I’m sure we’ve all recieved “Fwd: Fwd: Inspiration tale of bullshi- er, hope!!1!” and “Fwd: Fwd: I didn’t believe this, but it came true! OMG!” type emails from…cynically challenged friends and relatives, but what on Earth is the point of starting them?
Spam I can get - there’s money involved for a product or service. But what does the original writer of chain emails get out of random idiots sending his horsecrap story to their address book in the hopes that their wish would come true, or Bill Gates would send them money, or some other such nonsense. What is their motivation for creating them? Entertainment for the sadistic? Morons who believe their own lies?
Difficult to say if they’re commonly created for this purpose, but they must be absolute gold dust when they fall into the hands of a spammer, or in the case of the ones that get circulated by pre-teen girls, when they fall into the hands of a sexual predator.
They let you participate in glurge as a responsible slactivist, with the hope that you’ll be magically paid off for your virtual virtue later. You are an instant authority to the people you send them to, if they buy into it. At the very least, they get attention.
Some come with threats of bad luck if you break the chain, or at least lack of good luck that could have come if you hadn’t been such an ungenerous deadbeat. These are started by trolls. They like the power rush of pushing people’s buttons.
Most of the ones I get any more feel like networking and making friends. They all have a dozen or so personal questions that you’re supposed to answer and send back upstream while sending the questions on downstream. No threats, just a general 'you don’t want to dissappoint everyone, do you?" They’re chain mail lite.
Yeah, I was expecting to see an explaination along the lines of it spreading out the force of the blow, etc. Glad I wasn’t the only one with that interpretation of the title.
By the way of a hijack, I believe this is a myth born of game designers’ objective to make a variety of armor types have disadvantages so that player choice would be important. While mail is flexible in more directions than jointed plate, and thus appropriate for some difficult-to-armor areas, it is both heavier and less protective than true plate armor in every sense. Properly articulated plate is less burdensome and lighter than a mail hauberk.
Mail was universally replaced by plate when technology and finances allowed.
What I never could understand were the ones that claimed, in the body of the letter, to have made it around the world five times, and included testimonials about Martha Jones who forwarded it and won the lottery, and Edna Smith who didn’t forward it and got hit by a bus. Often, such testimonials are the entire body of the message. So what in the world did the letter say when Edna and Martha got it?
My former co-worker used to get emails about how Obama was a secret muslim, the democrats were going to take guns away, etc. A thing about misinformation is that for some if it’s repeated enough, it becomes true in their minds. The perpetrators of those emails probably used them to denounce their perceived opponent and since facts don’t work, misinformation might.
No, there’s only ever one athiest at a time. You’ve got a bunch of athy people, some of whom are athier than others, and whichever one is the most athy is the athiest.