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Return Of The Chain Letter

amarok2005

Ephemeral Spectre
Joined
Aug 26, 2005
Messages
370
Just a couple of days ago I received a letter -- a genuine white envelope in my mailbox. I opened it and unfolded paper that looked like a 15 or 16th generation Xerox copies. It began "Dear friend; Greetings. I am a retired Attorney. A few years ago, a man came to me with a letter. . . "

Having a short attention span, I skipped to the last page, where I found a list of steps to take: "1. Immediately send $1.00 to each of the six people on the list at the end of this letter . . . 2. Retype the last page . . . removing the name next to the #1 on the list and move the rest of the names up one position (#2 becomes #1, #3 becomes #2, etc) then place your name in the #6 position . . . 3. When you have completed these instructions, take the letter to a copy center and make at least 200 copies . . ."

"Well, I'll be switched!" I said (as one does). "It's a genuine dyed-in-the-wool chain letter!"

When is the last time anyone got a chain letter of the pyramid-like, everyone-will-send-you-money type? I haven't seen one in 20 to 25 years!

I actually fell for one as a wee, impressionable tyke, not because I expected money to rain down on me, but because the writer promised all manner of plagues and curses upon me if I broke the chain. So I irritated everyone I knew with unwanted chain letters -- and received not a few of them back! Arrgh! Now I had to write six times as many!

So -- we've all gotten emails from officials in Rwanda and other distant lands who want to put millions in our account (since our reputations as financial wizards are legendary world-wide). But is anyone still getting good old-fashioned chain letters?
 
What always got me about chain letters is this:
The idea is that you copy the original letter word for word but change the list of people to include yourself. If this is the case, how come the letter is always full of stories of people who broke the chain and then had some terrible luck?
 
Has anyone ever had a chain e-mail? Did they make the technological leap?
 
Yes. Same crud. Some heartwarming (actually nauseating) fictional story and ordering the recipient to forward it on to X number of addresses or dire consequences follow. To be fair, it isn't often it happens. I think this is because:

I always find the name of the person I know who sent it (they usually do it without thinking) then send them a simple email ...
"Send me another piece of annoying b***ocks like this again and I'll classify your address as spam!"
Usually I get a highly apologetic reply, along the lines of "I forwarded it automatically / I hadn't read it all through" etc. etc. Those that don't I don't care to have as friends.
 
I would have thought that the e-mail variety of chain letter would be far easier (and cheaper) to disseminate than the letter variety, especially seeing as how urban myths are transmitted widely in the same manner. Of course, the money in a pyramid scheme chain would be better for the snail mail. Last time I got one of them was back in the nineties.
 
You'd think that a "retired Attorney," assuming that he/she exists/existed in the first place, would be familiar with the laws against mailing chain letters.
 
I note a lot of chainletters (paper and email) don't even ask for money to be sent on. There's one I recieved many years ago that purported to have originated from a South Amercan missionary (it's quite a well-known one, apparently). It specifially instructed the recipient to send no money, but to copy it and send it on to such-and-such number of people. It then went on to give the usual dire warnings of what happened to those who'd failed to do so (how can they know this, I wonder)?

Needless to say, I didn't send it on.

The email ones tend to have a really shmaltzy tone to them, I've noticed - full of advice like "remember to phone your family once a week" before instructing the recipient to send it on. They don't rely on the foretellings-of-woe if you fail to do this so much, however.
 
If you've ever seen anyone who has installed the Facebook applications "Superwall" or "FunWall" you'll know the chain letter is still very much alive and well online, together with a host of other folklorish things - except now it ranges from "Forward this to a friend to see a cool photo!" to "Forward this to all your friends' walls or your family will be wiped out by the spirit of the dead girl at midnight".

Here's one of my favourites, from an acquaintance's "Superwall":
In the public hospital of Itaguaí (RJ) last weekend was born a girl with hands joined together, like one who's praying.

The doctors told the parents that they would operate the hands of that girl, and that they would give her antistatic. The operation was easy because it seemed like the hands were simple glued together one membrane (skin) layer apart.

When they opened up the hand of that child, you can't imagine what was written...

JESUS IS COMING BACK... The doctors started weeping and all that were in the hospital.

The suburb of Itaguaí is undergoing a movement now, People that have withdrawn from church are going back and others are receiving Jesus Christ as the only savior. God send that child simply to convey that message. After a few hours she died: JESUS IS COMING BACK

I have received now I'm passing on!!!

The Lord of Lords is coming back. 'Seek you the LORD while HE may be found, call you upon Him while He is near:' Isaiah 55:6

Send this to everyone in your address book, if you have different e-mail accounts send it to all recipients in all your mail account. Don't be to preoccupied with work. This is important.
 
Good grief, who is going to believe a story like that?! Whatever happened to plausible urban myths? That one is just idiotic. It's no snake in the bed, that's for sure!
 
You'd think that a "retired Attorney," assuming that he/she exists/existed in the first place, would be familiar with the laws against mailing chain letters.

The first thing I thought of when I read the beginning by "retired attorney" was of a MAD Magazine article from the '60s, which gave its own helpful list of addresses to send your next chain letter to: The Postmaster General, the FBI, and several other law-enforcement agencies in Washington DC. I think they gave the real addresses!
 
Great article on modern emoji chain letters, reddit and archives:
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/01/history-emoji-chain-texts/605272/?utm_content=edit-promo&utm_medium=social&utm_term=2020-01-24T12:00:09&utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_source=twitter

Operating in the same sort of intellectual-property gray zone, Jorge Galat, a 27-year-old software developer who lives in Buenos Aires, is likely responsible for some of the chain texts that have been widely shared. Three years ago, he and a friend built an emojipasta generator and posted the code on the open-source-software platform GitHub for anyone to use. To make it, they used the full text of r/emojipasta to train a simple probabilistic model, with the goal of creating “an unlimited source of emojipastas.” It works pretty well, Galat told me, though sometimes it can spit back out verbatim posts from the source text, or “things that don’t make any sense.”
 
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It works pretty well, Galat told me, though sometimes it can spit back out verbatim posts from the source text, or “things that don’t make any sense.”
It sounds almost human.
 
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