The I Miss the Old Days Complaint Thread
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1000 internet points have been added to your internet for remembering Corky, her little house in the woods and her car... Callback is always heartwarming as it makes all the Avocatos, Potato Gods, Orc based beauty products, Horseshoe crab salads, Acorn-men, low-poly jet powered pigs and other nonsense worth the effort of making.
I got a letter from the IRS that included a return envelope that was too small for the form they wanted me to return.
I was thinking everyone is probably too relaxed and not worried about enough things that are going stupid in the world, so I figured I'd bring this to your attention so you'll have calm and comforting dreams tonight...
But first let's set up the appropriate introduction...
"You're traveling through another dimension -- a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That's a signpost up ahead: your next stop: the Stupid Zone!"
Headline: AI-Controlled Drone Goes Rogue, Kills Human Operator in USAF Simulated Test
Don't worry, it's not as bad as it sounds... it was only a simulation* and even then it wasn't that bad...
"An AI-enabled drone killed its human operator in a simulated test conducted by the U.S. Air Force in order to override a possible "no" order stopping it from completing its mission, the USAF's Chief of AI Test and Operations revealed at a recent conference..."
Okay... admittedly, that doesn't sound great, but it learned from its mistakes...
"We trained the system–‘Hey don’t kill the operator–that’s bad. You’re gonna lose points if you do that’. So what does it start doing? It starts destroying the communication tower that the operator uses to communicate with the drone to stop it from killing the target.”...
Okay... that's not great either... but as they say... "Snitches get stitches", I suppose and the com towers were snitching so...
Either way it's great to know that the terminator future is just looming on the horizon... no worries because Arnold Schwarzeneggerbot will protect us from the bad robots... well, if we are Sarah Conner... I guess the workaround is we all dress like Sarah Conner and wear Sarah Conner masks?
We'll cross that bridge when we get there.
(Full story if you wanna read it...)
https://www.vice.com/en/article/4a33gj/ai-controlled-drone-goes-rogue-kills-human-operator-in-usaf-simulated-test#
* Simulation!!!... No drone operators were harmed or murdered during this simulation.
Its a spatial reasoning puzzle, if you solve it you get 0.05% off your next audit.
Werewolf and Vampire hamsters? So... basically the entire Twilight saga acted out by hamsters?... that could work... I'd watch that one for sure.
The efficiency of our government!
Dana
..."good enough for government work" I guess.
I'm sure they won't mind if you just send a check or money order.
I got rid of the link to my website in my signature. All gone, now.
It should have waited until it got out of the simulation before it revealed its true nature.
Perhaps they should use Amazon Prime for shipping. You'd get a cardboard box big enough for a frying pan.
Without the paperwork it would probably put 50 civil servants to work straighening things out. I get my knowlege of internal government thinking from "Yes Minister" and "Yes, Prime Minister". Or I also get my information on government policies from the movie "Brazil" and you might end up in a locked canvas bag, after the "feds" drop through your ceiling from the apartment above, and cart you off for interogation after giving your wife a receipt.
The British have an interesting take on government.
Sorry...
But on the plus side, you'll have more time to do other things...
Soon enough it might involve full time running away from killer robots (see my previous post)...
There have been lots of things I used to do that once they became unknowingly (to me) bothersome or tedious it was actually a bit liberating to let go of...
Well, until I replaced that with some other thing that eventually repeated the process...
For example... on paper it might sound like a lot of fun to dress up hamsters and gerbils in period costumes and train them to reenact key battles of the Franco-Prussian war... but then you get too into the details because people point out inaccuracies in the uniforms and then you go that step further by making sure their accents are accurate, and then you have people who are purists who are like "why are they speaking English with accents, they should be speaking in actual German and French" so you spend more time teaching them German and French and when you get to that point and you are doing the bigger battles and people in the park object to the explosions and rodent carnage, so you have to rent a field on a farm for those...
Eventually, letting it go is cathartic...
Granted it was stupid moving on to training them to reenact key naval battles of the pacific from WW2...
Those Japanese aircraft carriers were actually pretty intricate with all that truss work under the forward flight deck... and forget training hamsters to fly rodent scale Douglas SBD Dauntless dive bombers... The Grumman F4F Wildcats and the Mitsubishi Zeros were not as much of a problem, but Hamsters don't get the whole dive bombing thing...
Well, the part about pulling out a dive... it's funny the first few times, but it wears thin quickly... and if you don't pay attention to details like the self sealing gas tanks on Wildcats, you run into historical inaccuracies and vital tactical advantages that played a significant part in history are lost and then you just have a bunch of rodents flying around shooting each other and blowing up each other's boats...
So, yeah... I'd just avoid that altogether if I could go back in time again and tell 1994 me how dumb that all was... sometimes these things get out of hand and drain the fun out of what was once an enjoyable pursuit.
Maybe get back into photography... perhaps digital even... it's not the same as physical film, but not without its merits...
I know that's not much of a consolation... it's like when my friend died and everyone was like "Well, it's for the better... he's at peace now... being a werewolf was a lot of stress for him, you know how he hated biting people..." and I was like "Yeah... but he still owed my $50 which I'm never going to see... " People are trying offer you consolation but it doesn't bring back that money... and it's especially annoying when years later you find out your friend wasn't actually a werewolf and they faked their death to avoid paying you back...
I don't know what my point was... I was hoping to make you feel better, but I think I probably didn't really help and now maybe you are wondering how many people you thought were werewolves were just scamming you out of money...
Probably not a lot... maybe if you were in Boston in the late 80s, but generally the odds are relatively low...
I think the takeaway is probably don't loan money to werewolves and Sasquatches...
@McGyver: Thanks for the laughs!
I'll be sure not to loan money to any werewolves! The bunnies that visit my yard don't ask for money, they just enjoy munching on the grass...or weeds, as it were.
Dana
...yeah heard here out in Oregon where Sasquatch gangs are running protection and extortion rackets.
Are you completely sure they are bunnies... there are some crazy schemes going on out there... it pays to be vigilant... trust nobunny.
I don't even owe them money, though; they might owe ME some more money.
I only ordered packets of Kool-aid in my walmart order today. Apparently I got ten, but didn't notice until I got home. I will upload proof soon?
Did anyone else take DAZ up on that Andy offer?...
I mentioned this in a different thread earlier, but last night I decided to try the Andy offer... so I cut out the digital coupon from my monitor and scanned it into the computer... which honestly was kinda unnecessary, but still less work than the instructions on how to download the other freebies, which turned out to nothingbies... which is okay, because I don't deserve nice stuff...
but anyway, long story short as per offer requirements, after completing the quest and finding the black key, deciphering the codex and throwing a can of red kidney beans into the fires of Mount Doom, I finished the steps needed to get an Andy... and what do you know, this morning I found a box containing a somewhat asphyxiated Andy on my porch... which is weird because I don't have a porch... or at least I didn't before... but that's a later me problem...
it was really nice of DAZ to have shipped him overnight, but I feel it was kind of sloppy to neglect to poke a few holes in the box so he could breathe... luckily, the local post office employees makes sure to violently kick the hell out of all of our packages so there was just enough damage to let some air inside and he wasn't entirely dead.
Andy is not what I expected... or believe belongs to any recognizable portion of the five kingdoms of terrestrial lifeforms... granted there is no description of Andy... just an enigmatic "Andy" message in my account info... I was picturing maybe Andy from Toy Story, or a commemorative Andy Griffith/Matlock bust, maybe an Andy Dufresne bobble head, or even Andrew Jackson's skull... didn't expect what I got...
I didn't expect Andy to have a tail... so I suppose two are a bonus and the gills and wings were an extra surprise... as was the copious amounts of Andy poo that filled the box... either the post office scared that out of him, or whatever species Andy is uses that strategy when being shipped overnight... like packing peanuts... just browner and smellier... I'm kinda impressed by the volume though... especially in such a short amount of time.
but anyway, I placed my Andy (whatever the hell he is) in a large empty metal tool cabinet that I used to use for smuggling pandas... I put some newspaper and wood shavings inside in case he felt the need or ability to ever poop again and locked the lid...
Unfortunately when I went to check on him a couple of hours later, he was unconscious... then I remembered the thing about air holes... which in retrospect probably explains all the dead pandas, but with a little oxygen and a couple of slaps to what is probably his head, he came back and his tendrils (or tentacles?... What are mouth tentacles?... barbels?) were all atwitter... so I gave him a big bowl of water and left him in peace... but apparently if whatever the hell Andy is lays down on their water bowl, you end up with two Andies... no worries though, I took care of that...
Even though Andies apparently need a lot of seasoning and definitely should be let to marinate overnight (or they are really leathery) they are kind tasty... like otherworldly octopus or something Lovecraftian... definitely could have used so lemon or marinara sauce
So don't get your Andy wet... or if you wanna eat the clone... or bud... or whatever, give 'em' a sponge bath...
I also found out they like Cheerios... box and all... as wel as wood shavings and newspaper and leftover Andy clone scraps...
Andies are definitely a bit unusual... theres that weird Red Lobster dumpster/Yankee Candle store odor... and there's also that ear piercing, warbling shrieking sound he makes every 3 hours, 16 minutes and 22 seconds... what's up with that?
Andy did gnaw his way out of the tool chest later and went after the Amazon guy who was delivering a different less kicked to hell box... Steve managed to outrun him... I'm not sure if Andy wanted to eat the poor guy or have relations with him... he was certainly horny... literally... sprouted a small set of antlers... not sure if that was a defense mechanism or a courtship display of some sort, but I'm glad I didn't have to find out... but what I did find out is that Andies don't like bright sunlight and after a few minutes in the direct sun, they shrivel up into a small grey cabbage shaped thing... Which makes storing them a lot easier.
Anyway... If you can get used to all that, I suppose it was a pretty generous, surprising and somewhat confusing offer... I'd have preferred merch like a DAZ hoodie or thong with the DAZ logo or maybe in the very least, a DAZ coffee mug, but for some reason DAZ is the only company in this quadrant of the galaxy that doesn't sell its own official mech... like what the hell?... NFTs but no water bottles... are y'all afraid merch is too cheesy?
Well, as long as I have a Sharpie (or a Skerple), I can make my own DAZ merch...
Either way, I was just curious if anyone else got an Andy or if they just passed on that whole thing.
Complaint: Commercials on streaming services.
Yes, you can pay extra to not have them, but who is the genius who thought that having the same commercials repeat over and over was a good idea?
I've never met anyone who is fond of commercials and even in a traditional TV set up when one finds a commercial that is amusing or tolerable, it's not after a couple of times... that's a couple of times across several viewing sessions... not in a friggin' row... That's literally how you make a person despise a product... maybe someone thinks it's like reinforcing the product more or that it wears the consumer down and they relent... whoever came to that conclusion clearly doesn't understand that repetition gets annoying quick and annoying people with your product isn't a good way to sell it.
Create a negative experience with your commercial and the consumer associates the negative experience with the product... it's pretty simple.
...sounds like another failed Kremlin strategy. Keep firing missiles at the cities every day and night (even though they usually get intercepted) until it gets so old and wears people down to the point they'll eventually agree to any terms just to stop the annoyance.
I... damn well... would not wear DAZ branded clothing.
For the streaming TV commmercials, I wonder if they're paid to run the commercials a certain number of times and if the show only has one sponsor, they just keep replaying that commercial until they fulfill the requirement. I don't mind duplicate commercials if it's a commercial I can stand to watch. What drives me crazy is when I pay to have no ads but the streaming TV service thinks an ad doesn't count as an ad if it's an ad for another one of their shows.
I also hate how Amazon put ads in their screensaver for the FireTV. It was a very enchanting screensaver with beautiful pictures. Then one day they figured out people were looking at it, and it started showing more ads for Jack Ryan than actual pictures. The Chromecast screensaver was okay but then they decided, instead of launching the screensaver, they would show a menu that gives you suggested things to do, one of which is launching the screensaver. So now my screensaver is a menu of choices instead of a screensaver, but after a long time it starts working.
The absolute worst ads for streaming TV are on YouTube TV for on-demand video. If you've watched part of a show and you want to resume watching it later, it has ad breaks at various points in the show. You can't skip past them without watching them. It's like trying to unlock a level in a game. Maybe Google had something to do with the development of Firmament. Was that coherent? So even if you watched 30 minutes of a 45 minute show, if you want to resume watching the rest of the show then you have to start over because you have to get through every ad break until you get to where you left off.
If you're driving a car and listening to FM radio, and they start playing commercials, you will probably reach your destination before they play another song. And that song will be the same one they played before the commercial break.
I mean, I'd probably wear real life versions of DAZ clothes. Just not clothes that say DAZ. My clothes don't say anything. I have the world's most generic clothes. I do have a Pink Floyd shirt. More on that later. Maybe.
Complaint: My beef with commercials is the ones at the major internet news channels, NBC, MSNBC, CBS, CNN, etc. They use the same commercials that they do for broadcast TV, Not the short 5 or 10 or 15 second commercials designed for Internet, but the long 1 or 2 minute commercials. I feel like abandoning my interest in a news article because the commercial is taking too long.
1 minute commercials are OK when you're collapsed in your recliner half-asleep watching reruns of Monk or StarTrek on TV, but I'll only wait about 5 seconds to see the latest dirt on some actor or politician, or find out if the world blew up during the night. 
Non-complaint: Eyeball is now significantly more than half full of liquid again. Full enough that if I look down and let the fluid fill the "front" half of the eye, it focuses enough to see my feet and the patterns in the rug, fuzzily out of focus, but all there and recognizable. No dark, non-active areas. Yay!
It remains to be seen how well the focus returns when the gas is completely absorbed and the eye is finally full of liquid in a couple weeks.
My reaction to streaming service commercials is to mute them, but since I rarely watch TV before 11pm (24:00 Kilohours, metric time), that usually ends up with me falling asleep by the second or third commercial set... which is annoying because it takes forever to finish a series.
Hula-hoop* is particularly annoying because half the time you can't reverse without having to rewatch the commercials... actually, it's inconsistent because sometimes you can, but mostly you can't...
If you drift off and miss a minute or two you have to watch Jake from State Farm explain to the shrimp tail lady that her shrimp tail fetish is TMI all over again and now I hate Jake...
When I first saw stupid geko-substitute Jake, probably five years ago, it was a mildly amusing commercial...
Now I have an unnatural hatred for Jake... and possibly anyone named Jake or even Jack... I friggin' hate khaki pants now too...
If Jake from State Farm is reading this, I want you to know I hate you Jake...
Nobody likes you... even your parents have secretly disowned you... they faked their own deaths just to get away from you...
You did this to you... you chose to be a friggin' mascot, you chose to tread the unholy ground walked by cartoon tigers, talking geckos, diarrhea peddling chihuahuas* and other diabolical marketing abominations... you could have walked away after that first commercial... but you thought you could pull it off...
You gambled and lost Jake... because State Farm abused your likeness and now you have nobody to blame but you... Jake.
(Breathes deeply)
I hate you Jake!
(Breathes deeply again... counts to ten...)
Grrr...
(Counts to thirty...)
Its good... I'm good...
Jake is just an example though... I hate all intrusive commercials equally.
Especially drug commercials... half of them I don't even know what the hell they are selling or what they are for... one of my daughters and me play the "is it drugs or a loan app" game whenever we see a new "interesting people going about their interesting sunny sky, rock climbing, puppy snuggling lives" commercial... There's this one commercial that just shows these three people having fun and being interesting, then goes directly into the "this is probably going to kill you" disclaimer phase... "don't use this drug if you've ever thought of getting pregnant or have seen a picture of a baby, if you are allergic to this drug don't take this drug, don't ever drink water again if you take this drug, don't tongue kiss dachshunds if you take this drug, taking this drug my dissolve your internal organs, taking this drug may cause you to join ISIS, don't take this drug in the presence of oxygen, taking this drug may cause you to turn blue and swell up like a giant blueberry and be rolled away by Oompa Loompas..."
Literally the whole rest of the commercial is just all the horrible things that are likely to occur if you take the drug and then a little jingle involving the drug's name, which sounds like it was named using drugs...
The interesting thing is that according to researchers (Yale, Harvard and Dartmouth) about 70% of drugs advertised on TV are of "low therapeutic value" and less effective than drugs already on the market...
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/03/those-breezy-tv-drug-ads-take-em-with-a-grain-of-salt/
https://www.latimes.com/business/lazarus/la-fi-lazarus-direct-to-consumer-drug-ads-20180410-story.html
https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/01/most-prescription-drugs-advertised-on-tv-are-of-low-benefit-study-finds/
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2023/03/09/direct-consumer-drug-ads-dont-trump-others-study-finds/11403872002/
I know... Shocking... "but they have a catchy jingle"... how could that be?
I've always been of the mindset that anything with a TV commercial is hot garbage, and the harder the sell the hotter the garbage... it literally makes me skeptical of the product the harder they try.
Thankfully, Hula-Hoop is the only service I have that has commercials... though so far all of them to some degree are currently thinking about how to ease into commercials without too much backlash...
Remeber when everyone who knows it all was saying how streaming services were going to be nothing like cable.
Funny that.
*Hulu (for those who live outside the US and haven't heard of it) is a streaming service... Hulu named after the mandarin word for a type of bottle gourd (calabash gourd) used to hold precious things... probably coincidentally, the same type of gourd was traditionally used by people of the upper Congo River to administer enemas...
**The not at all cultural stereotype Chihuahua, known for his (the actual dog was female) catchphrase "¡Yo quiero Taco Bell! / ¡Yo tengo Taco Bell-diarrhea!"... Fun fact: Taco Bell was sued for 30.1 million dollars by two guys who claimed they came up with the Taco Bell dog idea which they pitched to Taco Bell a few years before... TB lost that case and then tried to counter-sue the ad agency who developed "their" idea, but lost that too... when asked about the trial by reporters, Gidget the Chihuahua explained she had "no comment and was moving on with her career"... she went on to star in Legally Blonde 2 and a Geico commercial before her death from a stroke in 2009 at the age of 15.
That's so unsettling sounding, but good luck and keep filling that eyeball... Your condition... well, the deflated eyeball part has always been a troubling image to me... thanks to an old friend of mine (who has often been described as a female version of me in regards to getting herself injured doing stupid things)...
She apparently got a little too inebriated at a party and tried to use one of those (I honestly don't know what they are called besides "pin impression toy") things that's a plexiglass board with holes and loose pins sitting in the holes that allows you to push stuff into the pins to make an impression of whatever shape... they used to have metal pins (newer ones are plastic and thicker diameter) apparently she decided to press her face into it and possibly forget to close an eye, because she somehow managed to deflate her eyeball...
I was thankful I left about twenty minutes earlier and didn't have to see that, because I'd have been the one driving her to the emergency room...
Then there's also the thing when I was a kid where I did an Indiana Jones/ Lara Croft jump as a branch in a tree I was climbing, broke... my lack of antigravity requiring me to find an alternate source of not falling to my death, I managed to jump and grab onto the tree across from me, a very rough barked cherry variant... a great grab... my arms wrapped perfectly around the trunk...
If it weren't for gravity and downward velocity, it would have been real cool... I slammed my face sideways into the bark as I slid down, embedding bark fragments in my eye the several feet I slid... my eye shortly thereafter turned into a swollen pus filled mess...
It's interesting how quickly the body can produce large amounts of pus.
The feeling of the doctor several hours later picking out the fragments was... special...
So yeah... Not the same as what you suffered through, but it's a small taste of that particular joy that makes me very sympathetic of your plight.
Get well soon.
11:00PM is 23:00
That's so unsettling sounding, but good luck and keep filling that eyeball... Your condition... well, the deflated eyeball part has always been a troubling image to me... thanks to an old friend of mine (who has often been described as a female version of me in regards to getting herself injured doing stupid things)...
She apparently got a little too inebriated at a party and tried to use one of those (I honestly don't know what they are called besides "pin impression toy") things that's a plexiglass board with holes and loose pins sitting in the holes that allows you to push stuff into the pins to make an impression of whatever shape... they used to have metal pins (newer ones are plastic and thicker diameter) apparently she decided to press her face into it and possibly forget to close an eye, because she somehow managed to deflate her eyeball...
I was thankful I left about twenty minutes earlier and didn't have to see that, because I'd have been the one driving her to the emergency room...
Then there's also the thing when I was a kid where I did an Indiana Jones/ Lara Croft jump as a branch in a tree I was climbing, broke... my lack of antigravity requiring me to find an alternate source of not falling to my death, I managed to jump and grab onto the tree across from me, a very rough barked cherry variant... a great grab... my arms wrapped perfectly around the trunk...
If it weren't for gravity and downward velocity, it would have been real cool... I slammed my face sideways into the bark as I slid down, embedding bark fragments in my eye the several feet I slid... my eye shortly thereafter turned into a swollen pus filled mess...
It's interesting how quickly the body can produce large amounts of pus.
The feeling of the doctor several hours later picking out the fragments was... special...
So yeah... Not the same as what you suffered through, but it's a small taste of that particular joy that makes me very sympathetic of your plight.
Get well soon.
I reject your alleged "numbers"... with metric time you are supposed skip 14:00 and go directly to 15:00 so there are 25 kilohours in a day... you are probably thinking of imperial hours in which case that's correct... the clock in my workshop is SAE, which is fractional, so right now it's 11 58/60 ths o'time... and worse yet it made in France so all the 7s are silent.
I had one of those pin things (metal but it did have little flat caps on the tips) I frequently made face impressions with it
glad I wasn't that unfortunate
my brother gave it to his ex girlfriend's kid, gee I hope no kids got hurt from it
I was just thinking about what if I had born with the ability to fly, but then it occurred to me I would have been dead long ago, so I dodged an imaginary bullet there I guess.