I Am Completely Serious

I hate the San Francisco airport as no person ever did before.

2013-07-23T01:06:15Z

Except maybe me, because I have hated that particular airport plenty of times in the past. Does this count as self-plagiarism?

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"Dear, I know you have anger issues, but please."

2012-12-13T00:23:14Z

Me: Is this show live? If I go to his studio and shoot him right now, will it just go off the air?

Mom: You may not shoot Chris Matthews.

Me: Sure, just keep talking, asshole! Your guests' jobs are just to sit there and look earnest and nod. You have failed to communicate a single idea in the past ten minutes you've been talking, but that's fine!... You're just shouting! You're not saying anything! Shut up!

Mom: Dear, please calm down.

Me: ...You think if I shoot him they'll just replace him with a robot anyway.

Mom: No.

Me: It would be funny if Keith Olbermann's contract had said they could just replace him with a robot if he left. Like they get a copy of Vocaloid or something and they load samples of his voice into it, and his show is just, Vocaloid screaming in rage. One half-hour-long Vocaloid scream.

Mom: *is now ignoring me*

Me: Or they can make it sing and there can be a musical interlude.

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I have this crappy insulated coffee cup with a Catholic nonprofit's logo on it.

2012-11-13T16:32:47Z

It's sitting on my desk here, it's one of those ones with sort of fakey brushed-metal parts over plastic parts. I finished the coffee in it about ten minutes ago. And now it's buzzing at me. Or hissing, I guess it sounds like static. It's kind of freaking me out. Maybe I shouldn't be putting coffee in this thing, I'm like feeding it or something. When it has imbibed enough of the dark liquid, it will extend its hot silvery robotic tendrils, and begin implementing its plans. Its plans to fundraise for a Catholic nonprofit I guess. Organize a silent auction of local crafts and homemade fruit preserves.

I don't even know where this cup came from, I guess from a nun. Did someone in my house steal a cup from a nun?

My frustration with the cup is symbolic of my frustration with absolutely everything. It is only Tuesday and I already wish this week was over.

(I am going to kick a couple of lazy-ass property appraisers in the face. Fuck property appraisers.)

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A helpful quiz for law students.

2012-05-17T23:59:57Z

Are you a law student? Are you considering doing a legal clinic where you'll
~~learn about the discovery process hands-on~~
~~interact with real clients (whom you seem to think are basically zoo animals)~~
~~get some bullshit to put on your resume~~
~~"network" by means of social interactions seemingly calculated to get you punched~~
~~you have done nothing but text all day I don't know why you're here~~
learn about the discovery process hands-on? Take this quick quiz to determine whether I hate you!

Question 1: You are helping an elderly client respond to a set of discovery requests. One of the questions is, "Have you done any repairs to your home, and if so, what kind?" The client responds, "Oh, lands, it was a mess, honey. And there was this greasy dust just everywhere, you could hardly even breathe."

(a) Ask her the question again, rephrasing it and speaking more loudly if she seems not to understand.
(b) Write down "it was a mess and there was this greasy dust just everywhere you could hardly even breathe" and move on.
(c) Write down "did not answer" and move on.
(d) Complain to the person training you that the client talks too much.

Question 2: A client has given you a handwritten list of damages, and he is sitting with you as you type it up for him. He has written this: "lost two cars. my truck is destroyed just can't drive it. you can drive the car though." What do you do?

(a) Ask him to explain what he means by this.
(b) Type those words in exactly.
(c) Type those words in exactly, noting conscientiously at the end "I don't really understand what he means by this."
(d) Complain to the person training you that the client is stupid.

Question 3: A client has filled out a worksheet consisting mostly of questions, which you are typing up. The last page is a checklist of documents she needs to turn in. There are three boxes that she can check for each document: "This document is attached," "I'll send you this document later," and "This doesn't apply to me." You have her file, which contains all of the documents which the client has turned in. What do you do?

(a) As you type up the last page, make sure the client has actually attached all of the documents she says she's attached and that the ones she says don't apply to her actually don't apply to her.
(b) Type up the last page as-is.
(c) Don't type up the last page at all, because it doesn't look very important.
(d) Complain to the person training you that there are too many documents in the file.

Question 4: A client has filled out a worksheet consisting mostly of questions, which you are typing up. The client is sitting there next to you. You find that he has left some questions blank. What do you do?

(a) Ask him to answer the questions he left blank and type them up.
(b) Ask him to answer the questions he left blank and hand-write his answers on sticky notes which you attach to the worksheet.
(c) Type in "did not answer."
(d) Complain to the person training you that the client is lazy.

Question 5: You are going over a client's claimed damages. There is a note on the file that the client is given to exaggeration. The client has claimed $15,000 for a destroyed car, but the client's most recent vehicle registration values the car at $6,300. What do you do?

(a) Tentatively change the number to $6,300, and write to the client explaining the change and asking politely if he has any documentation supporting his $15,000 number.
(b) Do nothing.
(c) Don't even notice the discrepency because you never actually opened the file in the first place.
(d) Complain to the person training you that you didn't know this law stuff meant you actually had to, like, READ things and INTERPRET them and make INFORMED DECISIONS and stuff.

If you answered "a" for every question, congratulations; you should go ahead and do the clinic. However, if you answered anything other than "a" for any question, not only may you not do the clinic, you must drop out of law school immediately, apologize to everyone you've ever met, and select a job in which your inevitable failure will not bankrupt anybody or get them sent to prison. You stupid jackass.

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I hate AT&T, as usual.

2012-01-08T05:44:25Z

I've spent the past three hours trying to get Dad's Samsung Galaxy Tab to install from non-market sources. This is necessary because it will not complete market downloads. That is to say, one cannot presently install anything at all on this absurd device.

Enabling of "install from unknown sources" appears to be impossible unless I flash a custom ROM (seriously, AT&T?); I may end up doing that, but I'd rather have the option of flashing it back to the original AT&T one in case it needs work. This appears to be impossible.

(This does work, but I see no reason for Samsung and AT&T to have charged Dad $400 for a computer that is incapable of installing software without the help of a second computer.)

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I've lost a bunch of weight due to many things being horrible the past couple years.

2011-09-17T20:39:20Z

I'm not going to say I'm not glad about the weight-loss thing. But if, like, Yuuko from xxxHolic or someone had showed up the night before graduation and told me I had twenty-four hours to choose between thirty pounds and extended existential horror + special bonus brain surgery, I suspect I'd have gone with the former. It's not an end that I feel justifies the means.

So it annoys me when people I haven't seen for a few years get wide-eyed and congratulate me, because clearly I must be far better off now, regardless of all other factors. Yesterday I wrote myself a new script:

"Thank you for contacting Sarah! Your opinion is important to her. Please stay on the line, and an operator will be with you in: (here I need to switch into a robot-y voice I guess) seven. bajillion. years."

Then I mime hanging up a phone.

I think that this will communicate my feelings effectively. It's more convenient than my other idea because I won't have to carry teaching puppets and mace.

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My vicious, unfounded accusation for the day.

2011-09-07T21:47:05Z

AT&T's smartphones don't allow call recording because AT&T doesn't want the stuff that happens during customer service calls winding up online.

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Things I Use Frequently That Were Clearly Designed By Idiots Or Villains

2011-03-28T00:37:58Z

1) A Blackberry Pearl.

2) phpMyAdmin.

3) A garlic press I got at Wal-Mart for $4.

The garlic press is the only one of these things whose behavior I think is really excusable. Blackberry Pearl, you are an expensive product which a lot of people worked on, and some of them had to have been at least moderately intelligent. Why are you terrible in every conceivable way? Why do none of your functions ever work without fiddling, and why do a lot of them not work even with fiddling? Why do you always misspell my name?

I have this phone because Dad got a Torch and didn't need it anymore. The Torch isn't really much better.

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I have formulated a policy, and have been attempting to adhere to it.

2010-08-17T07:06:48Z

The policy is that, if some item covered in the news has ever ruined my day, and if other people have already discussed it more eloquently than I can, I don't post about it here, so as not to ruin anyone else's day. I consider this policy to be socially irresponsible, but then I also consider this blog to be The Place For Talking About Fox Demon Cyborg Werewolf Romance, And Related Concepts. I assume that most people are here for the Cyborg Werewolf stuff, so the latter concern usually trumps.

But I'm breaking the rule for a second: I want the Cordoba dudes to build like, eight mosques. I will get them the damn money. I will steal it from Harry Reid and Obama. I am so disgusted by their wussdom that I changed my operating system, which is a new and scientifically unprecedented level of disgust. Probably there will be papers written.

What infuriates me the most about this whole discussion is that a lot of the people who are insisting that religious freedom doesn't apply anymore are the same ones who, in my home town, show up on the local news every once in a while explaining that it's a threat to their own religious freedom not to have the Ten Commandments in courthouses, and mandatory prayer in public schools.

When I was a kid, we had a sort of irregular Christian Ed class consisting of a lady telling Bible stories with a feltboard. This was technically "optional," but what that meant was that the parents had to sign something or come in and explain that we weren't supposed to be in Christian Ed. (And it didn't necessarily mean anything when they did - at one point Mom came in, and elongated_tito and I didn't have to go for a while, but after a while they started making us again, because they didn't feel like detailing an extra teacher to watch us.)

At least one of the Indian families - I'm not sure whether they were Hindu, Muslim, Jainist, or something else, but they weren't Christian - apparently didn't give permission, or else the kids didn't try to get it, because they were always there. I assume they didn't want to deal with the harassment that came with not filing off to listen to the Bible stories with everyone else.

I disliked it when school assemblies required group prayers, as nearly all of them did. Most of the time I would be a wuss and kind of duck my head so it looked like I was praying, but sometimes I didn't bother. A couple times I got yelled at for that. I remember wondering about this as a kid - I mean, they knew I wasn't Christian. This was something of which I'd made sure! (I was loud.) So by telling me to make these gestures that meant something to them but nothing to me, they were, in essence, telling me to lie to them. I was not a well-behaved kid, but I didn't like to lie.

(My disciplinary problems were, in fact, partly due to my determination to tell everybody exactly what I thought of them. Some thoughts, I felt, were best expressed through the fist.)

Now I see that it wasn't actually about faith - the teachers who did this didn't really care what I believed, or even what any of the other kids did. They knew that most of the Christian kids were probably only making the gestures while they thought about something else, and that didn't bother them. All they cared about was that we carried out the motions. In a community in which everybody's Christian, praying is just part of being a Good Kid, in the same way turning in your homework and not scratching up the desk with your pencil is. If you don't duck your head, shut your eyes, and put your hands together, you're misbehaving. They had no other context for interpreting my distaste for pretending to pray - they couldn't imagine any other meaning for what I was doing. Obviously, they thought, I was just trying to annoy them.

This is, I think, part of the impulse that makes people of otherwise normal intelligence insist that mosques are "symbols of hate." Christians tend to think of themselves as being the default in the US. Once a teacher told me in an exasperated tone, as if I was only pretending not to know this myself, that I wasn't "really Jewish," and therefore had to go listen to the Bible stories. I don't know how she defined that - maybe I should've been, like, wearing a yarmulke? I probably should've said "oy veh" or something, I don't know.

But because I wasn't blatantly, visibly something else, she felt I had to be Christian, because in her mind, that was the default state. And the thing about being the default is that you get used to things being set up for your own convenience. All the stories you hear are about people like you, all the stuff on TV's about people like you, all the pictures in your kids' books are people like you. You think that's how it's supposed to be. The world generally arranges itself conveniently so that you don't need to think about people not of your faith. When the guy on the podium starts praying, you know that everyone else is going to do it, too. When you see a mosque on TV or in a picture, you know it's really far away and nothing you need to deal with.

So you're so used to not having to see them that, when you suffer the slight inconvenience of having to look at a mosque or a kid who's not praying, it feels like an assault. Because it's all about you. When I didn't pray, the teachers knew it had nothing to do with my beliefs - I was just doing it to tick them off. When a Muslim group wants to build a mosque, Glen Beck knows it's got nothing to do with their faith - they're just doing it because they hate Christians. Glen Beck's smart! He knows it's really all about him.

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KSAOs make you stupid.

2010-07-16T20:32:24Z

And sometimes two of them are just the same question rephrased. Obviously, I rephrased some of my sentences and changed the order of the paragraphs.

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Dear candidates,

2010-07-11T17:33:06Z

Please refrain from conducting your door-to-door campaigning yourself if, by doing so, you will reveal to potential constituents that you are a total jerk.

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Warning: Ill-natured post.

2010-02-01T07:23:05Z

So I’ve been looking at the message board for a Facebook game.

I know that I yelled at my cold cream the other day, and I made libelous remarks about Octavia Butler due to my displeasure at her having gotten Serious all over me, and I suggested that Lois McMaster Bujold’s latest series might have been the result of a stroke or head injury. And I may have threatened Nalini Singh’s pets.

But… I’m not serious about these things? I think I would feel kind of embarrassed if people thought I was truly distraught about my cold cream, or seriously angry at writers for not meeting all of my expectations. Yet I think these people on Facebook are seriously angry at the programmers of the little farm game.

THIS GAME IS BECOMMING A SOURCE OF STRESS FOR ME!!!!

I HAVEN’T HAD ANYTHING IN MY MARKET FOR THREE DAYS SO I CAN NOT PURCHASE, EXPAND OR PLANT ANYTHING!!!! THEY NEED TO GET THIS FIXED. I DON’T KNOW WHO TO REPORT THIS TO????
MY LIST OF FRIENDS AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PAGE IS DOWN TO 5 FRIENDS WHEN I REALLY HAVE 34 FRIENDS!!
PLEASE WHO EVER IS RUNNING THIS GAME FIX THESE THINGS BEFORE MY BLOOD PRESSURE BLOWS A HOLE IN MY VEINS!!

She’s stressed! Her emotional health is your responsibility, game devs! WHERE ARE YOU

I should point out that the game’s start screen says “beta” real big, and it’s only been up a couple weeks.

is such a waste of my time…can you not get it set up so that this can be done easily as it is on other games…i spent over half hour just trying to get the screens to come up and then they disappear and you gotta reload…this should be a basic of the game not an after thought..just toooooo many steps…

I vaguely assume that people who spend time on the internet are familiar with the concept that, when a new website or service goes up for the first time, it may slow down or break if it gets a lot of traffic. Is this wrong of me? Apparently so. Complaints of this variety comprise a lot of the posts on this board.

Do Not set limitations .

People will leave this game fast. It gets boring after you have planted your crops. pay attention,, people like challenges to keep playing. Treasue hunting should be made as long as you keep finding things. Make them harder to find NOT shiny. Think it over .

I love all the imperative sentences.

i went from loving the game because of the awesome hunt for the treasures now that it is so very limited and not at all proftable i am just liking the game…..PLZZZZZ CHANGE IT BACK, increase cost on other stuff and leave our treasures ALONE!!!!!

And then she bit off a dev’s finger and tumbled into the fires of Mount Doom, the pretend internet rubber ducky still clutched in her hands.

Another thing I appreciate is the threats:

1: If there is nothing to salvage, and you can’t navigate completely around Islands, what is the point in playing. It becomes boring very quickly. We are fickle people, we will move on to the next more exciting game.

2: well i for one won’t be playing it so often
was fun when you could all pop to one island and race for each treasure.
it is now going to be the same as every other island / farm game - sheesh, thought i had found a treasure of a game !

I should make clear that, since this is Facebook, you can see how old the posters are. The median age on this board is about fifty. These people are adults.

This thread has my favorite threat:

5000 coins for 5 plow spots?

1: why does it show amounts at 500 and then 50000 and the 500 is not available?
Soesn’t seem quite right to get 5 plow spots for 5000 coins. gotta make the game a little easier to upgrade and move up if your gonna charge the point vaule to dang high!
Otherwise I really like the graphic worka dn the game. Can’t wait to see other options too!

2: [1], if you allready have 8 neighbors you can buy the upgrade plots for 500, you do NOT have to buy the ones for 5000 as they are the same as the plots for 500. Make sure you have 8 neighbors & if you are not able to buy them let Ralph know here via post, hope this helps.

2: I understand that part. But 5 plow spots for 5,000 coins? WOW!!! I’ll just not upgrade and maybe not play as much.

She’s just so blunt about the whole thing! She wants to be able to plow a lot! Make it so she can plow a lot, or else she’ll play less! It’s not hard!

(And technically, she’s wrong - it’s only four plow spots.)

This woman, on the other hand, is far too distraught for such manipulations:

HELP RAPH!!!!

My avatar is stuck! She moves her legs but goes no where!! Crops will die!!

OH NO

She’s just so sincere! She really identifies with her imaginary plants.

Something else I like is a lot of posts use the main dev’s first name to get his attention on their urgent problems. Half of them misspell it. (It’s “Raph,” but people read it as “Ralph” a lot.)

1: I just paid the $5000 for island expansion and got NOTHING except money taken out of my account. I’d really like to get what I paid for!

(Raph-the-dev explains the problem)

1: Ok, Ralph, I’ve added a bang load of neighbors and added a couple of $500 expansions. But the fact remains that I paid $5000 for the initial expansion and did not get what I paid for. You wouldn’t like that if it happened to you.

2: It happened to me as well. I even posted bout it. I got for the 5000 the same amount of land expansion as the 500. and that is 4500 hard earn coins. I would like it back.

1: RALPH! Did you give me my $5000 back?

It’s interesting how she doesn’t know whether she’s been reimbursed, because the money doesn’t actually matter enough to her that she’s keeping track of how much she has - yet it still drives her nuts to think that she’s been somehow cheated out of some of it.

This one is kind of the ideal of all entitled gamer posts. It has everything - possessiveness of free virtual goods, paranoia, use of the dev’s first name and an imperative sentence in the title, and an acknowledgement that the loss of her pretend object is emotionally troubling her.

RAPH!!!! please adress this as soon as possible

i want the gift of my skeleton back this makes me mad that it was taken away i could gift it this morning and know i cant whats going on here one day its there and then its not are you doing this just to agravate people because its not funny i am clearly upset about this

I halfway want to friend her so I can find out how old she is.

I especially appreciate that it’s her pretend skeleton that she’s getting worked up about. I can vaguely understand people getting upset about losing their animals - when I was a kid, I reset my game when my Pokemon got knocked out, because I didn’t want them to get hurt! (I over-leveled a lot to prevent this, yes.) After I caught Mewtwo the first time, I felt really guilty - I was just like Giovanni in the movie, trying to deprive Mewtwo of his freedom! So I reset and never caught him again. Even though we know it’s irrational, we have this emotional reaction to “living” things in video games, the same way kids relate differently to a doll than to a toy truck.

But the skeleton is a dead body lying on the ground that she wants to decorate with. I just don’t know, lady!

(Crossposted to SarahPin.com, Dreamwidth, and LiveJournal. You can leave comments at whichever.)

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ARGH EBAY

2010-01-20T02:08:39Z

Bring back negative feedback for buyers RIGHT NOW.

Auction Title: Pokemon The Movie 2000 DVD - No Box

Gray Feedback Left By Stupid Stupid Stupid Idiot Buyer: i didnt know that it was only the cd with no box

(I am very petty.)

(Crossposted to SarahPin.com, Dreamwidth, and LiveJournal. You can leave comments at whichever.)

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I give thanks for my ability to waste time yelling at internet people.

2009-11-28T04:15:01Z

This is the best stupid Second Life argument I’ve ever been in.

I’m just pleased with how my last sentence there turned out. And the intended recipient will never read it! She is too busy being wrong on the internet someplace else.

(Crossposted to SarahPin.com, Dreamwidth, and LiveJournal. You can leave comments at whichever.)

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Because I desire that all human beings be as grumpy as am I.

2009-07-30T13:02:41Z

Please enjoy these demonstrative images relating to the Avatar casting, via kate_nepveu, originally from RaceBending.com.

(Crossposted to SarahPin.com, Dreamwidth, and LiveJournal. You can leave comments at whichever.)

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