A quickie guide to #gimp irc jargon

With apologies to the FurryMUCK Jargon Glossary. Thanks to all #gimp irc folks who offered suggestions and comments.

• 31337 A hacker spelling of "eleet", which is in turn a variant of "elite". Used semi-ironically, as in "wow, lots of blinking animated gifs on your page, how 31337!" On the other hand, #gimp really is one of the more elite Internet forums in terms of the brainpower present and level of discussion -- quite remarkable given that it's completely open and unmoderated.
• albert Albert Cahalan, one of the hall of shame.
• battle, between Adrian and tc. For some reason, these two often get into battles. I'm not sure why.
• Bizarro Linux people lewing lamented that Linux people (who are generally considered clueful, patient, and helpful) seemed to be replaced by their Bizarro counterparts recently. This is probably mostly a consequence of the ever-increasing publicity and popularity surrounding Linux.
• blum, as in blum blum frub ulaanbaatar. See Raster's blum.c. And in case you're wondering, ulaanbaatar is the capital of Mongolia.
• Burrito One of the #gimp's two beloved bots. Burrito is based on the same code as Xachbot, and is run by yosh. One of Burrito's most important extensions is its ability to eek. It also has a database of 2-letter country codes.
• cbf cherry blossoms fall. jwz put it best: cherry blossoms fall / is a sneaky haiku trick / cherry blossoms fall. Another classic by jwz: haiku's inventor / must have had seven fingers / on his middle hand.
• crack (as in smoking crack) Used in the same context as "crazy" in colloquial speech. "raph thinks he can replace X? He must be smoking crack." Also crackhead (n), one who smokes crack.
• curried trout Quartic tends to slap people with them. When he was in Washington with a group of Gnome people, he had an excellent curried tuna fillet. And he used to slap people with trouts. So he thought curried trouts would be fitting.
• duck As in "I have a duck." yosh said this, and somehow it stuck.
• eek An expression of shock. Even better is to make Burrito eek. He does it so nicely. Derived from "Eeek, a German", the standard greeting whenever jtl logs on.
• eikel Dutch for "dickhead." According to yosh, it can be used affectionately too. Also Mos Eikel, the favorite hangout of #gimp'ers on Tatooine.
• even correction, when used at the end of a line. For example, after typing "helo", one might type "hello, even". See also s/.
• flowers (n) Something that tigert is obsessed with drawing. He is often harassed because of it.
• focus A command from eager Gimp people to the developers - to start actually working and stop chatting. Actually, this comes from the KDE mission statement.
• fscking (adj) polite euphemism for "fucking", nonsexual meanings only. This is Unix usage, but popular on #gimp. The word comes from "fsck", the Unix file system check utility. You generally only use this utility to recover damaged hard drives, i.e. when things are totally fscked up.
• gegl Acronym for "genetically engineered goat large". Coined by _vicious_. You can hit people with it too.
• GNUzi An extremist GNU project enthusiast, believes that all software not released under the GPL (Gnu Public License) is evil.
• hadjaha Swedish slang for a lewd act with a reindeer. An unfounded rumor has it that it's also a nonsense word that andersca's professor said after making an error.
• hall of shame A group of Gimp users who have somehow managed to piss off the Gimp developers. If you want to join, the best way is to suggest lots of complex, ambitious, and dubiously useful features, without any corresponding offer to implement them.
• irc client Everyone's least favorite Gtk project. For whatever reason, at one time there were seven active projects to develop a Gtk irc client. Used to deride poor judgement in choosing projects or lack of knowledge about what's going on. Often used self-deprecatingly, as in "I know, I'll write an irc client."
• jaded A lot of the #gimp irc people claim to be jaded (or even jaded bastards). Used as a catch-all adjective for angry, sick and tired of something, somewhat biased, letting off steam, etc. Popularized by Adrian.
• jaded bastard (n) one who is really jaded.
• jtml (n) A tool used to generate the www.gimp.org webpage. The pages are written as jtml templates, then rendered to HTML using an elisp script. It's evil but it works. Only jtl and Adrian understand it.
• juhana Juhana Kouhia. One of the hall of shame.
• jwz is dead No, jwz is very much alive and kicking. The point is to show how easy it is to get people to believe rumors. This got posted to /. and created all kinds of ruckus.
• kde Gimp and Gnome's sworn arch-enemy, even more so than Microsoft. Actually, a lot of us think the project is pretty cool, but are unhappy about the license for the Qt toolkit. Admitting that you're a kde user is a good way to get yourself hazed, larted, or otherwise harassed.
• kill Used to resemble the irc kill command, e.g. displayed as "/kill luser" (i.e. how a kill command would be typed). Used to warn lusers of obnoxious behavior.
• lart (n) substantial wooden stick, acronym for "luser attitude readjustment tool". (v) To hit someone over the head with a lart. The most severe chastisement, after thwap and slap. Also see the lart project.
• movies. Once, when we were all feeling silly, we came up with a list of movie titles sporting a Gimp theme.
• nt admin used to greet maru whenever he joins #gimp, because he administers a Windows NT cluster that used to be linux.
• palindromes. Occasionally someone will post as a palindrome. For example, zeno might /emote "onez *". This gets displayed as "* zeno onez *" on many irc clients.
• -poo An affectionate form of address, generally used to greet well-known denizens of the channel, as in "miggiepoo!" See also -wuggums.
• plush plush doll. Xach often greets people by cuddling their plush counterparts. E.g. "Xach cuddles the cute tc plush doll". tc would likely respond "tc makes soft noises".
• poke (v) to try to gain someone's attention. A lot of the time people have an irc window open, but don't actively read every message. For some reason, the messages "yosh pokes Snorfle" seems to catch the eye.
• pr0n porn, specifically porn images. The main reason to have disk space and internet bandwidth.
• rape (v) a particularly mild form of mistreatment. It's particularly common for the resident bots to rape the regulars. However, rape is now officially not allowed.
• rasterspeak (n) a form of english distorted by trying to type about twice as fast as would normally be considered wise. There was a lot of speculation that the root cause of rasterspeak was a dvorak keyboard. We finally asked, and raster responded that he had a "querty" keyboard.
• re A greeting for someone who has returned. Short for "rehi". Borrowed from irc usage.
• s/ correction (borrowed from early Unix editor syntax). Used to correct typos or elaborate on wording. After typing "helo", one might type "s/helo/hello/". See also even. Occasionally, you see more advanced regular expression syntax, sometimes using Perl syntax.
• slap A moderate chastisement, see also thwap and lart.
• slashdork slashdot.org. Just about everybody on #gimp reads /. regularly, but a favorite sport is to put /. down, mostly for the fact that most of its readership are less clueful than the average #gimp developer.
• sloth A mythical system that has wondrous features. I think this is an ironic reference to software bloat. Also refers to the "church of sloth, scientist", coined by Adrian. Adrian at one time convinced half a dozen friends to have a "sloth, scientist Day" where they would begin every sentence with "sloth" and end it with "scientist."
• songs. There are a few songs floating around, collaboratively written. Most everyone's favorite is the quartic song. There's also a miguel song.
• summon (v) To cause someone to magically appear. Often used whenever a tricky problem comes up that for which one person has the needed expertise. For example, whenever tricky X questions come up, oftentimes /me summons owen to #gimp.
• steve Steve Lumos. One of the hall of shame.
• theyallsuck A description of the state of most application categories, notably irc clients, window managers, browsers, and mailers. Joel Becker has registered theyallsuck.org for running comparative reviews.
• thwap (v) The mildest form of chastisement. If yosh makes a bad pun, quartic would /me thwaps yosh. See also slap, lart.
• weber Martin Weber. Inducted into the hall of shame for sending lots of false bug reports, creating his own private versions of a bunch of plugins, and starting projects (autotrace) requesting other people to finish because he has no more time.
• wilber Wilber is the Gimp's mascot.
• world domination The ultimate goal of the Gimp project. Borrowed from "Linux world domination", a slogan from Linux. Obviously, if Linux is going to achieve this goal, it needs more cool apps like the Gimp.
• -wuggums a less common variant of -poo.
• XachBot The #gimp's favorite bot. Xachbot's most useful function is the geturl/addurl link database. Xachbot also does rpn math, and keeps track of when users were last seen on the irc channel. He has more personality than some of #gimp's denizens. Playing with him is a favorite game.

More about XachBot

One thing that fascinates me about Xachbot is how useful the link database is. I asked Xach to put up a webpage with all of XachBot's links, and I find myself using it almost not at all. On the other hand, people use XachBot all the time.

Xachbot's link database is cooperatively maintained - there isn't a single person (or group) who's responsible. Yet, unlike most such cooperatively maintained Internet resources, XachBot's database is kept fresh and accurate.

Here's my theory about why it works so well - because most interactions with XachBot are public, they carry deeper meaning than simple machine queries. The person making the query publicly signals interest in the keyword. If the bot has a good answer, then it passes silently. On the other hand, if the bot is not helpful, the naturally helpful nature of people kicks in, and they give the answer. If it's something that really should have been in the database, it usually gets added.

Conversely, adding a url to XachBot is a good way to make a point, to emphasize "hey, this URL is potentially interesting or useful to lots of people, not just this one time."

The maintainers of these bots also keep a complete log of all that is said and done on #gimp, a very useful resource for historians, trivia buffs, and know-it-alls.