Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.

Underground > Temple >

E-mail bots and Magick

Aha! I am Klarion

22:15 / 12.12.06

I have noticed recently that I have been receiving these weird and oddly coincidental randomly generated e-mail headings (sent out by people trying to get you hooked into a scam or give you nasty computer viruses or whatever) that seem to apply to things going on in my life.

A specific example:

A day after getting a Caesar haircut at my local barber and picking up new and different cologne I received an e-mail bot titled “Roman Musk.”

More recently, I had been procrastinating (a bad habit that I have been trying to break) around writing my final paper for a class. I waited until the evening before it was due and then began to scramble like a mad man to get it written (pulling an all-nighter, as they say); however, I briefly paused to check my e-mail. And I discovered a single new message: an e-mail headline that says “Procrastination.” A day later I get approved for this board and decided to work it into my user name.

Has anyone had similar experiences with their fraudulent e-mail? Has any one attempted any sort of reading or divination via these crazy word combinations? What have been the results?

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

13:07 / 13.12.06

I had a very strange one yesterday on my work email. Having spent the last few days in a state of romantic confusion about someone, I received a spam with a subject about "gifts for your loved ones" or some such bollocks, with her name chucked in in the middle of the subject line at random. That was quite odd.

Mostly the ones I get at the moment read like Burroughs. I should complain to work, really, as I, and only I, seem to get tons of the buggers (and only since they installed their new anti-spam software- seriously, I never use my work email address for anything outside the office, chiefly because I can't remember it)- but they liven up the night.

13:23 / 13.12.06

yup I've chalked it up to a combination bibliomancy and the daimons of serverdom getting up to patterns.

It's a pet theory of mine that in an attempt to create a measureable controlable microcosm inside of Operating System logic of 1's and 0's we overlooked the haunted nature of reality and ourselves. We even named things in the systems daemon. Dig a little deeper and it gets better:

DAIMON - An intermediatory between man and a God often in the form of a spirit. Sokrates believed a daimon acted as a guardian and counselor during his career. Daimones (pl.) can be either or neither benevolent or malevolent.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

13:26 / 13.12.06

That would make sense- the very word I was thinking of popping up, completely out of place.

What you're talking sounds (to get all SF for a moment) like the explanation of the Meta in Richard Calder's Dead Girls/Boys/Things novels, but I can't quite come up with a quick summary of it right now.

13:38 / 13.12.06

I prefer the word Stichomancy to Bibliomancy, but yeah it's just another avenue for coincidence to jump out at you.

14:03 / 13.12.06

Quants: noted.

In my line of work (Unix SysAdmin) I've seen some random generated antics that would seriously fall under augeries/omen category. It's funny to me that a lot of people think machines and computers are somehow safe from the antics of anything else. As if all mighty Science somehow had managed to banish all that 'silliness' from its domain.

My two favorite examaples are the Phone Cure and the Sympathetic Server. The Phone Cure is when a well informered user or tech has a problem, tries every possible option to no avail and escalutes it to an expert, usually via a phone call. Merely by talking to the more skilled person somehow 'cures' whatever the problem was and it can now not be reproduced. this is especially hysterical to watch when it is well documented and in groups. The Sympathetic Server is when a server or other piece of equipement fails in sync with the moods of one of its operators, even if that person is not currently using it or has any contact with it.

In one of my last jobs I had a rather large server room to look after and as matter of course left small 'engineers' to look after each server. This might be a small toy or a drink umbrella and my supervisor thought it was a funny quirk. One day an official pair of eletrical engineers came into consult and in the middle of the tour of the server room I had to step away for an emergency leaving my supervisor to finish the tour. My supervisor latter told me the following happened...The lead electrical engineer was a vet and a very serious man. When his younger assitant noticed one of the toys (a tiny furry donkey I believe) attached to an extremely expensive server and commented on it the older man very seriously warned him never to interfer with such things as they were highly important to operations. My supervisor was quite shocked over hearing the exchange. It should be noted that I got this habit of attaching 'engineers' from people who worked in military ship building.

09:25 / 14.12.06

I have three different examples of SPAM divination. I wish I could find all the entries.

My first bit of SPAM divination came to my old Yahoo! account before it died, and just said "Cigar Three Curses", which I took as "Hi, this is Exu - pay attention to your SPAM for future messages!" and possibly a bit more. I never did figure out what the "curses" were about, though, unless it meant "expletives", in which case I was right - He was just fuckin' around.

The most recently was a subject line of "Oath Mimesis" at a time when a lot of Oathbreaking hoo-hah was going around my local community, including people presuming to paraphrase the words of vows taken by other people. It was also only a few weeks after the first time I'd ever seen the word "Mimesis" before, so it caught my attention.

Before that was a bit of email I got, with the Sender listed as "Freya". I'm not finding the LJ entry on that one, so I can't remember the exact details, but I recall the subject line was something about relationships that qualified as a THWAP upside the head, despite the fact that in context it actually advertised porn.

--Ember--