victory over evil

Remember my idea to poison the Secret Crush meme?

Well, bryant wrote a Perl script to automate the process. And beat the input into submission!

"I just took the thing offline after I noticed your script running, because the thing just had to die. It's easy for me to filter out your additions (via ip or browser checking), but since you published the script, it would just become a war of attrition for me to keep it running."

- a quote he made in the comments, presumably from the Secret Crush people.

Well done! *glee*

marketing sucks

I just got two anonymous comments on the last entry.

Both were absolutely identical, both were from IP addresses somewhere in Asia - one from Chiang Mai University, one from Seoul.

Both were advertising some movie. "The Passion Of the Christ". I had no intention of seeing it before, but now I certainly won't. Especially when the comment-spam advocates this:

This is a chain comment - post to FIVE of your blog friends in order to keep this going - pray for salvation and peace!

Simply VIEW the page SOURCE with your browser, find where it says CUT_HERE_HOMES for the beginning and end of where to cut! Paste that as your comment. Thank you for passing this on to FIVE blog friends!

So, let's see, how many of Peggy's buttons are pressed here? Being preached to; having advertisements invade her life (I avoid TV, I run an ad-blocker, I take deliberate steps to live as ad-free a life as I can), being blatantly used for transmitting others' ideas, cynical attempts to harness memesheepage... I'm really reluctant to turn off anonymous comments, damnit. But if this garbage keeps up... (Of course, for all I know, this could be a cynical smear campaign by people who think it's offensive to their religion, trying to create a bad buzz for the film by associating it with spam. But that way lies tinfoil hats.)

Anyway, I'm telling all of my "blog friends" reading this that this movie's advertising via spam, and not to go see it.

---

Addendum: I'd emailed the production company behind the film. This is what they wrote back-

The choice not to see the film is, of course, your own. However, our
company does not send out mass emails and this was most likely done by
someone not affiliated with the film.

I'm not quite sure if I believe them or not on the 'not affiliated' part. It's quite plausible that someone somewhere up or down the distribution chain is doing it...

by the way

Went to a party last night at chrissawyer's place. It was fun. Socializing with people I don't have to hide half of myself around is always nice.

I drew some silly shit while I was there, too...

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silly quiz

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