A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

My parents have been in a most unfortunate legal battle over the last year or two with a gentleman to whom they sold their Fairfield, Maine apartment building earlier this decade. He did this as part of a property-buying spree, using money which he didn't actually have, and a few years later the inevitable occurred, just like you've been hearing all over.

They don't want the building back - they would much rather retire from the property-management business - but they also don't want to have the house, which they still live in, default over to whichever entity would end up with it upon foreclosure. So they're fighting for it anyway.

Talking with me on the phone today, my mom said she'd heard that if you do an internet search for the guy's name, you see the message "landlord from hell", or something, and maybe I could look, and print it out and mail it to them? (My parents don't cotton to computers.) I quickly confirmed that, yes, the number-one Google hit on the guy is this horrified essay, which we can call the There's poop in the tub! document - sadly, the story is about my parents' building. Mom's mentioned the flea incident before. (Thankfully, they didn't get outside of that one filthy apartment, but jeez.)

Also in the top ten hits for the guy's name are this story about a different building, and this jawdropping forum thread where, halfway through, sockpuppets defending the guy and his partner start piling on. First, they pretend to be an earlier poster who has changed her mind, declaring the subjects to be paragons of humanity. When that proved ineffective (since the original poster was still following the thread and able to say wtf at this), they settled on anonymous sniping, blaming the victims for being so stupid and careless. There is an entertaining interlude before it wraps up where someone suggests calling a local TV news desk about it, and then a puppet says, "O hai! I'm from the TV! Plz stop calling me kthx"

So, yeah, dealing with these two folks is my parents' full-time occupation right now.

Our kitty-cat has started peeing all over the back of the litterbox instead of onto the litter. She is very neat with burying her other business. This is a recent change of behavior. It's a bit gross for her humans, but she seems as happy as usual otherwise. Should we be concerned?

It's only now starting to dawn on me that the main reason the RNC focused so heavily on how "elite" and untrustworthy the media are isn't that they make a fun arbitrary target for a bit of the ol' Two Minutes Hate; it's more hope that people (besides their friends in the crazy 29) will stop listening to the news, and therefore miss all the stories about any of the candidates written by people who are not full-time McCain handlers. Because these stories have been pulling out some awfully curious things lately, haven't they.

Expect the McCain campaign, now that it's revealed its true shape, to follow the GWB model of absolutely minimizing any direct exposure its key people have with the press. The only new twist they offer is spiking access-denials with open mockery:

Great scott, that was the most horrible thing I've seen in davis_square in a long time. It's like coming home to discover a steaming turd in the middle of your kitchen floor. (And you don't have any pets.)

This is a compliment to the mods that the turds stand out so much, rather than being part of the background noise like-certain-communities-I-could-name, but I still feel like it shouldn't have gotten as far as it did. Wrote a mod about it.

(Started to mention TNH-style moderation tactics in my email, for I am a fan of them, but then had second thoughts. I'm not convinced that they apply in the case of every active internet community. It's an interesting question.)

My "vacation" failed to start last week, since my main active client had a bunch of revisions for me to make, which didn't surprise me. The work I have done went live on Friday, so we are now done-done and I hope to do interesting things starting today. (The client's already started to make new sales via the software I wrote, which makes everyone feel good.)

First, though, I spent the weekend sick at home, playing video games. Saturday classicaljunkie hung out and we played XBLA stuff together, and Sunday I spent alone playing Half Life 2, which is new to me. And, erm, I just played it all morning this morning, too. That's enough of that.

This is my first exposure to the current generation of digital gaming with a high-def display, sitting at the end of an intertube ready to pump more gamage at me whenever I wanted. I can see why someone could just sit and play forever. (Microsoft happily keeps your credit card info on-file after your first online purchase, so buying more downloadable gobbidge thereafter is as easy as pressing a button. They are bastards.)

I haven't played TF2 yet. I'm a little scared to. I had fun runnin around one of the maps alone just to check out the place.

The sickness was worrisome. After a month of masterful regularity, maybe the best I've ever had, I didn't go for five days and it was starting to hurt. Sunday I turned to a coordinated regimen of many things to get it all out, and it worked, and it was pretty awful. I am going to drink through this bottle of prune juice and hope that balance has been restored to the force. I have no idea what's going on.

She let me pick her up yesterday and was very mellow about it, even purry. I was really surprised! And we play chase-each-other-around games sometimes.

OTOH I don't think she cleans herself very well and I have to wipe her butt for her sometimes. Frowny. Why do I end up with all the poopy cats?

She's here through the rest of this month. I don't think that her getting used to me will cause her to not flip out at seeing my mom again.

Walking out of a movie being shown at your friend's house lacks the satisfying feeling you get (or anyway I get) from walking out of a theater showing, and may even look rude to people prone to taking it the wrong way. But sometimes you just have to hit the gong. (And I don't think anyone took it the wrong way. I was polite about it.)

Wow, what a stinker. It was just one of those no-brain "comedies" where every single character is the exact same completely selfish Type-A jerk, and I had no desire to spend the next 90 minutes in their company. Filling the story with obscure nods to ST:TOS storylines does not fix it for me. Eating shit served to you by Bill Shatner himself is still eating shit. Sorry.

Here is a much better Shatner movie that derspatchel linked a while ago. Enjoy! (Regretfully it was my watching this in the office that began the sequence of events leading to the other film's showing. But, la.)

The betapalooza went really well. Three people showed up locally, and, what, 15 remotely? Some crazy number. May not seem big to you but it's the most players we've had crowded into the devchat at once, and a result of new developers dragging their friends in. I am well pleased.

It's also clear to be that I need to spend one more full day on Fluxx. There's bugs I swore I fixed months ago still hanging around. It feels like something got reverted at some point. Sigh.

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Apparently, Nintendo's official name for the system heretofore named the Revolution is: the Nintendo Wii. Pronounced whee!. I think this is brilliant, and not just because it's named after pee, though certainly that's some of it.

Also everyone in the office just laughed at me saying "I'm gonna start a wii tag."

I also worked 'bung' in. Lost the game, though.