anubis[1]I’m starting to get quite an inflow of spam on this site.  That’s not too surprising in and of itself, but what is surprising is that 95% of it is going to a single, very old post — my book review of The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers.

I’m kind of at a loss to explain why, although I do have a few theories:

  1. There is an anti-spam company called “AnubisNetworks” that they might think I’m referring to, and this might be attracting spammer attention for reasons ranging from sheer stupidity to full-on DoS attempts.
  2. The spammers might be interpreting “Anubis” as a misspelling of “anus” and flagging it as a target post.
  3. Similarly, “Anubis” or “Anubis Gate” might have some bizarre and likely obscene meaning I’m not aware of, and thus draws spammers seeking a community of perverts to exploit.
  4. These spammers might be big Tim Powers fans, although this is probably giving them more credit for literary taste than they deserve.
  5. These spam messages might actually be attempted communications from immaterial, primordial entities, drawn through some Jungian affinity by the reference to possibly the most ancient known archetypal psychopomp.  Since these entities would have only the most vague and general knowledge of humanity, their missives refer solely to mankind’s most primal drives — sex, money and cheap foreign drugs — along with a healthy dose of apparent gibberish.  Although seemingly meaningless, they undoubtedly contain a stark, alien wisdom when properly interpreted through the lens of obscure and ancient lore.

I’m really holding out for #5, but I’d settle for that as the plot of the next Tim Powers or Charles Stross novel.