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Solicitation at my door.
- I have a sign, on my door, that says "no solicitors."
- By law, all solicitors must have a solicitation license from the county on their person. It's a photo ID issued by the county. None of them do.
- I work from home with a handicapped wife. Do not bother me.
I give them one chance to go away. If they press it, I demand to see their license, which "Oh it's in the truck" or "it's in the office" or "I am not soliciting, I am giving you a FREE ESTIMATE..." I call the cops. Fuck em. Non-emergency number, I state a description of a suspicious man who refused to show me a solicitation license, and kept asking me to open my door. I describe the direction they are going with dates, streets, and times.
A few get nabbed. Some of these guys are known to the police because they are possibly casing your house and they have a ton of camera evidence of them peeping in windows and gates.
Shoujoago's Twitch streamer. She's an artist, female drag performer, and lover of cats. She plays obscure independent games she finds, draws stuff, sometimes has game nights, and hosts with her cat Marzipan. Huge Phoenix Wright fan. Usually has streams 2-3 times a week. Very calm and relaxed.
Friend of mines teen daughter did something similar. She posted on Instagram that she was at home, bored, fml, and all that. Sadly, some of her friends posted from the party. With her tagged.
"OMG SHOTS WITH #STACY!!! BFF AND JDC!!!"
Like, pictures of her and everything. Her dad made her write 100 times, "I need better friends" as part of her punishment, lol.
Here's the problem: Christians have no self-monitoring going on. Anyone can claim to be "Christian" and it's killing them. It's just a useless label anyone can apply to themselves or others. There's no certification, vetting, or sponsorship to revoke. It's a Jesus mask that so many can just strap onto their face with some rubber bands and do the same evil they have always done. This was one of the reasons against idolatry in the Ten Commandments: any fool can claim they represent God. "You shall have no other Gods before me," means "I am the only God," then goes on to say, "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven images." which is building on the same premise. "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain" is trying to cover all bases. But people break these all the time.
Christians need to unite on a common ground and make a stance of what they universally believe in. But yes, I hear you laughing, and you're probably right, that's never gonna happen. You're going to have factions like the Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879 claiming the Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912 are heretical scum, and push people off bridges. I mean, this is not a new problem, either. Look at the Crusades. Witch Burnings. The Spanish Inquisition. The list goes on and on.
In the end, it's all about people wanting power. Whether they have a Jesus mask or not, some people are facist assholes, want to be in charge, and they don't care who they hurt or what they destroy to get there.
Sweden was the same way, I didn't need a Visa. I hadn't traveled in a while (2006), and I was surprised I got stamped to enter the EU in my layover in Iceland (2022) last year. Now I gotta worry about this, because I plan on visiting my folks in Sweden every few years. It doesn't seem that bad, and I have zero reason to think I'd be rejected, but it's yet another hassle even if it's only $8 (but that's fair if we're charging Europeans $21, I'd even pay $21 without complaintif it changes to match).
OMG, though... those poor Brexit bastards traveling through Iceland. Me from the US was just "stand in line, they ask why you're traveling, stamp the passport and you're on your way." Brexit folks had to go down some spiral stairs into some cave next to the elevator shaft and it looked like the passport equivalent of "the cheap stadium seats."
- Panic at the Cisco
I used to troll my roommate: I have a Multi-Band wireless access point, and I would name other networks stuff to mess with them. They are from Louisiana, and are very proud of their culinary roots. One day, they came back from a trip with the relatives, and brought home some boudin, which I cooked and served with rice. I thought it was sausage, but it's a blend of pork cooked down with onions, peppers, seasonings, AND cooked rice, so serving it with rice was redundant, apparently. They got SO ANGRY, that to this day, I am not allowed to eat it in front of them, so I have been trolling them for "boudin with rice" everywhere I can. When they still lived with me, I changed the "ancillary network names" shit like, "Boudin with rice," and "Mild crawfish with ketchup," and "Campbell's New England Gumbo" and a ton of other culinary "bastardizations" of authentic Louisiana cooking. So every time they were on their laptop, I'd hear a "... Boudin corn dog--OH MY GOD PUNKIE YOU BASTARD!!! AAUGH!!!"
Maybe not the same, but a knoppix CD was part of my toolkit for field work for many years. Stuff I did with it:
- Retrieve or fix data from systems that could not boot.
- Scan systems infected with boot viruses (clamscan), and wipe entire drives if necessary
- Test various network issues: DHCP, DNS, tcpdump, and so on because Windows tools were pretty bad for a while
- Bypass various Windows restrictions on user's systems
It is me.
Nope. Her death brought a LOT of people to the funeral, but mostly people she influenced through the anime and science fiction conventions she helped run. I won't rule out her family showing up, but there were 250-300 people in attendance, and obviously I was distracted. She never wrote a book, but she did leave a some... let's say artefacts... of her family. A tarot deck, a book about family life in the early 1900s, and stuff like that. I don't know what to do with them, because I know some of them were stolen, and someone "outside the family" are not supposed to have them. She was never accepted as a "half breed," and part of why her mother left was because of the abuse. I remember hearing about when someone in the family dies, people just "show up" without being notified. It may be apocryphal, legendary without much fact, I dunno. But it was one of those "psychic things" that her family supposedly possessed.
I do know that she found out that her father died (really died this time, not faked his death) around 2002-2003. She knew that her family wouldn't want to speak to her, and if they did, they would probably do so for criminal intent. I remember that she encountered some of her extended family in public (one of the scams was an elderly woman with a small toddler, and an index card with "I am poor, and have no money to my grandchild") and she would say "don't interact with her. Look over there, there, and in that car: that's family keeping an eye on her, and to warn her if things start to go down. Even if you say you know she's a gypsy, yeah, don't do that. They will find you, and hurt you." Some of the men would see a dent in your car and say they could repair it for $200 or something. Hot women would approach you and stroke your hand while they had "visions." She knew all the tricks. She was great at carnivals, too, like how things were rigged.
Getting gyped” Learned this one is about associating gypsies with getting screwed over, so people started saying they got gyped because something bad happened.
This one is hard for me because my first wife's biological dad was from a family of ... and I can't even say it. My wife used to say "gypsy," and her family all said gypsies, but I can't say "Romani" either because they weren't technically Romani. The family came from Europe via South America and are a large isolated family up and down the US eastern coast. Most of the rulers of this family clan are wanted by the FBI, and they are involved in everything from penny bunko scams to psychic parlors to carnivals and crooked contracting companies. My late wife's family have been on a lot of TV shows since the 1970s, including 60 minutes and several specials on cable TV channels like Discovery. Everyone called them gypsies.
My wife died before the term "gypsy" started to be recognized as a slur, and I am curious how she would have handled it, because people used to ask her, "Oh Romani?" "No." "Irish Traveler?" "No, they are the Ristick/Ely clan." "... what?" But let me tell you, that family was very weird. Some of them still lived in vardas but most were circulating through private residences in common suburban neighborhoods. They were real hard to catch and pin down because almost all the top family members had multiple aliases, moved around a lot, and even my wife's dad had several marriages, and claimed the kids on his taxes for decades, even if they were in their 30s (which is a problem my wife had to deal with, like having to tell the IRS, "No, I am 33 and married, I not 8 living with my dad in eastern Ohio."). They have a very specific philosophy about their family as "chosen people" who were, as one story goes, forgiven by God because they stole one of the nails from the cross used to crucify Jesus. They don't even consider what they do fraud or stealing any more than you or I would think a monkey owns a camera. I was married to her for 25 years, and heard all sorts of stories about that family, and why my mother-in-law ended up leaving.
One of my wife's friends lost her baby to COVID because her mom wouldn't stay masked, and lied about having COVID when she visited shortly after the baby was born. The abject selfishness boggles my mind.
A lot of outsourcers do this. Here's my experience with a few companies.
- The "team" you meet are competent, English speaking fronts. They are the demo models of the people who will work on your projects.
- After the contract is signed, these people are swapped out with randos of varying competence.
- In some cases, some of these randos are further hidden behind aliases: people with names that are actually more than one person sharing logins and passwords.
- They will string you along, trying to charge maximum hours worked without regards to product or services delivered.
- Most of these companies have a "bucket of crabs" mentality: the managers are horrible, the staff incompetent, and once the gain some skill, they leave for better companies. They backstab one another, hijack projects to fuck over coworkers, and lie and cover their tracks. Some of this is cultural, like a caste system, while some are just racist.
At one time, these people were pretty good, but they realized they had skills and left for other countries for better pay and better working conditions. The bids got more and more competitive, cutting costs until they were literally filled with low-skilled labor who can't be promoted or leave for economic or competence reasons.
Not really. Part of my life's adventures have just been showing up.
"Wasted" as in how? Who are you answering to? What standards are you judging by, and are they your standards, or the cultural standards pushed onto you by a capitalistic "must be productive" mindset? Or parents pushing their own hopes and dreams unrealized by the same mindset? Are these friends really successful?
Maybe I was cursed or blessed by having parents who really didn't give a shit about me, were constantly "disappointed" by who I was, and not really caring about me as an individual person but how I made them look. My dad was a sociopath who never wanted children, and my mother was an alcoholic who wanted children to show that her marriage was successful and good unlike what all her relatives kept saying. Until she committed suicide and my dad threw me out while I was still a teen. Thankfully, I learned early on that my parents would NEVER be proud of me because it wasn't about me at all. It was about them. The disappointment was their motivator with no real strategy behind it, and they set me up to impossible standards with bad examples, and frankly, lies they were trying to make into truth. So I stopped seeking their judgement, because I could predict it would always be disappointment.
Last time I spoke to my dad (1998), he asked what i was doing career wise, and I told him, and he dismissed it as "you have no idea what you are talking about," as if I was making it up. The thing was, I was still making money. The money was real, his opinion of my success was worthless. He had to one-up me, and always will. I felt so free after that, and never spoke to him again. He never missed me because he does not love me or hate me. He just doesn't think about me at all.
The expectation of others is a powerful drug, I won't claim to be immune to it. But at a certain point, you have to ask who you are answering to when you determine your own success and failure.
I worked with a client where their router got hacked, but the site manager insisted that it wasn't, because he had an "unhackable" Macbook. Like, no, buddy. No. Every Windows 98 client, the Windows NT 4.0 server, and your router are totally, totally hacked, and pointing to Chinese DNS. "UHHH NOOO?? IT's a MAAAAAC! Hello? Anyone in there, Windows guy? I HAVE A MACBOOK!" With a patronizing chuckle. Then he mocked deaf people accents to re-explain, I guess, to make the point I was retarded.
Thankfully, his boss fired him on the spot. This was the THIRD time I was sent out there to wipe and reinstall, and my attendance of his firing was a mere formality. He was being hacked by an open Apple AirPort Base Station with no password or encryption that was inside the network, and refused to believe it because it was an Apple product. His boss understood, though.
Note: this is not meant to mock or deride any Apple product or fans thereof. Just this specific dweeb.
I think it depends on where you live. In my case, I see about 4-5 a week on my security cameras, but only a few a year ignore the sign. On nextdoor dot com, it's discussed and video camera footage is shared, so we know which neighborhoods are targeted. Mine is because of the aging population of upper middle income folks.