The Comet

When I was really little - like before 2nd grade - my dad got me this computer game/information game thing, I don't really even remember, but it was all about dinosaurs. I think it was just called "Dinosaurs." I can recall that there was one part where you could just click on different little icons, and it would take you to a new window/screen that just played a short animated movie about some part of dinosaur history. Dinosaurs in the air, large ones, predators, herbivores, whatever. I don't actually remember any of those in particular.

The only one that I do specifically remember is the one about dinosaurs going extinct. Most notably, the image of the comet crashing to the earth and how incredibly scared it made me. The image was of a bunch of brontosauruses chillin' like villains on a reddish plain, eating from some trees, with a stormy looking dusk sky in the background. It was mostly a reddish and orange image, possibly with some grays in the sky. Then something started lighting up behind the clouds as it moved closer to the earth and the dinosaurs turned their heads. The image of it behind the clouds really sticks out - it was well done, you could see an amorphous colored orb dilating in size and brightness as it went through different thickness and gaps in the clouds. Finally it touched down, and there was just a flash of white. Then everything changed, and it talked about the eventual extinction of all the dinosaurs, but when I remember most about this part is an emaciated t-rex stumbling to take its last few steps, and then falling over sideways and dying. Everything in the frame was grayish, gray dinosaur, gray sky, gray sands, and it was very eerie and scary to a 6-year-old me.

For a long time I was very very afraid of the earth getting hit by a comet and everyone dying out. I would look up at the sky - especially when it looked like it did in that video - and wonder if some light would start to shoot down the sky and be followed by a flash of white, and then I'd walk around and stumble to take my last few steps before falling over and dying in all gray. Sometimes I still worry about the first part. Sometimes I'm walking or driving or doing homework and I just imagine that orb of light crashing down in the sky wherever I can see the sky.

("Did anyone ever teach you to visual success?")

Peace out.

ArbitRage

This is the story of how to get screwed by Amazon. I think this is going to be another post that lands near the top of Google searches for related terms, which is unfortunate, but oh well.

So I was looking for a book called A History of Cambodia by David Chandler, which is supposed to be a really great history book that focuses on people instead of just great men and also focuses on times before Europe got there, instead of treating them as a prologue to Cambodia's real (white) history. A new copy of the book can run anywhere from like $35 to $100 depending on hardback and edition and all that jazz, but new copies were typically in the range of like $10 - $20. I found one in Amazon Marketplace for like $4 (+ shipping) and considering the description of the condition, figured it was the best deal I could find and went for it. Hooray! I couldn't wait to read about the people's history in Cambodia!

(To explain why: the orphanage I'm working at said that I may have an opportunity to teach history, and if that's the case, I want to make sure I have a thorough knowledge of Cambodian history in particular)

Anyhow, I came back to my house from a New Year's Eve party at about 2:00AM and saw a manila package with my name on it. A book! Hooray! Except it didn't look big enough to be the history book, nor did it feel heavy enough. I opened it up and found Mad Mary: A Workbook for Groups or Individuals, from the Bad Girls of the Bible series. I wondered what the hell had gone wrong. I went to my computer (keep in mind this is 2AM on Jan 1) to check what I had purchased. Definitely A History of Cambodia and definitely NOT anything close to Mad Mary. I kept looking through my email accounts and the Amazon account and my debit card's payment history to see if I had bought anything like this, but nothing was turning up. I looked through the package and saw the order slip inside, which seemed to imply that I had ordered Mad Mary, but I was putting together that something wasn't right here. I then noticed on the order slip that it appeared the seller was some name I had never seen before, and milde4 was the listed buyer. I wondered briefly if this was a joke gift from milde4, and wondered, "Whose initials are MIL that I know who lives in Delaware?" After running through my mental rolodex and coming up empty, I decided to try other options.

This was after I had taken a shower. It's now about 2:35AM on Jan 1.

I went to the sites for the listed seller, I thought about trying to contact them, I even went to the live help section to see if I could find what was going on. It was too late at night for that, so instead I typed milde4 into Google to find their page.

This is where I started to put it together.

People had posted questions often in the past on Amazon forums and jazz like that about milde4 and who they were and what they were doing and why they had so many sales and why something went wrong with their sale and why they got the wrong item. People who knew what they were talking about more would respond to them and claim that milde4 is a prolific drop-seller. I kept reading on for a little while, trying to figure out exactly what the hell was happening, but even after a number of pages and forums I was still a little confused. It was 3AM now, and I crawled in bed still trying to figure out exactly what had happened.

It was actually in bed that night that I did lay out the truth of the situation, which is like this.

Milde4 is one of the many names of an arbitrageur who operates a few sites. Arbitrage is when there exists a price difference for a single good in two different locations at the same time from different ends of the transaction. That is to say, suppose that Alice want to sell Book X for $3 and Bob wants to buy Book X for $10. This is an arbitrage situation, and a skilled arbitrageur would jump in, buy the book from Alice at $3, sell it to Bob for $10, and keep the $7 profit.

That's exactly what was supposed to have happened here. Alice was selling "History" for $.75 on Half.com and I was buying "History" for $4 on Amazon.com, so milde4 was supposed to make $3.75 by just buying the book from Alice but telling her to ship it to me, when I had just paid milde $4 for the book.

The only issue is that this operation is all carried out by software, is rarely ever checked by humans, and they make bugs a significant number of times. Like, from 3-10% of the time. In this case, the software's issue was that it thought Mad Mary was the same item as History. I don't know why it got this wrong - no parts of the book are similar at all - but it did.

So now I'm stuck with a book I don't want, and I want to correct this. I also feel pretty pissed off because arbitrage is a sort of juvenile thing to do in the first place and a way that leeches in society can make money, and I'd like to get back at whoever is behind the milde4 account. So I talk to customer support at Amazon to see if I can compel them to give me a copy of History. After all, the deal was I give you $4, you give me History. I don't care if you screwed up, I'm not liable for your mistakes, I held up my end of the deal and now you have to hold up yours. On top of that, you're a scammer and deserve to be punished, so I'd like a new copy of the book, hardback, please.

Unfortunately it's not in my power to do that. So I just have to settle for sending it "back" to him (for the first time) and get a refund. And hopefully get a refund on the shipping too. He asked me to print out a copy of the email saying that I had a defective product along with the product.

However, my printer was having serious issues. I don't want to go into too much detail, but it involved waiting for my mom to return from all her errands with the ink, changing it, putting the printer back online, sharing it, seeing what was wrong with our network, calling the computer guy at my dad's office, and waiting for him to fix it, all of which took about 5 hours. And I get tunnel vision with things like this, so I did nothing else all day.

Knowing that I have tunnel vision though, I personally gave up on the printer at 3PM, put the email on a flash drive, and decided to print it at Kinkos. The girl there, who was about my age, definitely thought I was a little bit crazy. I justified my actions to her by saying that "I'm away from home and my printer is broken," which are sort of disconnected and doesn't really make sense if you think about it, but I didn't really care. It cost $.11, which I don't think will ever be recouped, sadly.

Then I went to the post office, which I thought was a sleepy place for old people, but it was JAM PACKED. Seriously the line was like 20 deep. I couldn't believe that I had to try to fix my printer for 3 hours, step into a Kinkos, pay to print something, and then wait in a 20-person line all because this milde4 asshole had screwed up their algorithm and never bothered to check. I texted a few people while I was in the line - Kristin to see if I could hang with her; Tarik to see if his mosque was fixed; Haley because now I was bored in a long line.

Eventually, twenty minutes later or so, I had bought the necessary envelope and gotten it shipped. A girl who I had noticed on the way in - who I think was a senior in high school, judging from the "SENIOR" written on the back window of her car - walked in and out at the same time as me. She looked at me, definitely clearly as surprised as I had been that there would be 20+ people in a dinky post office at such a time of day and year, and we exchanged a few words about how trippy that had felt.

I went home.

And this is why I will always Google the people I'm buying from before I buy from them.

Peace out.

We Suck

"In his book The African Slave Trade, Basil Davidson contrasts law in the Congo in the early sixteenth century with law in Portugal and England. In those European countries, where the idea of private property was becoming powerful, theft was punished brutally. In England, even as late as 1740, a child could be hanged for stealing a rag of cotton. But in the Congo, communal life persisted, the idea of private property was a strange one, and thefts were punished with fines or various degrees of servitude. A Congolese leader, told of the Portuguese legal codes, asked a Portuguese once, teasingly: 'What is the penalty in Portugal for anyone who puts his feet on the ground?' "

[Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States]

Peace out.

New Years Eve

New Years Eve this year was a party that Chloe took me to, where I knew some of the people, and didn't quite know the rest, but in many cases had heard of them. I was rather worried when I showed up at first, but ended up having a really great time.

//

"DUDE. THIS GUY DID THE BEST STAGE TRICK. HE WAS SMOKIN A CIGARETTE -- HE ATE THE CIGARETTE!"

//

Talking with Dave about history and why America sucks and health care and morals, and everyone sort of paying attention and talking for the first bit, and then people slowly filtering out, and then realizing that Gab I was completely engrossed in the conversation and listened intently without saying a word until Dave and I were done talking.

//

"I hope they don't ruin Tron!"

"...Did you see the first Tron? It sucked. You can't ruin Tron."

//

His family tried to have an intervention on him to get him to stop drinking... while he was high on shrooms.

//

Oh man, the strip club story. They paid the cute girl in the strip club $40 to get their friend, K-hole, into "The Hot Seat," which they were not sure what it was. And yes, you know there's a problem because I said they got the cute girl in the strip club. The next thing they hear is "K-Hole to the hot seat, K-hole to the hot seat," but he freaks out, so they made another roommate go. He goes up on stage to the chair, and they tie him up in it. Then the cute girl says, "Alright Trisha, come on out."

And Trisha is not the cute girl. At all. Apparently she's some Amazon-sized Vietnamese girl with a not-so-great face, and she proceeded to beat and humiliate the kid in front of everyone. Apparently the worst move that she did was put whipped cream on her thigh right on the edge of her underwear and then force the kid to lick it off, which made him gag and almost throw up.

//

I was the first one to buy from the Wawa on Route 1 this year! $.20 for a Peppermint Patty.

Peace out.