収束ゾーンでのライフ: Life in the Convergence Zone

I made a video for Monsterdon, the weekly mostly-monster-moving event on Mastodon.

For some reason, people voted to watch Frogs (1972) this week. The title sequence I’m riffing on can make anything look action-packed, but, uh, I’m told… don’t be fooled by that.

I mean, it’s terror frogs. Don’t expect too much. xD

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

Dracula City! DRACULA CITY! Dracula City!

This Halloween, take advantage of our special liquidation sale!
Buy nine Draculas, get the tenth one for just one penny!

🎶 Dracula City
we sell Draculas
🎵!
and that’s all! 🎶

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

but it’ll be the right three people

(alt text if you want)

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

Apparently, no one noticed that Zoom Earth was literally talking about the City of Townsville in this post about a cyclone.

Powerpuffs save the day, everyone.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

Someone was giving away a broken television – “it flickers” – on the local Buy Nothing group. I have a project that wants a high-quality diffusion lens, so I say “Hey, if nobody wants to try to fix it, I’ll take it” and I end up with it.

I pick it up. It’s much heavier and thinner than I expected, and higher end than I also expected, but no big deal until…

…I get home and realise it’s an OLED television, which doesn’t have the diffusion lens I want. They must’ve spent some serious money on this thing.

So I get into the paperwork, notice a couple of extra bits but skip them to get to how to assemble the stand, do so, and hook it up to see the flicker. To my surprise, actually yeah, that’s a reasonable description of what it’s doing! But it’s mostly working so maybe I can fix it. If not, oh well, my bad for not checking to make sure it’s not OLED.

Then I go through the rest the paperwork they threw in with it from 2019 when they bought it and discover:

1. The actual purchase receipt
2. The actual extended warranty proof of purchase that you need to use the extended warranty
3. Which says that they bought three years of extension to the two-year factory warranty which means
4. This goddamn thing is still under warranty.

I presume they will want it back. I have left them a message. This may be complicated by the fact they were heading out right after I picked this up, so now I’m wondering if they were going out to buy another TV.

Given how much this one may’ve cost, I’m kind of thinking it’s worth their time to take the new one back. But we’ll see.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

here's something very slightly funny:

so amongst comcast business's many failures, the cherry on top was breaking our phone line for weeks so we couldn't get incoming calls, yeh? and we didn't know.

we discovered it when their dispute office couldn't call us and had to email.

(as always, let me take a moment to say: friends don't let friends do comcast business)

as near as I can tell, we were not receiving calls for most of march. we were getting calls in february, but not after that.

that's where the accidental favour comes in.

the line is back up, on another provider. but we're getting a lot, and I mean a _lot_, fewer spam calls. and i'm kind of wondering if by breaking incoming calls for a month they triggered a lot of line-disconnected routines and took us off a bunch of illegal spam lists.

(i say illegal because they are; we're on the do-not-call registry but there's a whole class of fuckwits who don't give a rat's ass about that.)

but we've literally not got a single spam call since coming back up. not one.

it used to be something by which we could set a clock.

i mean, obviously, it'll build back up over time as robocallers and spammers explore working numbers, and i've almost certainly jinxed it and there'll be a call any second now.

but still. they kind of hit the reset button for us. accidentally. while blocking all calls.

in this case, honestly?

i'm okay if we lost a couple of babies.

we got rid of a _lot_ of bathwater.

eta: yes, this means we won.

annathepiper and I went to the live show of Wait Wait Don't Tell Me at the Moore last night, and it was pretty entertaining. And it was about two hours, with a longer monologue, and all that, and generally we had a good time. The Moore is a lot better venue for shows like that than it is for music, so the sound was good.

But the weirdest thing was that the California joke not at California's expense got a roar of approval. 45's administration has made us actual allies. You don't have to be that old to remember when that was just unthinkable.

What the fuck, world? What the fuck.

Time to pack up and load out! We’re not actually leaving yet – that’s for tomorrow morning, all too bright and early – but we’ve already set up the duty schedules for all the Minions staying behind in the Lair, and now it’s just a matter of making sure we have everything we need.

I don’t know how much I’ll be on over the next week, though almost certainly at least a little. Other than that – see you at Worldcon, I hope!

ps: if you were in the ice cube tray discussion over the weekend, we may have decided at rehearsal that it needed a song and things got stupid pretty fast. XD

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
Bandcamp (full album streaming) | Videos | iTunes | Amazon | CD Baby

I finally found out how to enjoy something written by Bach. Now if we could just combine that with this:

...we'd have a real winner.

You know you've been running a festival too long when you find you're reflexively doing crowd-counts at somebody's wedding.

It probably didn't help that they had The Heather Dale Band in for the show nuptials, but still. XD

(Hi Ben! Hi Heather! And congratulations to Naomi and Glenn!)