Author: vanessa

Do what thou whilt shall be the whole of the law.

I got scammed by social engineering. Long story short someone who I though I had been friends with for months and months but who was apparently just waiting to scam me had me convinced he was sending me money to pay off some of my credit card debt. He submitted a fake check and my account got locked down. There was more to it but honestly it’s too embarrassing to talk about in detail. Now I have to go through a lot of rigamarole to deal with it.

It’s so frustrating. I thought I was smarter than this but nobody is smarter than social engineering, especially when you’re in debt. You’d think with all the trainings work has given me over the years, with how many scam baiting videos I watch, and with how smart I’m supposed to be that I would be better than this but he knew the exact buttons to hit to get me to believe him. We met over mutual interests, not through channels you’d expect for such a thing like shoddy emails or phone calls. If I’m being honest, thinking that I was too smart to get scammed was actually a factor in making me more vulnerable to this particular kind of scam.

The entire way he set it up was nothing like anything you read about or hear about. I almost thought it was a false alarm before they told me that the reason it was marked as fraud was that it was obviously photoshopped. Before then I thought he was telling me the truth. It was a good thing that I was broke so he couldn’t take anything because there was nothing to take. sigh I’m just so frustrated more than anything. The way he framed it is what got me. I genuinely thought he was trying to help me with my finances.

I don’t blame myself. I got taken in by someone really good at scamming in a way I’d never heard of before so didn’t know how to guard against. I just wish I wasn’t like this. I’m tired of being taken advantage of. I’m not sure what hangup I have that makes me so vulnerable, but it’s exasperating. I’m sure some combination of factors is what did it. I think it likely autism played a part. Worst thing is, I don’t know how to protect myself. That’s the scary part.

Love is the law, love under will.

Crushed,
Vanessa

Do what thou whilt shall be the whole of the law.

I know the Mandella Effect is no longer part of the current cultural conversation but this occurred to me and I felt like putting it somewhere. This one is just gonna be a brief note of something I realized while watching AVGN’s Berenstain Bears episode. We never knew what it said written out as kids back then when we were at the age of the target audience. It was written in cursive and most of us didn’t learn that until much later. For whatever reason “Berenstein” became the common pronunciation so we just assumed that’s what the cursive said and that got saved in our heads but once you know how to read you can never get back to the mindset of when you couldn’t. We see the cursive now and know how to read it so we’re surprised why it doesn’t match the pronunciation we were accustomed to and many of us insist it must have been spelled the way we had assumed it was spelled as small children, but it wasn’t.

Love is the law, love under will.

Satisfied,
Vanessa

Do what thou whilt shall be the whole of the law.

When I was young I was all about technology, especially electronics, but I find the older I get the less I like it. These days, I find myself loathing every new electronic innovation. Primarily it’s out of concern for how it will be exploited at the expense of the working class and how it’s often released unfinished and buggy making us be the guinea pigs. But also I don’t always want to have to fiddle with these things when they bring me no substantial benefit.

I hate that Kroger got rid of their normal grocery checkout lanes in favor of more self checkouts and these weird hybrid things. I’m the customer. You shouldn’t be making me do your job for you. It’s one thing to have the option but it’s another thing entirely to force you to do it. I come into your store and select some items to buy then you want me to fiddle around with a computer thing to tell you what I want to buy instead of you just doing it? Feels pretty exploitative. This is a big part of why I prefer to shop at Meijer but unfortunately that’s not always practical. Self checkout is nice when I only have a few items and there’s not much of a line but if I have a lot of stuff or heavy stuff I really don’t want to have to be the one to deal with scanning it all. Plus sometimes I prefer to interact with a real human rather than fiddle with machines.

I have just been made aware that they have driverless Ubers now. Not content to put classic taxi services out of business, Uber now wants to eliminate the drivers entirely. That’s absolutely terrifying! Nobody’s at the wheel! That’s incredibly dangerous! How is that even legal!? It shouldn’t be. Tesla’s failed self-driving launch should have been a clue. There should ALWAYS be a real human at the wheel to correct for when the computer inevitably fails. There should always be a manual override for EVERYTHING mechanical. Nobody should trust a computer to do anything without oversight by real humans. So now we have to look out for sleeping Tesla drivers and driverless Ubers. This is not ok.

Also seeing a car driving itself is incredibly creepy.

Self-driving failure related video clips:

Watch the related video reel here

Video shows moments before fatal Uber self-driving crash | ITV News

Cop Struggles To Pull Over Driverless Car

Driverless taxis in San Francisco cause traffic jams, chaos

Tesla Autopilot Crash FAIL! #Shorts

Love is the law, love under will.

Concerned,
Vanessa

Do what thou whilt shall be the whole of the law.

By the power of truth I while living have conquered the universe.

I really fucking hate the way anti-intellectuallism has spread in this fucking country. People seem to think facts are just opinions and that any belief is justified even if it goes against reality. Proof holds no weight with these people because they don’t actually care about what is but rather what they want it to be, truth be damned. It’s scary and disgusting. The conservatives are the biggest offenders but I’ve seen it from all over the place on all kinds of things. I’m sorry but no that’s not how reality works. You can disagree until you’re blue in the face but that doesn’t make false things true or make it ok for you to cling to such ignorance and stupidity. I’m sick of it. People need to learn to be intellectually honest.

Love is the law, love under will.

Frustrated,
Vanessa

Do what thou whilt shall be the whole of the law.

This is a shot easy on mental health and blame reposted due to its import stripped of its authorship by request of the author. Used with permission.

I have schizoeffective disorder so I’m sensitive about how people describe and label the concept of sanity.

When people try to pass laws to restrict what people with mental health issues can and can’t do, they’re doing it to me. When they blame murders at the hands of cis-het white conservative males on mental health, they’re blaming it on me. When people use words like “psychotic” “insane” “schizoid” in a derogatory manner, they’re comparing them to me as an insult.

It’s not like I asked the universe to be born with schizoeffective disorder. I hate everything about it. It’s horrible. It’s terrifying knowing that if something happened and I couldn’t get my Latuda, I would start slowly losing my mind. I got a small dose of what that’s like once when I couldn’t get a refill for 4 days. It’s real Flowers for Algernon type stuff.

I was a horrible person and hurt so many people I loved because of it being undiagnosed and untreated because of how it fucks with your mind.

There’s no way to use words to describe what any of that is like.

So you’ll never be able to truly empathize the experience. Nobody can who doesn’t also have the disorder. And please please please don’t go spreading that around. I don’t want rados knowing my diagnosis.

—Anonymous

Love is the law, love under will.

In solidarity,
Vanessa

Do what thou whilt shall be the whole of the law.

While I don’t think piracy is justified in general, this kind of theft of things you already bought happened to me recently with a PC game I bought on physical media; Tron Evolution. Disney revoked all the licenses of the game including legitimate pre-existing purchases of the game. I bought it brand new on physical media back when it first came out. Now I can’t play the game I legitimately bought brand new anymore for no legitimate reason. The CD key the game physically shipped with doesn’t work anymore.

Even working around the DRM it prompts you on install doesn’t help because it has a second form of DRM; Games for Windows Live. GFWL, is dead and doesn’t work anymore because it has been shutdown in favor of the Microsoft store and the Xbox services. It doesn’t let me sign in anymore and they tied saving the game into using it. (Yes I reset my password and no it did not help. I can sign into my Microsoft account just fine on my Xbox and on my Outlook. This isn’t an account issue.)

You have to authenticate the installation with one form of DRM, which is now revoked for no legitimate reason, then log into another on a now dead service, just to play a game I physically own on disc because Disney arbitrarily decided to say “screw you.” The game is already abandonware yet they screwed over legitimate purchases presumably out of arbitrary malice. They lose nothing off from me playing the game I already own ON PHYSICAL MEDIA. There’s no legitimate reason to do this to me other than just petty megalomania.

So now the only way I can play this game I paid for again would be to pirate it but I don’t even know how to do that these days and even if I did there’s no guarantee I’d even be able to save the game because that’s attached to GFWL for some absurd reason. Now, despite owning a legitimate copy of the game, I have no other option but to pirate it if I ever wanted to play it again. It’s fucked.

Love is the law, love under will.

Frustrated,
Vanessa