Fractals and Spam

Xhobitol

I’ve always had trouble coming up with titles for my images. Often, it seems that I’ve spent as much time trying to think up a name for an image as I’ve spent creating the piece. When title inspiration eludes me, I resort to simply naming them by the date and sequence – 20060905-01, for example, and tell myself that I’ll work out a decent name for the thing later.

As a result, my parameter folders are filled with whole blocks of unmemorable numeric titles. This make for a mess when I browse through saved parameter files because my visual memory processes are geared toward associating images with descriptive names, not strings of numbers.

A partial solution came to me from an unlikely source - Spam. My spam filter dumps all e-mails from non-approved senders into a special quarantined folder, but I still have to skim through them every day or so to make sure I’m not missing any legit messages. That’s when I noticed that a lot of spammers use made-up nonsensical names in the “From” or “Subject” lines.

Most of them don’t get much consideration – “Pr0n”, “PHmdARMA” and “AMvBBtEN” don’t really work as image titles for me (But one never knows..). Every now and then I do find a real gem. A few that I’ve either used lately or have filed away for future reference include “Zed Thill”, “Sang Bourgeois”, “Xhobitol”, “Freddy Kruger wears Rolex”, and my current favorite, “Grunting Strontium”.

So you see, I’ve found a use for spam after all..