Those who frequent the excellently time-wasting site TV Tropes may be familiar with the trope “Suspiciously Specific Denial“:
Well, in the last several weeks I’ve started seeing a new (to me) kind of spam message which is also suspiciously specific, and which, for some reason, is always about vaping. For example:
Yeah, those look like TOTALLY legitimate questions that someone would be asking on a blog that’s mostly about writing, amusing subtitles, and how long it takes somebody to fall asleep when watching a TV show or movie. 🤔
Just for fun, I decided to look up these vape shops, and stores with those names do actually exist, although not on the specified streets, so I’m going to have to say that the answer to both questions would be “no”. The vape manufacturers exist as well. So who’s paying for this particular spam? The vape shops that aren’t where the spam says they are? The companies making the stuff you put in the vape? Both? Communists? Hostile artificial intelligences? Well, to quote a venerable purveyor of a different sort of addictive substance marketed to younger folks:
Just remember, kids: Vaping is bad for you, which is why I can’t quite decide is if it’s ironic or oddly appropriate that vaping spam keeps getting attached to posts about that time I landed in ICU …
Viscosity 