Yesterday some shady guy (ManDyLoVln) IMed me a few times asking me to give him a copy of the Beck song, "Everybody's Gotta Learn Sometime," claiming that it wasn't on the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind soundtrack and that he couldn't find it "anywhere." Right away I got suspicious, 'cause random people just don't IM other people asking them to share files with them. Perhaps I'm paranoid, but it just seems either very shady or very stupid to ask someone you don't know to give you copyrighted music via AIM, especially when it's copyrighted music by a major-label artist like Beck.
Anyway, I decided to check up on this guy while I was talking to him. I went to Amazon and looked at the album's track listing, and sure enough, it's on the soundtrack. When I told him that he just said "oh." Yeah, "oh" is right, kid. I asked where he got my screenname, and he claimed to have found it on a message board where I said I was "a fan of the song." That's definitely not me—since when do I say I'm a "fan" of anything? Then he claimed that he found my name on Audioscrobbler, which I can see occurring—but when he sent me the link, Audioscrobbler wasn't even up.
I told him to try Suprnova.org, and he replied not 3 seconds later saying "I did...i did Kazaa too." Yeah, OK Kazaa jockey, stop wasting my time. He claimed that he'd sent me an email earlier, too—but I definitely haven't gotten any email from heirklein@hotmail.com yet. He also claimed to have read the resume posted on my site—but anyone who's ever looked at that would know that there's nothing to read there—what I have up now is a placeholder PDF.
I really am all for asking for things when you think you might get a result—see my earlier post asking for free meal points—but this guy seems either too stupid or too shady to waste time on. (Though I am wasting a whole post on him...) After I agreed that yes, you can find me on Audioscrobbler, he said, "make any sense?...im not a freak...just a college student who really wants that song." Again, I understand wanting a song—but there are ways to get songs that don't involve me. His plea ended up sounding just like some misguided attempt to play the "college good ol' boys' network" card—kind of like when the university administrator was on the hub asking "Does anyone know where I can find some substances to abuse?"
I Googled the guy's screenname while I was at it—it turns out that whoever he is, there's a LiveJournal with his name on it. I think the journal really speaks to what an idiot this guy must be.