Pornbots Keep Sending Me High Fantasy Excerpts
Yah, it's more shit from my inbox
Last week I shared with you all some selections from emails I didn’t ask for. The edition’s reception was fairly tepid. But if you’ll indulge me once more…
For a month or two now I’ve been getting dozens of porn spam emails every day. I’d say about a third of them come from an address with a regular-sounding name and have a subject line like “Hey Logan We Have Met! Looking for you!” Another third are emails informing me that a Google doc with a gibberish file name has been shared with me. The ones that go straight to spam are all “hot singles meet now older women want u sex me now.” But the final third that make it to my actual inbox are these random sort of flowery non sequitur phrases. The sender accounts all have old-fashioned but not-quite-real girls names, and there are no links inside, just attached PDFs of porn. Like…here’s the most recent one:
(I don’t open or download the PDFs because I’m not a fucking idiot. Oh, and before you fact-check any of my assumptions about porn or try to read into my own habits, just know that I don’t object to porn’s existence, but I literally never partake in it. I don’t watch it, and I’m not just saying that because my parents read these emails. It’s not my thing!)
Today, I decided to look into just what this word salad is.
Even aside from the rain and wind it hadn't been a happy practice session.
Turns out, that is a line from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (they’re practicing Quidditch), which does make a little sense, if the the emails are being auto-filled from random English language text sources. But could there be a deeper meaning?
Yesterday I got one from “Emmaline Yearling” with the subject line “Madame Professora Vorthys” and in the body of the email: “Jill Meyers was there and they wound up having coffeetogether in the hospital.” (yes, coffeetogether was one word)
By searching that phrase with the quotation marks, I found that it comes from The Kinsman Saga, a sci-fi novel by Ben Bova. Professora Vorthys is apparently a character in the Vorkosigan Saga book series by Lois McMaster Bujold, but “Emmaline Yearling” turned up no search results.
I kept going. Turns out “the complexities of sorcery and worlds and history” is courtesy of Revelation by Carol Berg, along with “the dark green water lapping eagerly over the low sides.” Combing through my Trash folder, I found a second line from Harry Potter — “You've used spiders in Potions loads of times / I don't mind them dead” — and one from that Vorkosigan series: “She darted like an eel around the Dendarii guards.” Sexy stuff?
A pattern began to emerge: sci-fi and fantasy.
I suppose the connection to fantasy makes a tiny bit of sense…after all, porn presents a (very different kind of) fantasy to its consumer, and however stereotypical this may be, I do imagine that the kind of sap who might download this stuff…is also a huge fucking nerd.
But the phrases are so clipped…at first I hadn’t even recognized them as anything more than word salad.
“the surfaces within the Ship of the Law cleaned” and “themselves; it was taken for granted by the children” and “The unfamiliar corridors smelled new” are all from Anvil Of Stars by Greg Bear. Is that supposed to look like an email a friend would send so I open it without a thought? My friends are weird but they’re not that weird.
Some of it’s just funny. Maybe not ha-ha funny, but idk, there’s something amusing about opening the digital version of a Playboy and seeing a topless co-ed and the caption is “bestingthem more often than not” (I’ve kept all typos as-found) (from Manifold: Origin by Stephen Baxter). “Surely Fade was terrified,” Furies of Calderon by Jim Butcher, is that supposed to turn me on?
This little exercise also laid bare how, frankly, nonsensical sci-fi and fantasy-speak sounds in the “real world,” an observation that’s been made before and played out by many a sitcom. “Still the Elder species subsequently took almost nothing to do with the rest of life in the galaxy whose physical trappings they invariably left behind; tyrants went unchecked” is a baffling and possibly un-grammatical series of words…it is also lifted from The Hydrogen Sonata by Iain M. Banks.
Some phrases I was convinced were AI-generated gibberish until I looked them up. “When the Soro intervened to end Pilan indenture to the Kisa” can’t make sense in context, right? The first couple links I clicked on led me to believe this was a poorly translated text from something in Hungarian, which I would have accepted, but nope! It’s from Startide Rising, a 1983 novel by American scientist and author David Brin, and I’m just gonna put the first paragraph of the description of Startide Rising from Brin’s website here:
The Terran exploration vessel Streaker, crewed by 150 uplifted dolphins, 7 humans, and one uplifted chimpazee, discovers a derelict fleet of spaceships — each the size of a small moon. They appear to belong to the Progenitors, the fabled First Race who seeded wisdom throughout the stars.
A HUNDRED AND FIFTY UPLIFTED DOLPHINS!!!!!!!
I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be a snob, maybe the book is good or just one of those things you enjoy if that’s your thing but it’s not my thing (like porn!), but oh my God. Can sci-fi just be…anything? Should I write some shit about my cat Matilda becoming Galactic Empress or whatever?
In fairness, I found some better lines that were taken from another Brin book, Heaven’s Reach: “A practitioner of thequaint Eartbling art of calculus” and “Both arms of his harness twitched as his rattled” and “The wagon passengers had already bathed” and “stiffened by rigid bones.”
Then again, I also found “brainsent spasmodic commands down the neural link” which is from Brin’s Infinity’s Shore, a totally terrible half-sentence but also, I guess, the closest thing to sex talk in this little project.
The most popular text source is Terry Brooks’ The Chronicles of Shannara series. Hot Girls In My Area have recently reached out to me with the following:
“But there are some within these walls who feel much differently-some who have lost friends and loved ones to the Gnomes who lay siege without” (The Wishsong of Shannara)
“Bargainss mean nothing now” (The Wishsong of Shannara)
“and theirbreath exhaled in a haze of white,” (The Heritage of Shannara unless it’s from The Druid Of Shannara, Google Books isn’t really sure)
“Two armed sentries were stationed before the door,” (The Sword of Shannara)
“and finally of their flight to the highlands.”(The Sword of Shannara, which might be a trilogy encompassing some of these other books, hard to tell)
“Yet within the shadow of their cowls” (The Elfstones of Shannara)
“even her neck and head-fingers so rough they felt as if they were made of wood” (The Elfstones of Shannara)
“Allanon came forward and stopped at the foot of the bed” (The Elfstones of Shannara)
“you merit that trust” (The Elfstones of Shannara)
“he rode swiftly away into the darkness” (The Elfstones of Shannara)
One has to wonder what author Terry Brooks and his cohort think of their work being used for this.
I’m so absolutely tickled by the implications of this discovery. I’d like to think the logic is that it’s every nerd’s fantasy to be standing awkwardly in the corner at a party, gripping a beer and sweating slightly, when a scorching hot horny chick walks up to him, places a manicured hand on his shoulder, leans forward and whispers into his ear, “Allanon came forward and stopped at the foot of the bed” (The Elfstones of Shannara). Oh my god, the hottie gets me!!!!! And this is the email version of that?
Or maybe it’s like, it’s rounding out the character of the girl in the picture. Because these porn consumers, they don’t just want to whack it to a girl’s (it’s always a girl) looks, they’re also interested in her personality. They won’t be able to splooj into a ratty hand towel until they know she’s got brains to match her beauty, and when he sees in the email “carryingthem up through the trees and into the darkened skies” (The Heritage of Shannara), god, he gets so hard for that well-read smokeshow.
As for the names of these “people” emailing me, besides Vorthys, I only got one hit: deceased former President of China Jiang Zemin. Who, I’m guessing, doesn’t send a lot of emails anymore. Which means that the other names are all available for you to use for your upcoming fantasy epic! Go ahead and call your starship commanders and high priestesses and naked models…
Britta Swiss
Rosy Dunphe
Verona Overshiner
Taylor Guilmette
Joetta Sica
Marinda Mcquirk
Carolynn Valley
Consuela Griffth
Berneice Kitchenman
Fidelia Mcclaughry
Adelaide Eastburn
Classie Teto
Alina Hollobaugh
…as this issue was going to print, I got an email featuring the longest text to date, apparently from The Son of Tarzan:
…so now I don’t know what to think!
To any phishing scammers or spammers currently reading this, yes, you can use Lizzie Logan Is A Genius as a text source, but you have to also paste my head on top of the naked bodies. It’s only fair!
Update from my quest to get free things from brands:
Two more cases of Nixie arrived.
I’ll stop copy-pasting from my emails…soon!
Lizzie