January 10, 2005

CATCH MY FALL

Swung by the Crown Pawn & Gun Shop today while I was out paying my water bill, and picked up, among other things, Vital Idol, which is zing-zinging and boom-booming from the spare DVD player in my bedroom as I type this right now. “There is nothing good in this world… there is nothing safe in this world… there is nothing pure in this world…” Ah. Good stuff.

I mentioned this in the comments threads on yesterday’s page, but I’ll put it up here as well, before we get into other stuff: my purchase of a case of Unleashed HeroClix off of Ebay has run into a snag. Gather ‘round while I run it down:

The purchase was from a place called Cedar Cliff Collectibles. I hit the BUY IT NOW tab and it put me through the process. The seller prefers PayPal, and I have a PayPal account hooked up to my VISA debit card, so I had no problem complying. By the time I was done, postage, along with the insurance the seller insists on having in the transaction, brought the price up from around $130 to $155, but a case of Unleashed is going for around $220 at all the other shops, before factoring in postage, so it was still a good price. I jumped through all the hoops, and got the acknowledgement/electronic receipts back from both E-bay and Pay Pal advising me all was copacetic.

However, I’m a worry wart. I’d never dealt with Cedar Cliff Collectibles prior to this. I immediately sent them an email giving them my mailing address and other contact information and asking them to get back to me with a ship date and, if applicable, a tracking number.

When I didn’t hear from them by Sunday morning, I got a little stressed… email in as nearly instantaneous as the illusion of linear time allows, after all… so I called the collectibles shop in… wherever the hell it is, MN, I guess that’s Minnesota… just to make sure all was well. It’s good that I did, as all was and is NOT well.

First I got some guy who was obviously a counter stooge on the phone. He assured me, in vague and general terms, that no doubt they’d gotten my order and he was pretty sure my merchandise would go out Monday. The reek of bullshit coming off this guy was strong; the odor was the very specific one of a mere hired peon who doesn’t know what he’s talking about and who is deathly afraid of bothering his boss to find out. But I was calling long distance, and I don’t HAVE long distance service on my phone, so I was using a pre-paid calling card, which is kind of a pain in the ass, and I wanted to KNOW. So I asked if I could speak to someone who would know something specific about this order, and after a minute, he put on someone who was fairly obviously the owner of the place.

This particular guy, whose name I do not even know, is unfortunately a pompous, paranoid prick, full of himself and wary to the point of being absolutely unhinged regarding his Ebay transactions.

Since as a general principle I prefer to keep my real name off the web as much as I can, and as I further do not like having people who know my address also know my real name, and vice versa, I registered for PayPal under the name ‘Darryl Madison’, and on Ebay, the name on my account is ‘Dan Madison’. These names are carefully crafted to be close enough to mine that delivery people won’t balk at handing me packages with those names on them (especially since I usually fill out shipping forms with just ‘D. Madison’), but they won’t show up if anyone out there I don’t particularly want to be contacted by, like bill collectors or process servers, runs my name through a search engine. This may seem overly paranoid to you, but, well, we live in that kind of world, and one of these days, my old buddy Slappy may actually sit down and read one or two of my novels featuring unflattering portrayals of folks with the initials ‘KB’. I assure you, should that happen, lawsuits will follow, and I’d really rather he didn’t have an easy means of finding out my home address in that event.

Beyond that perhaps nebulous possibility, well, I have in the past run into people, especially people involved in comic books and comic book related industries (like selling HeroClix) who do not like me one little bit, and who, upon finding out who I am, either do not want to sell me stuff, or want to suddenly slap an asshole tax on the transaction. I’m not making this up; I haven’t had a lot of these experiences, but even one is too many, and if not putting the name I am best known by on any of my Internet service accounts I avoid such an experience, well, it’s an easy fix.

In this case, it bit me on the ass, because apparently this gaping asshole in Minnesota was not going to ship out my case, even after the payment clears through PayPal (which will take until January 12, according to the PayPal site), because PayPal was telling him that my delivery address is ‘unconfirmed’. Which means… something, I don’t know what, he told me two different things. One is that the name on my PayPal account doesn’t match the name on my credit card, and the other is that the billing address on my credit card doesn’t match the shipment address.

Now, look, I am aware that a lot of fraud takes place, and I suppose, if someone had gone to all the trouble of setting up a PayPal account using my credit card and bank account information (although I don’t know how they’d do that) then I’d be grateful for this level of diligence.. if it somehow kept my credit card from being fraudulently billed.

However, what this guy was telling me adds up to, essentially, him taking the payment, but refusing to send the goods to the address on the order form, because he’s not satisfied it’s a good address. This strikes me as enormously self serving.

Maybe I’m wronging him. Maybe he would have refused the payment if he’d decided not to ship out the case. That’s certainly not among the options he presented to me over the phone, though.

I am, to some extent, proud of myself, though. I mean, when I finally got this guy (whose name I don’t know) on the phone, he was one of the snidest, snippiest, snottiest pricks I’ve ever had to talk to. He told me that clearly I didn’t know who I was dealing with. He was a major seller on E-Bay. He had 4,000 transactions. Where was my buyer’s profile? Why was I giving him a fake name? My address wasn’t confirmed. Did I know who he was? Did I know how much fraud there was out there?

13 years ago, when Steve Jackson took exactly this tone with over the phone after I called to ask where my damned $20 check was for an article of mine he’d bought that had been on the stands for three weeks at that point, I went off on him. I went up one side of him and down the other. I ripped him several new ones, not just one. And, in the end, I got my $20 check, and all the work he’d accepted up until that point, including a collaboration Jeff Webb and I had put a lot of work into, wound up summarily rejected, and Jeff is dead, now, and maybe he wouldn’t be if he’d become a big contributor to Steve Jackson Games. Ah, maybe, maybe, maybe…

I felt myself very nearly ready to go off on this prick… but I didn’t. Somehow, a year’s worth of customer service experience stood me in good stead. I kept hold of my temper and made a conscious decision to practice my soft skills.

And I got him talked… well… nearly around. He still isn’t sure. If I could cancel the PayPal payment and we could just do a credit card transaction over the phone, he’d be mailing the case out tomorrow, but PayPal does not allow a transaction to be canceled, which is very annoying. So I have to wait for the payment to clear out of my checking account, and then I have to call this guy Tuesday or Wednesday (or whenever the payment clears) and continue practicing my soft skills.

He has, at this point, committed to either ‘just letting it go’ and mailing it out to me ‘because I don’t really care that much, and it sounds like you’ve got some craziness of your own going on, but that’s fine’ (pretty much a direct quote, after he demanded I explain to him the reasons I wasn’t using my real name on E-bay or PayPal, and I complied), or to refunding my payment, once he has it, to my credit card. And, at this point, either one is fine with me. I’d like the case, but I’ll happily settle for just getting the money back… and whichever, unless this guy kisses my ass a LOT, I’m never doing business with him again.

It’s sad but true – a lot of people who go into business in geek fields are severely socially challenged. My buddy Steve Tice, and the guy he steered me to, Doug Sulipa, are remarkably exceptional in that regard, and it’s always pleasant to deal with people like that when you can.

IconUSA has always been very professional with me, too, when I’ve dealt with them. I just wish there wasn’t a Florida sales tax issue every time I buy from them.

Since this time, I’ve posted a shorter version of these events to my comments threads, as mentioned, and Mike Norton, a veteran of many PayPal transactions, has confirmed that this guy’s precautions are, essentially, absurd and unwarranted, since he is already insisting on insuring the shipment and making me pay for it. He would not be out anything no matter what happened. What he seems to be afraid of is that somehow I am some rip off artist who is using someone else’s credit card to swipe a case of HeroClix, and when that comes out, whoever’s credit I am ripping off will void the transaction, and he’ll be out the merchandise, too. However, given that the shipment is insured, in that event, he’d simply file a claim for its worth (I believe one of the things this sort of insurance always covers is fraud) and lose nothing.

Tammy has since pointed out to me the unpleasant possibility that this guy is a sharpy himself who may simply want to keep my money AND his merchandise. Having sussed out that I am using a wrong name on my PayPal account, he may feel there is a good chance I’d have a hard time prosecuting him for it or successfully forcing him to refund my money. I don’t know; we’ll have to see.

There is a Travis McGee book, I think, where John D. MacDonald talks about how we all, at some point in our life, construct little booby traps that may, at some point in the future, go off, firing a huge load of trouble from some probably all but forgotten incident in our past into our by then unsuspecting present. A lot of times, these booby traps never actually do go off, but sometimes they do, and we find ourselves looking back at what seemed like a harmless event in our past and kicking ourselves as we suddenly have to deal with the long delayed consequences.

See, that could be happening here, because, as I said, this guy demanded I explain to him why I hadn’t used my right name on any of my transactions, so I had to explain a little bit about the history between me and Kurt. I didn’t go into details, but I did say that a lot of Kurt’s fans did not like me, and I never knew when I might run into one. At which point, he said that he’d met Kurt once, and thought he was a nice guy.

Now, it’s certainly possible, even probably, that nothing is ever going to arise from some guy out there who likes Kurt Busiek having my real name and my current home address.

But I’m not wild about the possibilities that it raises, and that’s why I tried to prevent this whole thing in the first place.

It’s an odd world, where simply trying to keep your name and address reasonably private while buying something completely harmless can be so difficult…

AS TIME GOES BY

Mike Norton had an entry on his blog a few days back mentioning various blogging mile stones. What with switching between no less than four different blogs since I first started back on Doc Nebula’s Eastern Oregon Dum Dum Depression Blog in late 2002, for various reasons (usually having to do with supervisors wherever I was working at the time somehow becoming aware I was saying unpleasantly truthful things about them on said blogs, necessitating a quick URL change), and then switching the blog on this URL back and forth from one name to another, and all of Saban’s guest stints, well, it’s hard to keep track of just when I started.

However, I went back and dug through some old archives, and the first dated blog entry I can find was posted on September 14, 2002. So, while I haven’t hit the three year mark yet, and I have absolutely no idea how many actual entries I’ve done (I’d have to go into each page and count them by hand, as I have no spiffy keen blog features like so many do), still, I’ve been doing this a while.

Even A Brown Eyed Handsome Man has been around since April 18, 2003 (the day after my last day on my job at the City Clerk’s office), so I’m coming up on two years here at this old stand.

For whatever any of THAT is worth.

IT’S A NICE DAY TO START AGAIN

So, today I had to pay the water bill. I was also going to tote some clothes I have that need mending and alterations over to the local laundromat, which advertises that it does such services (as pointed out to me by the ever invaluable Tammy, who looked on the Internet for me when I lamented in an email that I needed such stuff done on a whole stack of clothes and a local tailor shop had apparently closed when I wasn’t looking). Being somewhat wise in the ways of… well, how my life works, anyway… I called over first to find out their prices. Turns out they want $8 to hem a pair of pants, and they send that work out to someone, too. This, combined with the fact that I’m not entirely certain what my leg measurements are, and if they sent that work out there it means they won’t do measurements, means I’ll… well, I’ll just have to look around for someone else who can sew, I guess.

But I did go out and pay the water bill, anyway, which meant I had to stop by the bank and get some money out, which meant I had money even after I paid the water bill, because, well, maybe YOU just take out enough money to do what needs to be done when you’re going to be out and about town on a beautiful day off (no kidding, high 70s here today and sunny; what’s up with THAT?), but I’m not that strong.

I’d discovered there was supposed to be a second hand bookstore somewhere in our tiny downtown area, so I decided to wander over and check it out. It’s about what you’d expect for our town, but still, anything is better than nothing. The SF section is three small shelves, one of which is entirely Star Trek and Star Wars paperbacks, but still. I found cheap paperback copies of Isacc Asimov’s Foundation & Earth, Gordon R. Dickson’s Dorsai!, and F. Paul Wilson’s The Keep, so that will give me something to read, now that I’ve pretty much finished this Robert E. Howard thing my editor at Joe Bob Briggs sent me before Christmas.

Dorsai! is the only one of those I’ve read before. Dickson is one of those classic old school SF writers beloved by so many whose work I have just never really gotten into. One of my post college housemates, an interesting guy named Mike Schechter, had a vast SF/fantasy library (one of the things I liked about living with him was that, between the two of us, our mutual personal library covered three walls of the dining room), which included a lot of titles I never had much interest in (Saberhagen, Dickson, Pohl, Anderson… Mike had extensive sets of the works of a lot of authors I didn’t care for much, as well as most of those I did and do like). During the two years or so I shared a couple of different large houses with Mike, I sampled a lot of these books, and while I can’t say I got seriously into any of these authors, I did discover that at least a few of Dickson’s Dorsai novels were worth reading. I’m recollecting, vaguely, a few decades further on, that Necromancer was the best of the bunch, but what the hell, I’ll give this one a re-read.

Wilson is one of those authors I’ve never read, but I keep hearing good things about The Keep, which was made into one of those movies that hardly anyone has seen, and few of those who have seen it liked, but a very very few deeply deranged sorts really really seem to enjoy. I read the first page and it didn’t seem badly written, so, what the hell. It cost me a buck.

From this place (Red Pelican Advertising and Used Books, I believe) I walked over to, as mentioned at the top of the page, Crown Pawn & Gun, a small cinderblock-construction pawn shop that looks very nearly exactly the way you’d figure it would from the name on the inside, but that usually has a good selection of cheap DVDs. Today was no exception; I picked up The Shootist, because Scott Shepherd pointed out to me in a comment thread a while back that it is the other Western that has John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart in it, so what the hell, The Replacements, because I’d long been curious about the film, and Gene Hackman is often fun to watch, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind because I enjoy looking at Drew Barrymore, Sam Rockwell was hilarious in GalaxyQuest, and I’m curious to see if George Clooney can direct, Best of the Best 2, which I saw a long time ago on video and remember being a surprisingly solid guilty pleasure, and Once Upon A Time In Mexico, which I’ve never read much of anything bad about, and hey, any movie that lets me stare at Selma Hayek for a while can’t be entirely worthless.

Then I came home, watched The Replacements -- it isn’t very good, but it isn’t terrible either, and Keanu actually isn’t at all bad in it, and largely unknown actress Brooke Langton struck me as being very hot whenever she was on screen – and then came in here to check email and type this thing.

I am currently in the middle of an (as always) self-played HeroClix battle pitting Man-Machines vs. Beast-Men. Taking the field in the shiny metal casings, we have Bastion, Brainiac-13, Ultron, Amazo, Bizarro, a Veteran Doombot, a Veteran Dreadnaught, a Veteran Manhunter, a Bat Sentinel, and a rookie Sentinel Trooper (the only one I have). Romping onto the field from the other set of locker rooms with apelike agility and/or pantherish power, you see Beast Boy (officially known as Changeling, but not in MY house, buddy), the Ultrahumanite, the Great Beast known as Taneraq, Gorilla Grodd, the Beast, the bone claw Wolverine, Hecate, Snowbird, the Lizard, Killer Croc, and to add a necessary element of comic relief, yes, folks, let’s give him a hand, all the way here from Gotham City, the Caped Crusader’s most ludicrous nemesis, Kirk Langstrom, the MAN-BAT! He’s not squawking that way to get attention, folks, that’s actually how he gets around.

Interestingly, the artificial folks seem to very nearly have the market cornered on Flight and Range Attack, and they’d be a surprisingly non-mobile force if my house rules on flying didn’t allow flyers to taxi other flyers. On the other hand, the Beasty Boys (and Gurls) seem to have bought up every last share in Leap-Climb and Blades-Claws-Fangs, with quite a few clicks of Charge thrown in just to keep things interesting, as well.

It’s too early to call the bout at this point, as we’re only on the third round. A surprise explosive barrage by a Trooper-amped Ultron severely singed the fur and scales of Snowbird, Hecate, Tanaraq, and Cheetah. But setting that up required Bizarro to get within close combat distance of both Hecate and Snowbird, which, since he’d already taken a forklift to the chops in turn 2 by an enraged Tanaraq, should have seen him off. But, maddeningly, both Hecate and Snowbird missed their strikes (even with Hecate showing Probability Control)! Yes, folks, anything can happen in Battling Tops – or, even, in HeroClix, if you just can’t make the dice behave, dammit.

My decision to set this battle on the warehouse map has already had a severely crippling effect on the robots, since if they could soar and pepper the Clawed Crusade from above the clouds, there would be a whole lot of new fur coats at the Metropolis Mart later on tonight. Which simply makes me wonder, how is map selection accomplished at official tournaments? So many teams could be utterly screwed by ending up on the wrong map, I have to assume that either they only ever use one map, which everyone knows and prepares for, or it’s a completely random selection procedure.

Amazo has been interestingly impacted by my new HyperSonic Speed house rules. While clearly Professor Ivo’s Avenging Android would like nothing more than to beat me about the head and shoulders with the nearest space shuttle or low income housing development for taking away his range strike while breaking the sound barrier, nonetheless, the new multiple attacks feature has stood him in good stead, allowing him to zoom up to a stack of boxes where Snowbird and Hecate were both hiding on adjoining hexes, smash both sections of hindering terrain into kindling, backhand Hecate across her snakelike chops once for good measure, and then retreat out of close combat distance with his last inch of movement.

Even under my House Rules for Outwit, which require a successful attack roll be made that does Zero Damage before a power can be countered, Bastion is a terror. With an 11 attack he will generally hit whoever he is trying to Outwit, a 6 range is better than most, especially on an indoor map, and since he’s a flyer and Outwit is a free action, he can taxi his fellow robots around while he’s doing all that, too.

Still, the fight is as yet too close to call. The Ultrahumanite, lurking in the back, still has the capacity to Telekinetically ram one BCFer (Wolverine) and one Mind Controller (Gorilla Grodd) into the thick of it out on the main warehouse floor, and either move could be a gamebreaker.

We’ll be back, after the half…

RULES OF THE ROAD

In one of his many invaluable essays on life in Hollywood, Mark Evanier described his first meeting with legendary TV comic and icon Milton Berle. Upon being introduced to Uncle Miltie and shaking hands with him, Mark, who is a pretty witty guy, blurted out without even thinking about it, "Wow, I didn't recognize you in men's clothing". According to Mark, this soured Uncle Miltie on him from that point forward, because Mark had broken Rule Number One When Hanging With Milton Berle, namely, Never Be Funnier Than Milton Berle.

I'm reminded of that anecdote now.

Recent experiences at Electrolite being pretty much entirely similar if not completely identical to my previous experiences at Uppity-Negro.com and TampaTantrum.com, I thought I'd take the time to extrapolate whatever wisdom there is to find in the whole mess. Here's The Deal, as far as I can see:

If you want to make friends and influence people when you head out onto the blogging trail, at least, as regards your posting comments on other people's blogs, you MUST NOT:

Rule E comes mostly out of my experiences with Aaron Hawkin's Uppity-Negro blog. He gets a lot of female posters and like any of us male geeks would be in that admirable position, he is thoroughly whipped by them. If a new reader comes along and does anything whatsoever to offend the babes on Aaron's blog, that new reader can expect a cold shoulder from Aaron roughly the size of the Greenland glacier. I don't really blame Aaron for this; for a male geek, positive female attention is a jewel beyond price, and if I ever had any women posting to my blog who weren't related to me by marriage, I'd most likely dance and sing like a puppet on a string when they cracked the lash, too.

I should add to this that I've learned, from Electrolite, that one Must Not Be Whimsical, Oblique, or Overly Geeky When Posting To A Big Important Political Marketplace of Ideas Type Blog, because those guys just have no time for Theodore Marley Brooks or Cornelus van Lunt references, regardless of how amusing or entertaining you and some others may find them.

Now, I am posting this to point out that while these may be the universal Rules of the Road on other blogs (and as far as I can see, they are, indeed, pretty much universal) you can ignore them here. I don't care if you:

Oh, and I like geeky references and would just adore whimsical, cleverly elliptical posts to my comment threads, although I suspect I'd get annoyed if someone started posting a whole lot of Harry Potter-speak here, just for one example.

If there is a universal rule on this blog, it is quite simply, Do Not Be A Bigger Asshole Than The Blogger. In fact, if you can avoid it (and most of my small number of regular posters avoid it with style and panache) Don't Be An Asshole At All. I am quite a big enough asshole myself to supply all the assholiness necessary for any blog, and I will continue to keep this blog well furnished with stupid remarks, doltish mistakes, whiney rationalizations, and defensive recriminations by the ton lot, there can be no doubt. You need bring none of your own asshole nature with you, I have plenty and am always willing to share.

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I'm not a likable guy. I'm not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It's simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don't like my opinions or my blog, don't read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I'm not going to say that this time around, because I've realized that what this is basically saying is, 'if you don't like what I have to say, tough, I don't want to hear it, don't even bother to tell me, just go away'.

And that's actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country... for a little while longer, anyway... and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I'm not sure that's a right when you're doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don't feel like reading... and I'm really quick with the delete key... as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don't like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance... these things are only worth my time and attention if they're entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough wit, style, and/or panache to amuse me... try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.