Tag: Heraclitean Fire

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Thesaurian spam

The spam filter caught this reply to my post with the title ‘The stupidity of big books (and the joy of cheap paperbacks)‘:

wooow, take a fancy to your things concerning Heraclitean The stake » The vapidness of swollen books (and the felicity of of small account paperbacks

Yup, the spambot has just run the post title through a thesaurus.

The idea of course is to generate fake comments which are genuine-sounding enough to avoid being deleted. It’s an ingenious idea, even if the results are a bit peculiar. I guess it might have worked better if the original post title was something shorter and less elaborate.

If nothing else, ‘the vapidness of swollen books’ is quite a nice line of iambic tetrameter.

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Hot trends in spam

It is fascinating to see the evolving ways in which spambots try to fool us into thinking they are real people. It’s like a very narrow version of the Turing Test.

In response to a birdy post which mentioned, among other things, ring-necked duck, someone submitted this almost-relevant piece of commentary:

Like the scaups she has a white crescent at the base of her bill although it is less distinctive than that of either the Greater or Lesser Scaup. The Female Ring-necked Duck can be distinguished from the scaups by the thin white eye-ring that trails back to her ear and the peaked shape of her head as well as by differing habitat. A generalized diet may allow the Ring-necked Duck to colonize new areas and habitats that other species might not be able to use and this may be why it seems to be faring well.

It doesn’t actually make sense as a real human response to the post, but at a glance I thought it might do. Although the fact it was posted by a website offering offshore banking services would probably have been enough to tip me off.

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Salmagundi update

A London Salmagundi, my Tumblr, has now been running for five months and accumulated over 1200 posts; if you haven’t been visiting it, this is the kind of thing you’ve been missing.

Photos by Pierre Bonnard — Hausa horsemen in quilted armour — C19th corset — a hornet mimic — Giovanni di Paolo — optical illusion — mermaid plate — Song dynasty vase — elephant skin — aubergine shoes — paper mosaic — knitted cuttlefish — brass knuckle — rhino beetle — Sweden — dub — ibis — sand art — taxidermy — cittern — set design — weimaraner — type specimen — target practice — bidis — bleeding tooth fungus — cricketers — diamond mine — mantua — good luck charm

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No more links

The plugin which automatically fetches links from delicious.com and posts them to this blog went wrong last night. So it seems like as good a moment as any to stop posting them to this blog altogether, since they are all posted to A London Salmagundi as well.

If you want to keep reading the links but have no patience for all the other bits and pieces I post to Salmagundi, you can also find them at delicious.

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Announcing Salmagundi

I’ve got a new little side project, Salmagundi, which is a Tumblr-powered short-form, scrapbooky type blog-thing where I can post assorted bits and pieces — photos, links, amusing cat videos — that I find on the internet. A web-log in the original sense.

Which probably means I’ll stop the automatic link posts here, and keep this blog for longer text-based pieces, although I won’t actually make that change until it’s been working for a bit.

I think it looks quite spiffy on a Mac; it’ll look slightly less spiffy on a PC, not least because it relies heavily on Helvetica Neue Light. And on any version of Internet Explorer older than IE8, you’ll just see a message telling you that your browser sucks. In your face, Microsoft.

There is a link to it (Tumblr) in the sidebar on the right. Or you can subscribe to the RSS feed.

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Housekeeping

Something went wrong with my WordPress upgrade, and I was still trying to sort it out when my computer died, and that took several hours to rescue (and involved reformatting the hard drive, reinstalling the system and restoring my files from a backup)… so I still haven’t sorted this blog yet. I don’t have access to the admin pages. If you’re reading this it means I’ve managed to post via the iPhone app, but the advent calendar is on hold for the moment. What larks.

EDIT: well, the good news is that I can get back into the admin area of the blog, the bad news is that I didn’t wait and check plugin compatibility properly, and one of the key plugins I use, Simple Tags, is currently borked. Hence the error message below. But I think sorting that out can wait until tomorrow.

EDIT: the Simple Tags problem solved! Yay! After about 20 hours of doing my own tech support, I’m almost back to where I was yesterday at lunchtime.