Saturday, January 12, 2013

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.

7 comments:

  1. Oh, so that's how you do a screen capture! I knew it was possible, but I had no idea how to go about it. (My computer skills are limited to those things I happen to stumble across.)

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  2. Ha, I didn't know how to do the screen capture either, so thanks! And good luck - I haven't gotten into things like Tumblr and Pinterest and am trying hard to continue that!
    erica

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  3. I haven't gone with Tumblr yet. Maybe someday :)

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  4. Awesome idea. It's like spam as found art.

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  5. I've yet to do Tumblr, but i like the idea of yours! Going to check it out...
    :)

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  6. I'll have to remember that for screen captures!

    I switched my settings awhile back to let anyone comment, though that includes spammers. Mostly the spam filters catch these nitwits, but for some reason, spam was getting through regardless, catching onto a single blog from a couple of years ago. I switched the settings for any comments on blogs more than sixty days old requiring moderation.

    I'm getting a lot of spam in the filters now. Much of it terminally ridiculous.

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