Today I Did Something Crazy

Not that crazy, but for me totally insane. I…started a Tumblr. An idea hit me with such force that I had to make it real and share with all of you.

It started a couple of months ago when I was setting up posts. I looked at page views and found that my Spamfiles post did pretty well considering it was on a Saturday on a relatively dead week. I thought to myself, “It is funny how despite being an annoyance, spam is also pretty damn amusing.” Then, on the heels of that, totally unbidden: “This is the kind of thing I’d expect to see on Tumblr.”

And bam. Like that, I had to make it happen. I’m sure this idea has been done before but, to paraphrase REACHED, it hasn’t been done by me. I find spam hilarious. The scams that never seem to change. The promises to enlarge an organ I don’t have. The way it seems translated into another language, then back to English, then back and forth a few more times to make sure it’s totally incomprehensible.

So I give you…The SpamFiles. I’m not sure how popular this will be, so it’s only going to be once or twice a week since that’s about how often I get a really outrageous piece of spam. If any of you guys have one to share, send it to me! There’s no need to open it—I don’t want you to risk any viruses on my account. You can take a screen cap of the subject line and email address and send thatto me. For those wondering, a screen cap is a picture of what’s on the monitor/laptop screen at the time. You get it by using the print screen (Prt Sc) button, one of those buttons in the upper right corner of a keyboard that doesn’t seem to do anything. I’m not sure about computers but I know that on laptops you have to hit the Fn (function) button, which is usually by the arrow keys, at the same time as Prt Sc. Then you go to something like Microsoft Paint and hit paste/Ctrl+V and crop out any information you don’t want to share.

If you have a Tumblr account, you can just submit to the Files but since I don’t want to exclude anyone, you can also email it to my SpamFiles mailbox. Like a query letter, please, no attachments, just paste it in the email. If you want credit, be sure to include your name/website and I’ll link to it in the blurb, but if you want to stay anonymous, that’s cool too.

Will you join me on this endeavor? I hope so, because it sounds like it could be a fun one.

When The Spammers Strike

On one hand, I think it’s a compliment when someone is trying to get spam through on your Comments section. It lets you know you’ve created something people actually want to look at.

It’s no secret that I hate spam. It’s vile, disgusting, and basically fills your arteries with processed crap. Email spam is similarly disgusting (I’m tempted to do an etymology day on why the latter is named after the former). Almost every day I receive something, either on Twitter, here on Blogger, or in one of my email services—don’t get me started on telemarketers. The most annoying spam has the subject line of “Hey,” which is made doubly annoying by the fact that that is how my mother usually headlines her emails.

Hm. That actually seems sort of appropriate.

In unrelated news, I’m glad I never told my mother about my blog.

Back to spam: unfortunately for us, it’s hard to battle. Once you find a way to block them, they come up with new ways to spam you! I think the only way to really combat it is to force people to take ethics classes and sign an agreement not to annoy others. And I don’t see that happening any time soon. It’s bad for business.

Cursed spam. Anyone have and good spam related stories to share?