Green Eggs and Spam

I've been getting a ton of spam comments to my blog for a while now:

As you can see, it's mainly in Chinese. Which is annoying. Well, spam is just annoying in general. And, strangely, it never used to be like this. I never used to get any spam comments. (I never used to get any comments at all...) but all of a sudden, a few certain posts are getting attacked by this randomness. Sigh. Good job I approve all my comments first though =/

However, some comments are not so unintelligible. Sometimes I get an actual sentence, either string together by somebody in a foreign country using an internet translator so it comes across as near nonsense, or by some crazy spam bot, I don't know. But I love them! Really strange, prophetic almost, phrases that seem to mean nothing and yet kind of fascinate me. I'm not entirely sure why, they're just crap really, but it gets a chuckle out of me.

And then I had a little inspiration moment and thought, I could make some great illustrations from these. So this is my new project.

I've got about 5 comments sitting there that could be vaguely useful, so I'm starting there. After I've done an illustration for each one, I'll just wait until I get another good bit of spam, and so on. So there'll be no schedule to this project; if and when I get a good nonsensical sentence, I'll do a new image. Should be interesting, if nothing else :)

I'm working on the first one right now. Still need a good title for the project though, can't just call it 'Spam Project'. Hmmm. I'll get back to you on that.

I'm definitely not the first person to do something like this, other awesome spam related projects out there are:

Linzie Hunter's Spam Project -

Elliott Burford: Spam -

I'll probably come across a few more on my travels. Nice stuff :)

Oh, it seems to be 2010. How did that happen?

Hello there! It has been a while, almost exactly a month since my last post. This is of course because something called Christmas happened, which we all know is the best time of year, except if you work in retail, then it is the worst. So I literally stopped internetting for about 3 weeks - didn't even check my email or nuffin. The hours that I wasn't spending at work I was doing christmassy/relaxy things with family, and it actually felt great to completely unplug. It also meant that I did almost nothing creative, except wrap some presents rather beautifully, but honestly, I feel no guilt. Christmas was hard. I got 6 days off over the whole xmas/new year period, which is a lot less than most of you, I bet. This is the problem you see, if I was still a student I'd get 2 or 3 weeks off, and if I had a decent job I'd get about 2 off as well. But, as a recent graduate and bottom of the pile, I had to sell sell sell to you consumer people. Ah.

So as a result of this, here are some facts:

I have 500+ unread emails in my hotmail, all of which are newsletters of some sort. Ugh.
I have 1000+ unread items in my RSS reader. Yep. Clearly I was the only one who stopped blogging over christmas. You crazies.
I had about 35 comments waiting for approval on this blog, 34 of which were spam. Which I don't mind because a few of them were hilarious. Most are just in chinese which means nothing to me, but some seem to be written by spam bots who string several unrelated words together to form nonsensical sentences. Which, me being me, I find fascinating and am going to make a new illustration project from because they are great :D
I have 0 job offers. (unsurprisingly, lols.)
I have about 7 new twitter followers, how I don't know because I stopped tweeting for a while too.
I have a brand new shiny digital camera (its pink!!) which I got from father christmas so I can post even more amazing pictures. Ah. Did I tell you its pink?

So, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, let's get this show back on the road.

Oh, yes. My job wasn't extended past christmas temp. The most gutting thing ever. So last day was yesterday. So I'm FRIGGIN UNEMPLOYED AGAIN. However, I'm still waiting to hear back about an interview I had at none other than AMV.BBDO before christmas so mega fingers crossed for me. More on that later.

So I'm spending my new found free time so promote myself to commissioners and get some illustration jobs, hopefully. Again, more on how I'm going to do this in the next post, which is tomorrow. I'm literally going to do the 9-5 thing at my mac up here in my loft and work my ass off to become rich and famous.

2010 = Rachel gets awesome jobs, moves out, finds some sort of boy-type. Trust me.

BBC website Error 404

This is random, I know. I was just going onto radio 1's website and I typed it in wrong or something. Anyway the 404 message comes up (what exactly is a 404 message anyway, what happened to 403 and 405?) and look:


It's got the little clown with his chalkboard saying 404! Do you remember him? He used to be with the girl, when BBC stopped broadcasting at night or something went wrong, it was super old school and then seeing it like this made me laugh. They actually went to the trouble of doing that, instead of just saying '404 error'. I think that's really cute! Awesome.

I told you it was random.

Dawdlr

I completely forgot that I did this. Dawdlr is a great little site, a small pocket of rebellion against an online world that is 'updated' every single second with what people are doing, where, through status updates, twitter, you know all that jazz. Dawdlr asks the question "What are you doing, you know, more generally?" and you have to answer on a postcard. The site is updated not twice a minute, but twice a year. Simple, really, and charming and so interesting what people say, some are ambiguous, some are frank.

So I sent one in in february (according to the postmark, 2nd Feb), and it's just been posted up:

http://dawdlr.tumblr.com/post/110881262

http://dawdlr.tumblr.com/post/110880954

Completely forgot I wrote that. And the slightly saddening thing is it's all still true; and I didn't get into RCA. Or St. Martin's.

When my spangly promotional postcards turn up I'll send a new one in. I like seeing something from the past turn up; maybe what I write next won't be true when it finally turns up on the site.

On another note, I've entered May's Creative Flair Illustration Competition - you can see my entry here; it's one of my mobile phone posters. Fingers crossed for that!