The Curse Stops Here, Too!
The below is copied verbatim from Dividing by Zero.
Congratulations!
You’ve just done the karmic equivalent of winning the lottery! Because you’ve found this page, you are now free from forwarding chain emails ever again! Want to rekindle a lost love? Just contact your old flame and if it was meant to be, it will be! Fame and fortune? If it was meant to be yours, it will be!
And all of this good fortune will occur without you ever again suffering the humiliation of friends or family members asking you to Please stop forwarding me this crap!
How does it work? It’s simple, any time you get an email urging you to Forward this to everyone you know! instead of sending it along, just click the delete button instead. You’ll instantly receive all the good luck you would have received anyhow!
It’s that simple!
Of course, there’s a catch to this. Now that you’ve read this page, you must never, ever forward another chain letter. If you forward a chain letter after reading this page, you may very well find that your friends and family members think you foolish. And all the bad luck threatened by every chain letter you’ve ever forwarded may come back to you tenfold!
Sure, it’s quite possible that this is complete hogwash. But do you really want to risk it?
(I don’t normally copy these things verbatim, but Blair gave permission as long as I linked back to him, and he kind of did get the idea from me in a comment I left on a previous post. Of course, he gets all the credit for follow through, and it doesn’t match my original idea exactly, so I could still follow through on that. But I want to find someone with the power to make it work.
September 5th, 2007 at 8:20 pm
Just to be clear, the anti-chain letter is a neat idea. I’m just concerned about a possible loophole where it winds up back with the person who started it. The person initiating the anti-chain letter could potentially end up on the receiving end of enough bad luck to destroy the planet.
That would be “Bad.”
September 5th, 2007 at 9:14 pm
I appreciate that. I tried to close all the loopholes, as I wouldn’t want to get bit by the chain letter I started.
There’s also the issue that vengeance feels good, but it does carry bad karmic weight at times. I’d hope freeing everyone else in the world from any possible bad luck would outweigh the bad karma.
Alas, I suspect that the villains I’m aiming for use similar techniques as the spammers, and no one really knows the people who start the chain letters, so my poisoned dart wouldn’t reach its target. All it would succeed in doing is freeing the populace from future harm. (Which would be a good thing.) I still have to find someone with the power to make it work.
(My middle name isn’t Marvelo.)
September 10th, 2007 at 10:46 pm
Yeah, but Delenn had that bit about doing the right thing (freeing the populace from chain letters) for the wrong reason (vengeance) causes the entire work to become corrupted. Dunno why I’m throwing Babylon 5 references, but that’s what comes to mind.
There is another explanation however of where chain letters come from, and that’s “The same place as jokes.”
I read a story some number of years ago where a scientist decides to create a computer model of how jokes originate. What he’d realized over time was that nobody ever knows who started a joke, only that they’d heard them from someone else.
Once all the jokes data had been fed into the computer, it was asked to extrapolate where the jokes had started. After a bit of number crunching the computer replied that the mostly likely explanation was, “Extra-terrestrial origin.”
The scientist was shocked by this and asked the computer what would happen if the origin of humor was discovered and the computer replied that humor would vanish. And throughout the world, people suddenly discovered that nothing was funny any more.
Perhaps chain letters also have an extra-terrestrial origin.
September 27th, 2007 at 2:41 pm
The cursor stops here.