I had the very annoying experience yesterday of my WoW account being hacked into. It's all more or less straightened out now, but it was a big stressful hassle.

I remember a few years ago, my dad read an article about gold selling and asked me how it worked (I guess the article wasn't clear). At the time, it worked like this: Some people in the game are too lazy to do the normal stuff you do to make gold. Blizzard doesn't sell gold. So some people made a business of making lots of gold (usually by setting up bots to perform repetitive tasks like killing creatures that drop valuable items), selling it on an outside web site, and then delivering it to the buyer in-game.

That's how it used to work. You'd see the bots occasionally and know what they were doing, and you'd report them, and that was it.

Things seemed to change around the time Blizzard started allowing server transfers (moving characters to a new server to play with different people), which I guess made it more efficient to generate gold by hacking accounts rather than using bots.

( Now this is how it works )

Oddly enough, they didn't take away all the gold the hacker made selling the stuff that was restored, so once I got access to the account back and took stock, all told I had profited about 5000 gold from the experience. I tried to give it to the guild leader to put in the bank by way of apology, but he wouldn't take it -- told me to buy myself something nice with my pain and suffering settlement. :P

Other souvenir: To encourage people to buy an authenticator, people who get one also get a special in-game pet. Since the hacker put an authenticator on my account (why? Blizzard could obviously take it off in a second), now I have the pet. I will call him Bandit.

The library in my new city is pretty nice, and usually quiet-ish. I understand that people no longer expect silence in libraries, which is sad, but I don't expect it anymore.

That said: I was studying in a room with about 10 other people who were also reading or studying, and actually everyone was being totally silent.

Two people, a man and a woman, walked up to the doorway of the room and started having a VERY LOUD conversation about someone they knew who was sick, detailing their symptoms at considerable length. AND VOLUME. I waited about five minutes, figuring this couldn't go on *that* much longer, and it just kept going on. And on. And on.

(This may not have had anything to do with it, but by far the closest person to them (actually they had parked themselves about two feet from him) was a black guy reading in a chair, occasionally glaring at them. It would have been horribly annoying either way, but this just made the picture worse, to have these white people totally oblivious to how they were being SO RUDE to a non-white person, as though he didn't exist. But I digress.)

Eventually I walked up to them and said, "Hey, there are a lot of people trying to study in here, and we can hear your conversation. Maybe you didn't realize that."

The woman said, rather indignantly, "We work here."

Seriously? I am very glad that I thought quickly enough to reply, "Then you should know better."

They didn't have the decency to look chastised, but at least they left and went into the closed area for library staff.

I'm tempted to write a note to the head librarian or something. I'm not much of a complainer either (the only time I've actually ever complained at a library was when some boys were making racist remarks to a girl and I wanted to get them thrown out), but omg. So terrible.

1:00am Bedtime.

6:00am Huge loud trucks arrive to do huge loud maintenance on the power lines directly outside our building. Second day in a row. They couldn't have been closer to my bedroom without being inside the building. I opened the window to see what was going on, and was eye to eye with a person standing on one of those mobile crow's nest things working on the line.

6:05am Move to Hannelore's bedroom which is on the opposite side of the apartment.

6:30am Hannelore's alarm goes off.

6:45am Power shuts off while Hannelore is in the shower. The loss of power causes the carbon monoxide alarm to make its "low battery" noise which consists of a piercing chirp every 10 seconds or so. We cannot turn it off.

( it goes on )

I should have known it could get worse!


Customer gives me credit card, I swipe credit card. Customer starts rummaging in purse.

Customer: "Wait, I have change."

Me: "...You just gave me a credit card. Do you want to pay cash instead?"

Customer: "No, I just want to give you the change."

Me: "......Uh."

Customer: "Can you do that?"

Me: "............Technically, yes, I could ring in a few cents of cash and the rest on a credit card. But WHY?"

Customer: "It just makes it a nice round number."

Me: ".....................But it's a credit card."

Customer: "Well never mind, you don't have to."


wat

i just

Does this make ANY sense to any of you?

Complaint: People who give excessive amounts of coins to cashiers when making a purchase, while there are other people waiting.

When this starts, it makes sense. If you're buying something that costs $4.01, it makes sense to give me $5.01 so you get a dollar instead of 99 cents back. This *reduces* the amount of time the transaction takes.

But you know, the more change you are trying to give me, and the longer you take to find it in your purse the size of Texas... It reaches a tipping point where the transaction is now taking longer than it would if you just gave me a twenty. And there are people behind you -- remember them?

Please stop taking five minutes to find eighty-seven freaking cents! While you're at it you could also stop acting like you're doing me a favor, and stop smugly bragging about how great it is to "get rid of" all your change. Maybe in your life this is some kind of major accomplishment, but neither I nor the people behind you are impressed.

If you hate change in your purse that much, give it to the homeless guy sitting outside the store, it's win-win that way!

There's a wank going on that's as old as the hills (aren't they all), and a lot of people are making extraordinary fools of themselves (don't they always). The epicenter wasn't in my part of fandom; my windows rattled but nothing fell down.

It does strike me, though, that in these sorts of things there's sometimes a tendency to suggest that all argument is useless because you'll never convince your opponents that you're right. I really can't agree there. If your point is a good and valid one, you should make it, not for your opponents, but for those reading along.

On the internets there are always more lurkers than participants. The ones opening their mouths are the ones who already have a strong opinion, and the more they talk, the more they have invested in never giving any ground or learning anything new, because in their eyes that would not be learning, but "losing".

The ones *not* speaking are the ones who aren't sure. Those are people your argument can reach, whether or not you ever find out about it. (Just try not to claim that the lurkers support you in email.)


And seriously, "victim privilege"? Bitch, PLEASE.


ETA: There's now a rundown on unfunnybusiness if you really want to know. Warning for nausea at others' ridiculous behavior, at the very least...

Got a reply to the Craigslist ad about the cat from someone trying to convince me not to give the cat away, because it would have been my mom's dying wish for me to keep it.


1) I barely even mentioned that I inherited the cat from my mom. And you, stranger, presume to know my mom's dying wish?

2) They actually wrote it would have been my mom's "deathwish".



Fucking Craigslist.

There was a little wank on Twitter the other day, when someone made an inflammatory remark about Chaz Bono @BrentSpiner, who RT'd it to his 500,000 followers, with predictable results. (FWIW, I hardly think Brent was in the wrong -- she tweeted to him first, he often RT's, she should not have been surprised.)

Anyway, the original remark was that she thought Bono's gender transition was a "tragedy [...] for the God that made her" (sic). It is extremely troubling to me when people invoke God in such ways, but it is pretty difficult to successfully debate religious beliefs. However, there was something else she said later that can be refuted: "a closet issue is that many are disappointed by it [transitioning]".

This comment sounds relatively mild on the face of it, albeit extremely weasely (how many is "many", and what does "disappointed" mean, and in what way is the issue in the "closet" -- what a heftily ironic choice of word!). But at the heart of it I see a very alarming and insidious thought process.

( Read more... )

Someone actually said "Happy Memorial Day" to me.

I just remembered why I don't like April Fool's Day: No matter how funny and/or self-deprecating the joke, too many people don't get it, and I just feel uncomfortably embarrassed for them.

See you tomorrow.