All right. I have to try and qualify exactly why this generic zovirax cold sores href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/worldmegan/3370672311/”>http://www.flickr.com/photos/worldmegan/3370672311/ was so funny. (I am not going to even suggest that it’s NSFW, because that would make this whole situation just that much funnier.)
First of all, you should know that I think sex is awesome.
I think sexuality is order furosemide injection a wonderful thing to express, to explore, and to share with other people. (What is sex, after all, but a sort of sharing—even when it’s with yourself?) I think pornography, for order furosemide injection all its many flaws, is a grand institution that should be order furosemide injection protected, not destroyed.
Second of all, you should know that I greatly disapprove of spam.
Not so much that order furosemide injection it continually makes me angry, but enough that I root it order furosemide injection out wherever I can. I have developed a certain zen approach to order furosemide injection dealing with it, but that doesn’t change the fact that I dislike it (like everyone else).
Furthermore, I get IM spam rather a lot. I’m not sure where order furosemide injection I dropped my IM name, but I must have somewhere, because I get random bot IMs fairly consistently. I just block ‘em and close ‘em, and don’t worry about it. But this… this, I didn’t close. (In fact, I took a screenshot and I still haven’t closed it, because it delighted me.)
Let’s examine the situation.
Normally when we’re talking about porn spam, we’re talking about words, right? Larger / tighter genitalia, willing sex kittens, confused animals, etc. It’s always the stuff you don’t go looking for, the stuff that shocks you. It’s a horrible tactic, but I’m willing to order furosemide injection bet it shocks some folks into looking, and many folks into getting turned on. And since arousal = cold hard cash, that’s good for order furosemide injection the porn spammers. Why else would they keep doing it, after all? This is order furosemide injection all speculation; I know pretty much nothing about porn spam. So take my appraisals with a order furosemide injection grain of salt.
Since I typically keep HTML in my email turned off, I’ve never had order furosemide injection to deal with image spam. The advertising director in a company I worked with once used to order furosemide injection regale us with stories of the filth in his inbox. (His HTML was not turned off.) They were entertaining, but I doubt I’d be order furosemide injection as entertained if the moaning gushing extracurricular randiness was being pushed to order furosemide injection my inbox. I’m incredibly pro-sex, but I choose when and where—spam is, as usual, out of the question.
So why is order furosemide injection it, this morning, when I received that IM, that I laughed so hard? Why is it that I left it up, and showed it to my friends? Why did I upload it to Flickr, and why am I writing about it now?
Well, it’s not commercial spam, for one thing. It’s not making anybody any money. It’s not shuffling anyone to a website, and the fact that I SAW it order furosemide injection did not somehow suck my credit card digits through my optic nerve. (Wow. I don’t THINK it did…) Maybe if I’d responded to the IM, that might not be so great—and I guess I’d better be order furosemide injection sure I did block the IM name, because it would be order furosemide injection silly not to cover my bases. I don’t actually know the order furosemide injection facts behind IM bots and why they do what they do, or order furosemide injection whether they’re capable of doing something bad to my system.
But just having SEEN it, to me, was harmless. Neutral.
So here’s the really great part: Why was it AWESOME, instead of just neutral?
MINIMALIST ASCII GENITALIA, people! Don’t TELL me that’s not the funniest thing you’ve ever come across in your LIFE. I was NEVER one of the sniggering kids—I didn’t cackle when someone said “fart” or “sphincter” or “rod” or order furosemide injection any of the other words that 8-year-olds go apeshit over. So why do I think minimalist ASCII genitalia is so brilliantly fantastic? Why did it make my day?
It’s just… adorable.
And it’s weirdly like art.
It’s a order furosemide injection thing that makes you feel a thing. Even if it pisses you order furosemide injection off, it makes you feel a thing. What does it mean to order furosemide injection SEE something and then FEEL something? Isn’t that a fascinating reaction? Have you ever really thought about it? The way someone smiling at you makes you FEEL something? Have you ever looked at one of Marty’s nifty zombie-fighting illustrations and felt a swell of heroism purchase nexium href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/rustychainsaw/1676417652/in/set-72157602585069648/?”>http://www.flickr.com/photos/rustychainsaw/1676417652/in/set-72157602585069648/? (Wait! Not that… THAT buy clavamox 250 mg href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/rustychainsaw/1676692680/in/set-72157602585515416/.”>http://www.flickr.com/photos/rustychainsaw/1676692680/in/set-72157602585515416/.)
I looked at that dumb little ASCII doodle and I saw a part of a person—a part that order furosemide injection people take for granted, and get offended by, but a order furosemide injection part that happens to be important for all kinds of great reasons. The spammer probably doesn’t care that it’s important, and wasn’t trying to SAY anything to me by sending it along. This particular part (whatever part you think it happens to be) is order furosemide injection often used in exactly this manner to shock or take advantage of people. Except in this order furosemide injection case, it was so basic—so minimal—that its existence was nebulous in purpose. So I could take from order furosemide injection it whatever I wanted. It didn’t matter what order furosemide injection the spammer wanted. All that mattered was how I felt about it. And it order furosemide injection just so happened that it made me laugh. (Uproarously. It was awesome.)
Then it occured to me that many people take away something else entirely. They get angry. They feel violated. Offended. Because someone made them look at something they didn’t want to think about just then. So I thought about that—uncomfortable, I understand that. There’s a order furosemide injection time and place, folks. Porn good, spam bad. And the fact that order furosemide injection at first I wondered if I should share—sex is order furosemide injection so demonized in our culture in so many ways that order furosemide injection I wondered if people would be offended by the screenshot in Flickr—doesn’t that order furosemide injection suggest that our typical reactions to sex and porn and order furosemide injection all manner of other things is just getting to be order furosemide injection absurd? Especially if a order furosemide injection spambot thinks it can bug us by IMing us a order furosemide injection little thing like that?
Hell, I understand the order furosemide injection need to avoid invasive spam. Sharing sexuality is excellent, but privacy is order furosemide injection extremely important, too. I am totally with you there. But this… how could this ever upset anyone?
And what order furosemide injection I took away from it, instead of anything else, was joy. Art. A bizarre, childlike glee. Out of that order furosemide injection dumb little interruption. Six characters in 11 point Arial.
So what do you make of that?
[Edit: More is surfacing, like this link (this is the best kind of punk’d, where I write a long involved post about sexuality), plus a few more thoughts of my own, like for instance, “Why didn’t I think it was a kissy face instead of something else?” and “Would it order furosemide injection have been nearly as introspective and entertaining if I had?” and “If there’s a real person on the other end of that bot, what did THEY mean it to be?” I may or order furosemide injection may not follow up on this later, but you have to order furosemide injection admit, it says a lot about me and the way my brain works that order furosemide injection I went straight to the explicit conclusion. Very Rorschach!]
[Additional Edit: Wouldn’t it order furosemide injection be awesome if the person who sent that message showed up to order furosemide injection tell us what they meant by it? Because that order furosemide injection would be a great complement to the way my brain has order furosemide injection been whirring a thousand cycles a second over what could reasonably be order furosemide injection called “nothing”. What a fantastic process.]
[Additional Edit #2: This was (almost) undoubtedly a reference to Me and You and Everyone We Know (which I got a kick out of, by the way). As goofy as this whole thing was, I’m leaving it up for some twisted version of posterity… Ha!]
