the curvature of the Earth is overwhelmed by local noise
Dear null,
You were recently selected as a candidate for publication in the prestigious Top 100 Leaders of 2012 Magazine. It is my distinct pleasure to inform you that your candidacy has been reviewed and approved by a special committee and that your biography may soon be featured in this extraordinary, professional magazine.
…
Amusing Spam o’ the Day. :)
So the other week I got this on one of my Dale Innis email addresses:
Hey Dale,
I found your site while I was looking for sites that have talked about World of Warcraft and wanted to reach out to see if you were interested in using a graphic my team and I designed, which highlights how online gaming stacks up against online dating, in a classic 8-bit video game aesthetic.
Let me know if you’re interested, would love to connect. Thanks!
–
Tony Shin
@ohtinytony
The phrasing strongly suggested that the writer was from a subculture with which I am not generally very comfortable (“reach out”, “love to connect”: ewwww, stranger-danger!), and I pretty much ignored it (but left it in my inbox with the several hundred things other swirling around in there), and later on I got an actual followup:
Hey Dale,
Wanted to follow up and reach out about the email I sent last week about the graphic on gaming and dating.
Hope things are going well.
Thanks!
–
Tony Shin
@ohtinytony
He’s still groping at me, but this seemed personal enough that I actually replied:
Um, hi! I actually have no idea what you were talking about. :)
What is this graphic, and how/why would I want to use it?
and he rereplied pretty quickly:
Hi Dale,
I was searching for people who have talked about gaming and those who’ve taken any interest in it, then came across your site. So I thought you and your audience might find the graphic interesting.
The infographic I was talking about lives here: http://www.onlineuniversity.net/gamers-get-girls/
If you like it, feel free to link to it or use it in a post. Would love any feedback you or your readers have.
Thanks.
Tony Shin
I didn’t reply again, ’cause while visually cute I found the image kind of silly and pointless (not sure just what point it’s trying to make, various of the facts seem awfully implausible but I don’t care enough to trace down the sources, etc). And I figured that was probably the end of that.
Then, today, at one of David Chess’ email addresses, I find:
Hi David,
I came across your site while searching for resources related to ‘NORML’ and saw that you had referenced their site. That said, I wanted to reach out to see if you’d like to view a graphic that my team and I created which illustrates the benefits of marijuana legalization. Would you be interested in taking a look?
I’d love to get your readers’ feedback as well as yours!
Thanks,
Jen R.
This seems markedly similar! Also from the email headers the first Tony mail and the Jen mail are both coming via a mass-mailing service (Tony’s via “SMTP.com” and Jen’s via “mailingcomplex.com”), forged to appear to be from gmail.com, whereas Tony’s followup seems to have come via Integra Telecom (not an obvious mass-mailer, but similarly forged), and his reply to my reply seems to have actually come from gmail.
I should just write Tony and Jen and ask what’s going on of course :) but it is fun to speculate. Is it a college visual design course whose professor encourages the students to do this kind of thing? Is it a very clever bit of meta-spam designed to be unusual enough that gullible people (like me!) will put up weblog posts like this that actually include links to at least one of the Infographics in question, and thereby boost their Google Search Rankings (Brazil Triplets Nude!), or something like that?
Apparently there is a real Tony Shin who is perhaps actually at-ohtinytony on Twitter, although that person calls itself “Tonytones”. The account does “tweet” about various of this same kind of enormous Infographic, though, so it’s plausible.
Relatedly, here is a sort of article-thing by or about or something Tony Shin and various similar Infographics (warning: all sorts of rather cheesy ads and counters and little widgets from social media sites you’ve never heard of and general annoyances), which refers to him as “a social media ninja and creative design samurai”. Maybe these emails are part of some ninja-samurai initiation ritual, in which the student must stand on one leg atop a flagpole, blindfolded, until his Infographic gets a Klout score of at least 47.3 or something.
And here is a much less annoying site which has had several posts about the Mystery of the Infographics, including “Tony Shin taken to task“, which links to an Ohio State University professor posting about one of tiny Tony’s Infographics, and opining quite accurately I think about the various dangers of this kind of shiny information packaging. All very much worth a read.
Haven’t found anything on Jen yet, though. I think I will write to her… :)
Today’s “Spam email in its entirety” is from one Miss Sylvia Martins, user cloudstrife3277 at a once-popular internet provider. Its entire content is:
Subject: HAPPY NEW YEAR…
You might be surprised to read this message from me
Not really all that surprised, Miss Sylvia, but thanks for your concern. And Happy New Year to you!
Took the day off today, just ’cause I felt like I needed a rest. And apparently one of the things I needed a rest from was writing! Just about 1500 words eked out (“eked out”) today, and we’re at:
End of Day Seven: 11,504
which may or may not be more or less just barely On Track.
I have some ideas about what might be going on in the story and how it might end, but they are tentative so far. (Am I supposed to reveal that?)
And in related news, a spammer claiming to be the U.S. Commerce Association Board of Review is happy to inform us that “Kims Keys & Locksmith has been selected for the 2011 Best of Winter Haven Award in the Personal Service Agents & Brokers category”. Woo woo!
And there is even a classy simulated award object:
Don’t you just almost want to believe that that might be something other than a generic picture of a shiny thing with some flat digital words carelessly Photoshopped over it?
I hope someone’s told Kim the good news, also…
So I don’t understand this kind of spam:
Hello,
My name is Franco Cavalier am sending you this email regarding in Purchasing Product from your company,I will like to know if you can ship directly to France , I also want you to know my mode of payment for this order is via CC . Get back to me if you can ship to that destination and also if you accept the payment type I indicated
Kindly return this email with your price list of your products..
Franco.
201, rue de Grenelle
FR – 75357 PARIS
FRANCE
Slightly even more puzzling because it was sent to my work address (in ibm dot com), and it was sent from an email address of “dummy” at somewhere in France (with a reply-to at a gmail dot com address).
What value does anyone get by spamming out a request for lists of goods that can be paid for by credit card and shipped to France?
I suppose he might just be gathering email addresses in general, to spam or to sell? But surely if you want to test to see if a vast number of email addresses are valid, you’d want to maximize the chance that the person will write back, and in that case asking for lists of products that can be bought via credit card and shipped to France doesn’t do that.
They could just be validating a big list of email addresses by sending any old junk to them and seeing what bounces, but (1) email agents don’t send “no such user” replies anymore, as I recall, for exactly this reason, and (2) this is an awfully weird “any old junk”. I’d hate to think that some spammer address-collector had this nice a sense of the absurd.
Ah, mysteries, mysteries…
I just got The Physics Book from Amazon (I think I’d pre-ordered it or something), and it’s lovely. Bigger and fancier than I’d expected, a nice weighty hardcover with lots of short entries about interesting physics things, and great pictures.
You should get it, too! And not just because the author’s office is more or less across the hall from mine or anything. :)
I’ve just started reading it (the introduction and then a few completely random pages), but I think I will enjoy it greatly; it’s nice and bite-sized (a box of intellectual chocolates!), which fits my current (tiny) attention span nicely.
I’m also enjoying The Quantum Thief quite a bit, in the digital edition, despite having sort of forgotten about it for long enough that starting out again I didn’t quite remember just who everyone was, or what had happened to whom previously. But it’s the kind of book in which you’re enjoying trying to figure out what’s going on anyway, so that hasn’t been a big problem. And the tech and the world and the culture(s) and all are interesting while one is trying to work it all out.
It occurs to me that I could just sort of leave this entry, with the date at the top, open in WordPress all day, and hit Publish in the evening or whenever I felt like I wasn’t going to write anything elsemore to speak of.
Maybe I’ll do that. Although I might forget. And it’s also nice to Publish shortly after writing, and get that sense of Accomplishment.
So for NaNoWriMo this year, assuming I convince myself that I have time, I’m thinking about a nonlinear hyperlinked novel. Say, 100 interlinked pages at 500 words per page? Or 500 100-word pages, or anything on that curve. Something like The Forked Stick, only I would “finish” it in a month, and not leave it hanging forever like I did with that. :)
Water Street runs close by the river, into the Dun Quarter, which is quiet but far from silent in this moony night, breathing with the sharp stillness of the river and the easy aches of poverty and long practice.
To one side is the pier, and across the street is an old building where a sign shows a cup and a hen. Far down at the other end of the street, the Long Temple broods in a feverish silent sleep.
(I am still quite proud of the Tic Tac Toe game embedded in The Forked Stick. Wow, that was some time ago!)
Didn’t you mean to say you assassinate your enemies
Didn’t you mean to say you kill journalists and artists
Didn’t you mean to say you give orders for the murder
Didn’t you mean to say you sell drugs to make your fortune
– Holly Near, “Edge”
I don’t actually recall how Edge got onto the iPad here, but I’m enjoying it very much. Energy, novelty.
Also enjoying The Dresden Dolls:
and you can tell
from the smoke at the stake
that the current state is critical
well it is the little things, for instance:
in the time it takes to break it she can make up ten excuses:
please excuse her for the day, its just the way the medication makes her…
– girl anachronism
What else should one mention in one’s weblog? I’m sure there are other things that will occur to me later in the day. But at the moment the desire to see it published and In The Can seems sort of strongish. So I will probably push Publish sometime in the next minute or so, assuming the universe and its laws continue more or less unchanged (something that it’s not clear how justified we are in assuming, or whether it matters whether we are).
Yep, here we go!
See you on the other side! :)
Marilyn Langston writes:
Dear David Chess,
I just got done reading your “Wednesday, February 16, 2011″ and I found it really informative! Do you do advertising? I’m marketing out a few sites and can pay you $50 via PayPal to add a text link into one of your older posts. The link would go to an education site and I’d make sure the site relates to your post’s content.
Thanks and let me know if we can work something out!
Marilyn Langston
I can certainly understand why someone might want a link from the really informative “Wednesday, February 16, 2011“, all about how bad Apple is at giving names to their products, but I think I will hold out for a better offer…
So I think I am pretty bored with World of Warcraft right now; haven’t played it in some time and don’t miss it. I have a level 85 DPS (ol’ Spennix), healer, and tank, they’ve done most of the Stuff except for raiding, I’m not that fascinated by raiding, and it’s hard to schedule anyway.
I’m also sort of tired of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which I have been watching episodes of from the Lesser Mesozoic on Netflix. I’d been having a very good time watching them, really, but then somehow at the beginning of the extremely exciting finale to Season Two, where the evil version of Angel is grinning devilishly (or vampirically) at an unusupecting Buffy from behind a tree in the cemetery, I was suddenly overcome by a large “oh, yeah, yeah, sure, evil Angel, whatever”, and switched it off.
(“Vampirically”? “Vampiricly”? “Vampirishly”? “Vampiresquely”?)
I’m not tired of Glitch yet (see me!), and am level 23, have nearly 50,000 units of currency (which is enough to buy the most fancy kind of house, although I’m enjoying life in my tiny apartment enough that I don’t currently plan to move), and am working on getting more and more and more skills.
With the various skills I currently have the money flows in at a pretty huge rate, from just walking through the world and casually harvesting things that I don’t actually need (because I already have 750 of them in my bags), and selling them in the selling place (which is called “auctions” although it contains no actual auctioning).
Once I have Master Chef II, though, and maybe once I’ve used my Martial Imagination and Piety to fend off a rook attack or two, I can imagine getting tired of glitch also. We’ll see if they develop the story as I hope they are going to.
I have not gotten in the least tired of Second Life, because it is sort of infinite, being different stuff created by the users alla time. (See ol’ Dale Innis’s insightful essay on user-generated content: UGC FTW!.) Lately I have been rather deeply embroiled in women’s fashion, but hey it’s the XXIst century, after all.
Oh, and…
does anyone know what “kasou no morinomajyo” might mean?
:)
While making a little house out of pieces of takeout-food cardboard on the floor this evening to amuse the cat, I suddenly remembered that I used to sit for hours and hours on the floor of the livingroom back in the house, making and knocking down and making again and putting heavy things experimentally onto the rooves of, endless houses of cards, made with more or less dogeared and more or less complete decks of playing cards.
Good times, good times. Haven’t thought about that in years…
