#We HAVE TWO FUCKING MODEMS A ROUTER

[undeadhousewife]

Our fucking network has been slowly but surely getting wonkier every fucking passing month and I swear to god I can't handle it but I also don't want to fucking look at it or fix it.

[cycle-hit]

one of the many mysteries to me about kotoko is how the FUCK she has money. she's a drop out (TASK)/"on break" (t1 interrogation) from education. she cant get student loans unless shes somehow gotten a financially aided gap year and its unclear if shes even still in college or not. she never shows us anything of her family so we have no idea if she can get in contact with them for money. the only two viable ways from our current knowledge i can think of is that she has money either from anything she saved up during college or shes taking money from the criminals she beats up.

which, again, thatd have to be enough money to enable her to not only pay for her mobile data (if shes not on the plan of her family) but also for her to afford two (seemingly real?) wolf pelts and to hand over 10000 yen to some guy for information. plus buy printer ink. her paying rent or paying for internet is debatable since we never see any router or modem of any sort in the warehouse and she could just be leeching off public internet. we have no god damn idea if she's even living in that warehouse legally- she could very easily be trespassing. living rent free if u will. hell, we dont even see kotoko eat food or drink water despite one of the lyrics of harrow being "feeding on food so i dont burn out" so we have no fucking idea if she's even using money on food or getting it through other means.

how long has it been since she "dropped out" or started her "break"? if she's using funds she's had saved how much was it? how long has it lasted? would she actually take the money the criminals she targets have on them?? her family APPEARS to be at least slightly well off according to harrow (or even referencing jacques roulet) so is she still in contact? has she taken money from THEM? kotoko for the love of god PLEASE JUST TELL US ANYTHING ABOUT YOURSELF OUTSIDE OF "SEIGI" HOW ARE YOU SUPPORTING YOURSELF ANSWER ME COME BACK HERE

[chronotopes]

i have many events i could relay from our past 24 hours but here are a few brief highlights before i TRYYYY to get my "work" done for the day

before we entered our first underground parking lot wegmans jenny was like "we have to not look too star struck. we have to act as if to us this is a normal wegmans." and then the first thing i said upon entering the wegmans is "WHY DOES THIS WEGMANS HAVE A BAR!!!" because why does that wegmans have a bar. there were people sitting at the wegmans bar having drinks. what the fuck.

thanks to a lore drop from a friend in college i was able to identify the remember the titans high school to jenny and matthew as we drove by it (sign out front saying 'HOME OF THE TITANS' was a big clue)

our apartment has a bedroom closet, a living room closet, and a pantry, and someone involved in managing the property has chosen to put massive fucking appliances everywhere BUT the living room closet, which is objectively the least useful of the three, making the other two unusable

our rent portal is not set up even though we were assured it would be <3 yayyy <3 if i have to go pay rent in person with a check tomorrow i will be so #peeved

most notably: when i set up our internet the verizon guy was like "umm you can use your own router if you WANT it's just that you will have to call tech support and then will have to help you set it up, they'll want your router's serial number and stuff." i was planning on calling them last night but was too tired. so this morning at 8 am i set up the router's connection to the modem. shrimple. and then call a tech support so that he can get the info. and he asks me to get him on facetime and is like "so the first thing yore going to do is take that white cable and. oh. oh ok. youve done that. do you like have an internet connection? is it working?" and i check. and it is. and he didn't need to do anything the router just started working automatically. which means i could have done that LAST NIGHT if i'd not made the silly mistake of trusting an internet provider guy about internet provider logistics

[of-another-broken-heart]

So tonight my router died.

I've had it since like. 2011 or something. Maybe earlier.

Unsurprising, I guess.

Except that I'm absolutely completely fucking poor broke destitute poverty piece of shit should die.

And now my whole family doesn't have internet because the little plastic box full of metal magic that made it all work, has shit the bed.

My modem still works.

Those are separate devices/functions, by the way. They're often packaged together, now. But they are still 2 different things. A modem does one thing. A router does another. You can house both in the same plastic. But it's still two devices.

I spent almost 2 hours getting kinda-sorta gaslit by a chat representative who didn't know that they were different things.

Anyway, my modem works. It's much newer so that makes sense.

And it has one single output. Which, obviously, I hook up to my PC. Because everyone else has wireless devices and they're not in the basement with the modem.

And it turns out my router was also a strangle point on my speeds. Despite the settings that were supposed to allow for the upper limit of my actual service, it never let through more than 30% of that limit.

I was used to getting 65-80 Mbps download.

Turns out I do actually have close to 300.

So uh. Hi there. It's me. The fat stupid idiot poor who can't even share internet with their family any more, and was unknowingly throttling the service she'd been paying for FOR YEARS because poverty means we can never ever replace things until they break—and sometimes not even then.

Like now! Does a new router cost $0.00? No? Well then I don't have enough to buy one.

Cool talk.

[midnightvoyager]

AT&T Blows

If you have to pick between AT&T internet and cans and string, get your fucking drill out to put that string in those cans.

I have been out of internet since Thursday the 17th of September after the hurricane. That sounds way bigger than it was because we weren't really in its path, just near enough to get cast-off. We had no damages and only rain, not even a flood. I didn't even hear any thunder. It was just fucking rain. And guess what, internet didn't go out during that! It happened to be out the next day, when the storm was quite over!

To begin with, they said they'd send a technician out Thursday the 24th to stare gormlessly at our fucking modem/router, maybe replace it, and go "Iunno, I guess it's a problem on our end" when everyone and their fucking grandmother knows the problem is on their end, their infrastructure is garbage and failing, their substations are shot, and their lines need replacing. After SEVERAL calls over several days, they finally go "oh yeah the problem seems to be on our end. They told us it would be back Thursday the 24th, but that obviously didn't work out. If this sounds like we should leave the service, yeah, but as I said, the alternative is cans and a string, which ARE looking tempting. We're on the list to be notified when Verizon gets 5G out here, but who knows when that will happen.

My dad isn't great at this kind of thing, he loses patience really fast and ends up letting it slide FOREVER, but let me paint you an image of our neighbor lady. She has three small children like 4-6 and two dogs. She has chickens and does a bunch of super impressive, complicated green constructions and projects with her husband, like this crazy cool garden setup that's self composting or something? I dunno, they build neat stuff. They hand-renovated my grandparents's old house, including learning new painting techniques for the bricks and shit, they've redone the drainage around the lake and driveways, they helped get our driveway regraded and resurfaced, they've absolutely transformed this entire area. What I'm saying is she has a lot of patience and she is industrious. She is also so nice that when she heard about a peacock who was getting bullied by the other peacocks in his coop(?), she adopted the poor bastard and found a nice peacock lady friend for him, and now they live happily with her chickens. She had no intention of ever getting peacocks. Lovely lady.

But apparently our extremely lovely, kind neighbor lady is an unholy terror when angered. Her kids have been doing online school because of covid, so imagine the fucking irritation of all of this. She has had to take her kids to school every day where they have a wireless bus so she can have them do their online schoolwork. She has been calling them incessantly and tearing them a new one, but news from her end has been quiet since they said they'd get it back up Thursday. Monday the 28th, she managed to get to someone high up in AT&T who said a line needs replacing (WE KNOW) and gave her a number and PIN to call with if it wasn't back 4:00 Thursday October the 1st (so TWO WEEKS from the outage start). He also mentioned there are "at least" an estimated 36 houses affected by this, and are you shitting me?? My dad has a business line too, so they just really don't give a single shit.

But the real kicker: She was quiet about it until then for a reason. Turns out my neighbor lady knows someone even higher up in Charter and is well on her way to brokering a fucking deal somehow to get cable out here. I thought Hell would freeze over before they even considered running it out here for less than four figures, but she's icing the devil's balls as we speak. They're considering resurveying the place and moving the coverage lines, or at least cutting the price down by at least $5k, and they're considering it seriously enough to take the time and call everyone who lives down here and send people out to have a look. Everyone who lives near me has got together and said we're fucking doing it even if it's just discounted if it's at least cheap enough that we can all pitch in and manage it.

UPDATE: Guess what wasn't working at 4! They amended it to "we have no idea when you will have internet back because we can't find a part we need." I ordered a wireless dongle so I can at least connect to Dad's wifi hotspot and get a little internet. Charter's coming to have a look Monday or Tuesday. I am serious when I say we might swap to Charter before we ever get our AT&T internet back.

UPDATE 2: They only just called to say they ordered the part from China and the internet will be back Monday

[luckdogpuppy]

Why I Hate Electronics

In the old days we had ms-dos and had to fiddle with config.sys and himem.sys spending endless hours and sleepless nights trying to get the computer to run a program. Computers have come a long way since windows 95 but using them certainly hasn’t gotten any easier. I remember wondering back then why they couldn’t make a computer that actually worked, that actually figured out how to make itself work and work with other programs and devices…after all, it is a computer, isn’t it? No, instead they just get more complicated and mystifying. Now its modems and routers and ethernets and wifi that drive me crazy, and trying to cope with constant buffering when I try to watch Netflix. Who the hell can remember which remote to use to access the right button? And when you do find the right remote to access your tv who can figure out how to get to whatever it is you need to fix? And how many fucking passwords can a person remember? And passwords have to be more complicated every year. I can barely use my phone, flipping from one screen to another with my finger. It seems the only way to get out of certain screens is to shut your phone off and restart it. And nobody tells you this stuff…you have to figure it out on your own. Ever read the Microsoft manual? Who does? Just looking at the pages makes me scream. And even when you go to Youtube they go so fast you have to pause it every two seconds to write that shit down. I have endless sheets of paper in a drawer filled with step-by-step instructions on how to do computer problems. Why? Why can’t computers do these things by themselves? The last time I lost my internet connection I got all excited when I discovered this thing on my computer that told me it would run a diagnostic of my system and troubleshoot it. Wow, that sounded great. When I went there and ran it it said “you have lost your internet connection.”  

They say that computers can do everything, but they still haven’t given us a computer that can fix itself or even do something as simple as letting us plug it into a router without having to go through an eleven step process to get the damn thing to work. What pisses me off is that I know they could do this. I can’t even get my two wifi extenders to work. By some miracle I did get them to work for a while but one day they both just shut off and I haven’t been able to get them running since. I can’t get past the step where I’m asked for a password. It says I’m supposed to use the one on the back of the router. Well, what it says on the back of the router is “password: (leave the field blank)”. Except when I am asked for the password it won’t let me leave the field blank. Instead it says “your password is not long enough.” Then I’m told to go to my wifi icon on my taskbar to find out what the password is. But I don’t have a wifi icon on my taskbar. So I go online and find that there are pages on how to find and/or replace the wifi icon on my taskbar, and after going through all five of the different methods of finding and replacing that icon on the taskbar without success I learn that there is no way I’m gonna get that icon to appear on the taskbar because the Windows 10 system that came with my computer doesn’t come with a wifi icon on the taskbar; Microsoft removed that file in the latest version of Windows 10. I learn that I have to buy Windows 10 Pro to get that stupid wifi icon. Are you shitting me?

I finally did find an obscure site that explained a convoluted way to find out what your router and extender passwords were. You have to start with your command prompt to get there…but that didn’t help…surprise, those passwords there didn’t work either. And don’t even ask me how to go back there and look at those passwords again. It took me an hour to figure out how to get to my command prompt from my start menu. Hint: don’t left click like you’re used to doing. When you left click on the Start menu you are presented with a long and very impressive list of places to go, all in alphabetical order, and you would think that the “Command” prompt would be there under the “c” column. But no, there is nothing that says “Command Prompt”. No, you have to right click instead. You’ll find another list of places to go there. But even then there is nothing that says “Command Prompt.” You have to click on “run” for the command prompt to come up. There is a lot of shit you can do through the command prompt but nobody is going to tell you what the secret codes are that will allow you to do those things. It used to be easy to get to the command prompt. All you had to do was click on the “Start” button. But now they’ve decided to make this an hour-long quest to find it. I have all this shit written down on endless sheets of paper in that drawer. Truth be told this electronic world makes me tear my hair out. I hate it with a passion. What pisses me off even more is that I also love it…when it’s working.

I can’t even get my computer to recognize my own email address. I bought a new Dell desktop three years ago and still get a daily message saying that I need to fix a problem with my Microsoft account. So I periodically go through the process and change my password but no matter what I do I still get that stupid message. I even had Microsoft tech reps guide me through the process three times now yet I still get that same old message. And every time I try to access my Microsoft account I’m told “that email address is already used by a different account.” I deleted all my accounts and started over but the message still comes up…the problem remains. I’ve explained all this to those tech reps but nothing keeps that message from coming up. I even signed up for a different email address but that didn’t fix the problem either and now I have an extra “Outlook” email address that I never use and wouldn’t know where it is if I did want to use it. I think the problem started when I bought a new Dell laptop. I had to sign up for a Microsoft account then. But I didn’t care for the laptop and sent it back two days later and ordered the desktop…and now Microsoft still thinks that whoever owns that laptop has the rights to my email address and not me. I explained all this to those Microsoft tech reps but that didn’t solve anything either. Yeah, this stuff bothers me. I’m the kind of guy who doesn’t like loose ends. I like things to be neat and tidy and feel like everything is in its place. But this computer stuff feels all scattered and disconnected and just fucked up. I know it’s working on my mind even when I’m not struggling with it.

In order to fix my Netflix buffering problem (and my wife’s need to have internet access for her work-at-home job) I bought a new router. I’ve had the same old cheap router for 6 years so I figure its time for a new one. I did just buy a 40 ft ethernet cable that I plugged into the back of the router and ran it along the ceiling down the hall and into the back of the tv in the living room, but we’re still having problems with “Home not available” still coming up at times. I actually bought a new router last year; an Archer A7. But I was never able to get it to work so I had to send it back, thinking it must have been defective. I realize now that it probably worked just fine and that the problem was me…that I couldn’t figure out how to get it to work. Then I had a helluva time trying to get the old one up and running again. Did you ever feel that your brain was on fire and ready to burst? That was how I felt after struggling with those two routers for 3 days. So my new router came last week and it turns out it’s the same model; the same one I tried to set up and sent back last year. I thought it was a different one because it was called a Tp-link, but its actually an Archer A7 too. On the box it says it’s a AC 1900 and on the instruction sheet it also says it’s a MU-MIMO Wi-Fi Router, so just figuring out what these things are called is a science in itself. So now I’m frightened to death to even try to set it up. The first thing the instructions say is “if this” and “if that”…as if I know the answers to these ifs. There is also a long list of FAQs in case you have problems and need help. That scares the shit out of me, too, cause I know I’m gonna need help…and lots of it. Then it gives me three different methods of setting the thing up, all of them quite convoluted and requiring me to access various internet sites, SSIDs and wireless passwords. Then I have to go to a number url: 192.188.1.1 and I remember that this is where I had to go to get my extenders to work but I was never able to get those urls to come up. Then I found out that they only come up if you use Google Chrome, and of course there is nothing in the instructions that tells you you can only use Google Chrome. No, you have to find that out on your own too. So now I have to change my browser and come up with another password so I can access Google Chrome. I am so afraid that I will not be able to complete these steps correctly and that I will then have to struggle another two days to get my old router to work again that the new router is still sitting on a shelf two weeks later. I’m thinking that I should go to Best Buy and have the Geek Squad come and set up my router but I know I’ll have to listen to them explain their convoluted tech plan that will ask me to decide whether to get a one visit deal or buy a year subscription…and I know one visit will not fix all my loose ends. And it makes me wonder if that is the reason why computers intentionally aren’t made to fix things.  

Oh, by the way, I’m sitting here writing all this down with my Microsoft Word, and now I find that I am unable to save what I’ve written because I don’t have a subscription to Word any more. I guess my free time is over. God, don’t you love it? You can’t even buy a computer with a simple word processor in it without having to pay a yearly fee to use it. Next thing you know somebody will figure out how to put a chip under your skin that measures how many breaths you take so they can charge you for the air you breathe.  

Dear Lord, if reincarnation is real please let me go to a world that is either before computers or way beyond computers. Or better yet, where computers and routers and extenders actually use a computer so they can work together.      

[ghostwise]

i’ve got finals, i’ve got essays due (i have got lots & lots of problems) 

 More modern au shenanigans! Title from a song. This one mentions @vlwv‘s warden, Mavis. Sticking to my resolution to write more things that are over 500 words long. :)

“Soo… do you have an evacuation plan yet?” Alistair asks, trying to sound casual.

The question means a lot of things. It means, ‘What is your evacuation plan? Surely you must have one!’ It also means ‘Are you as frightened as I am?’ And, perhaps even, ‘How can I make sure you are safe?’

But that’s a lot of words to trip over. And it’s too early in the day to be anxious.

Hamal, picking up on none of that, just glares at Alistair over his cereal bowl. He is seated on the couch, starting his day, while Alistair is at the table, on his third cup of coffee, five pages into an essay that is due by noon.

“No,” Hamal says, and returns to his breakfast.

Alistair taps a highlighter on the table, nonplussed.

“Don’t you think we should-?”

“Absolutely not. Anyway don’t you have, like, ten more pages of essay to write?” He looks at him intently. “Can you afford another late assignment, Alistair?”

Alistair lays his head onto the table and groans, because, no, he can’t. He doesn’t ask any more questions, and instead returns to his work.

It’s strange, how the days can proceed with such utter normalcy while, elsewhere, things fall apart. Hamal is right though. Ten percent of his final grade would be docked for each consecutive day the work was late. Ten percent! He needs to focus.

Just as well, too.

The peace in Amaranthine is as silky smooth as the surface of a soap bubble. There are essays to consider, and classes to attend. Alistair types away at his desk, and for a while the apartment is quiet. Hamal finishes his breakfast and makes more coffee.

A car screeches to a halt in the street, and the sound of the engine is familiar enough for Alistair to quip, as Hamal leaves, “Say hi to Tamlen for me. Tell him I’d be happy to replace his brake pads sometime.”

Then Alistair is left alone in the tenuous quiet of the apartment.

Like a bubble, like a snowflake careening towards a warm breeze.

.

“Fuck,” Alistair hisses. “Fuck, no, fuck, please no.”

There is no internet connection! his laptop cheerfully informs him. Try: checking the network cables, modem, and router. Reconnecting to Wi-Fi…

The time on his phone says 11:45am. He slams his laptop shut, picks it up and sprints out of the apartment with it tucked under his arm. His destination is the café three blocks over, and he runs the whole way, dodging around people and traffic.

Once inside he unceremoniously crashes into the nearest empty table, opening his laptop and connecting to the café’s wi-fi.

“Thank the Maker,” he says to no one in particular, though the people walking by are beginning to look at him funny.

After a moment, a familiar voice greets him. “Cretin. Internet access for paying customers only!”

“Yes, Morrigan,” Alistair waves her off, watching his file upload. “A cup of whatever the soup of the day is please! Owe you one!”

He doesn’t even have the decency to glance her way as she scrunches her nose and narrows her eyes at him. “Fine,” she mutters, turning and adjusting her apron. “Thank you for your continued patronage. For the record, I turned my paper in three days ago.”

Alistair nods absently.

Sweet, sweet relief floods his system as the assignment posts to his online classroom. He feels his heart rate begin to slow. A cup of shrimp and corn chowder is summarily deposited in front of him.

“If you need help paying off your internet bill,” she adds sweetly, “you need only ask.”

“You are so, so creepy,” Alistair sighs. “Who are your sources?”

Morrigan only shrugs and walks back behind the counter.

It is 11:58am. Alistair runs a hand through his hair, rubs at his eyes and smiles. Moment of crisis over, he digs into his soup with enthusiasm. He suddenly remembers he didn’t bring his wallet with him.

When he mentions this to Morrigan, she goes a few shades pale.

“You realize, I am at work,” she tells him, monotone. “I cannot strangle you while I am at work, and yet you put me in a situation, wh… a situation like this? Callously, you look me in the face? Without sympathy? You dare-?”

“Big, big tips for pals who let their friend run real quick to his apartment to get his wallet,” he says, smiling sheepishly. “I swear! Please don’t curse me.”

Morrigan purses her lips. “Leave your jacket and laptop, so it looks like you went to the restroom,” she says finally.

“Thank you!!”

“I know where you live.”

“Noted!”

.

Alistair is sure his absence from the café shouldn’t be too suspicious. It’s gracious of Morrigan to cover for him. She’s warming up to him, he figures; she’s friends with his roommate after all.

Speaking of, Hamal is still not back, and is likely going to be out with Tamlen until late in the evening. Alistair has no classes today, so he has free reign of the place.

It’s times like these that make him wish he were a little more graceful in social matters. Hamal has so many friends. Meanwhile, Alistair is not exactly unpopular, but he feels like everyone he knows was introduced to him by someone else. Taking the initiative is hard for him.

He has phone numbers for a few of his classmates. Mavis, Jowan, Zevran—maybe he should text one of them? Or all of them? Invite them over for a beer?

He’s considering it, honestly, as he plucks his wallet off the dresser by the door, and takes the steps downstairs by two. But he nearly trips as he reaches the ground floor.

“Oh, damn,” he wheezes, righting his steps. But he can’t help but stumble, overhearing what his downstairs neighbors are talking about.

“You alright?” one of them asks.

“I’m fine,” he says. “What were you saying? About the quarantine?”

“That it’s… it’s in Redcliffe.”

Alistair feels a rush of anxiety, just like this morning. “I have family there,” he says after a moment, as if there’s anything they can do about it.

“I’m sorry. You better call them. We’re calling our people now.”

“Yes… I, uhm… yes, likewise.”

Pit in his stomach, Alistair reaches for his phone. His pocket’s empty.

His jacket, he realizes, is at the café.

.

It’s the longest walk back. He feels cold all over, hearing the news spread all around him. People are talking about it, and it’s on the television screens he walks past the shops.

Defying a recent trend, which seemed to suggest the pathogen had slowed in its spread… new cases have been reported in the townships of Redcliffe and Lothering… a spokesman from the National Health Organization answers questions with us, live…

Morrigan is glaring daggers when he finally makes it back, but she reads him well enough to withhold judgment. He’s shaking so badly he can barely bring up his mother’s phone number, jumping slightly when she answers.

“Mom?”

“Alistair,” Fiona breathes through the speaker. “I was going to call you.”

“Are you- are you safe?”

“I’m in Denerim.”

Somehow, it hits him then. Alistair shuts his eyes and just breathes for a moment. “Thank goodness,” he manages. He can feel his mother’s anxiety through the phone, though, and after a moment she forces a laugh.

“I’m fine,” she assures him. “We… can’t go back home, though, not right away. Not until the quarantine lifts. But I was out of town for work, and…”

“I’m just glad you’re okay,” Alistair says. “Where are you staying? You should come here, we should be close by, just... just in case!”

She laughs at that, and Alistair feels a bit of the tension ease.

.

They chat for a while, reassuring one another, but by the time they hang up Alistair only feels marginally better.

Orlais. She wants him to apply for a passport, and take a semester off to go to Orlais with her. Just how long is this quarantine expected to last? Nobody talks about it, but if Fiona is that worried…

.

Morrigan gets a $10 tip.

[thegeminisage]

i know it’s bad to complain but fuck it

i’d like to register a few complaints:

there was ICE on my windshield this morning when i was up at 7am to take my aunt to school. REAL ICE! i was almost LATE because i had to SCRAPE IT OFF!!! it was 33 degrees! that’s only 1 above freezing! what the fuck!

i got tailgated by a schoolbus on the way back to my house. normally i turn into a passive-aggressive shit and soft brake check tailgaters but it’s a SCHOOL BUS. full of CHILDREN. what was that driver thinking??? i couldn’t even move over and let it pass me bc it was a one-lane road

there are two things of leftovers in the fridge and they’re both about to go bad and i wanna eat them both because i hate to waste food but i can only eat like two proper meals a day max or i die and each container of leftovers contains at LEAST two meals worth of food :(((

my internet is down. i called customer support TWICE yesterday and i have to call them again in a minute but i just woke up and i’m starving and also i don’t want to. 90% sure out modem/router needs replacing but if it does our choices are: pay $49 real cashmoney dollars and clean up the junkroom just for someone to come out to our house and do it when i am perfectly capable of doing it myself, OR, driving 55 fucking miles to the nearest spectrum store so we can get the new modem/router ourselves. where’s the option where they come replace it for free because we pay them a fortune every month for working internet??

i am probably gonna MISS art stream this week because of the internet and then i’m going on a trip soon so even tho i will try to stream the day before i leave i will DEFINITELY be too wiped to stream the day i get back and sdlkfjhlsdkjf i hate missing so many so close together

3 days in a row my wordcount has been 500 or less because i’m busy and tired and i just want to not do stuff for awhile. can i just stay home and not do anything for a couple of days please i just want to get to the end of this fanfic i’m getting REALLY close but the longer it takes me the harder it is to do i am FRESH out of self-validation i hate all 81,452 words of it

ok complaints registered i am going to go eat an apple and call customer support now wish me luck send me good vibes

[flerponius]

Mindless

“Hello, thank you for calling I-net service provider twelve customer support. How can I help you today?” Tuïf bent the left half of his sleek white company issue headset, feebly hoping the wires inside would reconnect. He had put in a repair ticket almost two months ago, and nothing had come of it.

“Yeah, my I-net isn't working.” he heard in his right ear. “It was fine three days ago but n-” Tuïf was startled by a loud burst of static in his left ear, and the call was suddenly in stereo. “-ust not working anymore!” he heard the customer finish.

“Can I have your name and CIN, please?” Tuïf requested, opening a new event form.

“Derik Juünz, zero zero zero four, nine one seven A, F F two two, zero zero B D.”

“And just to confirm, that was Derik Juünz, zero zero zero four nine one seven A F F two two zero zero B D, correct?” Tuïf said as he entered the data into the form.

“What, you got a hearing problem?” Tuïf winced as another burst of static sent the call back to mono.

“I’m just following procedure.” He reached for his cup of Earl Gray as Derik began informing him once more that his I-net was down.

“Well, let's see what we can do. Could you please find your modem for me?” Tuïf asked.

“What’s that?” Derik asked in return. Tuïf let out a sigh.

“It should be a small box with buttons and lights on it, with a NSNI cable connecting it directly to your wall.”

“What’s an NSNI cable?” Incredible. Tuïf was starting to doubt this guy had ever seen a computer before a few days ago.

“It stands for Nova Standard Network Interface cable. The head is shaped like a rectangle with a small divot on one side.” Tuïf heard some shuffling on the other end, including the sound of something falling and Derik cursing, before he returned.

“Okay, I’ve found the modem.”

“Thank you.” Tuïf said, wondering why he was thanking him. Oh right, procedure.

“Now, there should be a few lights on it. One of them should be labeled ‘I-net’. Can you tell me if it’s on?”

“Yes.” Derik replied. “I mean no, it's not on.”

“Okay, can you unplug the NSNI cable, please?”

“Sure.” As Tuïf waited for Derik to unplug the cable, he looked up his house on the distribution monitor. The system said he was receiving I-net, so it was almost definitely a problem on Derik’s end.

“Okay, I unplugged it, and now all the lights are off.” Tuïf lifted his hands from his keyboard and tensed them in frustration.

“Derik, that was the power cord.”

“Oh.” There was silence as derik seemed to think for a moment. “What should I do?” he finally asked.

“Plug it back in, please.” Tuïf took a swig of his tea and looked at the call timer. Six minutes? Really? It felt like an eternity.

“Okay, it’s plugged back in, and I unplugged the other thing.” At least he had the common sense to do that.

“Okay, now, look at the connector. Does it seem to be damaged or discolored in any way?”

“Nope.” Well, it wasn't the cable. Most likely something went wrong in the modem itself.

“Okay, now, there should be a button on the back that says ‘test’. Can you press it for me?” Tuïf waited for a full minute. “Derik? Are you still there?”

“I can't find it!” he shouted angrily, just as the wires in the left half of Tuïf’s headset reconnected, giving an extremely loud static burst.

“It should be red and about the size of your thumb, assuming you're a human.” Tuïf removed his headset’s left bud from his ear, deciding that occasional stereo audio wasn’t worth the pain.

“I still can't find it. Are you sure you know what you're talking about?” Tuïf felt a growl rising in his throat, and he took a sip of tea to drown it.

“Derik, there should be a serial number on the bottom of the box. What does it say?”

“Uh, hold on...” Derik instructed. “It’s um... I R seven seven zero two M Esh L five zero nine nine eight.” Tuïf muted his microphone and let out a frustrated snarl. Having got most of his anger out, he unmuted his microphone.

“Derik, that’s your router.”

“What?”

“Your router isnt your modem.” Tuïf chugged the rest of his tea. He diddnt care that he wouldnt be able to get more until the end of his shift.

“You told me it was the box with the buttons and the lights!” Derik yelled angrily.

“Yes, the one connected directly to the wall.”

“But this one is connected directly to the...” He trailed off as he seemed to remember that he had mistakenly identified the power cord as the network cable. “Uh, anyway, I found the modem.” Tuïf once more began to regurgitate his script.

“There should be a light on it labled ‘I-net’. Is it on?”

“Yes.” Derik replied.

“Then the problem is not with any of your equipment. There is something wrong with your router, which I cannot help you with, as it is not one of our devices.”

“This is unbelievable!” Derik yelled, prompting Tuïf to attempt to lower the call volume, only to remember it was already at minimum.

“You waste all my time just to tell me you can’t fix my I-net? Why can't you fix it?” Tuïf tried to think of a way to explain that this simply wasn't his job.

“I have an analogy for you.” he said eventually.

“What is it?” Derik asked, venom in his voice.

“Your window is cracked, and you have called a plumber to fix it. Do you understand?” He thought for a moment.

“But that can't be right! Modems and routers or whatever are both I-net things!”

“And windows and plumbing are both house things.” Tuïf retorted. “Do you understand now?” There was a click as Derik hung up.

“Well fuck you too.” Tuïf muttered as he ended the call. He only had a minute to himself before his headset rang again, likely with another mindless customer on the other end.

[artistic-writer]

RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

I fucking swear to God, internet provider who I shall not give the satisfaction of actually naming, if you don’t get your shit together, I am going to march to your HQ, ram your insistence of a non-essential engineer up your arse, and fucking fix the issue myself. It is NOT my walls.  It is NOT wifi signal being lost out of a window. It is not my fucking neighbours, magically causing interference SOMEHOW.  And it is not (and this one was my favourite) the fact that ‘maybe my house was built in the late 90′s when they put wire mesh inside the walls to keep the wifi signal confined to a room’.  Look at me. LOOK AT ME!  What you see is a 33-year-old woman, furious that you think she was somehow born yesterday.  It is YOU, and your SHITTY hardware that i have already had replaced TWICE in the last 8 months because you couldn’t organise a piss up in a brewery!

I don’t need an engineer, because we both know he is going to find fault with something I have done and so authorize you to charge me a ‘call out fee’.  Pro tip: If I have everything hardwired working just fine, it IS NOT an issue with the broadband line coming into my house. I know this and you know this, so stop trying to take me for a fool and insist the engineer comes to look at it. 

I don’t want a new, upgraded router that will ‘guarantee me wifi in every room’.  I literally have two rooms in my flat, both of which get perfect wifi signal until the fucking witching hour, and we both know it would cost me more money.  I don’t want your pissy suggestions that even a fucking child would know is a sales tactic.  Like a 14.5 hour day isn’t enough, I just want to come home from work, sit down and NOT have to reset MY ENTIRE FUCKING SMART HOME because your modem chooses 8:30pm every night to suddenly forget how to wifi.

YOU LITERALLY HAVE ONE JOB, AND YOU CAN’T EVEN GET THAT RIGHT!!!

[austinpanda]

Dad Letter 071821

18 July, 2021

Dear Dad--

I shall tell you an epic tale of internet loss! Here's what happened: When we went to bed last Monday night, we had no internet. No big deal, it just goes out sometimes. Still didn't have internet when we woke up on Tuesday, and we continued to be without it all day Tuesday. Then I got off work, and called them, and spent about two and a half hours dealing with them, before the call mysteriously dropped, and I decided not to deal with it any more on Tuesday.

In the two and a half hours I spent failing to reestablish my internet connection on Tuesday, a lot of the problem was explained to me. Firstly, whenever they access my information by my phone number, my Austin, Texas Time Warner shit comes up, and they immediately feel lost in the twilight zone, because I'm in Maine, and have been for some time. Once we get through that shit, and they find our current account, then we have to verify our address. Here's where the stupidity awakens and begins doing yoga to loosen up for the arduous work ahead.

When we moved here, we couldn't get them to give us internet service. We tried so hard, in so many long phone calls, to give them our money, but they refused, because our address doesn't exist. There CAN'T be a trailer 1A, there can only be numbers. If you include a letter, the way 1-A includes a letter, it breaks the whole fucking internet. The guy who represents the leasing company that owns the trailer we're renting even went down to the local Spectrum office and talked to them in person, and it still didn't work, until this one time when we called and got that one guy, the One Right Guy, who knew how to make it work.

The way he made it work was by taking note of the fact that trailer 2 appeared empty (It was not.) and he could just put "Trailer 2" in the address, which made it work, and he could give instructions to the installation pukes that it was actually 1A who needed the connection, not trailer 2. And I was there when the pukes showed up, so I was able to make sure they ran the cable to the proper physical location. And after that, all the mail we got from them said we were trailer 2, and had pissy notes written on it by the mailman asking us to correct it.

But we couldn't correct it, because that breaks the whole internet, if you'll recall, so we found a solution: We went with paperless billing! No more mail from Spectrum, our internet providers.

Then, few days ago, someone associated with trailer 2 requested a termination of service, and sure enough, Spectrum came and shut off the cable/internet to us in trailer 1A, because of the intentionally obfuscated trailer number bullshit.

And they can't just turn us back on, because trailer 2 now has service going with Spectrum, and 1A still doesn't exist! Never fear, they assured me, in the most recent phone call. They can create my address in their system, update everything so that it all has the correct trailer number (1A) on it, and even give us a new, cheaper deal on our next 12 months of internet, EXCEPT!!! When they're creating a new address, they have to physically send someone out to do a required thing, and there's no way around that. The guy still tried to upsell me on a complete cable/internet/phone package, and asked me lots of questions about what I watch, and how much, and what I pay for my phone each month, etc. I found a genuinely sweet and non-sarcastic way of telling him, "We ain't gonna talk about that."

That last phone conversation was yesterday, Wednesday, and now it's Thursday, and they'll be coming by to hook us up between 11:00 a.m. and 1:00 p.m. There's a chance I may be charged a couple of fees for the installation, but the Spectrum puke on the phone said he'd make sure we either (a) didn't get charged for it, or (b) get immediately reimbursed for all of it. We'll see how THAT goes, and it's almost time for the installation person to show up.

Okay, the installation person has come and gone. His reaction when I explained why he was there was priceless! He couldn't believe that our internet had been working fine until they switched it off by mistake and he STILL had to come out here and physically do stuff? Crazy talk! They should have fixed it over the phone! Zach and I both assured him that the nice phone pukes at Spectrum tried that many, many times, but since we were a whole new address being created, someone had to come survey the blah blah blah, and he basically said, "Yeah, that's bullshit."

Having said that, he DID have to take our combination cable modem/router away, and replace it with two devices, a cable modem, and a router. We had one combined device, a single black rectangular thing, and now we have two: a black rectangular thing, and a WiFi router that looks like it dispenses febreeze into the air, but it actually dispenses the internet. They really should make it dispense both; I know we have the technology to make that possible.

###

Now a couple of days have passed, and we continue to have speedy, reliable internet. I’ve been bemoaning our lack of adventure lately, but when it comes time for adventure to happen, we tend to want to stay indoors instead. I am working on fixing this! I’ve determined that a lot of my recent depression has been the result of all the isolation over the past year and a half, so I’m now attempting to do more stuff with other people. I have a goal here, too: to be able to have a New Year’s Eve party at our trailer with at least 5 or 6 fun people in attendance. So far I’m up to about 3 fun people, but I’ve got a few months to go, still.

Here’s something I’ve been experiencing some dread about: tomorrow I begin working at the casino full time. I haven’t worked full time since Progressive, years ago, and I’m worried that it’ll rob me of my sanity. I think I’m going to be okay, however! Because, as I predicted, nine hours at the casino doing audits isn’t the same as nine hours at the call center being shat upon by anxious car accident victims. Now the only person who poops on me is my boss, and then, only if I mess up something in a particularly regrettable fashion. Otherwise, my work is free from anyone giving me poop. It’s a refreshing change.

Also I’ve got a hearing aid-type thingy. Getting hearing aids is expensive, even with insurance, and I found a sort of middle ground option. They make a thing called an Olive Smart Ear. Basically, it’s a hearing aid that you can set up at home, and because (I assume) no doctor is involved in the process, they can’t legally call it a hearing aid. It’s called a conversation enhancing ear bud. Woo!

Anyway, the Olive Smart Ear isn’t really intended to be used in pairs. But when you get it, and charge it up, and stick it in  your ear, and you install the phone app, you can give yourself a hearing test. It shoots tones to your ear, and you press a button on your phone when you hear the tone. Then it adjusts the gizmo to suit your particular areas of hearing loss, and bam, something resembling a hearing aid but cheaper, with no doctor visit. You can also switch between three modes: normal living mode, conversation mode (background shit is muted) and television mode (TV shit is amplified).

I’ve spent some time wearing it and noticed a few things. First of all, I can hear all my S sounds really loud now, and I hit those Ss too hard, and it makes me sound lispy. I don’t wish to sound lispy any more than I ever wished to sound southern, so I shall work on that. Also, everything makes sounds. The remote to the projector TV makes little clicky sounds I never heard until now. Everything we own makes little clicky sounds. The air conditioner in the living room makes deafening jet engine sounds. But the hearing aid gizmo itself is kind of cool, all black with a couple of glowing lights. The whole thing is a button! You jam it in your ear, and tap and hold to turn it on, tap and hold longer to pair it with your cell phone app, tap and hold longer to turn it off. Quick tape to lower volume, quick double-tap to increase volume. It’s very futuristic. Plus, now I can hear a mouse get a hard-on.

More next week. All my love to you both!

[violetsystems]

#personal

I think everyone these days is going through a crisis of validation.  Nobody knows isolation better than an only child.  I’m the kind that grew up an outcast for the most part.  My mom always tells me how smart and well behaved I was.  I was always quiet.  Never in my thoughts.  That never went away.  To this day people I don’t even know are used to me being comfortable enough to sit down and share my thoughts every weekend.  I attend all these corporate webinars where they talk about companies controlling their “own narrative” in uncertain times.  There is a lot of reaching out and face to face regardless of distance.  Telepresence is such a real thing now because of the situation we are in.  Business keeps happening.  So does life.  I’ve graduated four steps in my cloth mask adventure.  Stepping up from sewing one back together left for me in the alley to finding a 3 pack of black cotton PPE’s online.  Being able to read the situations around us gives you some flexibility.  I’ve been up against the wall and under duress so many times in the last five years.  I’ve written about the feeling.  Being isolated and alone.  Under inspection and violated without any judgement ever materializing from it.  A trail by fire on whether or not I deserve to be left alone to live my life.  I finally got that wish I guess.  There’s a point when you want to curl up into a ball and sleep.  Having your office in your home is a blessing and a curse that way.  I’ve stuck to the same schedule I was always on.  I roll out of bed regardless at five.  I crawl back into bed around nine thirty.  Nobody told me how to do what I needed to do.  But I had some ideas from observing over the years.  Working from home every day means that my kitchen is my physical office.  My connection to the internet and my reliability to maintain office hours is another layer.  I spent a good portion last week massaging my internet’s router and modem.  Even when it goes down for an hour like on Friday, I have to run seamlessly off my phone’s LTE.  The difference in speed and ping has grown to have some meaning.  Just like cloud based virtual desktops and subnet math have been haunting me more than the plague.  My ping from my home is under ten milliseconds.  My response time to cases as they flow into my inbox is a little slower.  I spent Friday evening running a virtual happy hour and going away party for one of my employees.  I’m down two positions now.  I’m constantly barraged with people’s feelings on the internet about employment, disease, and what they think is fair.  And then there’s the work.  I know a lot about work.  I donated twenty dollars to the Jacobins in Brooklyn.  I also bought a watch.  I know what time it is usually.  It was 10:56 am CST when I got that Bronze 56k drop.  No masks unfortunately.  Just a logo’d sweatshirt.  The stussy sweater from Dover Street Market was a good look on Zoom for work.  My hair is growing back to a charming style as well.  I feel good about myself.  That comes from self care.  A process demonstrated weekly in my journal I write for you here.

Isolation doesn’t produce a lot of feedback from others.  It can be an echo chamber for the things that bother you about yourself.  For me the last month has really been a crisis of organization.  When I close my eyes and think of everything in my apartment I can account for most of everything.  If I scry back five years ago and overlay my apartment over the past it’s a way different narrative.  I was messy and chaotic.  I still am in spirit.  I was plagued by confrontations I didn’t face.  But I’ve made a lot of room for that poltergeist to dance wildly through the glass house I live in.  I answered to things in my life.  My health was a big one.  The virtual happy hour I hosted encouraged employees to drink.  I don’t drink anymore.  What makes me happy these days is maintaining a moderate degree of fiscal responsibility.  I can tell you how much money I wasted trying to cover up my unhappiness with myself.  That’s a big motivator these days.  Running makes me happy.  So does staying healthy.  Nurturing a culture of normality at work keeps things chill too.  Everything I’ve learned from working in this situation hasn’t made me feel unsure of myself or my skills.  It has made me feel overworked and drained.  Appearing on camera all day doesn’t bother me.  I still kind of fade into the background in large conversations.  But work is work.  I get tired of having to both justify my livelihood and be hidden and irrelevant at the same time.  It gets harder to know in isolation when it’s time to shut the office door.  For me it’s pretty easy.  Because I’ve been shutting the office door and setting up boundaries slowly for years.  Privacy is a mother fucker.  I’ve also been fighting battles and secret wars in this city for longer than I care to remember.  When I’m alone with my own thoughts its quiet and restful.  So the time has helped me understanding I’m still in a process of healing.  When you can sit and stare at the wall and smile to yourself without thinking anything.  Nothing creeps up behind you to ruin your mood.  That is the state my apartment is in at the moment.  I worry less about the world and more about access to my physical record collection.  If I suddenly think of an artist like Walt SImonson or John Byrne I want to be able to effortlessly remove it from the shelf.  I have time to alphabetize.  I have calendar reminders to sort.  And once all that is done I can sit and stare at the wall even more and have room to think of more.  There’s space in my mind and my heart that isn’t seeking validation from half assed sources.  I have time to reflect.  Time to know what’s working and what isn’t.  I spend less time worrying and more time doing.  Sometimes it feels like nobody is watching.  Nobody is paying attention to how I live my life.  Like I don’t matter to them.  That doesn’t really matter when you have self confidence.  It matters to me how I choose to live.  What sacrifices I made and their value to me.  And everything I spend my time and thoughts on matters to me as well.  I don’t have to say that out loud.  I project it how I live my life.  I’m a leader.  And most importantly I’ve had to lead myself out of darker places.  Alone.

How long have I been alone?  It’s a fucking mind blowing amount of time.  An amount of time no one ever recognizes or listens to.  Nobody has ever asked how it fucking feels.  I’ve said it here.  Just like I’ve transparently bore a hole in my heart for everyone to read.  Has it changed things?  Yes and no.  Has the world changed despite of that?  Yes.  How hard have I been hit by these dark times?  I mean if you want me to be blunt... These dark times have nothing on the depths of human shit I have witnessed.  And all I can do is shrug and live them.  Alone again.  Ignored except by phantom accounts with strange content.  Catfished by a million bots.  Some of which is probably a smokescreen for some genuine reals emotion under contract of duress.  Some people are just now realizing that online means something.  That people are more than just flesh and bone to touch, scar and warp.  Then there’s me.  You know me.  You know how I have felt.  You know for how long.  And you know nothing has changed.  That I am still right here feeling like I’m wasting and rotting away.  And yet I look around me and all I see is death and worry.  Why the long face?  Why so sad?  How long have I really been alone?  How psychologically emaciated am I from never being touched tenderly or told how easy I am to love?  How dark can it feel to be abandoned, talked and hunted by invisible predators?  To have your financial accounts prodded by hackers and scammers every week.  To have your packages targeted and stolen for months.  How do you think all this feels to live with and carry on your shoulders?  And worse to have no one acknowledge this weight you carry in your heart.  I don’t carry it alone if that’s what you are wondering.  I never have.  For years now, I’ve been typing away at a ghost in the machine.  Hoping someone was listening to what I said.  Hoping for a validation and connection.  And what I realized years ago.  Is that I had made a connection to something.  I was alone and yet not.  I looked around me and saw the old me in other people.  A sadder Tim desperately trying to claw for some sort of self esteem out of every moment.  Pointing the camera at myself and subjecting myself to public judgement.  Years later I’ve graduated to being completely ignored.  I just don’t register.  I’ll never be anything more than myself.  And here I am again.  Another week.  Same Tim.  Cleaner apartment.  Cooler gear.  Still just as much in love with this situation as I was February 14th.  Nobody is going anywhere for awhile.  Including me.  Which means I’m right where you want me as always.  Alone in my thoughts of you.  It’s a good place to be for the record.  I know I’m not the only one who thinks that way.  <3 Tim

[redditnosleep]

A Site Called "Cash for Confessions" Has Changed My Life

by Hayong 

I’m not usually the type of person to click on ads, but I was completely broke and still living with my parents. Before a bunch of you guys come at me and tell me to get a job and to stop being a bum. I want you guys to know. I do have a job. I work 55 hours a week and I give all of my money to my parents. They are the ones that don’t have enough to pay their bills. After everything is said and done, I have maybe 40 dollars a month to spend on myself. Fuck, they are my parents, but I make sure they have enough to eat before I feed myself.

That is why when I saw a simple black square take up the bottom right corner of my screen with the words “Cash for Confessions” inside of the box I clicked it. I was using an old beat up tablet and hooked up to really shitty Wi-Fi coming from the modem and router Comcast rents out to us, but the site opened up on my tablet in an instant.

Like I said, I’m not normally the type of person to click on ads so my guard was up high, but the website seemed completely safe. It was pretty much solid white with a small tan box in the middle of the screen. On the box were two generic words. “Create Account” I quickly made a throwaway e-mail address and clicked on the box. It took me to the next screen. It only asked me for three things.

User Name

E-mail Address

Currency Desired

My favorite superhero is Flash so I made my username BarryFlash, I typed in my e-mail address, and then typed in USD on the last slot. As soon as I finished typing the screen turned black. It stayed that way for a couple of seconds before two words appeared on the top of screen. Thank You. The two words faded away and were replaced by a series of rules.

”Cash for Confessions

1) All of the confessions must be completely true.

2) Do not use the money to help others out. This is your money that you have earned.

3) You may tell others about Cash for Confessions, but you cannot send this into anyone that will cause us any type of trouble.”

I impatiently tapped on the screen until the screen flashed a completely white screen before transitioning to a gray screen. An endless list of confessions filled my screen. I wasn’t really interested in anyone else’s confessions. I wanted to see if this thing actually paid us. After a couple of seconds of searching around I finally found what I was looking for.

“Once you click this you must confess.”

Without a second thought, I tapped on the link the other confessions disappeared from the screen and was replaced by an empty white box. I tapped on the box and my keyboard came up on my screen.

After a small sigh of anticipation, I typed out “I was a virgin till I was 22 years old.” Right after I finished typing the keyboard disappeared and the screen went completely black. I waited for a couple of seconds before the tablet vibrated. After a couple more seconds of waiting, I pressed the power button and my tablet came to life. There was a new e-mail. I tapped on the notification and the e-mail app came up and slowly started to load.

I almost let out a scream of joy when I saw that the e-mail was from Cash for Confessions. I tapped on the e-mail and quickly became sketched out and slightly pissed when all it said was, “$15 has been deposited into your bank account. If you would like more money please give us a better confession.”

Shit. I would have been happy with just $15, but I knew that there was no way they could have deposited the money into my bank. They didn’t have my account number, they didn’t even know what bank I used, shit, they didn’t even know my name. After letting out a depressed groan, I turned my tablet off and went to sleep.

I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of my tablet vibrating continuously. Once I got out of bed, I nervously walked up to my tablet and turned on my tablet. E-mails. Thousands of e-mails from Cash for Confessions. I nervously clicked on the first e-mail and almost dropped it on the ground. I closed out of the e-mail and looked through the rest. They all said the same thing.

“Don’t doubt us, Samuel Harrison. We know who you are. We gave you the money. Please check your bank account and see that we are a legitimate business. We miss you and we hope you come back.”

Curious and scared out of my mind, I clicked on my bank app and logged in. I had 14 cents in my bank account before (I checked earlier to see if I could eat Taco Bell the next day) but I now had $15.14. I was scared. I really was, but I was also excited. I mean, it was the first opportunity I was given to actually make a little pocket change for myself.

I don’t really know when I fell asleep, but I do know the sun was rising when I finally did. I kept writing out confession after confession. I mean, they knew who I was, but the people that were reading it had no idea who I was. All they saw were my confessions. I didn’t really put anything juicy, but a couple of them managed to make me around 30 dollars. That was 4 days ago.

I woke up the next morning and realized I was already 4 hours late to work. I don’t know why I was so dumb, but I called my manager and told him that I quit. In the middle of his rant, I hung up on him and checked my bank account. My jaw dropped when I saw that $1560.14 in my bank account.

For the next three days, I wrote as many of my confessions as I could, but yesterday morning I realized something. I was out of things to confess.

That is when I started to mess up my entire life in the span of 24 hours. I broke one of the rules. I started to make up confessions.

It started off with small shit like “I stole 100 dollars out of my grandma’s wallet when I was 12.” and quickly escalated to “I have a gun in my drawer. I am going to kill my parents tonight and they won’t be able to do anything about it.”

Right after I made that confession I checked my e-mails. A couple of my made up confessions made in between 15 dollars to 750 dollars, but my newest one made me $15,000.

I was ecstatic. Everything finally felt like it was perfect, but about an hour later, my tablet started blowing up again. Nervously, I checked it and saw that I had over 800 e-mails waiting for me. I opened the first one and instantly knew how bad I fucked up. I knew they all said the same thing, but I spent the next hour clicking through all of the e-mails and checking to see if it was maybe just a warning. It wasn’t. They all said the same thing again.

”Samuel,

Why would you lie to us? You knew we would figure out if you were lying or not, but there is a way to fix it. If you look in your first drawer you will see a gun. Kill your parents if you want to live. Fulfill the confession or we take your worthless life.”

I checked my drawer, and sure enough, the gun was in the middle of my drawer. I picked it up and felt goose bumps cover my body.

When my parents sat on the couch for our weekly movie night I took the gun downstairs. I sat next to them for the last time. I enjoyed every single second, every single laugh at dumb moments from the movie, and every single smile we gave each other.

As the movie ended I took the gun out of the back of my pants. Tears filled my eyes as I knew what I needed to do.

I placed the gun behind me and ran out the front door. I didn’t look back at them. I didn’t want to see their confused and concerned faces as I ran off into the night.

I went to my friend’s house that night. I knew I was putting him at risk, but I was honestly hoping they would kill my friend and me off, but unfortunately, I woke up this morning. I woke up and saw my friend cooking breakfast. With a feeling of dread and sadness, I turned on his tv and turned it to the news.

The main story was about my parents. They were found in our house. Both of their heads were mutilated by several bullets. I choked back my tears and sobs. I know they are after me now.

I’m writing this out on my tablet and leaving it at my friend’s house while I try to get as far away as possible. It’s my fault that my parents are dead, but it is now up to me. It’s up to me to get revenge for their deaths.

Until then. I want to leave you guys a warning.

Please be careful if you use Cash for Confessions. It is fine if you need a bit of money, but please don’t be like me. Don’t make up confessions.

[askflerpsocs]

Mindless

Inktober story 2

“Hello, thank you for calling I-net service provider twelve customer support. How can I help you today?” Tuïf bent the left half of his sleek white company issue headset, feebly hoping the wires inside would reconnect. He had put in a repair ticket almost two months ago, and nothing had come of it.

“Yeah, my I-net isn't working.” he heard in his right ear. “It was fine three days ago but n-” Tuïf was startled by a loud burst of static in his left ear, and the call was suddenly in stereo. “-ust not working anymore!” he heard the customer finish.

“Can I have your name and CIN, please?” Tuïf requested, opening a new event form.

“Derik Juünz, zero zero zero four, nine one seven A, F F two two, zero zero B D.”

“And just to confirm, that was Derik Juünz, zero zero zero four nine one seven A F F two two zero zero B D, correct?” Tuïf said as he entered the data into the form.

“What, you got a hearing problem?” Tuïf winced as another burst of static sent the call back to mono.

“I’m just following procedure.” He reached for his cup of Earl Gray as Derik began informing him once more that his I-net was down.

“Well, let's see what we can do. Could you please find your modem for me?” Tuïf asked.

“What’s that?” Derik asked in return. Tuïf let out a sigh.

“It should be a small box with buttons and lights on it, with a NSNI cable connecting it directly to your wall.”

“What’s an NSNI cable?” Incredible. Tuïf was starting to doubt this guy had ever seen a computer before a few days ago.

“It stands for Nova Standard Network Interface cable. The head is shaped like a rectangle with a small divot on one side.” Tuïf heard some shuffling on the other end, including the sound of something falling and Derik cursing, before he returned.

“Okay, I’ve found the modem.”

“Thank you.” Tuïf said, wondering why he was thanking him. Oh right, procedure.

“Now, there should be a few lights on it. One of them should be labeled ‘I-net’. Can you tell me if it’s on?”

“Yes.” Derik replied. “I mean no, it's not on.”

“Okay, can you unplug the NSNI cable, please?”

“Sure.” As Tuïf waited for Derik to unplug the cable, he looked up his house on the distribution monitor. The system said he was receiving I-net, so it was almost definitely a problem on Derik’s end.

“Okay, I unplugged it, and now all the lights are off.” Tuïf lifted his hands from his keyboard and tensed them in frustration.

“Derik, that was the power cord.”

“Oh.” There was silence as derik seemed to think for a moment. “What should I do?” he finally asked.

“Plug it back in, please.” Tuïf took a swig of his tea and looked at the call timer. Six minutes? Really? It felt like an eternity.

“Okay, it’s plugged back in, and I unplugged the other thing.” At least he had the common sense to do that.

“Okay, now, look at the connector. Does it seem to be damaged or discolored in any way?”

“Nope.” Well, it wasn't the cable. Most likely something went wrong in the modem itself.

“Okay, now, there should be a button on the back that says ‘test’. Can you press it for me?” Tuïf waited for a full minute. “Derik? Are you still there?”

“I can't find it!” he shouted angrily, just as the wires in the left half of Tuïf’s headset reconnected, giving an extremely loud static burst.

“It should be red and about the size of your thumb, assuming you're a human.” Tuïf removed his headset’s left bud from his ear, deciding that occasional stereo audio wasn’t worth the pain.

“I still can't find it. Are you sure you know what you're talking about?” Tuïf felt a growl rising in his throat, and he took a sip of tea to drown it.

“Derik, there should be a serial number on the bottom of the box. What does it say?”

“Uh, hold on...” Derik instructed. “It’s um... I R seven seven zero two M Esh L five zero nine nine eight.” Tuïf muted his microphone and let out a frustrated snarl. Having got most of his anger out, he unmuted his microphone.

“Derik, that’s your router.”

“What?”

“Your router isn't your modem.” Tuïf chugged the rest of his tea. He didn't care that he wouldn't be able to get more until the end of his shift.

“You told me it was the box with the buttons and the lights!” Derik yelled angrily.

“Yes, the one connected directly to the wall.”

“But this one is connected directly to the...” He trailed off as he seemed to remember that he had mistakenly identified the power cord as the network cable. “Uh, anyway, I found the modem.” Tuïf once more began to regurgitate his script.

“There should be a light on it labled ‘I-net’. Is it on?”

“Yes.” Derik replied.

“Then the problem is not with any of your equipment. There is something wrong with your router, which I cannot help you with, as it is not one of our devices.”

“This is unbelievable!” Derik yelled, prompting Tuïf to attempt to lower the call volume, only to remember it was already at minimum.

“You waste all my time just to tell me you can’t fix my I-net? Why can't you fix it?” Tuïf tried to think of a way to explain that this simply wasn't his job.

“I have an analogy for you.” he said eventually.

“What is it?” Derik asked, venom in his voice.

“Your window is cracked, and you have called a plumber to fix it. Do you understand?” He thought for a moment.

“But that can't be right! Modems and routers or whatever are both I-net things!”

“And windows and plumbing are both house things.” Tuïf retorted. “Do you understand now?” There was a click as Derik hung up.

“Well fuck you too.” Tuïf muttered as he ended the call. He only had a minute to himself before his headset rang again, likely with another mindless customer on the other end.

[inhandnetworks-blog]

Canada's Balloon Lawn Chair Pilot Speaks Out After Arrest

www.inhandnetworks.com

Daniel Boria was dreaming of an aerial stunt to promote his cleaning products company, All Clean Natural. When he couldn't find a pilot brave enough to drop him into the middle of an outdoor stadium in Calgary, Alberta, he opted for a do-it-yourself approach. Boria and his team constructed a makeshift flying machine by rigging 120 large helium balloons to the back of a lawn chair. After propelling himself above the clouds, he parachuted to safety...and was subsequently arrested.

Videos of the flight went viral Tuesday, leading to a flood of media requests. According to Boria, the attention has caused All Clean Natural sales to skyrocket.

Keep up with this story and more by subscribing now

Newsweek caught up with him this morning, as he was planning his next steps.

How did you come up with this idea?I wanted to do something really loud, and I've always had a bit of a passion for adrenaline. We had the idea of skydiving into the Calgary Stampede during the middle of the day. I actually had an airplane banner with our company logo and website address. We planned it as a promotion for our All Clean Natural products.

Why did you choose that event?It's a huge public event. The Calgary Stampede is the greatest outdoor show on earth. It's like a huge rodeo. The whole idea was to land in the middle of the truck wagon races and then to get arrested.

So how was it being arrested?Most of the cops were just really confused at first. Eventually, when they figured it out, almost everyone thought it was hilarious, except for those few. They were calling me Neil Armstrong when I got to the station.

Did you film yourself up there?I had a GoPro the entire time, so I filmed the whole thing. I don't have it with me, though. It's in police custody, being used as evidence.

Besides promoting your cleaning products, was this a personal dream?Personally, I've always wanted to do something like that, skydiving or parachuting. We didn't think of the balloons at first. We were looking to hire an aircraft pilot, but we couldn't find anyone willing to take us up and let us jump out into the arena. So we decided that we would have to construct our own aircraft. We thought balloons would just be too funny, and then we figured it had to happen.

What kind of balloons did you use?You know those giant helium balloons? You can usually see two or three of them outside car dealerships. We got 120 of those from a party store.

Did they ask why you needed so many balloons?They did, of course. I told them we were hanging an advertisement in the sky.

Legally?I didn't look into that.

You ended up getting pretty high. Did you have any safety measurements in place?I had an extra safety harness that I used up until about 2,000 feet, which is where I activated my parachute. Never operate an aircraft without a seatbelt, ladies and gentleman, boys and girls.

But were you concerned that 2,000 feet might be too high for the parachute to work?I was extremely confident.

What about your family?You know, everyone I talked to told me it was the stupidest idea they'd ever heard. They kept saying that people were going to think I was ISIS and start shooting at me. But I believe that we need to eradicate the human behavior of fear, the human behavior of conformity. When I first started my company, I said, let's try to be different.

What happened when you landed?I landed on a rocky hill somewhere, in prickle bushes, and scratched up my legs. I wasn't sure if I'd broken my foot or not. I was just laughing my head off. I limped down the hill to the highway and used this guy's truck to call our Mission Control room.

You mean, to call your friends back at the house?No, the Mission Control room…

How did the cops find out? Did the truck driver rat on you?I think he heard something on the radio about a bunch of balloons in the sky, and was like, "Oh…it's that fucking guy." He probably called them after that.

So what will happen on the legal front?I'm trying to find a lawyer as soon as we get off the phone.

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[ds4design]

Router assimilated into the Borg, sends 3TB in 24 hours

reader comments 0

"Well, fuck."

Harsh language was appropriate under the circumstances. My router had just been hacked.

Setting up a reliable home network has always been a challenge for me. I live in a cramped three-story house and I don't like running cables. So my router's position is determined by the fiber modem. In a corner on the bottom floor. Not long after we moved in, I realized that our old Airport Extreme was not delivering much signal to the attic, where two game-obsessed occupants fought for bandwidth.

I tried all sorts of things. I extended the network. I used ethernet-over-powerline connectors to deliver network access. I made a mystic circle and danced naked under the full moon. We lost neighbors, but we didn't gain signal.

Eventually, I gave in to the inevitable. After some research, I purchased a router that, I was told, would probably deliver useable signal to the outer reaches of the solar system. And it worked. The Netgear R6400 left only one place in the house with little-to-no reception. But, crucially, my wife and son were happy gamers upstairs, <Netflix flixxed, and Youtube tubed. Life was sweet.

Then, sometime in January, I came home to find my boy Adrian with his face in a book. Adrian reads a lot, but there is a time and place for everything, and this was gaming time and gaming place. "How's it going, Adrian?"

"Oh, good. I gave up gaming. I kept getting kicked. Even downstairs."

I attributed that to a busy server somewhere. My connection seemed good, and no one else was complaining. A few days later, my daughter Jennifer was home from school sick. She sent me a message saying that her laptop couldn't connect to the network. I talked her through a bit of trouble shooting, and, after restarting the router, all seemed to be right again.

I was troubled, though. Adrian had basically given up on gaming, but Netflix worked, and no one else seemed to be having problems.

I looked at the router settings, and they seemed OK. The router showed no interference from competing networks, but the amount of traffic it logged was suspiciously high. Or was it? I'd never tracked my household traffic before, so I couldn't be sure that what I was looking at wasn't the normal combined Youtube and Netflix usage of five people plus regular visitors.

In fact, interpreting the data use was more difficult than it should have been. My computer was confused about how numbers should be displayed. Applications that pay proper attention to the system settings use a point as the decimal place and a comma for separating thousands, millions, etc. Applications that only pay attention to my location use a comma for a decimal point and dot to separate thousands and millions. (This discrepancy can probably be attributed to me being a New Zealander living in the Netherlands.) So either the router had logged terabytes of traffic in the last period, or it had logged almost nothing.

I knew I would have to investigate. But I travel a lot for work, so finding time was difficult.

Suddenly, connecting to the network in the attic was impossible again. I couldn't figure out why. Then I noticed that my phone was randomly connecting and disconnecting from the network. A few days later, I got a message from T-Mobile saying that I'd used all my mobile data for the month. For the remainder of the lunar cycle, I would be reduced to data delivered by drunken sloths. This had happened before, but I'd been traveling a lot then, and I had been careful when traveling ever since—the sloths had caused fellow passengers to complain. In any case, I knew it was time to pull finger and do somethingTM.

Events intervened, and I was forced to delay doing anything useful. But everyone in the house was getting increasingly frustrated with the network. Then, on my way home from work one Friday, Donna told me that absolutely nothing in the house could connect to the network. And now she couldn't do her work. Deadlines were being crossed, and it wasn't her that was going to be dead. I got the message.

I arrived home that Friday night to find a house full of disconnected family members. Then, bizarrely, upon my arrival, everything connected. I ran a speed test from my computer and Donna's phone at the same time. On average, we obtained 150 percent of our maximum-rated upload and download speed. I declared there to be no problem right now. We decided to watch a show on Netflix while I kept an eye on networking performance.

To do this, I installed Peakhour. It found the router and started displaying traffic. It didn't look like much. Netflix started streaming, which caused a small bump in traffic. But traffic swiftly flattened out to background value. As I watched an old Star Trek episode and the network traffic, I contacted the Orbiting HQ for advice on how to figure out if my router (or anything else) had been hacked.

"When the police arrest your for distributing child porn" was the helpful response.

In the meantime, the total amount of data that I'd transmitted crept up, and Netflix choked on a particularly painful Wesley Crusher moment. That's when the first useful suggestion came from the collective Ars brain: a stranger had probably managed to connect to our wifi.

I know our neighbors, and I didn't think that was likely. But a huge number of devices were connected to the router, so I couldn't be sure. We turned off everything that could be turned off and slept everything that could be slept. That left a couple of unknown devices, which I kicked off the network.

Nothing changed. In the first half hour or so that I'd been monitoring, I'd transmitted 25GB of data. By the time everything else had been disconnected from the router and I'd checked that the TV software was up to date, I'd logged 188GB of data (up and down combined).

Meanwhile, Eric, our managing editor, had dug up an article from December disclosing a vulnerability in my router. The command that was supposed to kill the problem... didn't. Later, I discovered that if the command didn't work, you were already patched. Not only that, the only way to distribute the hack was for someone on our internal network to visit a dodgy website.

Lee suggested that I install DD-WRT. A quick search of DD-WRT's online database suggested that my router wasn't supported.

Also, there had been a firmware update since the hack was reported, and I'd conscientiously installed it. An Internet search didn't provide any hint of any other problems. The collective wisdom dictated that restoring factory settings might solve the problem, and it was about the only thing I could do in any case.

Fast forward another 45 minutes. The router was reset, and the network was set up again. By the time I was done messing around, Peakhour had my traffic clocked at 470GB. But I'd gotten rid of the problem (or so I thought). The next morning, before I left for the weekend, I checked: the total traffic was at around 500GB. Maybe I'd defeated the hackers.

That night, I heard from Donna. She'd been monitoring traffic, which was now over 3TB. And, just to make sure we had no doubt, devices were dropping off the network again.

The factory reset had not worked.

When I got home, I put the Airport Express back in place. And, in the following four days, a whole 12GB of traffic was recorded. Of course, wifi coverage upstairs was terrible. Discontent filled the air.

I examined the router logs of the R6400 and discovered that it had been contacting an NTP server just about as fast as it could. Evidently, my router was being used to DDOS someone (sorry, whoever you are). This, as far as I can tell, has not been reported anywhere. I don't have the skills to analyze the hack properly. And, to be frank, I just wanted my router back, which I still wasn't ready to give up on.

After some searching, I discovered that the DD-WRT database isn't very good, and a firmware update was available for my router model. I downloaded it, read the instructions, and followed them. Half an hour later, I had my router back on line and was monitoring traffic: silence. When my computer was idle, the router logged almost no traffic. I kept a close eye for another 30 minutes before deciding that the router was off the botnet. I could set up my home network again.

DD-WRT is not the friendliest bit of software, but I managed to fumble my way through to get everything up and running. Except for the 5GHz radio, which remained stubbornly off. I went back to the DD-WRT stock of firmware and discovered that I could update to a new version. Unfortunately, this time I did not read the instructions as carefully...

And then I had a brick. Admittedly, it is a brick that is no longer part of a botnet, but it is also not very useful either. After more searching, I discovered that I could, apparently, fix the problem by connecting to the router through the JTAG port on the router's motherboard. By this time, though, I would have just as soon stabbed myself in the eyeball with a fork. It would save time and hurt less.

So the Airport Extreme is back in position, the R6400 is in the garage with all the other bricks, and the attic is a (nearly) wifi-free zone again. Next time I'll just run cable.

I admit that I'm annoyed at myself, DD-WRT, and Netgear. I could have been more careful and not ended up with a brick. DD-WRT could have a simpler upgrade procedure. And Netgear could provide a secure router. I also discovered during this tribulation that I am not the only one who has experienced similar problems. Although there seems to be very little on the Internet, I discovered that other people in our neighborhood had had a similar experience. They, too, had been unable to remove their router from the botnet by using factory resets and manufacturer-provided firmware. They ended up replacing their routers.

Now, two experiences don't provide us with any statistics to rely on. But if my experience is common, then maybe manufacturers need to start producing a more extensive range of tools to recover hacked routers.