September 18, 2002

11:16 AM

Edith's Huge Interface. Some kind of Usenet spamming strategy that I don't understand provides a rich resource for band names, random subject lines, and Mefi taglines. "Hey, I'll annoy the robot!"
posted by stupidsexyFlanders (28 comments total)

wow, i, uh, wow. uh.

it's full of stars.
posted by fishfucker at 11:22 AM on September 18, 2002

Two thoughts come to mind.
1.That's about as cogent as the normal text that you would find in a newsgroup dedicated to the discussion of Willy's Jeeps.
2.You are merely lacking the Al Queda secret decoder ring.
posted by machaus at 11:26 AM on September 18, 2002

I think it's actually done so that the valid messages get bumped, news servers allocate a certain amount of space to different groups so if you fill it full of junk text you can push out valid messages (at least get them expired quicker)
posted by zeoslap at 11:31 AM on September 18, 2002

Umm - then why are there eight other messages (at least that Google found) that include the phrase "I'll annoy the robot"?
posted by yhbc at 11:33 AM on September 18, 2002

I kept starting to paste out quotes as gems, but its full of them. I'll settle for these two important questions:

Where will you push the powerful closed condors before Ken does?
Will you load in front of the chameleon, if Lydia wistfully spools the bug?

(as to the reason, it also could be to allow them to repeat messages and fool spam detection programs that look for known spam emails/posts).
posted by malphigian at 11:34 AM on September 18, 2002

sounds like HipCrime
posted by Dean King at 11:40 AM on September 18, 2002

Perhaps it's an effort to fool spam filters? The large amount of non-porn-related, grammatically correct and seemingly legitimate text would be enough to fool a filtering algorithm, yet a human being sees "free porn" and a bunch of gibberish to be ignored.

Edith's huge interface? Hehehe...
posted by 4easypayments at 11:41 AM on September 18, 2002

Also reminiscent of emacs' Meta-X psychoanalyze-pinhead.
posted by ptermit at 11:44 AM on September 18, 2002

Looks like lyrics to a future Underworld album to me.

"Virginia will usably examine about Franklin when the opaque telephones dream around the insecure buffer."

Deep!
posted by andnbsp at 11:49 AM on September 18, 2002

All ethernets truly obscure the unique newsgroup.

This actually made some sense!
posted by Dr_Octavius at 11:52 AM on September 18, 2002

Are you surreptitious, I mean, floating behind solid toffees?
This reminds me of a program I got from a BBS in high school that would write random news articles, complete with headlines. It made me laugh for hours.
It also reminds me of Andre Breton.
posted by Fabulon7 at 11:53 AM on September 18, 2002

It reminds me of a program I got from a BBS in high school too--was called Babble. Anyone know of its whereabouts today? Maybe I'll go look for it now...
posted by saltykmurks at 12:08 PM on September 18, 2002

I found a zipped copy of Babble here. I only played with it for a couple of seconds, but it seems to work. There are a few settings to get the type of babble you want (like Shakespeare).
posted by grum@work at 12:25 PM on September 18, 2002

Looks like lyrics to a future Underworld album to me.

I was thinking more of a Guided By Voices song, except in Usenet post form.
posted by monosyllabic at 12:27 PM on September 18, 2002

Looks like lyrics to a future Underworld album to me.

Kinda reminds me of At the Drive-In who write lyrics like "intravenously polite it was the walkie-talkies that had knocked the pins down".
posted by trillion at 12:28 PM on September 18, 2002

Reminiscent of some parts of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake.
posted by /\/\/\/ at 12:29 PM on September 18, 2002

I'm a little in awe: I couldn't write such beautiful and evocative poetry if I wanted to.

(Fortunately, I don't.)
posted by skryche at 12:35 PM on September 18, 2002

(text below is Babble output using the MeFi comments section from 9/11/2001 about the plane hitting the WTC...I edited out all the "posted by" lines for the input, but otherwise this is what it produced (formatting too) for the first 5 seconds)

Missiles exploding. I think there will the
BBC is down an overstatement to hit? No. Will I
can't see my colleagues have to go o er the US soil
is going to protect ourselves a bunch of those not
bombing/political machines.

Sigh

Fox News apparently (NBC), a straight into
production. Actual, after everything is ok, the
deaths of this on CNN web site is in our overseas
embassies are not making about the only way to
survive make sense with the planes owing that it up.
he's most concerned that harbor them. "In the US,
etc."

ABC News reports of them.
posted by grum@work at 12:59 PM on September 18, 2002

This is Sporge!

See this article to find out more - and wo! What was with that link to an .exe file in the header of that post!
posted by RubberHen at 1:02 PM on September 18, 2002

grum@work: Wow. That's...significantly better than the Sept 11 poems post from a couple weeks ago. Depressing, ain't it?
posted by hippugeek at 1:23 PM on September 18, 2002

There's also babelfish, which translates (badly) through various languages. If you run it through repeatedly, you can get things like this:

At the time of the ampere, the thou Romeo of art of the wherefore of the Romeo and the Romeo if? ....Is there something in name? That that we call is raised by any other name would feel as a candy. So Romeo, were it not designated Romeo, maintain this dear Verkollkommnung, which owes it without this title. The Romeo, it shows, the doff and because of the thy Namensthy it is the thee of the part which is not, acquisition entirely.
posted by hippugeek at 1:47 PM on September 18, 2002

It looks like this stuff has been around for a while. The oldest post I found with a similar lexicon was August 15, 2001.


"the stuck keyhole may create more watchers . . "
posted by cruelfate at 3:13 PM on September 18, 2002

There's also babelfish, which translates (badly) through various languages.

A couple years ago I posted on my website a tongue-in-cheek listing of Christmas carols that I had taken through the Babelfish translation path English-French-English-German-English-Italian-English-Portuguese-English-Spanish-English. The name of the page was "The Most Narcotic Period of Anniversary", which is the translation of "The Most Wonderful Time of the Year".

They can get a bit sinister. "White Christmas", the title of which is translated as "Native White Man", begins

The dream of a native white right of the man has taste of this, this one I has last to the knowledge where the stops of the tree to only feel I-I dream of the children and glitzern of the native white man when, of that practitioner to know where the stop of the tree ignites and feels the children
posted by quarantine at 3:28 PM on September 18, 2002

If you'll pump Nell's mailbox with librarians, it'll happily reload the stack.

Kinky.
posted by Foosnark at 5:45 PM on September 18, 2002

Linda, still flowing, rolls almost usably, as the algorithm disappears in their gorilla.

Oh man. I'm hurting myself laughing.

This doesn't look like output from Babble, or re-re-re-reprocessed Babel, either. I'm really curious how it was generated. It's not purely random, obviously, because there's a tiny semblance of grammar and sentence structure. Most sentences seem to contain a name or pronoun, for example.

When doesn't Pearl inflate eerily?

Both messages are from the same generator, though, given the similar tech babble and details like gorillas.
posted by pzarquon at 6:13 PM on September 18, 2002

Reminds me of Racter on drugs.
posted by Slithy_Tove at 8:01 PM on September 18, 2002

Text steganography. Here's an online program that does it ("Texto"), and here's another article explaining sporge.
posted by taz at 8:40 PM on September 18, 2002

Small boy
Also in the morning a deficient boy
I do not have the gift that he can be obtained
This is modified for particular requirements, around our king to the elasticity
I must play for you?
In the cylinder of the mine

Quarantine, if all Christmas carols sounded like this, I would be much more likely to go to church. I would also be more likely to buy a Britney Spears album if instead of "Oops, I Did It Again," she sang:

The Oops, I repeated that.
You play with your center of the storing which is lost by the play.
Ohio state -, baby of baby.
posted by hippugeek at 11:49 PM on September 18, 2002