Category: The Life Quotient

Real Life outside the computer. Personal issues and events.

Bob

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Today I remembered a funny situation from where I was living in London in mid 2000s for a little while. I had just visited a heavy metal pub in Soho after work (I used to work in Covent Garden as a bartender during that time). I had been in London for a few months at that point and I was trying to meet people to hang out with.

So I was sitting alone in the back couch/bench and a hetero couple sat next to me. The woman had a punk haircut so I decided to comment on that.

Me: Hey there, I like you haircut!

Woman: Hey thanks! You seem new here, where are you from?

Me: Oh I’m from Greece. I just recently moved here.

Woman: Nice, so what’s your name?

Me: Konstantine

Man: Oh that’s way too hard. What’s your surname?

Me: Thoukydides

Man: Alright then, we’ll call you “Bob”!

Looks like the police is unable to catch a scammer for the past 10 years

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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.

Meh

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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.

The day I believed in Karmic Justice

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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:

  • We got into a fight. I wrestled him to the floor and he conceded. I got up to leave and he sucker-punched me in the face with all his strength.
  • I borrowed him a PC game I loved which came on 3 CD and I had bought original with all my savings. After he returned it I tried to play it, but for some reason I couldn’t load the 3rd stage (2nd CD). When I asked him about it, he said it was working fine for him. A common friend later told me he laughed to him about destroying the back of the CD with a screwdriver so that I wouldn’t be able to play anymore.
  • I got into a verbal fight on the street with a Roma boy (I can’t remember why). Without me knowing, he gathered his friends and went looking to beat me up. They couldn’t find me as I had already gone home but somehow Dewie got involved. He then not only led them to my apartment, but he rang my doorbell, and told me he had a surprise for me (At that point we were on speaking terms again). I lived on the 8th floor, so imagine my surprise when I open the door and see 3 Roma boys come out of the elevator and jump me! Dewie was sitting next to the elevator laughing his ass off. Fortunately another friend of mine was at my place at the time for video games so I screamed for support and with his and (iirc) my sister’s help we managed to drive them back (the kids were I think 1-3 years younger than us). Dewie escaped and somehow thought this was something to brag about.

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.

Patronize me

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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.

 

Stranded student scammer unveiled!?

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Ivo De Bach. ScammerYou 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.

Ahaha, oh I'm almost a bingo card >_

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h/t to the Shevilempire

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 >_<

My first Android Tablet.

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Asus Transformer PrimeSo 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

  • How to import emails/mailboxes from thunderbird to Android’s email client.
  • She likes to save stuff like images she sees online, locally. What’s the best way to handle that. Should we try to send those in the cloud instead?
  • What is the best office suite to use for a tablet. In the laptop she used Libre Office so it needs to be able to handle .odt and .ods files.
  • Should I even bother to install Flash on it?
  • What kind of thing is a tablet best used for? What kind of apps do you recommend?

Yet more tooth ache

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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!