I basically 180-degree disagree with H. Perry H on the watchability of such a film—I would watch the shit out of this!—but love the opening graff of his post:
The internet is a Sarlacc pit of information: stuff goes in and it never comes out, the bodies just keep piling one atop another until they’re all digested into a sludge the individual elements of which are indistinguishable, it’s just a big, messy, congealed pile of videos, social media posts, other assorted viral moments, and mostly porn.
After a long trip, the dashboard of our Scion xD lit up like a Non-Denominational Gift Giving Holiday Display.
🙁
Since this is our “good” car (in contrast to our Prius with the bum AC, which is miserable for summer road trips), I high-tailed it to the mechanic, terrified that we’d done Something Bad to the car that we’re relying to get us through at least another two years (at which time our youngest can enroll in public school, freeing up $1200/month for an auto payment on something big enough for us all to not drive each other to the brink of murder during every damn road trip).
Fortunately:
Our mechanic (Rons’s Garage, God-of-yr-Choosing bless ’em!) is fantastically honest and
It was nothing
So why the light display?
We’d left the gas cap off.
We fueled up as we rolled back into town, as my wife needed the car for work the next day (a ~30 mile drive). And we hadn’t screwed the cap down all the way. A loose cap makes the car’s computer believe there’s an air leak somewhere in the fuel system (’cause there is–around the lose cap. If you’re wondering why the car gives a damn: To ruy efficiently, you need to maintain a proper fuel-air ratio in the engine, and it’s easiest to control this if you have a sealed fuel system. On top of that, petrol fumes are bad news for the environment, so many car’s additionally check for leaks just to make sure you aren’t wrecking up the joint with stray hydrocarbons).
The car can run basically fine like this, and there’s no real danger of damaging the engine. Put the fuel cap back on, reset the warning light, and all is well.
The lesson: If your car is throwing a CHECK ENGINE light, make sure the gas cap is tight. If it’s loose (or you lost it), then tighten it down (or replace it), and keep driving. If there’s nothing obvious wrong (no sluggishness or weird noises) and it isn’t nearly time for an oil change, you’ll be fine, and the light will reset itself within 100 miles. If it stays on, then go to the mechanic.
Ron didn’t charge me, because he’s a solid dude (which is why I keep going there). But plenty of guys would charge you for figuring it out (they did spend time pulling the code from the car’s computer and troubleshooting my dumbassery), and a few would even use this as an excuse to “repair” some “major problem.”
Hey gents: Ever wanted to do sex stuff to a cannibal ghost’s face? Well, guess what? NOW YOU CAN!
gaaaaaah!
I don’t wanna come off as a prude or anything, but I think that there’s maybe absolutely nothing not wrong with this, from it’s name—which starts with “sexbaby“(!!!), and then somehow manages to get worse—to the use of colors and shapes, to the reviews, distressingly low price, and the fact that this is in stock and “Fulfilled by Amazon” (thus conjuring the image of untold ranks of shelves in a Tennessee warehouse, holding uncountable numbers of cartons, each containing boxes upon boxes of individually packaged artificial ghostbaby sexmaws. With teeth.)
Continuing to experiment with both interactive fiction and consistent self-promotion—and you are the benificieries there-of! Please enjoy this lil interactive story:
Under normal circumstances I don’t link stuff posted on Medium, because I’m wickedly biased against what overwhelmingly seems to be a bloviation platform for painfully self-unaware “meritocrats” who were born on third base and think they batted a triple.
James Marks is not one of those guys. I’ve used his print shop for t-shirts, buttons, and stickers since just about the beginning, and watched them steadily grow via pluck and vigilance. I would take business advice from this t-shirt making vegan over most any other cat on Medium.
“On time” is begging to be late. The solution comes down to what I’m coiningReliance on Luck, or RoL for short. The best people have near-zero RoL: that shit will not fly while they’re on the job. But as you get lower down the chain of competence, RoL goes up.
These commandments that Marks gives you today are to be written on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you rise up. Bind them as symbols on your arm and bind them on your forehead. Inscribe them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates. And it shall come to pass if you surely listen to these commandments with all your heart and all your soul, your customers and clients will give you money and will return tenfold, and you will eat and you will be satisfied.Amen.
If you use LinkedIn, then your email and LinkedIn password have probably been compromised.If you reuse the same password across several sites, then you are likely a total sitting duck waiting to get exploited.Go change passwords NOW!
THE LONG VERSION
This breach seems to have gotten less press than usual, even though it’s liable to have a broader impact on folks, so I want to make sure it’s on everyone’s radar:
An enormous hack of LinkedIn accounts has surfaced (details). Crackers snagged ~164mil login credentials; since the passwords were stored as a unsalted hashes (i.e. “not securely”), the vast majority of these passwords were cracked.
I took the liberty of checking a couple friend/client email addresses while I checked mine (using this tool), and found that most of the emails I checked were included in the hack (as was I). LinkedIn hasn’t proactively informed anyone I’ve contacted about this. So, I’m spreading the word.
The immediate problem is losing control of your LinkedIn account (which, let’s be real, doesn’t necessarily mean much for most people). The bigger problem is that many folks reuse the same password on many sites. If the email:password you used on LinkedIn is the same as the one you used on Twitter or Facebook or Gmail, then those accounts are now also up for grabs. While a LinkedIn account may be of limited value to criminals, a Twitter or Gmail account can be much more useful, and a bank or credit card account—let’s not dwell on it. Did you start changing passwords yet? Go change passwords NOW.
Plug in the email address you use to log into LinkedIn (or any email you use to log in to any site; this service tracks many data breaches)
If you get a green bar, you lucked out. If you get a red bar with “oh no!” in it, continue to step #4
Read whatever details the site offers about the breach(es) you’ve been included in, and change your password(s) immediately.
Also set a new password anywhere else that you used that same password
EXTRA CREDIT
Passwords are inherently crappy. It’s just a fact of life. Consider upping your security in two ways:
Set up “two-factor authentication” (also called “2FA”) on any account that lets you do so. Different sites have different systems (and, alas, call them different things), but they all boil down the same: Once 2FA is set up, logging into your email account (or whatever) will have an extra step. First you enter your username and password and hit submit (like normal). Then they ding your phone (either with a txt or via app) and wait for your to respond (either by clicking “accept” on the app or entering the six digit code they’ve texted you). If you don’t respond, you can’t get in. This makes it impossible for someone to log into your account unless they have your username, password, and your phone. Much more secure. (I’ve added 2FA to several personal web tools I depend on, as I was getting hammered with a brute force attack a couple weeks back.)
Please seriously consider using a “password manager” or “password locker.” This is a piece of software (or service) that securely stores your usernames and passwords for all of your accounts. That way, you don’t have to chose easily remembered passwords for all of your accounts. Instead, you choose one very good password for your locker, and then let the locker generate insanely hard passwords for your individual accounts (all of my passwords are now 20+ characters long and randomly generated). Lots of folks like LastPass and 1Password. I prefer KeePassX and use MiniKeePass on my phone (I have lots of nit-picky reasons, but the tl;dr: The software implements good encryption algorythms in a secure way; it’s open source and well vetted; it’s not “cloud based”—”the cloud” is just “some other dude’s computer” [with all that implies, viz. security risks], and a cloud computer full of the master keys to folks’ online lives strikes me as an attractive nuisance, at best).
Sorry to be your bad news bear today; I hope you all get green bars and nonetheless CHANGE YOUR PASSWORDS, GET A PASSWORD MANAGER, AND START USING 2FA WHENEVER YOU CAN!!!
There are three types of things you have to do in this life:
Things you enjoy doing for entirely internally motivated reasons—those things that you simply find pleasurable or gratifying in and of themselves, without further social context.
Things you enjoy doing because someone will give you money to do it.
Things you enjoy doing because they please or help other humans whose opinion you give a shit about.
Note what is lacking here:
things you don’t enjoy doing
Everything that you do, you should be able to mentally reorient into one of the Three Things listed above. If there’s a thing you can’t do that with, then maybe you need to excise it from your life.[1][2]
