Re:What ITEMS have you been buying?

Gary Sax wrote: Bought a Samsung plasma d8000. No more sd Xbox anymore, god willing. Time to retire this 32 inch Sony CRT.

Wish I had a fucking HDMI Xbox!!!!!

I just wanted to follow up on this eleven-year-old thread and see if you ever picked up that Xbox.

Went straight to ps4 instead!

Finally some closure

Bought some colorful shoes last winter, taking advantage of the usual BOGO deal. They are basically fancy Converse Chucks circa 1975, but are comfortable with the addition of a dr scholl insole. I get compliments for the second pair.

raadshop.com/collections/all-shoes/produ...lacktiedyeskull00441

raadshop.com/products/hightop-purpletiedyeskullandrose00435

Recently, I bought a neat-looking dice bag from them, except that it is bigger than I expected, actually more like a small backpack/book bag hybrid. Perfect for carrying a couple of hardcover rpg books and a notebook, or perhaps a laptop computer. I would love it if they offered a t-shirt with this design.

raadshop.com/collections/stringbags-all/...lendidkingskull00926

Ah_Pook wrote: Finally some closure

Our long national nightmare has finally ended.

Cranberries wrote:

Gary Sax wrote: Bought a Samsung plasma d8000. No more sd Xbox anymore, god willing. Time to retire this 32 inch Sony CRT.

Wish I had a fucking HDMI Xbox!!!!!

I just wanted to follow up on this eleven-year-old thread and see if you ever picked up that Xbox.

Some serious thread necromancy right there.

"thank you" is an un-nuanced response to a post about the police entering your home at 6:00 a.m. I don't understand what happened but am sorry it did.
The other day a beer-bellied bicycle cop was talking to a homeless guy and kind of browbeating him for a while until he began acting more submissive. You could see the shift in his face, and the cop move on once he had won that little power struggle.

Brushes with the law
Later I was in line at the library desk to buy a used book, and he was talking at length to the two librarians, who were looking increasingly uncomfortable. He was chiding them for not reporting a found baggy of stuff, maybe paraphernalia (had to Google that spelling) and they were saying, "Ok, got it, thanks" but he kept going on. I finally asked him if we could use one of the librarians to do our business and he could talk to the other one, and he gruffly replied "When I'm done!" The other guy in line, who was suddenly my partner in suffering, gave me the "What an A-hole" face. I gave the "What's up his rear end?" face. I think they are universal. I figured as a tall white man with the trappings of middle class status and a full head of hair the worst that could happen is that he could bore me to death with a lecture.

Serving the public and emotional cocooning
He just walked off while his young, female latinx partner kept her face as emotionless as possible. The two librarians seemed relieved, but the reality was I could have waited thirty seconds and not gone into White Male Knight mode, and that cop probably has to deal with petty criminals and mentally ill addicts all day long so maybe he's a decent person most of the time. My father knew a police officer who went to our church in Sunnyvale. He told my dad that "When I was a cop, I thought everyone was an a-hole, and now that I'm not I feel like people are ok," or in the words of an article I just Googled, "Dealing with human misery on a regular basis also leads officers to shut down emotions." Viewing the people you serve as a constant threat can make you physically ill.

The anxiety factory
Due to some changes where I teach, I'm starting to see students not as bright young learners on their way to graduating as critically thinking participants in a democracy, but more on the same level as anonymous Youtube commenters who convert their chronic anxiety and depression into hurtful student evaluations that are now under closer scrutiny because the Dean is trying to purge his college of some chronically bad teachers. I'm not the most popular teacher in my department, but am certainly not the worst. Because I mostly teach lower level classes, I don't get a lot of frequent fliers, whereas instructors who teach the same upper-division courses eventually filter students who prefer their teaching. The students who like my teaching tend to be creative, smart, and super flaky.

I should probably quit participating in online professor forums, because it tends to attract a lot of complaining, which, thanks to the magic of language, starts warping my terministic screen. We have a toxic colleague who gets great reviews. Then recently I read this:

From what I can tell from decades in academia, students love narcissistic sociopaths. They are easily won over by a narcissist's charm and misread a narcissist's cruelty and self obsession as "he's really no nonsense!" or "he's easy, just do what he says!" or "he's really important and that's why he doesn't have time for students outside of class.

Sigh.

Really protecting and serving there. And they wonder why they should be defunded.

What a horrible experience. Good to hear nothing worse happened.

Police: [confused oinking noises]

RobertB wrote:

Cranberries wrote:

Gary Sax wrote: Bought a Samsung plasma d8000. No more sd Xbox anymore, god willing. Time to retire this 32 inch Sony CRT.

Wish I had a fucking HDMI Xbox!!!!!

I just wanted to follow up on this eleven-year-old thread and see if you ever picked up that Xbox.

Some serious thread necromancy right there.

I think the sacrifice of chicken nuggets was involved.

ubarose wrote: It was a knock & talk regarding what the laws here consider a civil matter. Our neighbors reported that we had a security camera facing their home and that we were spying on them. We actually did not have a camera, but even if we did, the object they reported as a camera was facing our driveway and, at least in my state, this would not be considered a criminal matter, but rather a civil matter.

So first fucked up thing, the police should have told them it wasn’t illegal to have a security camera and that they should contact their attorney if they have a problem with it.

Second fucked up thing, if the police suspected us, the people that have been living in this house for 25+ years, of something nefarious they could have easily come around during the day to eyeball the object for themself.

Or they could have come during the day, during normal waking hours, and knocked on the front door.

But no, they come to the house at 6am, in the pitch dark, to a house where everyone is clearly asleep, squeeze around the cars in our driveway to get to our not very accessible back yard, climb the steps to what is essentially a fire escape and pound on our door like we are harboring a murderer. To do what? Catch us in the act of possibly having the neighbor’s yard in the field of vision of a security camera?

Anyway, the pounding wakes us all up. Al sees it’s the police through the door window, and opens the door assuming there is some terrible emergency, like our house is fire, or someone has died or something. As soon as he takes a step back from the door, they push their way into our house. I come out of the bedroom, scared out of my mind by the noise and commotion, in my skimpy summer night gown, and nearly collide with a huge angry cop.

It took us a bit to even understand what the hell they were going on about. Al figured it out, and showed them the thing in our window which wasn’t a camera, and the police were all like, “Oh well, you can see how that might have looked like a camera from far away.”

But even if it was a camera, what were they going to do? Arrest us for recording the neighbor’s grass growing? It was all such bullshit.

So, anyway, now we are getting actual security cameras.

Final fucked up thing, I’m getting security cameras to protect myself from the police, not from thieves and criminals.

What they did is an actionable complaint. They had no right to enter your home without your permission, especially when they came to the back of the house instead of the front. If that happened to me, I'd file immediately.

The paranoia level of your neighbors suggests that perhaps recreational drug use might be part of their lifestyle choices. Or perhaps dementia.

Every time you wrote AL I thought you were saying Artificial Intelligence and I was all, "that is an impressive doorbell system."

www.cumberlandheights.org/blogs/addiction-and-paranoia/