omgwtf!

M-a-r-r-y-i-ng!

Okay, so there’s one syllable too many, but that’s for the extra awesome in this story:

May 16, 2008
Marriage Equality Comes to California
By George Takei
Our California dream is reality. Brad Altman and I can now marry. We are overjoyed! At long last, the barrier to full marriage rights for same-sex couples has been torn down. We are equal with all citizens of our state!
The California Supreme Court has ruled that all Californians have a fundamental right to marry the person he or she loves. Brad and I have shared our lives together for over 21 years. We’ve worked in partnership; he manages the business side of my career and I do the performing. We’ve traveled the world together from Europe to Asia to Australia. We’ve shared the good times as well as struggled through the bad. He helped me care for my ailing mother who lived with us for the last years of her life. He is my love and I can’t imagine life without him. Now, we can have the dignity, as well as all the responsibilities, of marriage. We embrace it all heartily.
The California Supreme Court further ruled that our Constitution provides for equal protection for all and that it cannot have marriage for one group and another form - domestic partnership - for another group. No more “separate but equal.” No more second-class citizenship. Brad and I are going to be married as full citizens of our state.
As a Japanese American, I am keenly mindful of the subtle and not so subtle discrimination that the law can impose. During World War II, I grew up imprisoned behind the barbed wire fences of U.S. internment camps. Pearl Harbor had been bombed and Japanese Americans were rounded up and incarcerated simply because we happened to look like the people who bombed Pearl Harbor. Fear and war hysteria swept the nation. A Presidential Executive Order directed the internment of Japanese Americans as a matter of national security. Now, with the passage of time, we look back and see it as a shameful chapter of American history. President Gerald Ford rescinded the Executive Order that imprisoned us. President Ronald Reagan formally apologized for the unjust imprisonment. President George H.W. Bush signed the redress payment checks to the survivors. It was a tragic and dark taint on American history.
With time, I know the opposition to same sex marriage, too, will be seen as an antique and discreditable part of our history. As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy remarked on same sex marriage, “Times can blind us to certain truths and later generations can see that laws once thought necessary and proper, in fact, serve only to oppress.”
For now, Brad and I are enjoying the delicious dilemma of deciding where, when, and how we will be married. Marriage equality took a long time, but, like fine wine, its bouquet is simply exquisite.

George Takei

Yeah, the haters are already working to overturn everything, but this is still really, really cool.

I can see why two people, both of whom happen to be of the same gender, being in love together for a really long time in a committed relationship would be so threatening to the Christian conservatives that they’d be outraged about this, you know? Everyone knows that only straight people can have that kind of relationship.

Right?

Droplets (0)

So I finally broke through the barrier and got a new credit card! Not a secured one, an actual credit card with Credit One Bank. They’re not actually a bank, and the card itself is probably the shittiest card in credit card history, but it’s got MY name on it, and it’s got a tiny adorable little $200 credit limit, and it’s something I’ve been waiting for for many, many moons so that I can finally start putting some positives on what for over a decade has been a very negative credit rating.

I just spent about a half-hour staring at my account on their website and all the lovely $0.00 notations that appeared today under “balance due” - I paid the thing in full on Friday and spent an anxious weekend checking it roughly every 13 seconds to make sure that the payment posted. When I got the “preapproved” offer for the card in the mail a couple weeks ago I was extremely skeptical, but leapt at the chance to finally have a real live credit card again because for about three months now I’ve been trying to get a card again. My credit this summer finally went from “omfg no” to “no credit history” because all the bad stuff has finally dropped off. I knew it was just a matter of time before someone said “well, okay…we’ll take a chance on you,” but had had no luck and didnt want a secured card.

Then this offer came in the mail and I checked them out and yeah, the company is horrible, but this is where you start over, and I’m okay with that. This is where you begin, reestablish, and then move on to better cards with better companies. And it was pretty funny reading up on them because Credit One has a terrible reputation. Shocking, I know. But I noticed as I was reading that the loudest complaints seem to be coming from the folks who were bad credit risks, got the card, and continued to fuck around by making payments either late or so close to the deadline that they were doomed to be late, or shit like that.

Now I’ve got no doubt that this company is awful and that any problems with them are bound to be magnified by a factor of about a million when compared to dealing with a far more reputable credit card company (if there are any - sounds like an oxymoron to me), but the thing that worried me was I saw a couple people had made payments online and didnt see them posted for 14 days, or so they said. So that kind of scared the shit out of me and that’s why I was camping the online statement for three days. I honestly didnt think it would post today, being Veteran’s Day and all, but it did, and I’m all about the YIPPIEEEE!

I paid it through my checking account so I’d not only have the Credit One confirmation numbers but my bank would have a record of the payment, too, and Credit One can’t turn around and tell me they never got it. Since I dont trust the company, I’m being super cautious, but really, now that I see they even posted on a holiday and I’ve already been through the process once now, I am going to go with the belief that as long as I make a payment the day I get the statement, it’ll be posted within a few days, never even go near the “due by” date, and I’ll be fine.

I monitor my credit reports carefully now, and I saw yesterday that Credit One has reported a new account to all three credit bureaus, just like they said they would. So that’s great, too. And in six or eight or 12 months from now, when I have months of unbroken, on time, more-than-minimum payments every single month, I’ll be able to tag one of the better companies and see if they’ll give me a better card, and get rid of this one and its four million percent APR, compounded six times daily and twice extra on Sunday.

Why am I telling you this? Because the day I got that card it was like a prison door opened in my life. It is my Next Chance at a Fresh Start. And I know that I’m going to do great with it because the only reason I got screwed in the first place was because I got laid off and couldn’t pay the bills and they wouldn’t allow me to enroll in the credit protection thingie even when I told the companies about the pending layoffs I was facing more than 90 days in advance. But up until the day I got laid off, I was paying about double the monthly minimum on all three credit cards I had at the time, and was doing extremely well with them and building a pretty good credit rating as a result. And that was on a significantly lower income than I have now. So I know that I can do extremely well with this thing, especially since it’s only a $200 limit, and I can’t really get into trouble with that. And even so, I enrolled in the credit protection thingie anyway. Never again will I be that fucking stupid and not enroll in the credit protection thingie.

So yeah, I got that card in the mail and actually had it out sitting on my desk, propped up against my monitor for about two days before I carefully and lovingly tucked it into my wallet. I couldnt stop staring at it. It is only a small rectangle of silver plastic, but for me, the incredibly significant meaning of this little card makes it completely transcend what it is to most people. I can’t stop thinking about it, I can’t stop staring at it, I can’t stop checking that stupid account page on their website and grinning cheesily as I gaze at that lovely, lovely $0.00 balance. And I’m cogitating very, very carefully what I want to buy first with it.

I was thinking maybe this and this. They have a buy them both and get a deal thing going for them on Amazon.com. But then there’s also this, which is enormously tempting, as well. And then there’s this. And this is also awesome.

And then, of course, almost (but not quite) everything on this list here is extremely tempting, but I do have to go through and update it with the newer stuff that’s come out since I built that list.

This is all just so exciting.

Comments(4)

You know, I read the headline to this article and my geeky soul positively shrieked in joy, even as I knew that with Darth Lucas’ thumb in this pie, he’s going to be pulling a lump of shit instead of a plum out through the crust.

It’s just an automatic reaction; I’m powerless against it. Even though he’s managed to turn the Star Wars legacy into nothing more than a corporate cash cow with no soul to speak of, even though he’s a talent-free, money-grubbing, pretentious, arrogant hack with stupid fucking hair, I am still so deeply in love with the original trilogy, I still believe in that story so much, that I can’t help but get excited. Hell, I even still watch the prequels. I’m a passionately, incurably devoted Star Wars geek.

Note that I did NOT say “deluded.”

I suppose it’s the eternally optimistic romantic in me that’s hoping against all the odds that this actually turns out to be something awesome. It won’t, but a geek can dream, can’t she?

I hate you, George Lucas. I hate you. With gobs of flaming hate sauce.

Lucas planning ‘Star Wars’ TV series - CNN.com

Droplets (0)

Update - 21 August 2007

Well, I’m going to cancel my BlueHost account and possibly move over to Lunarpages instead. BlueHost has a weird no-nudity-even-for-art policy that really rankles me that I didnt know about until I forked over a C-note, and also they seem to be having a lot of trouble with their CPU limit being set so low that some people can’t even run a WordPress installation on it. Apparently if you use any scripts and the script code is sloppy you trip the CPU load limit and your site gets blacked out for a little while. You also can’t do any backups of any size without tripping it, either. And also there are rumblings of email problems with BlueHost customers as well. These things have made me leery!

And finally, though their tech support is highly available and very responsive, their forums are nowhere near as awesome as the Lunarpages forums are - and one of the mods at the BlueHost forums is actually breathtakingly rude.

So this combination of factors has led to my calling BlueHost to get my money back and then I’ll go over to Lunarpages - $30 less for more features and what looks like better support, though BlueHost was very, very good. If they turn out to suck they also have a 30-day full refund guarantee, like BlueHost - and then I’ll just stick with the host I have now until I can find something better.

Also, Lunarpages accepts adult content - you can host an adult site with Lunarpages - and I heartily approve of this.

Because fuck censorship.

***************************

So I went and registered a new domain today so I can use it strictly for business purposes, and went looking for a new host. The guys I’ve been with for years now, Rackhost.net, are really awesome. I have no complaints at all about their service and I will say right now that their tech support is amazing. John Q is the best. I hate to leave them.

But I did a quick search ’round the ‘tubes and found BlueHost.com, who are apparently one of the best host providers anywhere. Their tech support is rumoured to be excellent and they have a ton of features and services with each account, not to mention a shitload of bandwidth and disk storage. Plus, I can host unlimited domains with them - so that means I no longer have to have separate hosting accounts for my domains.

It costs me $21 a month to host two domains with Rackhost and I only get a total of 12 gigs of storage and a few hundred gigs of bandwidth a month. For $8 a month with BlueHost, I got more features and a 350 gigs of storage / 3500 gigs of bandwidth. Clearly, though I have no complaints about Rackhost’s service at all, the clear winner here is BlueHost.

I’m a little nervous switching hosts because you just never know if the new guy is gonna suck, and boy, bad hosts are a real pain in the ass. But I couldnt find a single bad review about BlueHost and so I figured what the hell - it saves a lot of money, and I need to be saving a lot of money. Once I’m sure that BlueHost is reliable and trustworthy I’ll be able to launch my business-related domain too, and get my work stuff off sithly.com forever, which is good, because screw these friggin’ corporate Nazi web-surfing snoops. I want my work stuff totally separate from everything else.

This was triggered by just such a super-corporate, anal-retentive twat that bitched about my email yesterday. Turns out she was a dumb shit when it came to configuring her email client and when she went to see who I was by surfing over to my totally awesome home page, I guess she was scandalized.

Another victim Hoffed! I have the best homepage on the internets, man. I still get hate mail about it after all this time, people demanding I pay for the bleach with which they had to scrub out their eyeballs. I love my homepage. Sheer brilliance.

Anyway, in the next few weeks I’ll be switching this blawg over to the new host. Things should go smoothly (heh) but if the site blacks out for a day or two that’s probably what the deal is. It’s a good opportunity to try to tidy things up and put up a couple pages I’ve been sitting around not doing for like probably 10 years.

And, of course, my homepage is coming with me, intact.

Comments(2)

i’m still seething.

this is a test post. i’m trying to figure some of this shit out by myself right now because that wordpress bullshit got me so unbelievably angry that i’m not fit for human company.

this is a new little thing i’m trying to include on the site but as you can see, it renders bizarrely. i’ll leave this post here in case someone from the site comes over here to take a look at what i’m talking about - i’m about to email them for some support.

hopefully they’ll be a lot nicer than the wordpress goons.

Edit: Saturday, 13 Jan 07

Well, I just heard back from Brad at indieKarma, and yeah, not only did he respond to me on a Saturday, which is very cool to begin with, but he was actually a very nice guy and explained what the problem probably was (snarky CSS), and asked for a week to try to sort it out on their side. He was totally casual penis. I approve highly, and because he was a nice guy I’m totally a fan of indieKarma. Plus they gave me a free dollar to start off with! Sweet!

It’s so much easier to be a decent human being than it is to be a raging, foaming cock, you know? And, I might add, better for business. Nobody in Bedford Falls liked Mr. Potter, but everyone just loved George Bailey.

Good luck, indieKarma guys! Let me know if I can help out somehow. And thank you for not being a dick to me, Brad. I’ve had a bad couple of days. Your being a decent guy, not treating me like an idiot, and giving me such a helpful reply to my support request really helped me feel a little bit better.

Comments(10)

AAAAAnnnd right in keeping with my firm belief that the WordPress “support” community is the worst fucking community on the Internets, my theory is proven soundly once again by its own members.

What’s funny is how I get called a troll and insulted for bitching about how fucking rude these assholes are, but if, for instance, you have a look at whoami’s past posts, you will see that he is pretty much regularly an asshole to other people all the fucking time. He’ll post in a thread just to do nothing more than insult you for not doing something the way he thinks it should be done. And then in his profile he describes himself thusly: “im not rude, im succinct. Dont want a straight answer, dont ask me. and while we are at, learn how to ask a question.”

lrn 2 rite nub. Jesus Christ.

He doesnt need to learn how to keep a civil fucking tongue in his head and shut his fucking mouth when he doesnt have an actual answer to a question, but you need to learn how to ask questions according to his specific guidelines nonetheless. Heh. He’s been on the site a while and he is absolutely typical of the type of “volunteer” that hangs out there to provide “support” to hapless users who go there honestly believing that theyll receive assistance.

Well, as I said in my posts there on that thread, I’m done with that fucking website and with that community. I’ll track down my answers amongst people who actually know enough of what theyre talking about to be able to give you some assistance if you have a question, instead of insulting you to make themselves feel better about being so ignorant and pathetic.

These guys are everything I despise about geeks wrapped up in a neat package. Arrogant, pretentious, condescending assholes who feel so lame and useless that all they can do is attack other people. I hate those fucking guys.

And for anyone who happens to be coming here from the link in that thread to either mock my website or myself, you are free to do so but remember two things:

- You dont mean fuck-all to me, because youre too stupid to live and I wouldnt piss on you if you were on fire, so your time would probably be better spent kicking puppies or whatever else it is that you get up to when youre not jerking off into a Dixie cup and drinking it because it’s the closest youll ever get to an actual blowjob; and

- Just because you volunteer your time does NOT GIVE YOU LICENSE TO BE A COCK. I know you think it does, but you’re fucking stupid, and you should save yourself all the effort of trying to think for yourself, ’cause you suck at it. Youre just wrong, and that’s all. Thinking youve got a right to treat other people like shit because you volunteer your time on the internet is like thinking you’ve got a right to stab someone because they took the seat you wanted on the bus. Do the human race a favour and kill yourself.

And whoami? Eat a bag of cocks, you rude, knuckle-dragging fuckwit. Calling you a Neanderthal would be an insult to Neanderthals.

I didnt get out of IT because of the users. I got out of IT because of the geeks.

I asked for a mod to contact me regarding all this bullshit but I dont expect them to. The only thing the WordPress “support” community is good for is taking potshots at other people from behind the safety shield of anonymity. When you actually stand up to them and demand responses and action, they fire insults at you from behind their barricades and then write you off as a troll. What makes me laugh is apparently they’ve got this new “Kvetch” system going in now. If these people actually cared at all about the users, they’d have responded to these complaints a long, long, long time ago now. This has been going on forever. Who the hell are they kidding? The people I feel most sorry for are the sorry bastards who are going to go there thinking that theyre actually going to get help.

MAN I’m SO PISSED right now!

Calendar links broken. « WordPress Support

Comments(2)

So! I knew it’d only take about a minute before I got tired of that orange thing this new theme had going. So I’ve made a few changes, primarily to the main page, to make it more palatable to the old peepers.

I’ve made it so that you no longer absolutely need to be registered and have a previously approved post to comment. Those measures were only in place because of the spam I’ve been getting hit with. However, since I’ve updated this theme and activated the Akismet plug-in, it’s caught almost 50 pieces of spam in just the past couple days and not one has gotten by. So I’m going to relax the restrictions for a while to see if anything gets through. Right now, the way I have it is that you need only supply a name and email addy to post; I’d like to keep it this way, and that’s what I’ll do provided Akismet keeps up the good work.

In the meantime, I kind of like the changes so far. If anyone notices anything heinously broken, drop me a line, would you? There’s still lots of stuff I want to do to this site, and since I have a new, working theme that doesnt have any insane code in it I’m able to make more changes and learn as I go along. I have pause here to say thanks and give a shout out to Kaushal Sheth, who is the guy who made the modified Fluidity 3C 1.0 theme that I used for this new layout. He took a lot of care to comment a bunch of stuff in the code and the CSS and that’s helped make it worlds easier to mess with this thing and learn as I go along. So that’s pretty awesome. Thanks, Kaushal!

Which reminds me - the calendar over to the left is broken in that it adds a trailing / to the end of the permalinks for each date. That breaks the link and sends you to a 403 page. I’ve made a post on the never-helpful WordPress forums regarding this, but of course I havent even received a reply, although this is a problem a lot of people have. As I’ve said before, I hate those motherfuckers over there. Theyre the rudest bastards on the Internet and they think their shit doesnt stink.

Anyway, it’s a matter of actually finding the bit of code in the php that runs the calendar that’s giving me the headache - once I can find out where it is, I can make it so that end / doesnt appear in there, and that will fix the whole situation. If you think you can help with that, I’d love to hear from you! Otherwise, you can use the calendar by just clicking any date you wish to peruse, then when you get to your inevitable 403 page, you just go up and manually delete that last / from the URI. Hit enter, and the page will load properly. I’ll get it fixed as soon as I can; trust me, it’s making me nuts and I am on a mission to find where it’s hidden!

Okay, I’m late for some incredibly boring work that’s due insanely early.

*sigh*!

Droplets (0)

Scooby’s dad, and the creator of The Great Gazoo, Astro Jetson, and Penelope Pitstop, among others, has shaken off this mortal coil and gone to that great animation studio in the sky.

Theyre all leaving us, these giants of joyful youth, and I see none rushing in to fill the empty spaces they leave behind. We have some folks who have promise, but it looks like the times ahead will be heavy.

On the other hand, we have incredible things happening with digital media. Perhaps the focus has simply shifted. Still and all, there is nothing quite like old school animation, and it is unutterably sad to me that this art form is slowly dying. Maybe I’m just a dinosaur, but I’ll take that celluloid stuff over CGI any day of the week, man. As beautiful as CGI can be, it lacks the organic flow and beauty, the tactile feel that celluloid animation leaves on your eyes and your soul. Or maybe just my soul.

Either way, Mr. Takamoto, thank you for making my life a brighter place to be. Thanks for making a stoner and his talking dog such a beautiful illustration of what friendship means the world over. Every human being on the planet knows who Shaggy and Scooby are, and they are so beloved that not even Hollywood could tarnish their memory.

And thanks for being the genesis of the idea behind Scooby Snacks. My dog really loved them.

AWN Headline News

Incidentally, if you can’t see a title for this post, or if there’s just a bunch of boxes there, it’s because it’s written in the Japanese alphabet. The title for this post is what Google Translate came up with for the phrase “rest in peace.” (And many variations thereof, which when translated changed “rest” to some form of “remainder” when put together with “in peace.”) It actually reads “remainder of peace,” which is kind of irritating, but it was all I could find!

Droplets (0)

Some people like to bitch and moan that you have to register with this site in order to comment. Here’s a friendly little reminder of why that’s so, with some helpful advice:

Suck it up, dawg.

(wait, I can explain…)

Droplets (0)