Extremely Lame

Back when the internet and e-mail was new, we slowly began to see the emergence of a plague on the internet. No, I’m not talking about Sasser or MSBlast or Melissa. I’m talking before any of that. Back when AOL completely dominated everyone’s 28.8 modems, we saw the formidable rise of chain letters. Naturally, they were almost always in all caps. SEND THIS TO 25 FRIENDS IN THE NEXT 25 MINUTES OR WEASELS WILL CRAWL OUT OF YOUR BUM AND DEVOUR YOUR SOUL. I never sent these. As far as I know, my soul is still intact. Despite my ignorance on that account, I know that weasels have never crawled out of my ass, so that goes to prove that these things were a crock.

Once AOL faded into the twilight as broadband began to take over dialup connections, this kind of stupid became less and less prevalent. Instead, it got eclipsed by a new kind of stupid: The ridiculously easily refuted scare/free money chain forward. Instead of the idiocy of the blatant chain letter, these didn’t usually tell you to forward them. It simply did one of a couple of things. Either they promised monetary rewards for doing so or they were filled with easily refutable, but scary sounding warnings. These forwards made a terrible attempt at spoofing people. Hmm, it must not have been so terrible a job if millions of people got fooled and forwarded them. No, they were indeed terrible. It’s just that people are god damned morons when it comes to the Net. Remember the forwards that supposedly were from Bill Gates/AOL/Intel/The Fairy Fucking Godmother and that this person could track your e-mail and pay you a thousand bucks if you forwarded this message? Yeah, that was one of the free money ones. These weren’t typically in all caps, but there was another way you could know what they were without having to infect your brain with stupid. Just look for the subject line to have “FW: FW: fw: FW: Fw: FW; FW: fw: fw; Fw: READ THIS” and you’ll be able to spot them from a mile away. Hell, if I see even a single FW: in the subject line, I pretty much toss it out of habit.

Fortunately, now that human generated e-mail is on the decline, we’re beginning to see less and less of this stuff. Unfortunately, we’re seeing another explosion of spam and other unwanted e-mails from social networking sites. At first, it was just porn invites from MySpace and quiz results and stupid apps from Facebook. Now Myspace has applications people can add. As if MySpace wasn’t bad enough, now I get to see MySpace corrupted with L’il Green Patch and SuperPoke! spam all over the god damn place. If they didn’t send me stuff all the time, or if I knew what they were in the subject of the e-mail, it wouldn’t be so bad. Myspace apps are the worst about it. I’ll get an e-mail saying someone left me a message and I get happy because I’ve not talked to said person in a while. So, I log in because I can’t read the message from my  e-mail. I log in, check the message, and it turns out to be spam.

I’m pissed off enough as it is, I think I’ll go outside and get some air and think about something that I hate less, like Tom Waits.