This L.A. Craig’s List job listing seeks a professional liar: someone to pretend to be multiple users on a bulletin board, to simulate an active and thriving online community.
“However, these characters must maintain a strong presence on the board so other members feel as if they are genuinely part of their community, thus, creating more activity on the board.”
Someone out there doesn’t quite get it.
I temporarily disabled my firewall today and received this piece of Windows messenger spam: “Stop these annoying messenger ads for FREE and FOREVER! Open your web browser and go to www.FightSpamWithSpam.com.”
It makes sense, I suppose. I’ve seen popup-killer applications advertised in popup windows and e-mail spam filtering software advertised in spam e-mail, so this is the new equivalent. Meta-spam is a simple way to target their demographic, and who cares if it’s evil?
Still, you have to give them credit for their technique; after showing you how to turn off Messenger services yourself, they beg for donations to fund their spamming efforts. (Grrr.)
Does the cover of Joe Clark’s new book remind you of anything? (Hint, hint.)
Back in the 1980s, a few thousand devoted followers of a religious sect called the Church Universal and Triumphant relocated to a 32,000 acre Montana ranch and began preparing for the Apocalypse. Claire Prophet, their aptly-named leader, predicted a devastating Soviet missile attack on the United States set for April 23, 1990. Responding to these doomsday visions, the sect began stockpiling weapons and creating fallout shelters to survive the attacks. (The church still lives on, albeit in a mainstream form.)
Audio recordings from internal church services surfaced sometime during the late-1980s and were released on Faithway International’s Sounds of American Doomsday Cults Volume 14. Unfortunately, the album’s out of print and unavailable through Aquarius Records, but I have several of the tracks in MP3 format (thanks Daryl).
The highlight of the batch is the Invocation For Judgement Against And Destruction of Rock Music (3 MB MP3), a three-minute roster of ’80s rock and pop stars sentenced to eternal damnation for various crimes against God. You might recognize it from Negativland’s “Michael Jackson” off of Escape from Noise, which samples it heavily. Follow the weirdness with this partial transcript.
The new version of the MAME arcade emulator plays several popular games from the modern era (post-1995) of arcade gaming: Area 51, Cruis’n USA, Cruis’n World, Vicious Circle and Maximum Force. The catch? The Area 51, Vicious Circle and Maximum Force ROM files are over 520 megs each, and Cruis’n USA requires a 4Ghz+ CPU to run at full speed. (In other words, you’ll need a computer that runs at nearly twice the speed of today’s high-end desktop PCs.)
