Re: META: Keep the subject lines and icons reader-friendly please!

From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Thu Oct 12 2000 - 00:49:07 MDT


At 12:12 PM 11/10/00 -0400, Mike wrote:

>I recall a year or two ago one teenager was forced to unsub from the list
>because some of the posters' email came through an ISP called 'lucifer.com'.
>Sometimes there is just nothing you can do about such parents

Well, you can avoid shoving stinging mustard up their nostrils just because
you can.

It certainly seems to me that naming a place `lucifer.com' is an act of
adolescent bravado (unless, of course, you're a Satanist). *Not* good
memetics. *No* way.

This all gets tricky, because we're set up to find familiar scary things in
shadows. I looked at a cryonics site the other day,

http://www.alcor.org/

and bless my furry feet and ears there was an icon which showed:

a) a human rising out of flames to supplicate a dragon, or

b) a leering devilish skull with two forked horns rising from the top of
the skull, or

c) a weight-lifter engaged in carnal activities with a winged alien, or...

Call me perverse, but the only thing I *couldn't* see as a gestalt was
anything to do with fixing frozen people and returning them to a healthy
life in the future.

Don't provoke the bears as they roam about in the streets, people. Not
unless you absolutely have to, with something you absolutely can't convey
any other way.

Damien the Preacher Man



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