Chaos Theory: Twitter secret spammers with Gene Weingarten

Quotes

krisjohn:
"I hope we have to go through all of this crap because out of an infinite number of timelines, this is the only one where we survive. Otherwise it's hard to justify."
mightshould:
"I'm coping. That's a major accomplishment. Anything else is bonus."
Mary Rodgers:
"So I asked the shrink: When you're depressed because of actual things that are depressing, are there any drugs that can make you feel better? And he said no, which was even more depressing."
David Sedaris, Happy-Go-Lucky:
"I figured my post-college life would be pretty much like the one I'd been leading for the past decade: work some little job I didn't have to put much into, then come home and do my own stuff. It was the life that most of my friends had, and half my family." "It's a consequence of putting stuff out there--you're going to get reactions."
Kristina Marusic:
"There likely aren’t a ton of people on this planet—let alone within your geography or social circles—whose moral compass, sense of humor, Netflix addictions, dietary restrictions, and idiosyncrasies sync up with yours closely enough to make you want to hitch your wagon to them for the long-haul (and the internet is making us all even picker)."
John Oliver:
"Let this be a lesson that you absolutely don’t want to fuck with someone who has the patience, attention to detail, and sustained anger to crochet their resentment into a handmade garment."
Gail Donovan, quoted in "Knitting Yarns" in the essay "Knitted Goods"
"I love taking what is basically a long string and constructing a three-dimensional object. I love thinking about how somebody figured out how to do that!"
Amber A’Lee Frost:
"It’s not just bad for a person to rely on their weakest skills for survival; it’s unsustainable and immiserating."
Michael Che:
“You know what else makes you do crazy things? Crazy,”
August and Annie/Isaiah, "One Last Stop."
"Does it ever, like...I don't know. Make you lonely? To love somebody who can't meet you there?" "Sometimes. But, you know, that feeling?" When you wake up in the morning and you have somebody to think about? Somewhere for hope to go? It's good. Even when it's bad, it's good."
Katie Brennan:
"The Office taught me that love isn’t always an immediate burst of rainbows and butterflies; sometimes the best kind of love is a quiet, enduring, and steadfast process. When you really love someone, you know they are worth putting in time and effort. Even if you entertain the thought of someone else during the process, i.e. you get yourself a Karen, you know they can’t compare to your person. No amount of time can make that connection fade, so whether it’s consciously or subconsciously, you wait for your stars to align. It might take your company casually hosting a Casino Night, or a heartfelt post it note attached to an Office Olympics “medal,” but eventually your time comes—and when it does, it’s pretty much the best thing ever."
Jane Tyson Clement:
"We don't notice the strange way things come about while they are coming about. It is only afterwards that we see the pattern..."
"Candace Kahn," Almost Romance:
"You can't blow off a good story just because it's challenging."
Nick Cave:
"I prefer to say that I have made, for reasons of survival, a commitment to the uncertain nature of the world. This is where my heart lies. I suspect it always has."
Ted Lasso:
"I love meeting people's moms. It's like reading an instruction manual as to why they're nuts."
Ask Amy:
"My point is that you can lay out your plans, but the world might have other ideas."
supercrayon:
"But I kept thinking there’s a future me a week or a month or a year away that is through this. That future me is not plagued by uncertainty, they know what happened and they’re looking back at how things played out. I liked to think that future me was sending strength and love to present me. Sometimes now, present me in fact does send strength and love back towards past me. Your future selves know what happened. The you of a week or a month from now knows, and has already started to plan your next moves. I hope strength and love are rippling up and down the timeline between yourselves."
Christina Long (Washington Post)
“WHY ARE NONE OF MY INTERESTS WORTH ANYTHING IN DOLLARS,”
Michael Diamond:
“People get frustrated when they can’t see the future,” says Diamond. “The future looks scary if you’re telling them it’s just staying at home for the next 12 to 18 months. You shouldn’t really be that surprised when at least a fraction of them get angry."
Seanan McGuire:
"Please stop trying to solve me. I'm not a problem."
Morrie Morgan, in "Work Song" by Ivan Doig:
"I don't know any cure for being myself. The lotion for that hasn't been concocted yet."
Jason Mendoza:
“Sometimes you just gotta huck a Molotov cocktail at a drone and see what happens.”
Augusten Burroughs:
"But impossible is a concept that makes one's heart laugh and throw peanuts at the television."
Augusten Burroughs:
"Even if things aren't catastrophic now, catastrophe has always followed me. Life unfolds, right? All the time, it's unfolding, and I'm going to follow it."
Augusten Burroughs:
"My life has never really been “happily ever after.” I’ve always had conflict and disaster follow me around like a shadow, and I can’t really believe that will suddenly stop now that I’m happily living in Connecticut with three dogs. We’re just going to have to see."
Jacqui:
“If you have a job where you’re not coming home with stories, it’s time to leave. That simply is our qualification. Healthcare helps. Benefits are nice, but oh my god, how do you not come home with stories? It is the easiest qualification, but it’s true. My feeling is if you don’t have a story, it wasn’t a good day."
armeowda:
"Many people can cast their affections broad and bright as floodlights, but others of us are laser beams, and when something actually trips our attraction/affection sensors it can feel like a certain kind of instant precision strike, and it can leave a mark forever."
Stan Tatkin
"There's actually nothing more difficult on the planet than another person."
Lani Diane Rich:
"What doesn't kill you makes you stranger."
Heather Havrilesky:
"Do they let me write these words because I’m good at it, or do they let me do it because I’m an entertainingly crazy person who is slowly but surely unraveling before 50,000-to-100,000 sets of eyeballs each week?"
Justin Peters:
"The simple lesson that Millionaire taught me is that if you want to change your life—either by winning a lot of money on television or by some more prosaic means—at some point you are going to have to take a risk. Unless you are John Carpenter, you will eventually have to step into the unknown, bet on yourself, and hope that you are making the right decision."
Leslie Jones
"Women are the same as humans."
Anne Lamott:
“If you’re paying attention and making your own life as beautiful and rich and fun as it can be, you might just attract someone who’s doing the same thing,” she said. “You can give up on tracking someone down with your butterfly net.” “Never give up, no matter how things look or how long they take. Don’t quit before the miracle.”
Seanan McGuire:
"If what I say doesn’t help you, ask someone else, until you find the person whose reply tells you how to kick the damn door down."
Grangousier:
"It's 2018. There's a realistic chance of pretty much anything happening if it's ridiculous enough."
Joy:
"I feel a constant low level of stress every day, just by virtue of existing in my environment,"
Fancy Feast:
"When she was on a bad date, she would go to the bathroom, hit her nose until she got a nosebleed, and excuse herself, because it was easier to punch herself in the face than suffer the consequences of rejecting a man."
Ber:
"Get your freak on, screw the powers that would deny you."
Lee Bradford:
"Lee? Why does all this weird shit only seem to happen to you? Well, disembodied voice from nowhere-statistically, it has to happen somewhere."
David Neal:
“Nobody told us that our ‘15 Minutes of Fame’ would include shaming, insults, threats, etc. And that we might not have even asked for it.”

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September 30, 2009

Twitter secret spammers with Gene Weingarten

"The other day, while noodling around on Twitter, I discovered the page for this attractive, perky young person, Vanessa Alfano. As you can see, Ms. Alfano's life interests are peculiarly commercial: She is into weight-loss programs, home marketing make-money schemes, hot porn teen videos, and she's REALLY into teeth whitening products. Even though those are the subjects of all of her tweets -- she's a relentless generator of spam -- she's got more than a thousand followers signed up to read her every word. She has roughly the same number of followers that I do.

This seemed puzzling to me, so I did a little research. It turns out there is a Vanessa Alfano, and she is, indeed, the woman in the picture. She's a former TV weather lady and early-morning smiley-chatty girl for Fox 5 and CBS affiliates in New York. Currently, she is running a health and fitness Web site and can really use publicity, so she was delighted to get a call from The Washington Post and help me out with whatever I wanted.

Here is how the call went:

Me: So. You just have to answer a few simple questions.

Vanessa: Okay!

Me: How can I get whiter teeth?

Vanessa: Omigosh. I don't know. Maybe baking soda?

Me: What's the best way to make $56K a year working from home?

Vanessa: Omigosh. I don't know. Come up with a good idea, I guess.

Me: Know any sites for hot teen porn?

Vanessa: No! That's not my thing! (pause) Why are you asking me this?

Me: Have you seen your Twitter page lately?

Vanessa: Uh oh. Oh [bad word.]

So I gave her the url, the one you are looking at, which it turns out is not her actual personal Twitter page.

Vanessa: Okay, hang on. Getting it on my screen here. (high-pitched squeally voice) OH MY GOD. THAT'S TOTALLY MY PICTURE.

Me: Totally!

Vanessa: OH MY GOD. SHE HAS MORE FOLLOWERS THAN I DO!

Posted on September 30, 2009 at 09:44 AM in Geekitude | Permalink

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