The rules.
1. If you say “Honey, I need a spanking,” you can not then say “Ow!” when you’re being spanked.
2. If you say “Ow!” when you’re being spanked, you can not expect the person giving you the spankings to take you seriously if you’re laughing when you say it.
You know who you are…
U-Haul’s online, computerized reservation system sucks hefty moose willie.
I just want to get that out of the way before going any farther. U-Haul’s online reservation system is truly Teh Suck. It could suck a golf ball through a garden hose. If the suck of the U-Haul reservation system could be harnessed and used for good, it could replace gravity. It’s a good thing the rest of U-Haul’s customer service system blows to the same degree, to equalize the pressure.
As anyone who’s been reading this journal for a while knows, I’m in the process of moving. Specifically, to Atlanta. Two weeks ago, I found an apartment up there; last weekend came the Big Move. (Well, of my stuff, anyway; I’ll be staying in Gainesville for the next couple of weeks or so, and I’ll be in Tampa for Necronomicon next weekend.)
Anyway, before the move, I used U-Haul’s Web site to reserve a truck and one of those things you use to drag your car behind the truck, one way, Tampa to Atlanta. On the day of the reservation, I got a text message on my cell phone telling me the truck and car-towing-thingie were ready, and giving me the address of the place to pick them up. Got an email with the same information. Being the suspicious bastard I am, I called the location. “Oh, sure, come on down! We have the truck!”
They didn’t have the truck.
It took them a little over an hour to figure it out, but they didn’t have the truck. They did, however, have a slightly bizarre toy for sale: a plastic car that lights up and bounces up and down when you push a button, all while playing hip-hop music:
It’s a weird little slice of urban Americana. The three people in the car are racially balanced–one white guy, one Latino guy, one black guy–though I couldn’t help but notice that the black guy is riding in the back. The text on the bottom of the box reads “These homies are chillin’ in their Low Ride!” Now, for fifteen points: How many stereotypes can you find in this one toy, available for the low,low price of just nine dollars and ninety-five cents? I bet it’s probably made in China, though I didn’t think to check.
But I digress.
Anyway, after an hour of waiting, the U-Haul location determined that, text messages and email and phone conversation to the contrary, they didn’t have my truck. The guy called around a few places, found a place that did, and sent me over there.
Another hour in the second place, and we were ready to g–oh, no, wait, I reserved a hand truck, and they didn’t have one available. Some searching around, and…hey, wait, we have an appliance dolly, will you take that instead? Oh, and we don’t have that doohickey that tows your car by the front wheels, we just have one of the big flatbed things that you drive your car up onto. How’s that sound?
Appliance dolly in the back of the truck, flatbed trailer in tow, and joreth and I were off to the apartment for some backbreaking physical labor.
There is a warning on the U-Haul appliance dolly. It warns that the dolly can be recognized as U-Haul property just by its design alone, and that anyone caught in possession of it without a rental contract may be prosecuted for possession of stolen property.
Now, the U-Haul appliance dolly has a very, very short foot. So short, in fact, that it’s very awkward to use. U-Haul specifically designed, engineered, and built a custom hand cart just so they could be recognized if someone walks off with one, but from all appearances, the usefulness of the hand cart in tasks such as, say, moving heavy objects was not a primary design consideration.
I have a bookshelf. It’s a very large bookshelf, about seven feet tall, made of dense particle board. It weighs more than I do. In fact, I believe it weighs more than Joreth and I put together. If a person were to, hypothetically speaking, load it on an appliance dolly, and then, just as a “for instance,” cart it over a doorstep, and this hypothetical doorstep were, say, about four inches high, and while doing this, if my thumb were to get between the appliance dolly and the bookshelf, so that the bookshelf dropped that four inches onto my thumb…if all these things were to happen, then one might expect a certain amount of hopping about and swearing might follow very shortly thereafter.
Hypothetically speaking.
This set something of a tone for the rest of the packing process. I tripped over, walked into, barked my shins on, and otherwise injured myself with approximately three-quarters of my possessions, and I own a lot of crap. joreth did her best not to laugh, a heroic effort that can not be understated.
About three hours into this process, I got a call from U-Haul. “We’re showing that you have an equipment reservation for today. Are you planning to come in and pick up your truck, or should we cancel your reservation?”
Looking back on it now, perhaps I should’ve told them to cancel the reservation, because then, hey, they’d probably forget they even owned the truck!
After she’d finished studying, Shelly came down from Gainesville to help finish the packing and whatnot, arriving just in time for dinner. The rest of the packing went quickly, if a little haphazardly, and in no time the truck was buttoned up and ready to go. Night had fallen with a particularly wet thud, so we finished up in total darkness.
And then came…time to load the car trailer.
Which is very large.
Back…no, no, pull forward just a hair…um, wait, right a smidge…no, your other right…um, forward…no, wait, the other way, I mean left…now back up a little…um, too far, forward a bit…
It’s actually possible to carry on a surprisingly lengthy conversation using only the words “back,” “forward,” “left,” and “right,” provided you don’t want to talk about anything other than moving backward, forward, left, and right. We did eventually get the trailer hooked up…not by any particular skill on our parts, I think, but rather through the well-known Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of Automobile Motion. As anyone who’s ever passed the second grade knows, this uncertainty principle is given by
where delta-X is the change in the distance from the hitch to the trailer, delta-f is the change in frustration of the driver, i is the importance of getting the goddamn trailer hooked up right fucking now, U is the U-Haul Constant (a universal property subject to change without notice), n is the number of tries you’ve made so far, and lambda is the wavelength of light most likely to give you a headache. As is intuitively obvious to the most casual of observers, the more frustrated you are and the more important it is that you get the trailer hooked up right fucking now, the more tries it can take, all other things being equal.
It’s about two hours from Tampa to Gainesville, and five more to Atlanta. This assumes, of course, that one is driving at a reasonable speed…say, fifteen miles per hour or so over the posted speed limit, the posted speed limit being a most unreasonable speed, all things considered.
In a desperately underpowered Ford POS towing a car on an absurdly large trailer, it’s a little more. Especially when one has not showered and feels like the inside of a yak’s armpit.
Shelly and I stopped in Gainesville long enough to fail to sleep because the cats decided that five o’clock in the morning would be an ideal time to start playing, and the game they agreed on was “let’s knock everything off all the desks and then chase each other over the human’s bed.”
The cats were asleep when we left, the furry little bastards. The trip to Atlanta wasn’t as bad as it could have been–we could have been on fire, for example–and the unloading of the truck once we arrived went smoothly and effortlessly.
As it turns out, there are people who will–get this–actually unload a truck for you, if you give them this thing called “money.” The joy I felt on discovering this can not be overstated. We’re talking the rapture of the angels, here. We’re talking music of the spheres, winning the Lotto, George Dubya’s term in office ending, and finding free pr0n on the Internet all rolled into one. Now that I have learned this Very Important Thing, I will never unload a moving truck again. “Not unloading a truck full of crap” ranks surprisingly high on the list of Things That Make Me Happy.
Pausing only to buy some new pants, fill up with gas, and leave my toothbrush and cell phone charger in Atlanta (goddammit), we headed back down to Florida at a much more reasonable speed, detouring through Tallahassee long enough to visit Shelly’s sweetie there. And when we got home…
…fire poi!
The set of fire poi I ordered arrived. I need to practice with them sans fire until I’m reasonably sure I won’t set myself on fire when I use them (because it could always be worse until you’re on fire, and at that point it’s difficult to say ‘it could be worse’ any more). With a bit of luck, I can arrange to have smoocherie be there when I light them up for the first time, because after all, she is the reason I’m into poi spinning in the first place, and I did take her virginity and all. So how ;bout it, smoocherie, you going to be available before I leave Florida for good?
All the other things I’ve called the “funniest thing ever?” All lies. The real funniest thing ever:
It takes a random Family Circus cartoon and pairs it with a random Nietzsche quote. merovingian, I think this is right up your alley. The Family Circus is arguably the most dreadful, insipid, flaccid, banal comic ever created by man, but Nietzsche makes it all good. A few of my favorites:
Shelly went to Tallahassee yesterday; she’s spending the weekend with her other boyfriend and his wife. So I’ve been spending the last two days straight playing World of Warcraft nonstop. Shelly gave me a call this afternoon to say hi, and laughed when I told her what I’d been doing.
Her: You need a local girlfriend. One you have a lot of sex with. While I watch.
Me: Okay, you’re on.
Her: We need to have rules, though. We need to tell her that she can sodomize you with a strap-on, but no oral sex.
Me: No oral sex? But I like oral sex!
Her: Yeah, but…um, no oral sex because…um, because your cock belongs to me. Or something.
Me: Hey, I’ve got an idea. Write down every sex act you can think of on a sheet of paper. Then go through the list and roll a six-sided die for each one. If you roll a 1 or a 2, she’s forbidden to do it; otherwise, she can.
Her: Hey! We should do that every day.
Me: So the rules change every day and she never feels secure?
Her: Yes! In fact, I think I’ll write up a 48-page contract, and you can tell any new girlfriend she has to sign it before she’s allowed to date you.
Then it occurred to me that several people on one of the poly mailing lists I subscribe to are essentially doing just that, and they can’t figure out why they can’t seem to find any new partners.
*sigh*
…because I haven’t the time to post the things I want to post myself, about Dragon*Con and spinning poi and BDSM and the TV show “Battlestar: Galactica” as an anti-transhumanish meditation…
First, a post on the nature of resentment by lefthand.
“Resentment or the act of deliberately provoking negative emotions by focusing on them is powerful magic. Carefully applied, resentment can destroy friendships, marriages, businesses and all other human activities. Resentment is capable of overcoming all obstacles and eliminating connections. Resentment gains its power by a deliberate disconnect from reality. It ignores all contradictory input and focuses on egregious, insulting and humiliating aspects.”
Go read it. Seriously. It’s good stuff.
Next up, this beautiful little musing on desire and avarice by jane-etrix. She writes about everything this well.
Geek humor: I do not believe I have seen anything in at least six months quite as funny as this. It helps to know that in Unix, “sudo” means “superuser do.” It runs a command as ‘superuser’–that is, it runs that command as though the person issuing the command were logged in as root, with unrestricted authority to take any action on the system.
[Edit] Here’s the image, and yes, it really is that funny.
Every religion has its ‘miracles,’ where the face of Jesus appears in a cabbage or the name of Allah materializes on a rusty bucket or some damn thing. Nothing can comare, though, to the visceral, undeniable appearance of the Flying Spaghetti Monster in the sky. We are all touched by his noodly appendage!
And finally, datan0de points out that August 29 is in fact Judgment Day. Hail the rise of the machines!
So Tuesday afternoon, Shelly blew the engine in her car while travelling back to Gainesville from spending time with her new sweetie in Tallahassee. I had (naturally) forgotten my cell phone when I went to work Tuesday morning, so I came back to 17 missed calls and an “I’m stranded in some Godforsaken hellhole!” voicemail from Shelly.
Into the car, up to said Godforsaken hellhole (about three hours’ drive), and I picked her up in…
…the. Creepiest. Hungry. Howie’s. Ever.
They had, if you can believe it, an old-fashioned analog telepone with a mechanical bell in it, of the kind young whippersnappers today have never even seen. Every time it rang, I reached for my cell phone, which has a ringtone that mimics those old-fashioned telephones for, y’know, irony’s sake.
So Shelly’s car is a total loss. I drove her back to Gainesville, then the next day headed back to Tampa myself.
But that’s not what I came here to talk about. I came here to talk about the Singularity.
The Singularity, as all transhumanists know, is that point of technological shift past which people on one side of the technological change can not predict, or even understand, what life is like for those living on the other side. Transhumanists sometimes call the people living after this point in time “Humanity 2.0”–something that scares the crap out of conservatives of all stripes.
But as it turns out, they’re all wrong.
You see, on I-75 south of Gainesville, there is a billboard that makes it all clear. The billboard advertises “Life 2.0”. Apparently, Life 2.0 doesn’t come after some profound new disruptive technology or some social or technological paradigm shift. No, Life 2.0 is what happens when you retire to a retirement community outside of Gainesville.
Silly transhumanists!
Last Thursday, i ate lunch in a small cafe on the first floor of the office building where I work. I ordered a tuna and cheese wrap, a SQL Server buffer overflow attack, potato salad, an F-22 Raptor, and duct tape. I didn’t get all of the things I asked for, which was unfortunate. I won’t say it ruined my lunch, exactly, but the afternoon wasn’t all I had hoped it would be.
Shelly’s got her Internet radio station playing, and a very strange mix of a VNV Nation song just came on, which reminded me I wanted to show this to datan0de:
I’ve been head-down in a major rewrite of my sex game Onyx for the past several weeks, and have had time for nothing–I mean nothing–else. I’ve fallen into the habit of bringing my laptop with me on my lunch break every day and coding while I’m eating.
The downside is that I’ve been having conversations like this lately:
Shelly: I’m horny!
Me: Can’t sleep…can’t eat…can’t fuck…must….code!
The upside is that the game is turning out major kick-ass, and is so much better than the current version that I’m almost embarrassed by the current version. (By the way, datan0de, I’ve implemented all of your suggestions from your last round of alpha testing, and found the crashing bug you reported… I have a new build ready for testing if you guys are up for it!)
It’s been almost five years since the last time I worked on Onyx, and I have piles and piles of small pocket-sized spiral notebooks (some of which date back to 1993) filled with notes, ideas, game actions, kinky sex ideas, and so on all pertaining to the game. I dug them out and have been flipping through them as I work, and I’ve found all kinds of things scribbled in the margins that don’t have any bearing on Onyx at all but must’ve caught my attention:
Knowledge is power. Power corrupts. Study hard. Be evil.
The secret to a great friendship is to have lots of fears in common.
Feminists fuck better.
People who make their own beds seldom want to sleep in them.
Every man is the creature of the age in which he lives; very few are able to raise themselves above the ideas of the time.
–Voltaire
Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man.
Today, we’re taking some time off to go to Busch Gardens. When we get back, time to code some more.
On days like this, it’s always important to remember the true spirit of Easter:
Today marks the day that Jesus rises from the dead, rolls away the stone, and looks for his shadow. If he sees it, there’s six more weeks of Lent.
Apple doesn’t miss a trick when it comes to design. Their computers and consumer electronics tend to be stunningly beautiful–if you ever hold an iPod Nano you’ll see what I mean–and the same design sense carries through to their packaging, advertising, and other incidental design. I still have the box my iSight camera came in; it’s too beautiful to throw away. Hell, even the bags they give you your stuff in when you go to the Apple store are gorgeous.
But what would happen if the product packaging for the iPod, one of the most successful electronic devices ever, were redesigned by Microsoft?
This video seeks to answer that question.
Like life, it is funny because it’s true. Work-safe, with sound.
[EDIT]: The user who uploaded it to YouTube has now pulled it down. There is a direct download link to the .wmv file here. If that quits working, I’ve also mirrored it on my server here, but it’s an 18-megabyte download; please be kind to my bandwidth!
