Legal advice

"Don't worry. I basically told them that if they try to enforce the payment, you'll post the scoop on them all over the internets."

Andrew Breitbart

He was a prick, a villain, a duplicitous bastard, and a special pile of human excrement.

*sunglasses*

Purplz and forced labor

This was supposed to be a nice end-of-month report about how I managed to put the shelves up and my purplz are feeling better with artificial lighting - even the one I was worried about and considered taking to a panel of experts this Saturday. She looks fine now, and I probably won't be taking her anywhere for fear of damaging leaves during transportation.

However, yesterday I signed up for forced labor and holy shit does that suck.

Training (or retraining) costs much more than a semester of study at a generic university (not necessarily a diploma mill, but considering that pay-to-study students and free-to-study students are put in separate groups, the difference is negligible in practice). Therefore, anyone who blames unemployment on people who are too lazy to "respond to economic challenges" by "increasing their relevance in a modern job market" is welcome to suck a barrel of cocks and die.

So training is usually paid for by organizations, who then can force the employee to "compensate" if he resigns (or is fired) before a certain term, usually three years.

Now, I have already signed up and underwent one training course, which saved our organization 200 times the money (the alternative was demoting me to secretary and "outsourcing" the EDM system for a fuckton of money to a company in collusion - that is hiring them to do nothing and split the money).

And maaaan are they pissed. (We also prevented the purchase of pirated accounting software, thus making enemies throughout the organization.)

So they want to outsource the whole department and to that end cancelled the second training course I had signed up for at the last moment, by REFUSING TO PAY.

Now, the alternative to outsourcing is reorganization, which might land me a relatively high post - higher than my dad, who's served for more than 40 years. And the fuck who occupies an equivalent post right now does not want this to happen. So far his attempts to have me fired caused me a fuckton of trouble and him substantial monetary loss, so if I were him I'd just write the whole thing off as ye olde favoritism but nooooooooooooooo, sunk cost fallacy strikes again, he'd rather see the whole department outsourced and his wife and newborn child* left without food and lodging than see me sitting there looking smug.

*This is not female camaraderie but basic "what an undeserving fuck" envy. What wouldn't I do to have a wife and children?

And this is why, upon learning that the org won't pay for the training, he made me sign the compensation bet anyway. And I did, because hey, bureaucracy is three interlocked gears and nothing will get done if everyone follows due procedure.

HOWEVER, being the clever little bitch that I am, I do not keep my savings (whoa savings!) in the same bank where my salary lands. So the maximum they can rob me of is my salary or unemployment compensation, which would be devoured anyway by the training compensation I already owe them. There's no money for them to steal that I would have to go to court to get back, and an attempt to extract compensation from me would involve them going to court, which they wouldn't do.

Why steam?

...
Toldya. So Zeno Clash is in the current Indie Royale bundle. I'm going to use the downloaded version if I ever get to play it, because fuck Steam - but from now on for now I do have a legal right to play the game in some form. I paid noticeably more than the minimum - but not as much as for Trine when it was on Humble Bundle, because 1) Indie Royale's money distribution scheme is not transparent and 2) fuck Steam.

Anyway a wild post appears in my RSS reader about the EPIC TRIUMPH of indie games over soulless corporate monsters, and for two days I try to find a device that is capable of browsing sites chock-full of javascript to place a preorder for that totally epic game.

What do you know, it's steam only. These guys are going to rake in upwards of $3M from private users and their game is steam only. "Looking into the possibility of a DRM-free version", seriously now? Holy shit it's your IP, couldn't you tell steam exclusivity to suck a cock and die from the start?


Also, there's an Indie Music Bundle, which I'm going to pass because demanding a higher price for a lossless format is a big no-no, even if you're basically giving stuff for free. This coming from someone who once rebought an album due to accidentally choosing to buy it in MP3 (back when a single purchase didn't mean access to all available formats - it does now). In before "but lossless is heavier!!!": BULLSHIT, not by much considering the overall bandwidth hit from all those ohsoclever $0.01 valued customers (who would still predominantly download mp3s, else it wouldn't be the default option in music e-stores).

(Similarly, demanding more for signed copies on kickstarter is also a big no-no, unless you cannot possibly handle the end product - e.g. you live in the USA and your kickstarted stuff is shipping out of China directly to the customers. Yes, I understand signing takes time and effort - but not priced at $10 per three seconds.)

Hardcore

Yesterday I spent most of the slacking-off time doing data collection and data entry work.

Today was slow, so I started to learn Python (between translating an official statement that No, we won't be trying to build a nuke using this particular thermometer, and explaining to our Western colleagues that they really shouldn't blame the db admin for their failing to upload 75Mb over sat).

All for a single puzzle in an adventure game.

This is not to say that people should put puzzles requiring higher education and/or days of study in their games, but that people should try to make games that would make the player WANT to put in such work.

Alchemy, Mafia, Feudalism and Copyright

My mom was born in a backwater place with an unpronounceable name which I will from now on call Georgetown, because that's what the toponym means. Recently, the reintroduction of feudalism through federal law made people buy land like crazy (reminder: even with the government giving away land to other countries, we're still the largest country in the world, territorially speaking) and build houses on it like crazy (because unused housing land may be confiscated), which in turn created the demand for cheaper (meaning locally produced) modern building materials. Georgetown was especially friendly to ecology-destroying businesses, so it experienced a tremendous economic boom (its neighbors dwindling to obscurity with their furniture and toxic chemicals businesses). 20 years ago, my parents were considered filthy rich for owning a (kinda shitty, but we weren't complaining back then) car. Today, there are bloody traffic jams, and my parents' new car, a Honda CR-V (which cost them all their life savings), isn't particularly good by local standards.

The alchemists' village is halfway between Georgetown and the capital. There's a German glazing plant and not much else. The local crafts traditions have existed since forever and were made a national resource of strategic importance by the decree of the first Romanov tsar (we're talking 450 years ago here). People made alchemical clayware, tableware, pipes, ovens, goddamn bricks and generally behaved as if the clay would never run out.

....surprise, surprise....

The craft survives on imported Ukrainian (shit) and German (awesome) clay. Stupid tourists can't tell the difference (they also can't tell the difference between a spray-on picture of a dick and Ms. Artamonova's exquisite azure-and-gold ornamentation), and since more affluent collectors never visit the place, resellers mark up the price to high heavens, buy out the handmade preciousness and have attempted to put some restrictions on its sale to private people.

And some time ago, the mafia decided to COPYRIGHT THE CRAFT. And they nearly succeeded.

Under the pretense of "preserving the craft", they copyrighted the toponym, copyrighted PAINTING THINGS BLUE and forced the craftsmen out of the firm by not paying them and not heating the factory during winter. They tried to ban people from making stuff in private while being employed at the firm by claiming that every design they invented while being employed is copyrighted by the mafia. They tried to cut off the supply of tools and materials and then claimed people started stealing them from the factory (not a single supposed thief has been caught or acknowledged the alleged theft). They took away the folk craft status from other manufacturers which hit them with an insane tax burden. That sort of shit eventually led to the protesters' star craftsman dying of a stroke at the age of 49. In the autumn, I found their shop closed with no indication of when, or whether, it will be reopened.

The good news is that since then the former chief accountant of the factory spearheaded the effort to get things to quasi-normal. Half a year ago, the shopkeeper at her shop "couldn't comment", yesterday at my wondering aloud whether to buy the incomplete coffee set (awesome sets don't sell in local shops because hardly anyone visiting the place can fork over the money for a complete set) she volunteered, "Why don't you preorder?"

What could I say other than "SIGN ME UP"?

The full set in azure and gold, made from awesome German clay with the late master craftsman's molds, named simply "Morning #3", is going to cost me all the money I was saving toward nothing in particular since paying off my loan (the declared goal was buying a new PC, but turns out the place I now live at is at risk of BURNING TO THE GROUND if something more power-consuming than a Soviet-era clothes-iron is plugged in when the fridge is in the active phase).

And when my dad decided to tell me off, I countered with, "Well, YOU lost the heirloom coffee set to a greasy fuck, so I'm going to buy a new heirloom that my future kids could lose to future greasy fucks! Hooray for family traditions!"

...

Meanwhile, the crystal factory in another town, to the east of Georgetown and its furniture-and-chemicals neighbors, has been bankrupted, resold and is to be "renovated" to produce - what else? - building materials. Fuck. Traditional down scarves have been successfully copyrighted and are now sold for $400-something. However, metal trays painted with awesome ethereal flower motifs - another folk craft - only cost $30 apiece, which won't buy a doodle from an attention whore at deviantart. The mafia hadn't gotten to them. Yet.

National embezzlement month

Today's Windows Update showed me when I last did something useful and/or creative:

Oct 22, 2011.

It's been three months. That's like a prison sentence. I could have punched some fucktard in the face on Oct 22, or ogled some unsuspecting women on cam, or protested something that's worth protesting, and got out today.

However, of all the infinite possibilities, I happened to protest a stupid and wasteful government contract by singlehandedly doing $30000's (contractor's estimate) worth of work in 7 days' (and 2 nights') time, without the perspective of getting paid.

It seems I will get paid for that, however (my usual rate of $7/hour, capped at 8 hours/day, ignoring overtime). But the contract for the work that I have already done is still going through. I'd rather not get paid but stick it to the man, especially considering that I have met the man in question, and he's an asshole hipster fuck (WHO SELLS PIRATED IBM SOFTWARE, HELLO THERE TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN*).

*No, I'm not writing to IBM, because they'll just pass it down to the regional department, who are proven to be CORRUPT FUCKS.

Anyway: If I get paid, I'll use the money to buy a very special 6-person coffee set. Windows Update is being annoying, so why this coffee set is special will have to wait until after I reboot the PC.