It never ends....

Sunday 16th February 2003

I know, I know: I took a few days off. It happens.
On the bright side, people still exist only to anger me. Including our old friends at Verizon.
What have they done this time, you ask? Once the loading thing to the right is replaced by the Play Arrow, thump it to hear something entirely too confusing.
I'm still not sure exactly what's going on here. Best I can figure, this month's bill of $337.42 somehow includes $77.87 which no one can quite explain. The closest thing to an explanation is that it's been lurking in the system since sometime last year, and no one bothered to tell us about it until now.
That aside, no one can tell us why we're paying Verizon for anything anymore. Especially now that their neat little twenty-four-hour serviceline has evaporated for--depending on whom you ask--three to nine hours per night, in some parts of the country, as of anywhere from last August to this January. Which sounds, to me, like exactly the sort of shit Denny's got sued halfway into extinction over. Doesn't it?
Granted, spending three hundred bucks a month to have a phone with which I can talk to people I don't want to talk to is a hell of a writeoff. But there are limits to that. Specifically: the limits are something like seventeen percent of my taxable income. Which is to say that my nontaxable income is neither written off nor taxed. Which is to say that I have no officially nontaxable income, since that would be, you know, allowed by the fourth and fifth amendments, which, if the fourth and fifth amendments applied to Duhmerican citisens, this would no longer be the fun and exciting dictatorship we like to complain about.
Bow down to the oligarchy; otherwise, the terrorists win.
So what else is new....
Went to a couple of restaurants. First I went to Perkins, which went theocratic--I mean nonsmoking--at six. Which annoys me. So I went off to Village Idiot instead. Mostly because I was actually hungry, even though, when asked, at Perkins, literally before I'd sat down, whether I was, in fact, ready to order, I told them, precipitously, that I was, in fact, not. Silly me for thinking I might be able to eat sometime during the next five hours.
So now I'm at Village Idiot. And realise that this is the place I go a lot. Mostly at night, of course. Because, at night, all the servers and managers and...pretty much everyone but those loud, annoying, debilitatingly retarded customers [my theory that the decibel level of a given 'tard will be inversely proprtionate to its IQ has pretty well passed into law now] are cool. Not so during the day.
Which became an issue one the Ultimate Skillet I'd ordered without mushrooms because I'm allegric to mushrooms so please hold the mushrooms turned out, despite the bill advertising NO MUSH, to contain mushrooms. Which, while bad on its own, paled in comparasion to the server who told me that I was wrong about the mushrooms being mushrooms, took the skillet containing the mushrooms away, left the bill, and never returned.
I fucking hate that.
So. How are you supposed to dead with a situation where a place you go roughly every night sucks that badly during the day? You can't just walk out and expect to go back; you can't make a huge deal about it and expect to go back. I'm not sure what I was expecting. I just know that Hunter paid the twenty bucks to the dirurnal management who never bothered to ask whether everything had been okay [personally, I think they knew better than to ask that] and got pushed out by the next party of victims before she could bring up the issue on her own. I guess the new plan is to mention it the next time we go in there at night, when the rational people are on the clock.
I'm not sure what I'm expecting from that. Probably not much. I guess we'll see what the reaction ends up being, and then decide whether to give up altogether. I'm sure Village Idiot can live without my business. And that of anyone hitting gremlin.net and taking my word for it. After all: who needs satisfied customers to survive in this recession-crippled world?
Anyway....
Not a lot of website news [unless you count the increasingly silly 'debate' currently occuring on the board]; although, I'm just about ready to get started on DeityFree.com now. I know a lot of people have been waiting on that one. The concept is to kinda spoof all those AntiX sites [AntiSmoking, AntiDrug, AntiDrinking, AntiScience, AntiReality, whatever] with, well, and AntiReligion site. It won't be the first of its kind, of course; but, given some of the people lining up to help out, it might be one of the best. That's the plan, in any case.
In other news, I picked up a few new websites for use with Deadache. Call me kooky, but even a CG cartoon combining Survival Horror with Reality Television will be slightly less unbelievable with a few RealWorld EasterEggs dropped in. And one thing we learned from GrandTheftAutoIII was that SemiNonFunctional websites are a good example of that. If you haven't learned that yet, hit PetsOvernight.com, LoveMedia.tv, and so on. It's worth it.
A few of these SemiNonFunctional websites are already known. Which ones they are will be a surprise; but at least a couple of those perpetually-under-construction sites to the left are going to be donated to the show. They'll still work as standalones [or, they would still work if they worked at the moment--most of them are kinda unfinished right now], but there will be a number of crossovers throughout the Grempire.
Why not. I do the same things with novels, after all.
Anyway: once I get DeityFree.com started, I'll replace its advert at gremlin.net/index.html [as much as everyone seems to dig that] with a new advert for one of the new URLs. If it works correctly [I won't know that until I've filmed it and really looked it all over], it should be A) entertaining, B) informative, and C) a pretty good advert for Deadache. Oh, and D) a decent test of the technology we're using to make the show.
Time will tell, I guess....

Spam of the Day

Wow. This spam is really informative. Especially the part where it was sent to gremlin@gremlin.net, which is not the EMail address which AT&T--admittedly my cablemodem providers--have on file for me. I wonder how Comcast Customer Care [Online_BillPay@cable.comcast.com] worked out that gremlin@gremlin.net had dick to do with AT&T. I wonder also why they're the only ones who seem to be aware that they've purchased one of the largest companies on the planet. How odd. broadband.att.com--reportedly changing to Comcast sometime today....

More Later....
--Gremlin