Real Life outside the computer. Personal issues and events.
Ever since Stable Horde, my life has been code.
Other than some activities with the family, I’ve done basically nothing else. Today is the first time in months I decided to take some time to play some video game. Vampire Survivors if you’re interested.
It’s been a wild ride.
More than 9 years ago, I posted that the one scam artists that I fell victim to (because of good fucking heart) was still at large. I just found out that he’s been going around unmolested in Europe ever since and there’s a huge thread about that one guy by now in a French forum.
He changes names and nationalities constantly, so any information I provided about him is way obsolete by now, but his face and sob story should remain approximately the same.
So…yeah
The janky mods of the Anarcho-Communism group in Facebook decided to ban me because I vented against U.S. Imperialism in a thread venting against cis people, in the same style the OP did. They piled-on me trying to prove that privilege-don’t-real if you’re poor, and deflected criticism by pointing out they’re not U.S. citizens themselves. Eventually I pissed one of them enough by applying the same logic to my arguments, that they muted me and asked one of their buddies to ban me.
Unfortunately this is par for the course for anarchist organizing on shit platforms like Facebook and that group had just devolved into the anarchist version of purge-bait. Here, I’ll give you a sample of the daily quality of posts:
“All people not in my oppressed class are crap!”
You now have seen 90% of the “content” posted in this group.
Unfortunately in too many public anarchist spaces, this kind of venting (that should normally be reserved for your affinity group) is par for the course, and then mods fall on top of each other trying to prove who is the best ally by banning whoever tries to use this as a springboard for discussion.
It’s all just immature fucking posturing by immature people who just discovered anarchism. Followed then by more posturing by the resident in-group who has 5% more power than the rest and wants a reason to exercise it. This shit is what passes for activism for many, and the reason why I have lost a lot of interest in trying to contribute as much as I used to in /r/anarchism.
The funny thing is how the people who are ban-happy when they think they’re on the right, cry foul when they end up on the opposite side, like a mod in reddit who whined about me oppressing them for reverting their deletion of a post ((It was nothing reactionary but rather a silly anarchism-related game they didn’t personally like)).
Now to be clear, there is nothing inherently wrong with banning or venting online, and neither of these acts, nor being a ban-happy fuckhead is isolated to anarchists, in fact right-wingers seems to be naturally more complacent and glad to fall in-step to a leader-figure. However there is something wrong when most online discourse on this subject is dominated by immature anarchists trying to prove how radical they are. Even more frustrating when they are stumped that they go digging into your profile and attempt to start an oppression olympics with you as a silencing tactic.
It had gotten so ridiculous at times that I managed to avoid getting banned for the longest time because I am Greek (and therefore “non-white” somehow? Dunno how that works, but whatevs) and could speak with some experience about U.S. imperialism. But someone from mainland U.S.A. making the same arguments would be banned without a second thought if they didn’t “win” at the oppression olympics at some other area. I.e. it stops being about what you say, and rather about who you are.
So, meh. Probably for the best as the group had just devolved into people daily calling each other “trash” and high-fiving each other about it in a group-masturbatory celebration of how progressive they are.
Have I ever written the story of how a high-school “friend” of mine performed the most absurdly underhanded act I’ve seen? No? Story time!
When I moved to a new area in Athens in 1992, I started in a new Gymnasium (what would be called “Middle-school” I think for U.S. Americans.), and I had to make all new friends from scratch. As I was a very awkward kid (shy and geeky but feisty as well) I started getting into a lot of fights and became a bit of a pariah to my classmates.
I did make some friends, but I also made a lot of enemies. A lot of those enemies were content to simply torment me daily with new nicknames, spitballs in my hair during class, attempts at bullying etc, while others were very happy to simply goad the rest into keeping this up, or attempting to keep me as a social outcast. One of the latter was a kid we’ll call “Dewie” for this story.
So this kid was very very slimy. Always trying to get people to start shit with me, telling people lies or secrets about me etc. To my face though, he tried to be friendly and even to befriend me. To an extent, it worked, since I didn’t have a lot of people to hang out with; but since I also wasn’t completely oblivious, this relationship became a friend/nemesis situation. I.e. some weeks we’d be on just speaking terms, some others we’d be friends (e.g. I’d invite him home to play video games etc), some others we’d be bitter enemies, fist-fighting in the yard, or randomly on the street etc. It was a weird situation caused in part by my own character type. I’m very difficult to anger and very easy to forgive and trust people.
What didn’t help matters is that I had found some other people who I was friends with, and he managed to insert himself into that group as well. At that point this pissed me off because they knew we did not get along at the time and they nevertheless allowed him in. This further complicated things but this situation kept going on for 3 years.
Some of the things I remember Dewie did:
Even though all of that, my common group of friends would just no drop him from the circle, to the point that I would have to avoid hanging out with them when he was around, eventually causing me to be almost completely alone except 2 very closer friends. And even them I almost lost during this time.
But there was one thing that not just Broke the Camel’s back, but pile-dived into a pyramid of Camels. The act so low and stupid that it still stupefies me.
When I was 15, my mother died. At that point I was almost completely alone, friend-wise. Silver lining to that event was that people started talking to me again, even some people who had been my mortal enemies during all my high-school year. There was an outpouring of compassion during those first few weeks/months and the classes at my age-group decided to make a fund-drive to get me some economic support (I was completely orphaned at that point). Dewie, at the time happened to be the class accountant, so naturally he gathered the money for everyone to transfer to my family bank account. It was not a lot, but it was a symbolic amount (I think it would have been something like 100-200 Eur now).
Next day, Dewie is missing from school. Apparently he had to go urgently to the hospital. We were all wondering what happens, and then a common friend, Alex, drops this bombshell:
On the previous day, he run into Dewie on the street. Dewie was on the other side a small avenue, and as soon as he notices Alex, he raises a couple of Heavy Metal CDs and shouts to him something like “look what I got!”, and runs over to show him. At that point a motorcycle run blazing past and smacks straight onto Dewie who is dragged on the group with his face for a couple of meters.
In case you didn’t get it, Dewie has used the money my class-mates had gathered out of support for my dead mother to buy himself music CDs…
And Karmic Justice struck him down like a clay pigeon!
I don’t remember how Alex knew this. I think Dewie might have bragged about it already (he was notoriously stupid at times). Whatever the reason, news quickly spread out in school about this dastardly deed, and for half a year or so, the world turned a bit on its head and I was the liked-kid, while Dewie was the social pariah.
Unfortunately, due to my inherent awkwardness and Dewies inherent slimyness, this didn’t last. Within a year, things were back how they were, with Dewie still involved my group of friends and me being the outcast.
But at least that act was so heinous that I could never forgive him for it, and would avoid him like the plague from then on.
Patreon is a new service that has recently come to my attention. It attempts to implement the concept of crowdfunded patrons for artists, which is how I always thought the content creation in the digital age is meant to evolve. When your audience is not limted by geographical location and you do not need gatekeepers publishers, it makes a great deal of sense to take control into your own hands.It immediately sounded like a great way to gauge how many people are interested in my efforts to provide the best experience on the games I develop on OCTGN, and I know for sure that there’s a lot of people who’ve been meaning to support my work all this time.
So I decided to run a patreon campaign and see how it goes. Unfortunately I’m not a huge video maker and I don’t have any special camera equipment to speak of, so I haven’t made an intro video as requested, but I plan to cook something up as soon as I get some time available. I probably won’t show my ugly face so you’re likely to end up simply listening to my sexy Greek accent while watching some OCTGN footage in the background 🙂
If all this sound exciting, take a look at my patreon campaign and please make some suggestions for improvement if you have them. Specifically I have no idea what to put in for future goals in a project such as this. I could also use some more potential rewards for my backers, so if you’ve got any ideas for either of these, let me know.
Alternatively I could also take some suggestion on page formatting, better pictures, videos and so on. If you think I should be doing something differently, again, all ideas are welcome.
You remember the conman going by the name of Denis Janson? The guy who has been extremely active all over Europe for the past 5 years, scamming helpful people out of hundreds of euros for wanting to do a good deed? Well, as it happens, people have been leaving comments on my site in the meantime, and it seems like some reporter has finally uncovered the real identity of the perpetrator; A guy going by the (facebook) name of Ivo De Bach!
I have no idea how that reporter tracked him down, but the photos match perfectly. Same haggard face, same chipped tooth. Go look at the photos I and others have taken in my previous posts. It’s almost certainly him.
If you know this person, be aware that he’s a very active scammer and a brilliant liar. I can’t tell you what to do this information, but if you help bring justice, I’d appreciate if you could let me know.
I don’t know if I should be glad or not that I don’t hit a bingo here. I hit 8 of the above including the center, but no 5 in a row.
I should probably be ashamed that I’m in the same bingo card with MRAs and Randroids, but to my defense, I don’t wear it all that often and I bought it to fit more into the gothic scene at the time 🙂
Oh Yeah!
I will take solace in the fact that the ones I’m hitting make me just typical, and not a shitlord >_<
So my wife’s netbook’s screen died, and since she was already fed up with the performance of the thing, she decided to abandon it and try out a tablet. Due to her inexperience with the platform, the decision fell on me.
After some looking around, I decided to go with the Asus Transformer Infinite which just came out this month, and is the first (AFAIK) tablet to sport a true HD 10′ display. I was also considering the more budget oriented TF300T Asus Transformer, but after discussing with some iPad 3 owners around here, they informed of the pros and cons of a higher resolution which has to do more with reading on the tablet, than about watching movies and so on.
So given that the wifey is more likely to be using it for reading and writing than anything else, we went with the more expensive model. Yesterday we received it and I got to play with it a bit, and I must say that I’m very impressed with it. It makes my Samsung Galaxy S phone look ancient and ugly. Here’s the promotional vid.
So the thing comes with Android 4.0.3 which is the latest and greatest of the OS. It has very little other bloatware (comparatively to Samsung at least) and is very responsive. However I still needed to root the thing in order to install some basic apps like Adfree. Other than that though, she’s going to primarily use it as her home workstation so I’m trying to figure out what kind of apps and setup I should be installing. Also another significant issue is how to import her previous emails from thunderbird which I don’t even know if it’s possible. With Ubuntu these kind of things were fairly easy to figure out (even when migrating from Evolution to Thunderbird) but with the current OS it gets more tricky.
Issues I still need to consider
Yet more teeth pain
It seems I just can’t get any respite. Just 2-3 days ago, one of my front teeth started being increasingly sensitive to cold. The sensitivity increased day by day, until we reached today, where it leveled up in pain, and has now started hurting by itself, and also by pressure as well, making it increasingly difficult for me to eat.
Fortunately painkillers still seem to work, but I have no idea why this particular tooth started aching all of a sudden. It’s nowhere near the one that got extracted last week and I never had problems with it. And yet, now it’s hurting as if it also has a fracture.
Goddamnit!
I am generally very healthy but my mouth more than makes up for the pain quota.
So, a few hours ago, I got back from the university dentist clinic…with one tooth less. Finally my odyssey in finding why I’ve been in having pains when chewing with this tooth and lately simply constant extreme pain on it and around its area, are at and end.
You see, this particular molar had been torturing me for years, IÂ initially noticed a few years ago, shortly after I got my wisdom teeth removed, chewing particular foods with it, (especially “chewy” ones like rump steaks and the like) sometimes caused extreme pangs of pain, but it was infrequent enough that I could dismiss it. Unfortunately it wouldn’t dismiss me.
The pains started getting more frequent and later on affecting other kinds of food as well. I mentioned this multiple times to my dentist when I visited for my regular check-ups, but every time he looked at it and said that it doesn’t look as anything more than pressure from my grinding issue. With alarm I kept mentioning that the pain was growing in frequency and intensity as time passed but nothing else came of it.
Eventually, one week ago, things came to a head, ad this tooth simply started hurting constantly one day. It started as a weak pulsing pain but day by day it increased to annoying, then distracting, then intense, then “the painkillers, they do nothing!” to “Gawds please kill me quickly” kind of pain. At around the point where it was just “intense” I decided to get a second opinion, since my regular dentist couldn’t find anything wrong with it (“But it’s a perfectly healthy tooth!” were his words – granted this was before the pain become a constant experience, rather than only present when chewing on this tooth). Frustratingly, this second doctor made the same exact remarks and thought it was simply pressure as well and gave me a small drilling to alleviate it. However to his credit, he did passingly suspect the true cause and said that I should return if the pain persists.
However after the pain didn’t dissipate and one particularly painful night, and a suggestion by liriel and my mother-in-law, I decided to go for the ultimate investigation and visited the university clinic. Unfortunately I didn’t know the correct time, so I ended up in the emergency care, after roughly 3 hours of waiting around, I got to sit on the dentist chair, and the doctor that checked it, announced that I have aggressive periodontitis. She did some cleaning and said that I should visit the clinic again during daylight hours and go see the Periodontology experts.
Fortunately, the cleaning she did seemed to stop the general pain all around the area (until then, the pain was a “throbbing” kind that seemed to move from tooth to tooth, and even reached my ear), which allowed me to sleep easier. Unfortunately, it focused all that pain into the problematic tooth itself which made the pain constant, rather than throbbing and made it so that even the slightest touch hurt like a motherfucker.
So into the periodontology clinic I went, and after significant waiting again, I got looked at by a certain long-haired expert who announced that I definitely do not have aggressive periodontitis. Dismayed I asked “Then what do I have doctor” who then, to my frustration announced “I have no idea, but it looks very healthy, albeit suspicious”. Fortunately he had the good grace to say that a healthy tooth shouldn’t be hurting like this, so he would refer me to some other experts who would drill in to check the nerve itself…next day. I went into the clinic at 1pm and left at 5:30 so they were about closing at that time and I had to practically run to an arranged meeting I had for Mage Knight (Note to self: Not a good idea to try to explain very complex board games while having intense tooth-ache).
Anyway, so next day (i.e. today) I started quite early on and went for a visit to those other experts. Fortunately the waiting time was much less and soon I was in to figure out what the problem was. After a few tests on how alive my tooth was, where I didn’t even neither cold nor electrical shots to it, they declared that I had…aggressive periodontitis. Their suggestion was they should simply clean the area and make me come back next week. Fortunately I managed to convince them that this was definitely not a good idea with the amount of pain I was in, and that they should go and consult with the Periodontology expert who said that I don’t have periodontitis. More specifically, I asked them to look for the long-haired blond dude ((I am so fucking lucky he was distinctive like that and I could make them figure out who he was, without remembering his name)) and see what he thinks because I damn well was not going home without a definite diagnosis today.
Fortunately the guy was still available so they went to fetch him. After a while however, rather than him, I saw yet another dentist come in, in a rush, wordlessly grab his utensils and start banging on my teeth once more. Once I made it clear that the molar really really fucking hurts when he’s banging on it, he discussed a bit with the others and then got to the anesthetics. At around the time, the long-haired dentist (by now I knew he was dr. Roellke) arrived as well and he got to see them drilling it to figure out what the hell was wrong with it. Fortunately, they suspected correctly this time (I must have got the drilling expert this time) and they saw my tooth had a small fracture right down the middle…vertically.
This kind of fracture was positioned in such a novel way ((seriously, they came and took pictures to teach other students about it)) as to make it invisible to x-rays as well as to the naked eye, which is why my regular dentist as well as everyone else couldn’t see anything wrong with the tooth and announced it as perfectly healthy. Unfortunately, all this time, the fracture as deepening until it eventually reached the nerve area, which allowed germs to pass through and wreak merry hell on my pain receptors. I suspected something was horribly wrong with the tooth for years now, and perhaps if we had caught the fracture when it was still beginning, we might have saved the tooth, but everyone was so focused on my grinding problem that they didn’t believe me that this tooth has a special kind of pain.
Unfortunately this meant that the tooth was unsalvageable, so this time dr. Roellke himself took me to the surgeons who would extract it. 3 different anesthetics and some serious pulling later, I had the bad tooth lying in front of me, looking all ashamed for its act. However, I really don’t care. Testing my teeth now, I finally bit down without any pain, which is something I haven’t had for years no, so one bad tooth is a small price to pay for this.
Time for my first golden tooth methinks!
