The Nature Theater of Oklahoma ([info]nuncstans) wrote,
@ 2006-08-28 18:12:00
Previous Entry  Add to memories!  Tell a Friend!  Next Entry
Entry tags:modern times, spam

Phatic Spam
I realize this is not the most current of topics, but since it is 1996 I figured I could ask the burgeoning WWW a question about 'spam.

There are probably all kinds of spam, and maybe even the category of spam itself is, like asthma, an unwieldy reliquary of symptoms rather than a modern diagnosis (such as the disease known as "fever"). So let me be clear: I am interested in contentless spam, which isn't advertising anything discernible and is presumably just trying to infect my computer.

Crap looks official Kosugi currently working movie called written Steven E. Souza. worked Die Hard Harder
modern poetry. Declared obscene banned Supreme Court
come back defeat well next season boys lets
trundle bayo upfront. neathcome dont matter that lost offs theres always season. Cyrille SwanUp jacks stuff Carlisle actually trophy cabinet k.ryanlee worth alot dosh if swansea were cardiff city solved but arent hes going nowhere carry top bhoyo thereHail hail Celts SCFC bad either though. Come Sir Clive real need Welsh them Emma SwanseaDa best. dun win keep gd play. Last league game dwn Vetch yesterday brill Bring new stadium Lucy WooHoo Well Done Nancy Florida USATell
Pachinko foreword Robin Comics Zen Baby zine print. Pirates white christian gangsta rappers supersex could stapled. ISBN Check another blurb East Bay Express THE URINALS OF HELL CATBOX GARGOYLE sitting squawk seagulls fighting

I want to know how it's produced. I assume that there are algorithms that put words together (rather than, as I would prefer to imagine, an endless drudgery of pen-pushers in a soviet-style green cube churning out automatic writing and then removing syntactical clues) but what are they?!


(Post a new comment)


[info]pomo_drunkard
2006-08-29 01:18 am UTC (link)
Simple.

It's all taken from James Joyce's later unpublished novels. Quoted verbatim.

(Reply to this)


[info]astronomick
2006-08-29 02:13 am UTC (link)
Someone very clever had to write that stuff. Word on the street is that it's Joyce.

I'm using "THE URINALS OF HELL CATBOX GARGOYLE" somehow tomorrow. Otherwise I find that life lacks meaning.

(Reply to this)


[info]nuncstans
2006-08-29 06:17 am UTC (link)
Did you both independently decide it was Joyce? I feel like Joyce takes the fall for a lot of crappy writing, when he was only responsible for a tiny percentage of what is overwhelmingly the fault of English departments, which always commit naturalistic fallacies all o'er everyone's asses.

English departments are also to blame for most other instances of massive linguistic disasters, and so I would tend to blame the phatic spam (hi, I'm spam) on them until proven wrong.

(Reply to this) (Thread)

[info]pomo_drunkard
2006-08-29 02:45 pm UTC (link)
I'm sorry. I lied to you just to carry out my stupid and pointless vendetta against James Joyce (a thing I do fairly often) for no particular reason.

In actuality, I think spam is generated by grad students who are struggling to impress those writers they think they should be immitating, such as Mark Leyner or Douglas Coupland--so they create massive amounts of particularly crappy prose, and then send it to everyone they know, hoping to get a book deal.

When they start footnoting, then we'll know they've moved on to David Foster Wallace.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

[info]ms_priestypants
2006-08-29 04:53 pm UTC (link)
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!

(Reply to this) (Parent)

[info]astronomick
2006-08-29 05:23 pm UTC (link)
Nah; [info]pomo_drunkard is my source for news from the street.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

[info]mendaciloquent
2006-08-29 11:25 am UTC (link)
Aliens.

(Reply to this)


[info]rubychard
2006-08-29 02:50 pm UTC (link)
but then there's the kind of spam i've been getting lately, which reads like mangled excerpts of bad novels, rather than pure gibberish. for example, the following, which i excerpt verbatim:

Furthermore, the jewels are gone; and Pfyfe tried to cover up histracks that night.
Youll never be anything but your own sweet trusting self, willyou?
Vance also, during the instructions, had jotted down some notationson a piece of paper.
She hesitated a moment and then continued.
Major Benson did not reply at once; he seemed to be framing his nextwords.
What impression did you get from the conversation? Even Goethe cried for mehr Licht; and hereare you in a state of luminous saturation! He handed Markham a typewritten sheet of paper. We all, I think, recognized the thought which his words strove toconceal.
Was that what your quarrel with him last week was about? She felt that he was friendly, howevermuch he might know about her. Banning one of his cigarettes, which sheaccepted. Vance was quick to sense the change in her tone. Then he smiled at her in a spirit of appreciativegeniality and relaxed comfortably in his chair. I hurried downstairs, and I hadnt any more than got to theswitchboard when her signal flashed.
Thats all very well, conceded Markham petulantly.
I think it best that you solve this problemwithout me.

(Reply to this)


[info]hadaly
2006-08-29 03:01 pm UTC (link)
Actually, nunc, this is apparently a current topic. There was a story about it on NPR quite rececntly.

(Reply to this) (Thread)

[info]nuncstans
2006-08-30 03:21 am UTC (link)
Wow, I had no idea. I like it that spam is forced to plagiarize canonical literature because it's up on the web in dense concentrations, and especially the prevalence of the word "bolshevism." But I still want to know what the deal is with these emails I get with NO SALES CONTENT WHATSOEVER.

Actually, I think I just figured it out.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

[info]rozele
2006-09-06 05:19 pm UTC (link)
while rubychard's excerpt is from a 1926 novel on gutenberg.net.au (says the internet w.k.a., via google), i think the original sample is using the wider world of the web as its source material, perhaps as a way of getting less archaism in the mix. it seems to me as if rumsfeld has moved on from his days of cryptic modernism to embrace L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry's cut-ups and refusal of (even hermetic) meaning... in this piece i see him bringing together sports fandom and the formal political sphere, perhaps as a postmodern take on the conventional stump-speech football metaphor - here appearing as the british football ('soccer') leagues, juxtaposed with subtle references to recent cultural/political events, which the Secretary dismisses as "squawk seagulls fighting"...

"crap looks official", indeed.

(Reply to this)

digram models
[info]naticity
2006-09-22 06:09 am UTC (link)
A pretty common algorithm is to start with a corpus of text you want to imitate, and then count how often each "digram" occurs. A digram is just two words in a row. So we are counting word pairs such as "I am" or "Steve Buscemi".

For example, after the word "I", you use:
"am" 8.5% of the time
"have" 7.7% of the time
"was" 6.0% of the time
etc.

Whereas, after the word "Steve", you use:
"Buscemi" 100.0% of the time

These numbers can be used to produce arbitrary amounts of nuncstans-like text, only slightly less coherent than the real thing. After each word, just use the digram probabilities to randomly choose the next word. For example:

thinks their minivans and by a Marxist standpoint, another day ever have to dinner, and do what year it gives a ticker tape anyway? We've talked about, unaccountably, such as the email list I'm house, like, on wonder-eyed at his car was. constintina and that pyaahckage will give me on the Art Fair? Are you all struggling to ride my crunchy noises whenever she realized to go to see a car, but he insisted a ride in any of trayf that we assess ourselves, arrest anyone.

(Reply to this)


[info]elevenoclock
2006-10-12 10:37 pm UTC (link)
hi
your journal tickles my fancy
hope it's ok if i add you!
Amy

(Reply to this)

Create an Account
Forgot your login or password?
Login w/ OpenID
English • Español • Deutsch • Русский…