It’s only just begun! A view along Artists Alley for all you dear readers. It is slightly low press, as compared to previous years, which is remarkable and somewhat less distracting. Which I like.
Also, today is brought to you by trolley and bungee: 
BCW, Braunschweiger, Copernicus, and Wittgenstein. Classic names in comics.
I’m going to liveblog throughout the con for as long as WiFi, LTE, and the Good Folk of the Battery Blessing Way are with me.
The hotel, the Hyatt Regency at McCormick is quite good. The bathroom is a little haha and the lack of plugs only demonstrates that they don’t really understand technical people. Also, the power plugs by the bedside are switched with the primary room lights, so, your phone charging and the doofy little alarm clock they give you are functionless if you turn the main lights off by the door. It’s not a feature, its a mistake. But how do you fix it? Rewire the joint. LOL. Nah. It’s not worth it.
Soon we’ll migrate down to the queue lounge and wait in line from 8am to 10am. Then the con starts at 10am, and it’s an instant hustle for some. Some to artists alley, some to exhibitors, some just because it’s the way of the con. I’m going for social support for Scott. Plus it gives me a chance to keep on trying to catch up with my comic reading.
The time is right again, the stars are in alignment and the Great Lake has receded to reveal the Convention Center of the Old Ones, the Display Space of the Insane Damned, McCormick Place in Chicago Illinois! Tentacle monsters, inexplicable seaweed tresses, and the definite sense that maybe Jim Butcher used the entire building as inspiration for the Harry Dresden stories.
We have purchased snack foods and purified water supplies. Healthy snacks with an eye to fiber and protein that we can carry with us on our travels without having to purchase an $8 cuppa coffee or a $17 hot dog or a $25 dollar slice of microwaved pizza. We can sit down and enjoy our snacks in the places reserved for buying patrons and enjoy when frustrated concessioners make their precious frowny faces at us as we enjoy our own treats.
I probably have enough for a two week adventure, and that’s okay. It’s all shelf stable and not going anywhere, and it’s all good for me anyhow, so I can drag anything to work and use it to battle low blood sugar hangries.
The cat sitter is set. I have to get a few more cans of food for Ysy, that’s tomorrow during lunch. Then we will be off for a cavalcade of sitting and watching and enjoying as geeks, dorks, and nerds celebrate pop culture, comic books, and social and economic planetary domination over the uninteresting residuals of the species.
We’re all judging you. With our little plastic wrapped booklets of artwork and our little trollies full of collectibles worth more than your entire educational experiences combined. Then we’ll store all of it in perfectly airless preservation solutions until we remember much later that we have any of it and how much is stacked up…?
And we will laugh, privately, and amusingly while the residuals go out to buy diapers and formula.
I haven’t logged into Facebook in quite a while and I’ve been doing bits and bloops around the network, like connecting MOD Pizza to my FB account and vastly lower interaction metrics. The Facebook security watchdog noticed!
So they locked me out. I could get back in if I could identify my friends in a quiz format. Fine. Took the quiz, passed. Account password changed and updated.
Hilarious. Facebook is like herpes. I hardly miss the cold sores.
So far it has happened to me twice. I have received contact from people who are very much no longer with organizations that I have a relationship with. The first contact was from a telecommunications technology company, obviously remaining nameless with the offender also remaining nameless. I had recognized the name from a previous connection when I was working with a current telecommunications company that is related to my workplace. The messaging was catered to create a fear response and panic move on my behalf to drum up business for the account executives commission. They had my name and my email address, they worked at a new company, and there is no reason why they should contact me as there was no prior contact with their new company for any purpose where I should expect contact. Essentially they copied their customer list in one company, and then when they went to another position elsewhere just uncorked the list and hit up all the contacts, in a targeted fashion. The first time was remarkable, but I thought it was a situational outlier.
Today, after I got the mail out of my home mailbox, I found another card from a previous contact with which I had made a few financial arrangements with the person, they were no longer with the financial institution that I do business with on personal terms, but a wholly new company, whom I had never had contact before. Again, the person copied their customer list from one company and carried it with them to another company.
I find all this to be wrong. It could even be regarded as corporate espionage. Right now it’s a simple matter of just tossing all these cold contacts suddenly warm again right in the secure recycling bin. There is no way that I’m going to contact any of them, but because I regard this as wholly inappropriate use of privileged information, each time I spot it, the relationship is dead on arrival. I don’t want to talk to these people, and doing this underhanded thing is worth exactly what I’m willing to pay for it, which is to throw it all away and not even give it a single thought. You stole the list, you are attempting to be clever and sneaky. I will not be a party to it.
I, of course, won’t identify companies or name individuals, but I find this to be utterly reprehensible, and as a practice, I’m calling it out. If you quit a job where customer lists are handy, you leave those lists behind, and you find a more wholesome and honest way to approach customers. So, off the offending mail goes, off to the recycling bin!
Finally found the perfect recipe for poached eggs for my morning breakfast. An English muffin, toasted. Then a smear of Kerrygold Butter. Then the eggs. I suppose you could call it a firm poach. I have little silicone poaching cups I got for Christmas years ago, a little spritz of nonstick spray. Then put those in ceramic ramekins, put those in the Instant Pot, a cup of tapwater, seal. High pressure for 7 minutes and 7 minutes of NR, then a QR. Put the eggs on the buttered muffin halves and a little scratch of pepper and salt. Perfect. The yolk is just ever so accidentally runny, but right on the edge of being set. Perfect.
I tried to buy a 1.3oz tin of Reuzel Beard Balm from Amazon. Twice they shipped me Blue Pomade. Why?
Because Amazon has a GIGO problem. Check out this snapshot I just took. The wrong one is on the left, the right one is on the right. Look! At! The! Labels!
Amazon will always error out here because they have totally mislabeled the entire stack supply at distribution! So anyone who orders this will get the wrong thing. Thankfully my barber will trade one for the other, so it’s fine. Honestly I should just buy it from my barber. Lesson learned.
Stupid dullard Amazon. You done fucked up now. Morons.
So, Amazon shipped my Reuzel Beard Balm and… WRONG AGAIN IN THE SAME WAY. So instead of sending out another tin which is wrong, they want me to ship it back. LOL. Fucking Amazon, man. And this is the dark side of Jeff Bezos’s company. Top notch work you fucking dullards.
I wrote this letter as a reply to the fifth or sixth sales representative with AT&T. They are attempting to sell us fiber optic data services. I directed them to our Telecom MSP as a professional courtesy, as I do to all sales folk who directly appeal to us. It’s just good business practice, the MSP exists to handle the complexities of telecommunications for us.
Hello,
You’ll be the fifth AT&T sales associate that I have written this to, so here goes… Please direct all sales inquiries for the COMPANY domain to MSP. Person 1 and Person 2 have been CC’ed to this email. Please feel free to share this detail with any other AT&T sales associates who might want to contact us, or not, as we are just forwarding all of this to our Tcom MSP.
We are now considering AT&T to be harassing us, but since your company doesn’t seem to understand cease and desist, we’ll just keep on sending all of you to our MSP. I would ask to be taken off the list and to “Please Stop”, but AT&T isn’t interested in stop. Perhaps AT&T doesn’t have a clear definition of the word stop.
Here… here’s the definition of stop:
stop |stäp|
verb (stops, stopping, stopped)
1 [ no obj. ] (of an event, action, or process) come to an end; cease to happen:his laughter stopped as quickly as it had begun | the rain had stopped and the clouds had cleared.
• [ with present participle ] cease to perform a specified action or have a specified experience: she stopped giggling | [ with obj. ] : he stopped work for tea.
• [ with present participle ] abandon a specified practice or habit: I’ve stopped eating meat.
• stop moving or operating: he stopped to look at the view | my watch has stopped.
• (of a bus or train) call at a designated place to pick up or let off passengers: main-line trains stop at platform 7.
• Brit. informal stay somewhere for a short time: you’ll have to stop the night.
2 [ with obj. ] cause (an action, process, or event) to come to an end: this harassment has got to be stopped.
• prevent (an action or event) from happening: a security guard was killed trying to stop a raid.
• prevent or dissuade (someone) from continuing in an activity or achieving an aim: a campaign is under way to stop the bombers.
• prevent (someone or something) from performing a specified action or undergoing a specified experience: you can’t stopme fromgetting what I want.
• cause or order to cease moving or operating: he stopped his car by the house |police were given powers to stop and search suspects.
• informal be hit by (a bullet).
• instruct a bank to withhold payment on (a check).
• refuse to supply as usual; withhold or deduct: the union has threatened to stop the supply of minerals.
• Boxing defeat (an opponent) by a knockout: he was stopped in the sixth by Tyson
ORIGIN Old English (for)stoppian‘block up (an aperture)’; related to German stopfen, from late Latin stuppare ‘to stuff.’
Please Stop.
Please Go Away.
No, We do not want any. Even if we did, we don’t anymore.
Thanks
We’ll keep getting helpful AT&T sales reps until I create a spam filter for the att.net domain and route everything to the trash, which really, I should do out of professional courtesy to AT&T. If it wasn’t for the fact that they at some point could email me about repairs, that would be something I could seriously consider. Alas, I may have to just start ignoring them with my delete key.
Unless they … stop… HA! HA! HA! They don’t know the word, “Stop.”
On Friday I ordered four new beard balms. An extra Reuzel 1.3oz tin, a Viking Revolution Citrus, a Viking Revolution Sandalwood, and a Rocky Mountain Barber Cedarwood. I tracked the shipment with Amazon, it was listed as arriving on Monday, prime promised it on Sunday, but hey! It arrived on Sunday after all.
So I opened the box, and out came the Rocky Mountain and the Viking Revolution tins like I expected, but the Reuzel was wrong. Very wrong. What I expected was a 1.3oz tin of their Beard Balm, smallish, with a pirate on the label. If you have seen it, the label is very distinctive. What I got instead was Reuzel Blue Pomade. It’s still top-notch stuff, but pomade, not balm. I have no use for pomade. The canister is factory wrapped, but Amazon doesn’t want it back. I did the return, they declined to ship it back, because it is classified as a personal use product, to just throw it away. I can’t throw a perfectly good, unopened, factory wrapped tin of anything away! Even the sticker on the back is wrong. The scan sticker says Reuzel Beard Balm 1.3oz. and if you look on the label of the actual product, you know something isn’t right, because the product clearly states 4oz tin. It’s HUGE in comparison!
So I reached out to Junior’s Barber Shop. If he has customers who might buy it, I asked him if I could just give it to him. But he’s on vacation until March 20th, so it’ll all have to wait, unless a gentle reader out there in Blog-land has a use for Reuzel Blue Pomade. If so, please let me know! I would hate to have to chuck it in the bin.