside]Edit: Asked permission from the host, was told no even though there is nothing in their terms of service that could interpreted or construed to the effect that using SQLite or something similar was not allowed. Figured this host was more expensive than average because it had better than average service and was liberal in what they let you do with your share of resources on their servers so long as it was legal and within reason. But nah they're just overpriced and evidently have two terms of service: one they let people see, and a 'secret' one whose terms you apparently have to figure out by breaking them and getting your account suspended. Complaining to them ain't worth my time, because if they gave a shit their service wouldn't be shit in the first place. I'm half-tempted to scrap the current PM data code and set it up so it uses a .NET DataTable whose DataSource is a flat XML file. Would use substantially more server resources than SQLite.

And that's all I have to say about that aside from the fact that we will be not be renewing our hosting account here. We will instead be moving FSTDT to a relatively high-end Linux/BSD dedicated server plan elsewhere that lets you roll your own shit, and I will set the server up to run FSTDT with nginx + Mono / ASP.NET core + PostgreSQL like I wanted to begin with. I am much more familiar, experienced, and competent with *nix servers, especially when it comes to web servers and databases. We may even make the move a little before this account expires so it coincides with the Shavy-era FSTDT rewrite. (Amusingly, every admin of the site thus far has rewritten its code to suit them.)[/aside]

Progress on the new PM system
+ Database schema
+ Module (static class or struct in C# speak) for database access that handles all SQL queries and abstracts working with a database away from the main code, but I'll likely be making small changes to the queries that return lists of messages to retrieve one 'page' at a time (one page = 25 messages) so I can paginate message lists.
+ Abstract base classes (MessageList, PagedDataNavigator, Message, and Message's child classes MessageWrite and MessageRead) — for non-programmers this more or less means I did a skeleton or 'outline' to put most of the code and now have to 'fill in the blanks' with that code.
+ Most of the code generating the HTML table for message lists, probably one of if not the hardest part because I decided to write it by hand.

As you can see, I'm about one-quarter to one-third of the way finished. Much of the code is pretty generic, and a lot of it can be reused in other parts of the FSTDT rewrite: PagedDataNavigator was already written for it, and the Message, MessageWrite, MessageRead will likely form the foundation of similar code for quotes and comments.

One more thing: Pepe's probably pretty salty right now. Hasn't been able to get a message through in five days and counting, but I'm not calling 'victory' until it's been a week. Even then, something of his will probably manage to slip through every now and then, but at nothing near the old pace of his textual diarrhea. Hopefully it require enough work to get rid of him for good.

If you are having trouble posting or seeing comments, send an email to admin@fstdt.org with your username, the browser you are using, and if possible, the IP address and ISP you're using when comments don't work. Also include any browser extensions you are using. If you prefer IM, I can be reached on Skype (search spikedee@openmbx.org) or AIM (screenname 'a nerd of sorts'). I will always fix the troll bouncer so you can comment and/or see comments again. Someone's priorities are way mixed up if keeping trolls out is more important to them than letting people use their site.

Also email or post any other errors and issues you encounter in the Site / Off-Topic Thread'!

I'm so sorry for all the downtime and any other problems!! I feel really bad for not giving you any tangible new features for the wait. I made a large number of fairly significant changes to the database, a few of them particularly major changes, like completely redoing the pubadmin table in anticipation for the FSTDT rewrite and also because of how extravagantly disorganized the pubadmin data was stored. (I discuss the details of that later in this post.)

Many changes also had to be made to the behind-the-scenes FSTDT code to accommodate for the database changes, and in one case something had to be all but completely rewritten. (When that happens, I just go ahead and get a head start on the rewrite's transition from C# back to VB — the current C# version is itself a transition from an earlier VB version — it's like some kind of bizarre cycle. I write the new code in VB, since then it will be usable in the actual big rewrite itself. A number of other changes unrelated to those necessary to accommodate the database changes were made, but none of them are major.

But the biggest change to the FSTDT server-side code, though, is that the new troll-detection and auto-cleanup system Piège-à-Pèpe (PàP) I've been talking about is finally in place and has a real name!! Much of PàP is still turned off on the server side for that reason, but everything on the client side is operational. It still does more than enough to be useful and justify going live with it.
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Known issues

oopz

I scrapped the original Banned IPs table and replaced it with one that supports wildcards and does away with the surrogate key. This is not an "issue," but I sure as hell accidentally made one while I was working on this. I intended to export the original banned IP list and import it into the new table. Unfortunately, however, my executing a query with a single misplaced colon deleted the entire list of IPs. Since the old table had not been cleaned out in literally 8 years, I doubt this will be a major issue. Like half or even more of those lost IPs were probably Mabus in the first place. Yes, he really was that fucking crazy.

[aside]Gotta love SQL and how it will execute literally anything without asking the user if they're sure they wanna do that, not even if it is something that just screams "What this does is almost certainly a mistake, and YOU WILL REGRET EVER EXECUTING THIS!!!" If you know SQL, can you guess what the offending statement was and where I put the misplaced semicolon? If you can, I'll give you the prestigious Little Bobby Tables Award and put your name on it at the top of the page for all to marvel and envy.[/aside]

Losing the banned IP list means there's a small chance we'll see a slight increase in the number of trolls over the next few days. When and if they show their ugly troll faces, their IPs will be re-collected again and added back to the database. Piège-à-Pèpe will also help deal with some of it, so any issues with this should be fully resolved over the next few days. Still, if you see 'em, report 'em in the Site / Off-Topic Discussion Thread.
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Proxy Penalization

This is not an issue so much as something worth noting. PàP heavily penalizes known Tor nodes and IPs from a certain major Turkish telecommunications company. If this is a problem for you because you accidentally trigger other penalization from PàP such that it incorrectly considers you a troll, then use another browser and/or a different proxy to access FSTDT. If you're completely stuck, contact me. (See info above.)

Though not done by PàP, a certain other hotbed of seediness that calls itself a web host and proxy server provider has been completely banned. If you're posting from an IP there, you're probably The Frog or someone else up to no good anyway.
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The Croaking Cloaking Croat

PàP could quite possibly have trouble recognizing the Croat because the information and behavior PàP uses is all over the place for him. I don't know if it's deliberate or the result of him using a fuckton of different devices. He also avoids obvious Tor nodes, (likely because they were already banned here), but I know a Tor exit note emitted his verbal diarrhea at least once — and possibly twice or more if an anonymous commenter was him as I suspect.

[aside]On the other hand, Le Frog Français is much easier to spot. We will most likely be seeing much less of him as soon as his first IP is added to the fresh, new, and now-empty banlist. He unwittingly gives PàP a decent amount of information to work with and seems to think otherwise. That means his comments will be tossed out and their originating IP banned before they ever even reach the server code that adds comments. Try harder, bro.[/aside]
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"Summary" of database changes (and relevant FSTDT code changes)

Cleanup

I removed a ton of dead weight from the database (empty tables and a surprisingly large number of columns created for abandoned features). Doing this also required removing references to said dead weight from the FSTDT code itself; despite never actually using it, quite a bit of code (especially related to user accounts) queried the database for it. Trying to do that now that it's no longer there in the database would throw a Kerblewy error.
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New Banned-IPs table

As I mentioned earlier, the old Banned-IPs table has been replaced with a new one that supports wildcards and does away with the needless surrogate key, instead using the IP addresses themselves as the primary key.
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New banned-strings list

The banned-strings list was also scrapped and replaced with something supporting wildcards. Since you're most likely not aware of the banned-strings table, what it does is that if you try to post a comment with a string in the table, the comment is simply ignored and not posted, and the quote page the comment was posted from acts like nothing happened. (It does not ban or monitor people who try to post comments with the banned strings; it just discards comments that contain them.) Nearly all of the banned strings are for automatically discarding obvious spam that resembles nothing a real user would ever actually post. Believe it or not, this pathetically simplistic technique actually catches almost all of the spam that somehow makes it past the "Check here" button.

Note that the names of both Le Frog Français and the Literal Motherfucker are in the banned strings list now, since saying them is like speaking Lord Voldemort's name. A few of other tics and words related to them are also banned. These are mostly Frogface's.
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Stored procedures

In addition to the stored procedures I wrote working on the pubadmin table, I also wrote stored procedures to handle all of the other specific database-related tasks that the FSTDT code has to do, such as getting the comments for a quote and paginating them, logging in, submitting a quote, etc. (Aside from the occasionally mentioned exception, none of it is actually used in the FSTDT code right now, and the current codebase won't be updated to do so. This move was in preparation for the new upcoming rewrite I keep talking about. It will interact with the database exclusively using stored procedure insofar as possible. Unless you have good reason not to, I am ridiculously passionate about storing procedures in databases rather than using inline queries that reference the structure of the database, but getting into that will launch me way beyond the point.
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Pubadmin database overhaul

I redesigned the entire pubadmin database table. Note that I didn't say I restructured the table, as that would imply I just shuffled things around a bit, maybe tided up a few loose ends, or made a lot of changes but very minor ones, etc. — no, I redesigned the pubadmin table. Doing this is where the protracted downtime came from and why the site had to be brought down.

I completely rethought not only how to store pubadmin data but also how to approach the task of handling the pubadmin system itself, both in database design and the site's code.

This post and "summary" is already long enough, so I won't go into detail, but I will say that this was probably the most needed and overdue change I made: the old pubadmin table was there and indeed stored pubadmin data, but pubadmin data was also strewn across three other unrelated tables besides the correct one. That data had to be moved in the process of redoing the pubadmin table and the columns that contained it deleted.

For those who don't know about how awful making structural changes to a large database is, this task necessitated creating a temporary table, copying the to-be-changed table's data into the temporary table, dropping (deleting) the to-be-changed table, creating a new table like it with the desired changes, copying the data from the temporary table to the new table, and finally dropping the temporary table. This obviously isn't technically changing the table but making a whole new one.

When your database is stored on a shared database server with 100 or so other databases, and the table you want to 'change' has over 100,000 rows and 15-20 columns, and its indexes have not be defragmented in a while, you're gonna be waiting a couple hours, and that's with the whole process being the only transactions taking place on the database and with you the only user accessing it. Having other users accessing the database would cause the transactions to be even slower to the point of timing out because they took too long.

And that is why we had to go down for maintenance and why we were down for so long.

[aside]If you can't change a table's structure, then it would seem a new table should be able to be created in "just" four steps (rename the original table, create the new table, transfer the data to the new table, and drop the renamed original table). You can do this when it doesn't violate any foreign-key constraints that create relations between data and connect their tables. Ignoring these constraints can compromise the referential integrity of your database and cause its relations to fall into such a state of disarray that they may as well not exist.[/aside]
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Rewriting the pubadmin code-behind file

Since I completely redid the pubadmin table, I had to gut almost all of the FSTDT pubadmin code-behind file because it was coded to read and write data using the old table. I bet every query in the gutted code would have failed when attempted on the new pubadmin table. (Not having that happen is one of the major advantages of using stored procedures that tell the database what you want rather than telling it how to do it.)

The overwhelming majority of the gutted code was just that: literally gutted, i.e. removed from the codebase altogether. The remainder was kept in the code, but it was still gutted in the sense that it was commented out so it wouldn't be used. The parts I commented out and kept were ones that can be easily translated to VB and used in the FSTDT rewrite. By saving that code, I'll have a concrete launchpad from which to begin the process of writing the rewrite's pubadmin code.

[aside]Already having something tangible like that to work with from the get-go makes starting a project from scratch a lot easier for me, even though this is mostly just a psychological thing, and I often wind up not even using or replacing those parts. Am I weird for this?[/aside]

So quotes could be approved, the code-behind file for the PublicAdmin.aspx file had to be almost completely rewritten aside from the repeater controls that show similar quotes to check for dupes. They still worked because they were using stored procedures when I had my first glance at the database back in September of last year. The rest of the rewritten code also uses stored procedures and saved views, unlike the original code, which used a combination of inline SQL and a separate data access class that also used inline SQL itself.

PublicAdmin.aspx also had to be updated to remove controls that interacted with the not-reimplemented functionality, like issues and public admin being able to actually be used by the public again. (These issues will be fixed in the FSTDT rewrite at the latest.) Mods will probably immediately notice these changes on the page.

Mods, everything in the above paragraphs probably needs to be combed through for bugs because it was literally written in half a day. Report any issues you find, SVP.
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Anyway, bear with me while I get any kinks worked out, and please let me know if you notice any. Post them in the Site / Off-Topic Thread, or if you think they can be exploited or pose a potential security issue, send a message to the email above instead or shoot me an IM.

Again, sorry for all the down time! I'll try not to do anything like this again.

(Note: This thread's locked now 'cause the party has levelled up now!)

Let's talk about the site and other things!

Post feedback, issues, random comments, death threats, etc. here like in the other Site/Off-Topic discussion threads.

I feel like I've been a bad admin lately, still getting, being too busy with work-related stuff, but as far as that goes, things should be calming down since the beginning of the semester rush is over. I'm sorry for that.

Still, I want your honest opinions: How am I doing as admin? What am I doing right? More importantly, what am I doing wrong? Do you have any suggestions for how I can improve it? Do you have any other suggestions?

Also, I have a couple of new nominations for mods in mind. I won't say whom yet, but I want this to be a democratic process, i.e. for most of you guys to approve of my decisions before I make them. I also haven't contacted the nominees yet, but I will be doing that one day next week, and if they accept, I'll put up another post seeing if you're all cool with it.

Thanks guys for hanging in with me while I get the hang of running this crazy train! Being the conductor was the last thing on my mind when I made my first comment way back in 2008. It still kind of feels unreal in a way.

2/1/2017: Voting's over! I'll verify the count sometime during the next couple of days, and the winners of the prestigious FSTDT Awards will be announced!

—

Voting this round is open till the end of the month. The usual rules apply, except this time we're voting fundie-against-fundie. That means the list of categories is [em]much[/em] shorter this time around ([b]choose from the list of nominees here[/b]):

• Religious Fundie of the Year
• Right-wing Fundie of the Year
• Left-wing Fundie of the Year
• Conspiracy Theorist of the Year
• Sexist of the Year
• Racist of the Year
• Single-issue Wonk of the Year
• Vulture of the Year
• Batshit-insane Person of the Year

When you cast your vote, use quote numbers instead of fundie names: that will make things much easier for me!

Happy voting!