bladespark | Entries tagged with idiots

I keep seeing jokes and lols and blurbs mentioning anybody who's rich as a member of the 1% They have movie stars and wealthy fictional characters holding up those little signs saying things like "I never wanted for anything growing up, and now I have money and style, I am the 1%."

NO. NO NO NONONONONO!!!!!!

"Never wanted for anything" is not the 1%. Movie stars are not the 1%! MILLIONAIRES are not the 1%! The 1% are so absurdly, horrible, disgustingly rich that they are miles and miles and miles beyond that! THINK about it, people!!!!!!! Gah. The amount of money made could be charted with a line, right? Goes from homeless broke-ass people at 0 up and up and up from there. WE'RE NOT TALKING ABOUT THE PEOPLE MORE THAN HALFWAY UP, we're talking about the VERY TOP 1%, the people who make more money than the merely "rich" could even dream of, okay? The people who make more money than all the working stiffs and all the ordinary millionaires in the country combined! They make millionaires look frigging POOR! There's a reason people are pissed at them, and it's not "I'm broke so I am jealous of the wealthy" It's "I'm disgusted by somebody who has so much money that he could buy whole nations." Nobody needs that much money! It goes beyond "successful and well off" and into "obscene."

Also, for FRICK'S SAKE Rarity is not in the 1%!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Sweet Celestia, people! She WORKS WITH HER OWN ~~HANDS~~ HOOVES to make her money! She's not even "rich" let alone in the multi-billions kind of territory the 1% occupy!

So STOP BEING SUCH IDIOTS! However you feel about the occupy protests, you could at least take half a frigging second and three points of IQ and understand what "top 1%" MEANS.

Sheesh. Morons.

Current Mood: aggravated

We're not moving after all. Our landlords basically jerked us around, screwed with us, lied to us that it was okay, and then turned around and denied our approval, so we're stuck here.

Still looking for a new place, but it's probably not going to happen right away.
I may fricking take a few more days off work ANYWAY because I'm so frigging stressed over all this. Grrr.

I understand that things take time. Delays happen. Yadda, yadda, yadda. But if you're going to take FOURTEEN DAYS TO SHIP MY ORDER, do not promise me it will be five!

So yeah. The package I THOUGHT I ordered in time, that I've been checking my mailbox twice a day for, SHIPPED TODAY! The day before I leave for the convention I ordered it for! And that would be FINE if they hadn't PROMISED ME FIVE DAYS.

Current Mood: pissed off

This is not a religious sermon. This is one of my other soap-boxes. One of my BIG, FAT, hot-button issues. Let's see what you guys think of it.

( Rambling and ranting under the cut )

And anybody who wants to debate with me about this is welcome, but see icon. I am kind of pissy right now, so don't expect me to be all gentle words and kind correction, if I think you've said something stupid I'm going to let you know. :P

Current Mood: annoyed

Thought the one. People who are tech savvy really, really, really, really shouldn't condescend, or tell half-truths to people who are not. If you want to go there, your IQ is probably not any higher than mine, I've just applied myself to the humanities and not computer science. It's not just in my journal but all over the discussion of this I've seen tech people sneer down their noses at non tech people. Not all of them, but enough to really get my back up about the whole thing. Please stop doing this. Thnks.

Thought the second. I am not paranoid. I'm really not. In actuality a HUGE amount of my personal info is available to anybody who cares to look for it. But that is my choice. I do business under my real (ish) name because I choose to do so. I tell people how to find me at the Saturday Market because I choose to do so. I use my address and not a PO box when shipping because I choose to do so. I feel those choices are the best for my and my business, and after taking reasonable precautions for my safety, I feel secure in having made them.

So in actuality I don't really mind people knowing what city I live in. When I choose to tell them. Having that choice, or any choice about my personal information taken away from me pisses me the hell off. It is not right. My personal information is MINE. I made the choice, on many occasions, to leave comments on posts where I was told my IP address would be shared with certain people. That was my choice. I chose to make it possible for posters and moderators to find me if they felt they had a real need to do so. I did not choose, in any of those occasions, to have my IP address parsed out to directly tell those people my location. There is a difference between those two things, and having somebody else make that choice for me is completely unacceptable.

I hope that someday this will become recognized as proper privacy etiquette by website owners and other people who have access to my info. Right now it seems woefully misunderstood by all kinds of people. It is never okay to make privacy choices for somebody else. Not about anything. Not ever.

Current Mood: aggravated

When you comment in a community* the community moderators and the owner of the post you commented on can now see your location. Country, state, and city. Which means that people living in small towns who do things like... oh... call out a scammer on their scammy posts, for one example I've seen happen a lot, can now be found. Physically. Where you live. By people who might have a reason to go and hurt them.

You can't turn it off. You can't opt out. It doesn't draw from the fields you voluntarily fill in either, far as I can tell it's pulling the info from your IP address. And it's retroactive so every comment you've ever made in any community EVER now has your real location attached to it.

Bra. Fricking. Vo. Livejournal. Bravo. If anybody gets hurt because of this I hope you get sued into oblivion. This is almost enough to make me leave lj, permanently and for real this time, even though this is my primary internet "home" and social hub.

Morons. What the HELL were they thinking of when they did this? WHAT THE EVERLIVING HELL.

(And yes, I know that by posting people's IP addresses they've effectively been doing the same thing all along. But there is a big difference between "If somebody knows how and wants to go through the effort they can see where you live" and "HERE'S WHERE YOU LIVE FOR ANY IDIOT TO SEE RIGHT NOW, NO EFFORT REQUIRED." That kind of thing puts ideas into people's heads. It begs for abuse. It's just pleading for somebody to do something stupid.)

*Update: Apparently it's not all communities. Since I don't own any communities to test with I'm not sure what settings are required, I'm hearing conflicting answers from different people. There's some protesting going on in the latest lj news post, but it looks like most people haven't noticed the change yet. LJ itself has said nothing at all about this, neither notification it was starting nor defense of it continuing.

Update again: They've removed the feature. And there is a poll (and good comments discussion) about the IP logging here: http://lj-feedback.livejournal.com/16181.html

Update some more: Oh GODS I'm glad they removed this. It told people specifically when you move/go on vacation. Ie. if you post from a new spot it displayed (New location(Formerly Old Location)) That is such a bad idea that I can't even come up with words for how much of a bad idea it is! And it means that you can't retroactively proxy it to fix the problem, as it will then say (proxy location(formerly real location)) WHAT THE HELL WERE THEY THINKING?

Yay, one more update: "Generally, when you run an IP addresses (past and present) through a search engine, it defaults to the largest town within a certain radius, thus preserving some sense of anonymity. What is being broadcasted on lj, however, is much more specific.

In one instance I entered an IP address from location x into a search engine and it showed my location to be ~20miles from x. LJ reported my location to be ~5miles from location x. (And, incidentally, the town lj announces is not even shown on some road maps.)"

From a user's complaint on the well-hidden post from livejournal that mentioned this "feature" in passing. (Which I finally dug out.)

Now will people please stop treating me like I'm some kind of idiot and admit that I had reason to be concerned? Thanks so much.

Current Mood: enraged

Ron and Anthony are famous!

And of course there are already idiots. :P The system has a thing for submitting an explanation with the photo, and I explained that neither cat nor snake is in danger here. But it stripped my explanation off when it posted, so now people are flipping out over it. *eyeroll*

I mean come on. "I pray the parents are in the house watching the snake." Well, given that one of us has to be BEHIND THE CAMERA then yes, we're watching the snake. Srsly.

Also, YET AGAIN, Anthony is the one in danger here, not Ron. The CAT is the creature that hunts and eats snakes, not the other way around. But as cats can be trained, we have trained Ron to leave Anthony alone. (It's the only thing we've trained him to do, the pest, but still... I wouldn't have done this if we hadn't!) People are so farking ignorant.

But eh, I don't even want to enter that argument. Arguing on the internet, special olympics, you know the saying. :P So I will enjoy the two seconds of fame and ignore the stupid comments.

http://silkenhut.com/yahoo-messenger-iq-test-virus/

Half a dozen people who IM me need to read this. :P I'm getting REALLY tired of IMzombies trying to give me this thing.

Current Mood: annoyed

If you're commissioning something from me, and you give me a reference sheet that doesn't look like what you want, whatever I make is not going to look like what you want either. I cannot magically read your mind and know that the character actually has pawpads when the ref sheet doesn't show them, or that the character hasn't got headfluff when the reference sheet shows it does.

And to be completely honest, even if you verbally mention that there are some differences, when I'm working I'm looking at the reference sheet. It's awfully easy to forget what you've said and make what I'm seeing instead. I'm WAY more of a visual person than a verbal person. So please get an accurate ref sheet done if you're going to commission something!

A few of you may have noticed that sparkcostumes.com doesn't seem to exist at the moment.

That's becauase Serverpro are the worst, most awful, horrible, useless, failures of a registrar and host to ever exist. (That's why I bailed on my bladespark.topcities account, because it was irrevocably associated with them.) I'm trying to sort out the complete clusterfuck that's going on here, and the end result SHOULD be to finally free me from their incompetant clutches, but it may be a day or so before the site is back. If it's longer than that I swear somebody is actually going to get sued. Or murdered. Whichever I can managed to do first.

If you hit on me, via IM or any other medium of communication, you will get blocked. I have public IMs for business only, and even if I didn't, I'M MARRIED.

Thanks.

P.S. I'm also not your shrink.

Because apparently people don't know this.

When somebody asks you to pay through paypal and send it as a gift so they don't have to pay fees... well first off, hello! They are telling you that they are competely okay with ripping off somebody, because they are ripping off paypal. Admittedly paypal makes out like bandits on fees, and they are a faceless corporation, which most people don't mind ripping off, but it's still a red flag.

That's not the big, fat, dangerous red flag though. The big problem that should be staring you in the face but most of you apparently haven't thought of it, is that a gift is a gift. It cannot be disputed. I mean what are you going to say. "Hi, paypal? I freely gave somebody a gift, but now they're not giving me anything in return, so give my gift back please."? Yeah, no. You send that money out and you will never see it again, no matter what they person you're paying that way does. They can take the money and run and you are left without any form of recourse whatsoever. And remember that just by asking you to do this they've already told you they don't mind a little fraud. What's to say they won't mind defrauding you too?

So unless you're willing to write that money off as an actual gift and get nothing in return, don't pay somebody with a paypal gift. Seriously, don't.

(And you artists asking people to pay this way, firstly shame on you! And secondly, good luck if paypal should notice you're doing this, they can and will shut your account down for fraud if they catch you at it, and what are you going to do then?)

If I get one more person say I'm their "friend" when I've never even had a single non-business conversation with them I'm going to bite them!

"Allows you to IM me" does not = friend.

"Lets you have access to my contact info" REALLY does not = friend, since I let anybody have that, even people I absolutely hate. It's flipping public information.

Even "Will talk to you" doesn't = friend, because I'll talk to most people, unless they manage to really piss me off. But I think this is going to start becomming a blocking offense. I am SICK to death of people assuming some kind of friendship when they have not even bothered to try the tiniest and simplest efforts to have a real friendship. If you can't answer the question "What are some of their likes and dislikes" for example, you are not a friend! I've you've never asked "How has your day gone?" and actually listened and cared about the answer, you are not a friend!

Friends are people who know each other, and who care about each other. If all you've done is IM stupid memes and random links, that's not friendship. Watching my livejournal is not friendship, nevermind the word that lj uses for it. And looking to me for your emotional needs but not giving a crap about my needs is also not friendship, it's leeching. If you want to be my friend, you need to actually give a damn about my feelings, and not just want to bask in the glow of knowing a fursuit maker, or a female on the internet, or whatever other reason you have to be hanging around. I don't actually mind having "fans" who follow me just to bask in the glow of knowing a fursuit maker, I should add. Many of you have proved to be nice people, but if you don't even know me well enough to know about my personal life, then you're not actually my friends, sorry no. (I do mind the ones whose interest in me has to do with my gender. I'm flipping MARRIED QUIT HITTING ON ME. And some of you reading this had no idea I was married, didn't you? If you didn't know that, you're definitely not a friend. :P)

Grrrrrr.

I am making this rant public because somebody might actually read it and get a clue. If you find yourself offended by this rant, YOU are probably one of the idiots currently pissing me off with this behavior.

I debated about posting this in public, but since the moderator involved has taken to deleting things, I've decided I might as well make sure my side reaches as many people as possible.

So.

There's a new furry writing forum around. They don't seem to be doing much to advertise it, but on the off chance you folks hear about it, I thought I'd let you know...

That you can get banned, without any warning, without having broken the rules, for making a joke that the moderator doesn't like.

http://forum.roguerodent.com is the place.

The joke was "It's dead Jim" in a thread about how to get new members, because a new one hadn't joined in some time, and there had been no new posts for four or five days. I was trying to be amusing and start up the discussion on how to get new people again.

Instead, I got banned. And sent a very ranty note, I might add, about how I was defying the moderators (not sure what I did that falls under that category, since, you know, they don't give warnings, just bans.) And that I was harming the forum. (Funny, that, I was THE single most active poster there...) And I think I was insulted, the mod called me a "weed." Which is new to me, but probably not intended to be polite. :P

So I suggest that unless you're happy with getting banned for anything and everything that annoys a mod, with no warning and no chance to explain yourself, that you stay far away from the place. It's probably going to die soon anyhow, since they seem pretty lousy at getting new members, and pretty good at driving active members away.