Ah, spam. Now that it’s here, it never really goes away, does it? It’s like the herpes of the internet.

It’s been a while since I’ve talked about spam, because what’s the point? And yet here we are, because now I’m not just getting regular spam, I’m getting AI spam:

You can read that post for yourself if you want. I wrote it, and I can’t disagree with this summary. But you can tell it’s written by AI. It doesn’t really add anything to the conversation, it doesn’t city anything specific, it just doesn’t say anything at all. It’s just there.

The second one appeared over on my book blog:

The post it is referencing is here. Again, I can’t really argue with this; it’s an accurate summary, except perhaps that bit about “the overly harsh tone and nitpicking”. Ironically, that was kind of the point; I was nitpicking and harsh. This entire post is about books that failed to resonate with me and I have an honest-to-god English major under my belt, and I’m not just going to say “yeah, this book is stupid, don’t read it”. I’m going to tell you why I picked up this book in the library and then I’m going to go into details about why I put it down saying “oh hell no, life is short and I am old”. That’s kind of the point of a book review.

Both of these spam links went to a “24-hour” sports website, one in Japan and one in India. (As far as I can tell, they are pretty much the same, so it’s someone just hoping to make a lot of money from ads or whatever.) I don’t really get into sports any more, for a lot of reasons that aren’t relevant here, and I can’t remember the last time I watched a game of sportsball. I may be old, but I’m busy, and I have a lot better things to do than to attach my emotional and mental state to a bunch of athletes who just happen to live in the same area I am and are probably all on steroids anyway. I mean, who cares? And why? I sure as hell don’t.

The irony is that if they had reached out and said they wanted to advertise on my site, and here’s twenty dollars to put a link up in your sidebar for the next six months, I probably would have done it. I may have standards, but I also have bills, and life happens to be real expensive right now. They could have done it like that, but they chose to spam instead. So they get nothing from me, and I get nothing from them except the joy of marking their comment as spam. I’m pretty easy to please in that regard.

A side note apropos of nothing: On one my earlier “forest of spam” posts, I included the tag pizza in Karachi. I have no idea why. Maybe I was trying to be hip and cool (yeah, good luck with that!), or I was just being really random that day (which is a thing that happens almost every single day), or I wanted to add a tag that would just totally screw up the SEO for this page, because seriously—fuck SEO. 

Yeah, it’s probably that last reason.

Yet another side note: 

I wanted a generic sportsball to use as the featured image for this post, so I went over to Gemini AI and asked for one. (Turnabout seems like fair play.) It gave me a picture of an American football, complete with NFL logos. I asked it to remove the logos and it did, but it was still distinctly an American football. I then asked for a sportsball that wasn’t a football and it gave me a basketball. So I asked for an amalgamation of different sportsballs and it said “That sounds like a great idea! Here you go…”

This is yet another reason to detest AI. I did not ask you to judge my choice. I gave you a request and I expect you to fulfill it without judgment. Even Amazon manages to do that. Sigh…

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