meept

The Glorious MEEPT! was a slashdot account that posted occasionally funny trolls in response to articles. A lot of people felt he was -1 material, but the few MEEPT! posts I saw were quite funny.

I always thought of the Road Runner when I saw a MEEPT! post.

Actually spelled MEEPT!!; he (she? it?) would begin and end each Slashdot post with it. It was also his name. Another nick was "The Glorious Meept", with or without the exclamation points. He had at least three or four user accounts at /., all variations on "meept" and "glorious meept", and I still have a link to his last one (but user.pl is no more, I think), since I wanted to see what havoc he'd bring to the joint.

The reason for the havoc, and the frequent cancellation of his account, was that MEEPT!! (I'd always think of a talking, gonzo Road Runner when he appeared) would, at times, post flamebait. Sometimes it was hilarious flamebait, sometimes it was just a mischievous, unfunny, offtopic blast, with an invisible Come bring matches and a gallon of petrol! sign attached. It got the job done either way; someone would take the bait, leading to giant threads that were miles away from the article's topic. While all the flaming raged in the threads, MEEPT!! would be long gone, his mission accomplished. The threads would then be deleted, along with his toplevel post.

Other posts were even more hilarious at times, poking fun at the herd mentality that can run rampant in the Slashdot Nation. Even if my own ox was gored, I had to laugh. Then there was his content-free "poetry" phase, thankfully brief, but often funny as well.

There was also a BEEPO!! (I think), who may or may not have been MEEPT!! - he described himself, once or twice, as a friend of MEEPT!! There was, once, a crack of the /. server, and/or of Slash, allowing MEEPT!!/BEEPO!! to do weird things with his already-existing posts.

It would be nice if Rob could dig out a MEEPT!! Greatest Hits collection, but I suspect the posts, like MEEPT!! himself, have gone off to the Great Bit Bucket in the Sky. Or something.

I remember MEEPT from the period before user accounts came into existence. It seemed that his comments were of a slightly different nature back then. At one point (still before the advent of accounts) there was a message about how MEEPT had been executed at dawn, and the author of the message claimed to have overtaken MEEPT's account. I seem to remember things going downhill after that. Who knows? maybe it really happened that way.

At any rate, after user accounts came along, I posted as AC for a while, then left /. for a time. I finally got an account, but still didn't read /. for about a year. I missed any further development of MEEPT (in addition to all the stuff about Natalie Portman, hot grits, Signal 11, and so on).