Spam, Spam, Earthquakes, and Spam
The funny thing with earthquakes is, obviously, you don’t expect them unless you, I guess, work at a geologist’s, a seismologist’s, I don’t know.
But the funny thing is, once they start happening, you first have to go through, hey, what is this?
Is this an earthquake?
It’s an earthquake.
I better go on social and see if everybody else is also posting there’s an earthquake.
And then if you’re me, you go and start checking for the earthquake reporting sites and they typically take a couple of minutes.
So you have a couple of minutes of, I’m not crazy, right?
But then you can see all the posts on Facebook, man, it was a long earthquake today.
I think 10 or 12 seconds here, it was located very close to where we are.
I never know what to make of the earthquake readings because you’re like, oh, it was a magnitude 4.8.
And then an hour later, like, I mean, it was a 4.7, but all I know it was a lot, it was a lot.
And the whole house is shaking and it’s making a lot of noise.
And I like to think of myself as somebody who’s good in an emergency.
Your Daily Lex.
And I think I was, I mean, what are you going to do in an earthquake?
In the first two seconds, I was like, this is an earthquake.
And I came out and, you know, I’m in the center of the house and I’m telling everybody, this is an earthquake.
You are safe.
Not enough time to tell them to go to anywhere safe.
And I really think that there’s no place that you’re supposed to go in an earthquake.
Like, you know, he’s talking about doorways, some people like bathtubs, but none of it really is any good.
If anything, you’re supposed to get under something big and not be in a room where lots of things can fall on you.
And we don’t have a ton of things that can fall on you in this house, which is good.
But I appreciate that once again, I was able to spring into action.
I couldn’t decide if I want to say sprung into action or sprang into action.
I think I want to say I sprang into action.
So I sprang and did nothing other than tell people, hey, this is an earthquake.
Boy, it’s lasting a really long time.
Jesus, this is really long.
And then I definitely let out an F-bomb, like, what the F is going on?
And then it stopped.
And then of course, once it’s done, I want to look outside to see if you get neighbors to come outside and be like, wow, that was an earthquake.
And my family’s like, you can’t go outside.
And I’m like, no, you can go outside.
You don’t want to go outside during an earthquake because, again, you want to avoid things falling on you, especially you don’t want to be by anything big.
And it’s safe for driving.
You’re supposed to pull over, but don’t pull over under an overpass for hopefully obvious reasons.
So anyway, earthquakes are fun because now it dominates the whole day.
And I still have a little bit of the adrenaline rush of, hey, the whole world is shaking.
Crazy.
Anyway.
Also, spam.
I want to talk about spam.
That was my other topic for today.
A couple of days ago, I wake up and my inbox is overstuffed, certainly compared to normal.
And I’m trying to understand what the heck is going on in here.
And I have all these bounce emails and I’m realizing I’m getting a bunch of bounce messages from emails I have allegedly sent, encouraging people to buy Bitcoin.
And then I realized that it’s spammers specifically abusing the signup form for Lex’s games at Lex.games, wherever you surf the internet and wherever you get your podcasts.
So this rogue account was signing up for accounts using other people’s email addresses, I guess, and making its username be like, you should buy Bitcoin at this URL and signing up with multiple variants of that.
And then having the emails get triggered, I’m like, hey, thanks for signing up for my games.
You should sign up for Bitcoin at this URL.
It’s just obnoxious, right?
Like just crap.
And of course it’s coming from me.
And it started doing this around two in the morning.
So I was in a wake to know that it was happening.
So at seven in the morning, I was able to stop it, not even with the use of a captcha, which I’m not above using.
I just would prefer not to use just by checking for obnoxious usernames in more strict ways, which literally immediately eliminated the problem.
But it’s just, it really is crappy that spammers ruin everything because they do.
They’ve ruined email, which is still functional, but they ruined it.
And I don’t know, just the fact that I have to take time to block spammers from signing up for my games, lest they use that to send one crap.
And like, I mostly felt bad about is that I was now the spammer, like they were abusing my thing.
So people were getting emails from me saying, Hey, thanks for signing up for my game site, but they didn’t sign up for my game site.
Luckily, I guess most of them bounce, but probably 30 or 40 messages really were sent to people who had no idea what the hell was going on.
I mean, they just assumed it was spam, I guess, but I’m not a spammer.
You guys, it’s not cool.
Anyway, uh, get fired up for the aftershocks.
Also an alcohol that I really used to enjoy, um, now there’s fireball, but, uh, have a wonderful weekend and, uh, stay safe out there.
You crazy kids.
Lex.