exxxcited!

Back in the day we would regularly post fun things that came in the mail in spam (some of them even featured in the 2004 NaNoWriMo novel, including as the source for the title, come to think of it).

Lately either the quality of the spam has been going down, the quality of the spam filters has been going up (I think that’s mostly it; gmail is darn good), or I’ve just gotten a bit jaded (probably part of it also), but we got a good one today (boy howdy!).

The subject is “Show this to your girlfriend so she knows how to make you exxxcited” (except that there are various blanks and letters from random obscure bits of the Unicode space scattered about, presumably to defeat spam filters), and the content is delightful:

We clenched. More stunned than stagnant, we stood greenish and fibrous.
…
He guessed every dismay, and did not reckon it hazy to outlive merely in his memory theorem he would look.

Isn’t that noteworthy?

(Where I’ve put the ellipsis, there are some more odd symbols that appear to have no function or content, but you never know.)

This is good spam both because of the wonderful imagery (and note that there are currently no hits in Google on “we stood greenish and fibrous”, in quotes and all (although there will be one shortly)), and because it appears to be totally beneficent and selfless; there is no phishing URL to click on, no embedded iframe trying to phone home to some spammer to confirm my address exists, no nothing.

Just them standing, clenching, more stunned than stangant, greenish, and fibrous. He guessed every dismay!

Oh, and it’s from one Orlando Albrecht.

Thanks, Orlando!

Days of splines and toeses

So in the morning when I wake up I am vaguely surprised to find that once again I am in the same bed and the same room, the same universe, as when I went to sleep.

’cause it seems like a big coincidence!

But, it occurs to me, that’s not necessarily what’s happening; memory is just as unmoored as immediate experience.

Maybe tomorrow morning I will wake up in my nest, surrounded by M and our other flock-group members, curled up in our diaphanous salmon-colored leaves, stretch and yawn, attach the platinum blades to my hind set of legs in case of hungry sleet-flies en route, and fly off to work, thinking all the while that it’s funny I’ve woken up yet again in the same nest, in the same mile-high tree, that I went to sleep in last night.

The King’s Country, as the royal precincts with their streets and shops and storehouses have come to be called over the paranoid years, is saturated with security, and eye-patches.

In order to present a disadvantage to anyone who might mean ill toward the monarch, anyone entering is given a tight black eye-patch, and must wear it over one eye as long as they remain within the walls.

A one-eyed man came to the Gate to King’s Country one autumn afternoon, upon a commission to repair a water-wheel. He assumed that, already equipped with an eye-patch, and more importantly a non-functional eye, the rule would have no effect on him.

But, due to zeal in defense of the sovereign, or perhaps certain reservations about the cut of the mechanic’s clothes, the Sergeant of the Gate declared that, in order to present a disadvantage as intended, the patch would have to be worn over the newcomer’s good eye, not the bad one.

Appeal to the Chief of the Guard did no good.

So, in the country of the King, the one-eyed man is blind.

(That was the easy case, I think, mundane and cloudy. One could as well have done “In the country of the King, the blind man has one eye”, which might have been about how the monarch’s deity-infused aura provides sight to the sightless, or alternately “In the country of the one-eyed, the blind man is King”, which might have taken more thought.)

And there was some third thing that I was going to write down, and that in fact is the thing that got me to open up this computer and start writing in the weblog here, but at the moment I have entirely forgotten it (phah!) so I will just say that I have been playing Real Racing 3 on the iPad here, and it is fun. And the graphics are woot good heavens! Right now I am working on upgrading my second car, a BMW M3 Coupe which I have “resprayed” all shiny red:

That’s my first car, a now-fully-upgraded Nissan Silvia S15, behind it.

The In-App Purchases have not annoyed me, or tempted me, yet (unlike in certain other pad games).

Vroom vroom!