The stupid… It burns.

One hell of an identity theft story

by

Man, what a crazy story.

Today’s Minneapolis Star-Tribune has the first-person account of St. Paul resident Austin, who has spent the last decade dealing with myriad problems caused by a man who lives only a few towns over, but who has been misusing Austin’s Social Security number to buy cars, open lines of credit, and even get health insurance.

The pisser is that the authorities won’t do anything about it.

He claims that his attempts to get local law enforcement to care have been fruitless, even when police were presented with a folder containing several years’ worth of evidence and a definitive paper trail.

According to Austin, a St. Paul Police Dept. sergeant told him, “The only way we can really do anything is if you capture him on video using your card.”

That’s cold. You’d think with a large collection of evidence the police would be more than willing to shove their boots up the guy’s ass. I’d be furious.

I thought the older were wiser

by

I’m not sure what it is, but my last couple of work days have been a bit more interesting than usual. On Sunday I had a lady that didn’t know what the word “simplistic” meant, and yesterday I had another lady that didn’t know what a “commercial” was. Both ladies were at least in their mid to late 50’s, and native English speakers.

Here’s what happened on Sunday: I helped a lady who wanted to find a Windows 10 compatible mouse, and I told her that all the mice we sold were simplistic to install, she interrupts me and asks me “What does simplistic mean? Does it mean it’s simple?” I wanted to pull a mirror out of my pocket, have her look into it and tell her “No, I’m talking about you…” But other than that she was a nice person, but strange… She wanted to know if I knew the tax rates of all other 49 states because, you know, that’s something that I should know right? Turns out she lived in California and wanted to buy a steam gift card to get Stardew Valley for herself. More power to her, but she kept asking me math questions to try and get me to confirm answers for her…

Of course that was much more pleasant than the other lady. She was an all out total bitchface. She wanted to buy a TV, and she was looking at the commercials playing on all the TV’s assuming that what was on the TV had something to do with it… it was a commercial for Uncharted 4. I explained that to her and then she said “WHAT IS A COMMERCIAL?” Which threw me the fuck off because how can you not know? Especially since I’m pretty sure she was around when the first commercial was invented… So I explained it to her, telling her that it’s an advertisement for a Playstation 4 game “Oh, well I don’t want that.”. Already I was missing the Stardew lady… When did words like “Simplistic” and “Commercial” become too scary and confusing for people? Son of a bitch… No wonder Donald Trump won the GOP. I’m a fucking thesaurus compared to Mr “I’m good at words”.

Oh well, on the same day Stardew lady needed help I did help a friendly gay couple choose between Star Wars Battlefront and Fallout 4 by telling them that it was “Skyrim With Guns”, and we all laughed. So maybe there is still some hope for humanity…

Stupid asshat of the day

by

Sending someone your nudes doesn’t seem like the best way to test someones eyesight while you’re working on getting their glasses fixed.

While the woman was waiting for her glasses to be fixed, she received a text message containing an image of a nude, fully aroused man. A short time later, a second text arrived, with the message, “Did you like that?”

Genius… This is right up there with these subway guys who froze their urine and put their privates between some subway bread. How do these wanks think they’ll keep their jobs after doing this shit? If they even do…

Because when you think of GDC, you think of erotic schoolgirl dancers.

by

microsoftdancer

Microsoft’s timing couldn’t be better. 😛

Hours after hosting a “women in gaming” luncheon at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Microsoft threw a party with scantily clad dancers in school girl outfits. It wasn’t a good look, and the company has since apologized.

Of course they did pull out Phil Spencer Bot to offer up apologies about the whole thing. Because he’s done a great job so far keeping up the company image. I always love reading his stuff. In fact, lets embark on this journey together. 😀

How we show up as an organization is incredibly important to me.

Yes, and your company’s message has been loud and clear… Annoy the fuck out of people to use your new products.

We want to build and reflect the culture of TEAM XBOX – internally and externally – a culture that each one of us can represent with pride. An inclusive culture has a direct impact on the products and services we deliver and the perception consumers have of the Xbox brand and our company, as a whole.

Inclusive, we want everyone to flock to our walled garden. That includes you, ladies.

It has come to my attention that at Xbox-hosted events at GDC this past week, we represented Xbox and Microsoft in a way that was absolutely not consistent or aligned to our values. That was unequivocally wrong and will not be tolerated.

We’ll remember to buy male dancers next time… in tiny miniskirts!

This matter is being handled internally, but let me be very clear – how we represent ourselves as individuals, who we hire and partner with and how we engage with others is a direct reflection of our brand and what we stand for.

If they were trying to reflect the Microsoft brand I’d say Mission Accomplished. Having read many posts by all kinds of virgin man children gamers from all corners of the internet I’d say you know your target audience quite well! Hell, a small portion of said audience seems to think you’re doing a great job.

When we do the opposite, and create an environment that alienates or offends any group, we justly deserve the criticism.

Your money is important to us too. All inclusive!

It’s unfortunate that such events could take place in a week where we worked so hard to engage the many different gaming communities in the exact opposite way. I am personally committed to ensuring that diversity and inclusion is central to our everyday business and our core values as a team – inside and outside the company. We need to hold ourselves to higher standards and we will do better in the future.

Yes, higher standards. Like making sure Windows 10 gets put on as many computers as possible with or without your consent.

You know. I don’t think this would have been as big if they had regular dancers and maybe included some male ones too… But that would probably creep out the guys at the conference, and we can’t have that… can we?

How to prove you didn’t steal anything: Flash the security guards and bite them

by

People do strange things when they’re caught being stupid.

When the store’s loss prevention staff accused her of theft and pulling her clothes partway off didn’t convince them otherwise, she resorted to violence. According to police, she hit one of the employees trying to detain her in the face, then bit his arm. She left “visible injuries” in the attack, but nothing bad enough that the employee needed medical attention.

Dumb people do even dumber things when they get caught. I’ve seen tweakers around this area do similar things, but not quite that grotesque.

Microsoft wants to make an Upgradable Console

by

I thought I’d be done talking about the latest Microsoft hooplah that’s been taking place, but the other day not long after talking about Microsoft’s attempt to get everyone to go over to their UWP platform I read an article that forced my head to hit my solid oak desk. Microsoft wants to make the XBox One an upgradable device.

“We see on other platforms whether it be mobile or PC that you get a continuous innovation that you rarely see on console,” he said. “Consoles lock the hardware and the software platforms together at the beginning of the generation. Then you ride the generation out for seven or so years, while other ecosystems are getting better, faster, stronger. And then you wait for the next big step function.”

I can only speculate at this point, but knowing Microsoft the XBox One’s upgrade path would probably consist of starting out the consumer with what one would consider bottom tier hardware, and give them the option of upgrading using Microsoft’s proprietary hardware. Basically the Mac of PC Gaming, only with a Mac at least you can still mod games far more openly than you can with Microsoft’s proposed walled gardened ecosystem.

Even other people, such as the CEO of Epic (makers of the Unreal Engine) has spoken out about how foolish this is.

“Unless Microsoft changes course,” Sweeney says, “all of the independent companies comprising the PC ecosystem have a decision to make: to oppose this, or cede control of their existing customer relationships and commerce to Microsoft’s exclusive control.”

Meanwhile on the Microsoft side:

“The Universal Windows Platform is a fully open ecosystem, available to every developer, that can be supported by any store. We continue to make improvements for developers; for example, in the Windows 10 November Update, we enabled people to easily side-load apps by default, with no UX (user experience) required.”

Really? Then how come there are two different versions of the new Tomb Raider floating around with Microsoft’s being the one with issues such as missing features from the Steam release? If you buy The Witcher 3 from GOG or Steam for example, you won’t notice a difference. Same with most Steam and Nonsteam games as they both use the same executable and get the same updates. Microsoft’s method fragments the PC Gaming ecosystem by making dev’s choose between UWP and the more traditional means of developing a game, and consumers go over to yet another application (and OS if they haven’t moved to 10 yet) to grab these titles.

This move isn’t Boneheaded, it’s XBoneheaded.

Oh, and on a funnier note I had to change the brackets around user experience. In the original article they used [] instead of (). If I left the quote in it’s original state it would have read as:

“The Universal Windows Platform is a fully open ecosystem, available to every developer, that can be supported by any store. We continue to make improvements for developers; for example, in the Windows 10 November Update, we enabled people to easily side-load apps by default, with no UX [user experience] required.”

Yeah, I’m happy with my current gaming experience thanks. 😛

May the storm bring forth the stupid

by

last night there was Thunder and Lightning while I was sleeping, it woke me in the middle of the night and gave me a weird dream I’ll have to divulge in a particular circle at some point. But on another note I think some of that stormy weather brought out the weird folk. I had to deal with a guy who claimed to be a homeless businessman who wanted to launch a new type of business where people could learn anything for free, ANYTHING! I won’t go into the full story because talking to him was like dealing with a man with 23 snakes in his mouth, and I’ve been called in to work on my day off tomorrow and I need sleep. But felt the need to write something up to get the annoyance out of my system. I’m sure if you catch up with me at some point I can give you the details on the whole score. I had to laugh that he didn’t know me at all and wanted me to design him a website… that day, for an entire $10 an hour… I actually make more than that now. He was also suspicious of me because I stayed mostly quiet while he spoke. He was unsure if I even knew what encryption was.

Oh well, I’ll save the rest of the story for another time.

Happy Stupid Day

by

Today wasn’t one of my better days. I broke down all my freight and things were going well, that was until the store opened. It’s geriatric discount day and everyone came into shop. My first customer bought a prepaid cellphone card, and in Oregon we have a 911 tax, 75 cents goes to the state to fund 911 calls since less and less people are using landlines and moving to cellphones. And this customer was bitching about how he shouldn’t have to pay this tax because he never needs to call 911… Kinda makes me wish there was a program where you need to signup just in case you need to use 911, and if you don’t signup for it then you can’t dial it with your phone. Then on the off chance where they need to call 911 and can’t then we can at least say we’re thinning the herd.

Then I had to help a bitchy lady with a camera purchase. She wanted me to pick out the SD card for her because she didn’t understand how storage capacity works. She literally told me in her own words “Please do my thinking for me.” Then she also wanted me to pull out the camera, put the batteries in and the SD card before buying it… My boss gave me the ok to do so, so I did. And I may have “accidentally” set the SD card to read only mode. :v

I also had to activate a phone for someone and help another who didn’t know how to turn his phone on because apparently the red button where it said “PWR” alluded him. But they were much nicer so I took the time to help them, even though reading instructions was too hard for them. Everyone else was actually quite pleasant. And my bosses didn’t get on my case about not getting the freight finished or put away, probably because I looked like I was going to beat someone with a wii controller. Or shove a selfie stick up someones arse. That would actually be a good use of one now that I think about it. A selfie AND a colonoscopy all in one? That could be marketable!

Oh and on the ride home we almost got hit by another dumbshit’s car because he was too busy looking in another direction while swerving behind us. They looked to be about my age so they weren’t senile, just fucking dumb. There were lots of dumb people today. Dumb dumb dumb.

I’d have gone to sleep by now but needed a bite to eat and needed to take out a bit of my rage in Elder Scrolls Online. I escaped Cold Harbour and made it to the world of the living near a ship. I made my character a Khajit Sorcerer. It’s been pretty fun so far, but it’ll take some getting used to. This isn’t like Skyrim where I can live out my random fantasy of being a khajit tailed cyberninja with dragon wings, troll moons, pogo hammers and anything else that could feed my absurd imagination. But it certainly did bring back good feelings like I used to have in Uru when I still had a warm happy feeling for that game. I’ll need to get back to it. ESO that is… People seem to be friendlier there.

Thoughts on the latest shooting.

by

The whole shooting at the Umpqua Community College has been all kinds of depressing. The guy behind the shooting announced his plans on 4chan of all places, and while there were some people in the thread telling him not to do it, he was still cheered on for starting the “beta uprising”. Having read what I could of the archive before projectile vomiting I could see he couldn’t score with someone of the opposite sex. What fascinates me is the people in that thread giving their undying support, I know it shouldn’t surprise me since misery loves company and everything, but damn that’s a heaping load of misery…

But you can’t point at one thing in these cases and place blame, A lot goes into this mental behavior. Mental health care in the United States has been poor since the 1980’s, people with mental issues have problems getting the proper care they need, but they have no issues getting their hands on guns to commit these crimes. They also find people just as crazy as they are and have crazy children, then impart their mental teachings. Technology has advanced tremendously, and has made it easy for people to connect with each other, including crazies finding other crazies to enjoy each others company in their own echochambers. They become so comfortable talking like this all the time that they act out in the real world thinking they won’t get in trouble. I’ve seen guys and even some girls that fit the mold.

You know, some people say that the government is trying to control our population by using chemtrails and other means of sterilization. But that seems rather pointless when we appear to be doing a bang up job trying to kill each other.