Voracious Salmon is Viscious

[flwyd]

Salmon are apparently now on Yahoo Instant Messenger. And they're getting into creepy your mom joke territory:

voracioussalmon 11:24
I heard your mother has the AIDS, and I just wanted to give you my condolences. I didn't know I was infected.

Comments

[mirumototsubasa.livejournal.com]

I tried to talk to a few of those at first. Since I work at a seafood place, I thought they might be a co-worker or something. Then my "Who's this?" was replied to with a "Huh? WHo are you?" and....I stopped trying.

salmon, trout and coho

[ommadawn.livejournal.com]

I find these quite rewarding now that I understand the mechanism by which they arrive. Neither of you started it, so it's natural for them to devolve into "no, you msged me first" "no you".

My approach now is once the first message hits me, I start the conversation with something like "hi, you don't know me and i don't know you, but we're both victims of a bot that scrapes our IM identities from LJ or Xanga or something similar, and then mediates a conversatoin between two randomly selected folks."

I often then share a link relevant to the subject http://jwz.livejournal.com/885227.html (you can find this by its subject "was this ever funny" and the user jwz if you forget where the post is).

I've had these conversations go on for a couple hours after we settled what was happening.

In a previous post Trevor had a name for these, but I couldn't find his posting when I needed it.

The other person's names were always of the form + [salmon|trout] but lately i've been getting coho, as well.

[slyviolet.livejournal.com]

The switch in register from "your mother" to "the AIDS" and then back to "condolences" is really jarring.

[ommadawn.livejournal.com]

supposedly the opening lines for these things is taken from one or the other's blog. I've never recognized my own text there, however, and it wouldn't surprise me if my sample goes to you and yours goes to me, but I don't have any knowledge of the internals of this particular beast.

[flwyd.livejournal.com]

Nope. I figured out my first salmon by googling the opening phrase and found several other hits. Sometimes, they even tell you what's going on.