If anything, going through this month has proven to me that while I'm capable of meeting deadline when put to the challenge, it may not always be quality work. That scares me, because (let's face it:) I strive to be the best and nothing but.
So, in an attempt on filling today's requirements before I head out for work, here's a little random something I decided to write up one day years ago about spam. Not the tasty food, mind you - but the actions of spamming. For some reason I found this to be a bit amusing, so here's some insight on my past thought processes.
Until the 'morrow.
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The act of spamming is defined by Wikipedia as "the abuse of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited bulk messages."
The term itself gets its roots from a well-known sketch from the famed Monty Python comedy team. In it, a couple is seen in a typical British greasy spoon trying to order a meal off the menu. At first, it appears quite ordinary (with a starter suggestion such as "egg, sausage and bacon"), but as the list goes down it ends up being laden with entrées relating to Hormel Spam – so far as to even have dishes like "spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, baked beans, spam, spam, spam, and spam" or even the lavish "lobster thermidor aux crevettes with a Mornay sauce garnished with truffle paté, brandy and with a fried egg on top and spam." Years later, in the infancy of the online sector, people would actually continuously quote the sketch over and over (or at least put down "Spam" repeatedly) to drive out newbies in the chat room or message board. Hence, the word and practice that would later be christened as "spamming" was born.
Nowadays, it no longer pertains to chat rooms. E-mail accounts are flooded everyday with countless amounts of junk e-mail – now also colloquially known as "spam." Public social networking sites such as Facebook and Myspace, and online message boards end up becoming infested with a bunch of immature (and possibly unintelligent) Internet users who for some reason love to waste their lives by copying and pasting numerous facsimiles of the same image, word, clause, sentence, and/or paragraph over and over and over and over (and yeah... I’ll stop now...), either making one ginormous post that takes three hours to scroll through, or multiple posts at one time. (In my view, higher numbers of duplicate objects or spam posts usually equal a higher amount of stupidity – and thus, a higher chance of dying as a lonely virgin.) Of course, this practice exists outside of the digital word – most notably with little kids (or people who act like such) who keep pestering us with the annoying and repetitive "Why?" and the even more intolerable and infamous "Are we there yet?"
If you’re reading this, chances are you’re one of the many people who’ve encountered spam and hated every bit of it. I’ve had more than my fair share of it. Seems that every day when I check my e-mail, I get anywhere from 25 – 50 new e-mails – all of it spam. Then we have more spam – when I check my Facebook every once in a while (I'll admit, I used to be hooked), I look at the many things people post. Some are funny comments that I just laugh at (but I don’t call that spam). A couple more (usually ones I post) are either meaningful or inform friends that a new blog is up for others to read.
But then there's that idiot who keeps putting down "New pictures! Comment please kthx" over and over. (If you have a profile on a social networking site, you probably have a friend who spams like this.) Like, one bulletin every hour or so. Heaven forbid, maybe even within a lesser timeframe. Then they go off on a tangent and whine about how nobody cares because they didn’t get a comment, ending their tirade with a "COMMENT MEH PLEASE!!!" or something similar.
Or here's another great example. Once I was on this forum where people are commenting on random crap. (And by that, I mean random. People just jumped topics every two posts.) And then some nutjob (who probably isn’t that bright) decides to go make a post. What makes this post stand out was the fact that it was in bold and (the kicker:) he deliberately copy-and-pasted two hundred and twenty-one lines' worth of "~CHOCOLATE IS THE BEST~" – enough chocolate to make even chocoholics puke.
What makes forum spamming even worse is the fact that it (like all immature actions) incites more immature actions. A few hours later some other kid responds with 92 lines of "~WAFFLES ARE BETTER~" – not enough to match the first dolt but still enough to take the role of the shot that was fired back. And then a spam war ensued, with worthless lines of responses and half-witted people throwing more fuel to the fire.
(Author’s Note: As a lil' piece of trivia, here’s further proof of my theory that spammers probably have no lives: A response in this war was the sentence "BUT THIS IS BETTER." This line was repeated 10,383 times. I really wish I was kidding about that number. Well, anyway, after MS Word did some statistics, it reported that whole entire meaningless post of spam had 155,760 letters and 41,536 words. What caught me off-guard was the fact that each sentence was bolded in Times New Roman typeface and the font size was 24. Which meant that if this were to be printed off of MS Word with regular 1" margins, it’d waste 452 pages.)
The worst thing about forum spamming (or any kind of spamming, really, but this kind is prevalent in message boards the most) is the fact that very offensive comments may be repeated throughout various threads over and over and over. Yes, administrators can ban the user in various ways, but that's one huge mess they'll have to clean up in the end. Of course, we knew that. What we didn't know was the fact that it cost business associations all across the United States over $10 billion USD back in 2004.
Spam sucks. Period. It’s an annoying, memory/time-wasting device that
Honestly, whoever created it should DIEEEE. If you’re like me, and you just HATE it... we should do something. If you're a spammer, kindly stop your immature and annoying ways. If you fail to do so, then may God have mercy on your soul. But if you're agnostic or not of a monotheistic religion, then... just die.
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