Amber Night (rebooted)

That’s the best I could come up with. Feel free to post your own witty caption.

NSFW warnings (language) in all the blogs linked in this post.

In an unintended second part to the story, another blogger gets outed and gets fired.

Our boss found the blog. Someone squealed on us. I don’t work there anymore.

I feel pretty ashamed at the moment. I did over 5 years there and it all came down to this.

I know some of the stuff I blogged about was bad, but a lot was over exaggerated for comedic effect and lots of stuff was made up entirely. I thought everyone knew this.

Ouch. It was a funny blog too. I’d link it, but it no longer exists.

(Re-blogged from Thatguys, who I was mean to, but who “worship[ped]” me anyway when I was Miss Bea Havin. This makes them better human beings than me, which I will eventually have to come to terms with. But for now it’s a couple pints of Steven Colbert’s Americone Dream and a 40 ouncer.)

Unfortunately he’s not qualified to win a Darwin.

EUGENE, Ore. (AP) – When Robert Gillespie looked up from his text message, he saw a freight train. EOM. (“End of message,” that is, for non-texters.) Eugene police say Gillespie’s car crashed into the side of the Union Pacific freight train about 2 a.m. Tuesday.

I blame SOE…

On Friday, Penny Arcade commented on the recent firing of a Nintendo contractor (who is, by the way, a bigger front-page-photo whore than I am), and made an excellent and entirely relevant-to-me point:

You are not “posting anonymously” if you use a fake last name and have pictures of yourself on your blog. That is not “anonymous.” That is “I dare you to find me, and then, having found me, terminate my employment.” You should not expect GloboMegaCorp to “grok” participation culture like blogs. Also, you shouldn’t expect them to know a word like “grok.”

I’m thankful it didn’t bite me on the ass back in the days where I was occasionally posting about my job. On the other hand, those were the days when I was a Federal employee, and *snort* just try firing a Federal employee, am I right? Fortunately for me, I didn’t authorize the torture of terrorist suspects and baby bunny rabbits, so I like to think of myself as un-fireable.

Or at least I was. A couple months back I suffered that other thing. My project was canceled and I was layed off. So I did what every self-loathing left-wing liberal granola hugger would do. I became part of the problem. Which is to say I became a contract employee. And you thought I just sold out my creative soul.

Anywho.¹ That’s why you’re not going to see me digging² on my co-workers or my job here on these pages. Which is really a shame because the mithril mine that is my job and are my co-workers is a veritable mother lode of almost daily anecdotes and guffaws, whose rich ore will sadly lay undiscovered in the underground caverns and cloistering darkness where I spend 1/3 of my life.

Having said that, I’d like to direct you to my friend’s new blog. Her name is “April Day” and she blogs about work…

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¹ I refuse to let moxcamel take this away from me!
² To preemptively strike the metaphor.

Granted, it’s early in the presidential campaign season. But Amber Night Megalomedia is ready to announce our backing of the one and only candidate that will truly make a difference: Lee L. Mercer Jr.

My platform for President of the United States Of America is Criminal Law. It is developed from my Method of Education. I was ordered to create and or invent by the United States Army that is now intact regulating the United States Government protecting it through Military Intelligence Computerization Management a new Disipline I invented and the Administration of Criminal Law Laws across the board.

Damn straight. Finally, a politician who tells it like it is. And while I’ll agree he’s nowhere near as charismatic as Barrack Obama, when was the last time you heard Obama take on “Military Intelligence Computerization Management?” Never, that’s when. Because Lee L. Mercer Jr. invented the goddamned thing. He’s also got deep insights into the current Iraq quagmire:

There is some concern about the war in Iraq. I know of U.S. government evidence that the war in Iraq is illegal and it can be solved through me representing the United States Government with a peace treaty. I know there are notations in my ROTC Biography of a guarantee from Iraq through me for peace to the war in Iraq and that Mr. Hussein is innocent of his charges.

And while you might argue that Mr. Mercer Jr. is yet another spineless Democrat advocating cut-and-run-and…um…acquiting Saddam Hussein, let’s take a moment to remember that none of the other candidates have ROTC experience.

This campaign season, vote Lee L. Mercer Jr. He’s going to “do what the President of the United States of America is supposed to do and complete the federal and military government biography and autobiography in development in Eye Spy Community-Military Intelligence (All Three) Business and Commerce Intelligence Education across the board National and International.”

And I think we can all agree, that’s what America needs right now. Let the healing begin. Vote Mercer Jr. And for chrissakes, somebody please give this man a Wikipedia entry.

This is a real product. I’m not making it up.

Here’s what I love about 3D Mailbox: “If you delete good mail, it goes to the trash alley.” Next to this proclamation we see a screenshot of Trash Alley (above) showing that our discarded email has turned black¹ and is now standing in a dark, grafiti-strewn alley while a lone palm tree behind a chain link fence marks the boundary between Trash Alley and where the beautiful emailerati enjoy the sun and fun. A length of torn down chain link lays in the foreground, marking the place of the previous evening’s riots where some uppity emails got theyselves some stick time.

As if to highlight the plight of our urban deleted, even spam gets to hang out on the beach while you decide their fate. If the system can’t figure out if an email is spam or not, it gets to go ice-skating.² Granted, they have to wear bikinis (presumably this makes it easier for the virtual INS to search them for illegal phentermine offers), but it’s probably better than living with the knowledge that at any time, the popo might show up in the ‘hood to lay down some e-pression.

(via The Forge)

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¹ It could just be that trash alley is a very dark, cold, shadowy, place. You know, for your black emails.
² Yeah. Ice skating. Dear god I love this product!

Had it not been for the fact that she takes her clothes off for a living¹, Mia Rose’s World of Warcraft account banning might not have even made the WoW forums, let alone that paragon of journalism par excellence², Kotaku. But she does, and so the story, likely influenced by some sort of memish fluffer, got pretty big. And then it got nasty. Well, nastier.

Oh it didn’t get nasty about the banning. The banning just became part of the lead, sort of like “Mia Rose’s account got banned BECAUSE SHE’S A WHORE!” A comment left at Broken Toys sums up the general nastiness rather succinctly:

“Giving porn actresses respect will just make them even more stuck up bitches than they already are.”

It’s nice to see the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory is still in effect.

Mia herself admits she didn’t handle the sudden torent of vitriol—most of it not even related to the banning—very well. “Argh. That’s pretty much all I can say. I mean, I shouldn’t have responded at all,” she told me in an email. Her lash back only fed the flames to the point where the story—remember the story?—was completely lost.

I exchanged a series of emails with Mia, and we talked about…you know…girl stuff. Then we did each others’ hair, Ron Jeremy came over for some scrapbooking, and then…alright, actually we just talked about the whole banning fiasco. More after the jump.

¹ There might be a little more to it than that. I’m told.
² I almost kept a straight face when I said that!

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Read the rest of this entry »

The first 4 comments in this thread just made my week.

It was supposed to be all rainbows and unicorns from here on out, but no.

Read the rest of this entry »

This is a whine. You might be interested to know I also have a very savory brie to go with it.

Recently I found the perfect birthday gift for my brother. He’s all growed up with kids and everything, but is still a big kid, especially when it comes to comic books. The guy flies multi-million dollar aircraft for UPS (I’m no longer allowed to call him “Brown” or tell him what he can do for me today), but can’t setup his email or Google the inter spaces to save his life. But name a character in a comic book, and he can quote you chapter and verse. Or however it is that comics are organized.

You might have heard that to promote the new (and, let’s face it, fucking disappointing) Fantastic 4 movie, 20th Century Fox had 40,000 quarters stamped with a Silver Surfer emblem, and had planned to release them into the wild until the U.S. Mint got all uppity. Well some of them made it into circulation, which of course means they wound up on eBay.

Long story short, I paid about $100 to an eBay seller for one of them. In case you nodded off, I paid $100 for a goddamned quarter. Laugh it up now, but in 20 years it’s going to be worth $110. Who’ll be laughing then beyotch?

Here’s your Madame Obvious eBay tip of the day: When looking at someone’s feedback score, even if they have a positive score of 99.99% and a bajillion positive feedbacks, look at the last 3 months of comments. I wish I’d done that. My seller, with an overall feedback score of 99.8%, has been selling for a long time. Unfortunately he started slacking (or sold his account) a couple months ago, and roughly 1/4 of his feedback within the last couple months is either negative or neutral.

My experience with this seller: no communication, took forever to ship, and even when my $100 quarter finally did arrive weeks later, it was rolling around loosely in a plain envelope, uninsured, even though I payed for insured. There was a tear in the envelope that only through sheer luck it hadn’t tumbled through. After seeing that, I had to take it to a comic book store in Santa Cruz just to make sure it was the genuine article, which thankfully it was. But because it had been rolling around in an envelope all the way through USPS, it was scuffed enough that it couldn’t be considered “mint” as the seller had advertised.

As I tracked back the negative comments left on this seller’s profile, I saw that he had in turn left negative comments on their profiles. Apparantly all of his buyers were liars, didn’t read the auction, and were just downright delusional. All hundred or so of them.

Here’s where the eBay feedback system is broken. I don’t do a lot of eBay transactions, so whereas this guy has a feedback score of something like 32,000 my feedback score is 12. Because he deals in volume, 1 negative feedback score isn’t going to hurt him at all. But when he writes a “revenge” feedback to reply to mine, my score drops from 100% to 91.6%. Ouch. Of course anyone can play detective and get a more accurate picture, but how many eBayers do that? (that’s not rhetorical, I really don’t know)

There’s a simple fix to this problem, and for Christ’s sake I can’t understand why eBay doesn’t see it. The system just needs to be tweaked such that neither party gets to see each other’s feedback until both leave feedback. This would eliminate “revenge” feedback, and encourage both parties to leave a true accounting of the transaction. There could also be a timer mechanism, so that after a certain amount of time the feedback of one party appears even if the other party left no feedback, and further feedback would be closed. This would encourage both parties to leave feedback in a timely manner.

Am I missing something? Would that be so hard to do?

I thought briefly of going through the dispute system, but this morning I noticed his account has been closed. So um…yeah. I’ll go through the motions, but I’m pretty sure I’m stuck with a $100 quarter that’s probably worth somewhere between $0.26 and $60. My brother will no doubt love it scuffs and all, but it’s all left me pretty jaded on the eBay experience.

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