> Cargo cults built dummy items trying to entice planes to land or drop cargo on their islands. So it wasn't pointless on their part...

The central notion of the cargo cult is not just that they do what they do with the intention of attracting planes, but that in the process they fundamentally misunderstand the function of the things they are building. They grasp only the superficial form, and make a mistake in causality.

And so I like the idea of some addled ur-designer somehow grasping the form but not the function of your traditional tear-off flier and creating this as an attempt to capture the imagined or perceived dynamic of flier-based advertising: if you put up a piece of paper with writing and tear-off tabs, the Good Thing will happen.

But for all that, "cargo cult advertising" was just an offhand description for the idea of how a flier like this might have come into being naturally, as a joke when the idea first occurred to me. Certainly it's not actual cargo cult phenomenology on my part given that I knew the thing was absurd when I made it, nor do I expect most people who encounter it to mistake it as an earnest attempt to achieve some sort of transactional effect.

Hiya! I've gone ahead and made a little blog just for these fliers, since the first one seems to be going over so well:

http://uselessfliers.tumblr.com/

> Geez, look at all the nails in that thing.

Yeah, I know, right. That pole deserves a better photograph for its own sake.

The sign got taken down pretty damn quickly, in fact, which I probably should have anticipated given that the pole was (a) covered in nails but (b) totally bare of signage. Oh well.

> So stupid qualifies for funny these days?

It qualifies the shit out of for funny, yes. It's in the manual that comes with the internet.

Hi! Thanks for the link! I'm glad you're liking it.

And agreed, CheeseDuck: most of the generated strips are just plain nonsensical. Pure Markov models are really naive things -- that they can generate readable text at all says more about the structural redundancy of natural language than anything. But it's that weird, fractured insensisibility that I find so charming about the output.