Skitzocow SpectateSwamp / StoneDan

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A little background: The Daily WTF is a website dedicated to "curious perversions in information technology", which means it runs articles on horribly failed projects and has a... rather unusual forum.

Meet SpectateSwamp. He created a "Desktop Search for the Masses" (SpectateSwamp Desktop Search, or SSDS) which he really, really, really, really wants you to take a look at. His favourite method of demonstrating this involves "screen reshoots", which means he records a video (with his camcorder), plays the video back on his PC, then records the playback so he can focus on the things that are important. See, he doesn't believe in editing videos, so if he wants to chop irrelevant parts off of a video, the screen reshoot is the only way to go. The desktop search in question functions perfectly, so long as you put a description of every single file on your PC into a single text file. If he thinks you're being remotely positive about it, he'll call you a "Swampie" and tell you to go out and convert the masses. If you aren't being sufficiently positive, he'll order you to come over to his "SwampShack" so he can... educate you.

Among other things, he wants to demonstrate SSDS' superiority with a "Search Engine Showdown". Mostly, he wants to go fisticuffs with Old Man Google. This is not a figure of speech. He believes there is a guy called Mr. Google who runs the company. The same goes for "Old Man Kopernik" and others.

Over the course of his "screen reshoots", he discovered something he calls "faster than sight" objects, which he decided are of alien origin - because they're only visible in horribly low-quality screen reshoots. He found more alien objects than that, though! I'll just... let him speak for himself about the famous Tobacco Leaf Flyer. (Of course dude's on YouTube.)

Oh, he's also a shaman. (Picture below the cut because of rape eyes. )
wdQdNef.jpg

And in case you thought he's kooky but harmless, he has previously run for office and would like your advice on dealing with the Secretive Hidden InterNet Censors who ratted him out on his illegal hunting activities (which he himself recorded and put on YouTube).

I've barely scratched the surface, here; there are seven years' worth of posts on the TDTWF forums to go through, plus countless other tech forums, a YouTube account, a personal website and mainstream media descriptions of his attempts to run for political office. He had a website dedicated to his antics for a while, which was never even remotely complete but is still a good introduction to Swampology. It died a while ago, but there's a preserved copy here. There's an ED article, too, but it's shitty and he edited it a few times, so it's impossible to decipher.
 
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I was at TDWTF at the time. This guy was bloody hilarious and strangely intriguing at the same time. In retrospect, I think he was fun to follow because he's kind of like Ulillillia - with just about 0.15% of Uli's programming skills and 0.029% of Uli's social skills. :D

I even made an appropriately epic music video for desktop search fans and tried to show him how to make his videos meet the general standards of YouTube conspiracy videos, because he was failing at it. I think I also wrote some stuff that ended up in The Stupidest Man on Earth website.
 
"Desktop Search"? Does that name even makes sense? I hope he knows that you can google stuff on smartphones and laptops.
 
Dork Of Ages said:
"Desktop Search"? Does that name even makes sense? I hope he knows that you can google stuff on smartphones and laptops.
You have to remember, this was a while ago. "Desktop search" just means the smart local document search system that is pretty much built in all operating systems these days, both desktop or mobile. It was a little bit hyped at the time because WinXP didn't come with anything of like, so there were a few competing applications for that.

And it was also a bit funny because the guy's "desktop search" program didn't actually let you search your documents. They had to be manually added to the program's index, and it could only handle plain text files anyway.
 
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WWWWolf said:
Dork Of Ages said:
"Desktop Search"? Does that name even makes sense? I hope he knows that you can google stuff on smartphones and laptops.
You have to remember, this was a while ago. "Desktop search" just means the smart local document search system that is pretty much built in all operating systems these days, both desktop or mobile. It was a little bit hyped at the time because WinXP didn't come with anything of like, so there were a few competing applications for that.

And it was also a bit funny because the guy's "desktop search" program didn't actually let you search your documents. They had to be manually added to the program's index, and it could only handle plain text files anyway.

Oh, I get it now. I thought he meant an Internet browser search like Google.
 
Dork Of Ages said:
Oh, I get it now. I thought he meant an Internet browser search like Google.
I'm not really sure he knew what he meant. I should probably mention that he expanded this "search" program with functionality like choppily playing videos backwards in slow motion, randomly showing bits of text in a very large font and spotting faster-than-sight aliens. But yeah. Initially, SDSS was meant to bring the power of computing to the masses by searching through files. There was something about homeless people putting SSDS on CDs and taking it to the library with them and... something something Swamp Shack.

WWWWolf said:
I was at TDWTF at the time. This guy was bloody hilarious and strangely intriguing at the same time. In retrospect, I think he was fun to follow because he's kind of like Ulillillia - with just about 0.15% of Uli's programming skills and 0.029% of Uli's social skills. :D

Wow, what are the odds? :D

WWWWolf said:
I even made an appropriately epic music video for desktop search fans and tried to show him how to make his videos meet the general standards of YouTube conspiracy videos, because he was failing at it. I think I also wrote some stuff that ended up in The Stupidest Man on Earth website.

You're basically my hero right now. :heart-full: (no homo)
 
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