The Irvania Blog

Okay, I admit it. I’m not exactly the most prolific or timely blogger out there. Now, finally, after years of minor annoyance, the spammers have done me a favor: they’ve given me something to write a blog entry about.

I mentioned on my bio page that I had to change the contact e-mail address on my web site because the old address was inundated with hundreds of spam messages every day. Then, shortly after I launched this blog and the Irvania discussion board last month, I noticed that somebody was attempting to use the new discussion board to send spam. I swatted the nuisances down as they popped up. Then somebody tried it on the new guestbook. Just yesterday, somebody tried sending spam in the form of comments attached to my last blog entry.

Dealing with the spammers is easy. They’re not the sharpest computer users around (otherwise they wouldn’t spend so much time and energy sending spam) and wiping out their daily efforts before anything is seen by the public is generally just a few keystrokes and a few seconds of my time each day. It would be a minor annoyance in my daily routine if I didn’t enjoy squashing them so.

Still, all this spam raises two questions in my mind: who is doing it, and why?

The first question: why. Who knows? A deliberate attempt to pester people who run blogs and online forums? Hardly seems like a reason to waste hours every day. A need to annoy people who read blogs and forums? Can’t be. Financial reward? You gotta be kidding me… does anyone actually make any money sending spam? Does anyone really buy the stuff they pretend to be selling?

The second question: who. Okay, I haven’t bothered tracing back the inept attempts at IP spoofing and the bogus free e-mail accounts to figure out exactly who it is, but it’s pretty obvious from the tracks left in the mud that it’s one person doing almost all of it. The subject matter is pretty juvenile, the writing is sophomoric, and the whole thing looks like it comes from someone who doesn’t speak English as a first, or even second, language. Based on all that, my first guess was that it was coming from a kid with lots of time on his hands, probably in Russia based on some of the net path.

But then I got thinking… what if it’s not just some 11-year-old punk in Kiev with a lot of time on his hands? My mind started racing over the options… could it be that Russian hacker who got into the system four or five years ago? No, the Mossad took him out. Could it be a rival game designer? No, they’re all literate. Could it be that it’s that irate person who e-mailed me years ago who was really angry because he’d done a “really complicated” web search and ended up at my lame web site and couldn’t figure out how to get back out again? No, he wouldn’t be able to find this blog.

Then it hit me: hey, wait a minute.

Whoever is doing this is spending hours every day, week after week, specifically trying to harrass me, even though all evidence should be telling them they’re getting nowhere. Not only can’t they spell, they can’t put a sentence together to save their life. They’re wasting lots of time doing something pointless when they should be out looking for a job. They’re involved in illegal activities and they have no problem with using other peoples’ stuff without permission. Hmmm…

Could it be? Could the real-life Dweasels be back?

Stay tuned.

[Note from Dave: For some reason, this particular article generates a great deal of spam comments. I delete them all before they’re posted, of course, but for reasons that are beyond me this piece attracts spammers like transvestites to a Marilyn Monroe convention. Therefore I’ve disallowed comments on this article, just to cut down on the amount of spam I have to delete daily.]

Last night I saw an ad on TV for a new movie about the 300 Spartan dudes at Thermopylae, entitled, I think, “300 Spartan Dudes at Thermopylae“. Or something like that. Then something happened that somehow disturbed me: I realized I wasn’t really interested in seeing the movie.

I thought to myself: What kind of wargamer am I? What kind of military history buff am I? Here’s a new movie about some historical battle, of obvious interest to wargamers, with lots of great special effects and fight scenes. I should be looking forward to seeing the movie. Instead, I’m more interested in trying to figure out the structure and symbolism of Aeschylus’ early dramas.

(For some reason, I don’t remember seeing any Ancient Greek Dramatist army lists in DBA or DBM or Armati or WRG 7th or any of the other Ancients wargame rulesets. That’s too bad, I’ll bet my Aristophanes army could clean some serious clock if it were up against a Sophocles or Euripides army. “Spears forward, my Frogs! Advance to contact! Ribbet like you mean it!”)

But anyway. Since that lame Pearl Harbor movie came out a few years ago I haven’t seen a lot of the newer war movies. I saw Troy and Alexander but I didn’t see Alamo or Master & Commander or a bunch of the others. I just haven’t been interested. That’s got me thinking: Am I really a wargamer? Any real wargamer would feel obligated to see each and every one of these movies, preferably several times.

This is an interesting point, because several of the main characters in my first book find themselves questioning their identities, what they expect of themselves and what society expects of them. (”Are we not Dweasels?” “Are we not Bad Days?”)

Am I getting jaded, or am I just being a normal Bad Day?

Whichever, I feel a new set of house rules for DBA coming on…