My spam avatar

  • I get slammed with spam e-mail, like every­one does these days, but I was a lit­tle intrigued to find that my spam had cre­ated a new per­son to send spam to. In the course of throw­ing out ran­dom names — any­thing to get past a spam fil­ter, right? — one of the spams gen­er­ated the name “joaprh ellis.” And then some­how that name got affil­i­ated with my e-mail address, and mes­sages addressed to joaprh ellis started arriving.

    As it stands right now, joaprh gets more spam than I do. Which seems a lit­tle unfair some­how. Don’t I mat­ter? Aren’t I good enough to receive all the valu­able and excit­ing offers that go to joaprh? What’s he got that I don’t have?

    But then, of course, you can’t help being intrigued with this man of mys­tery. Who is this joaprh? What siren call haunts him that he wants so badly to make $50;000 overnight!! and yet CLEAR UPP B.AD CRED.IT at the same time? He seems to be some­one that has a lot of prob­lems, and yet he’s out there, tak­ing life as it comes, try­ing to find the best prices on hotels in Milan, mak­ing all those inquiries to find out how to finnally bee t.he BOSS!!@ And he never gets tired of find­ing solu­tions to life’s thorni­est prob­lems — some­times he wants to read the same infor­ma­tion eight or ten times just to make sure that it’s not just too good to be true! What a guy!

    So I real­ized that since joaprh was work­ing to make some­thing of him­self, the least I could do was to help out. It seems to me that joaprh’s biggest prob­lem is that he doesn’t have a real­ity. Well, I’m no Dr. Franken­stein, but since you have a whole dig­i­tal indus­try focused on cre­at­ing avatars — the lit­tle char­ac­ters you make up to rep­re­sent you in every­thing from a com­puter game to a blog com­ment to a instant mes­sage — I could cer­tainly give my good friend joaprh a push in the right direc­tion by giv­ing him his own avatar.

    avatar 2But when I Googled “avatar cre­ation” I saw that I had a prob­lem. The ones you get that way are all just too dippy, too perky. They all came from Anime world where tiny noses are upturned and eyes are huge. And they’re just too darned young to have enjoyed the full life that I know joaprh has. Even when I was try­ing to give my avatar the dark, brood­ing look of a man who is very, very inter­ested in skankky-chix-all-the-time, the best I could do was this annoy­ing lit­tle nerd at right. Phooey! That won’t do for mr. ellis.

    In the end, I had to employ a low-tech solu­tion call­ing “draw­ing” and make joaprh’s avatar myself to try to cap­ture the many sides of this multi-layered indi­vid­ual. I mean, con­sider what I know of him:

    • He has prob­lems – He’s obese. He’s going bald. He’s got sleep apnea, dan­druff, aller­gies, sex­ual dys­func­tion (poor mrs. ellis!), fun­gus in his toes and good­ness knows what else. Mod­esty didn’t allow me to keep pry­ing into his pri­vate affairs.
    • He craves escape — He’s just got to get away on a 14-day cruise, round-the-world travel pack­age or get a valu­able time­share in Europe and Asia in spite of the fact that he NEEDS CASH NOW-No WAITTING.
    • He’s got an eye for a bar­gain — Joaprh never inquires into any­thing that isn’t so ridicu­lously under­priced that he has to see it to believe it. I don’t want to find fault, but it sounds to me like he’s just cheap.
    • He’s a health food nut — No preser­v­a­tives for this boy! He wants to buy his gen.er#ic alll-NATRal vit­ta­mins in BULKK.
    • He des­per­ately craves higher edu­ca­tion — It’s just heart­break­ing that some­one with joaprh’s com­plete inabil­ity to spell cor­rectly is for­ever look­ing into get­ting a GED, BA or MBA.
    • He loves free verse poetry — Many is the time that I’ve reflected on the deep mean­ing of the strings of verse that close out so many of the appeals that come his way. What a cul­tured indi­vid­ual he must be if even the tough­est sales pitch has to end with “library egg­beater frigidaire frankly scar­let i dont give a damn the­ater blender dia­mond cof­feecup” to catch his attention.

    So my joaprh ellis avatar is below. I think I’ve got him started here. I hope you’ll all get to know him. He may not look like much, but he gets a lot of mail, so he must be impor­tant.
    spam avatar1


    Related posts:

    1. The S-word
    2. The Ortho­dox con­vert list

    September 26th, 2006 | Grace | 3 Comments |

3 Responses and Counting...

  • Word­mama 09.26.2006

    Hey, I used to date him, didn’t I?

  • Grace

    No, I think Eduardo had less teeth. But, y’know, you have to take your inspi­ra­tion from somewhere.

    Actu­ally, you may find my for­ays into the world of avatar cre­ation mildly inter­est­ing. Since it’s mostly the pur­suit of the Gen-Y crowd, I was mis­taken for some­one that was WAY too inter­ested in chang­ing lit­tle out­fits and back­grounds. And of course, none of the avatars looked like any nor­mal peo­ple, and of all the things that were inter­change­able for a female, the basic look was iron­cast. I was going to look like a snotty lit­tle slat­tern, by golly, though I could have 20 dif­fer­ent hair­dos if I wanted. Kind of sad, because there are prob­a­bly a lot of great young women that will think they’re deformed if they’re not built like Lara Croft (who actu­ally is deformed). But then an old fart like me would say that.

  • Mimi

    Bwa­ha­ha­haa­hah­ha­haa. That’s funny.

    And, the avatar, just what I was picturing.

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