helen-louise's journal

Okay, no matter what your opinions of Google since the Google+ real name policy fiasco, I highly recommend that you go to your local region's version of the Google search page and click "Play" on the Google Doodle of today. It's amazing!

I didn't know that Google Doodles could be videos, but there you are. Now I'm wondering what other ones I've missed. Heh.

In other news, I am home from BiCon and very slowly re-spooning.

Something fluffy I should have posted weeks ago:

Local boy with cancer turns into a superhero for a day. From the Seattle Times. Linked by Topless Robot.

Electron Boy's amazing power felt worldwide.

This may interest some of you: Film director Kevin Smith is thrown off US plane for being 'too big for seat'. In a series of Tweets, he laid into Southwest Airlines for their poor customer service. I'm going to copy & paste a lot because he is too verbose for 140 characters!

Dear @SouthwestAir - I know I'm fat, but was Captain Leysath really justified in throwing me off a flight for which I was already seated?

Here's the story, as told today:

Via @mitch_bartlett "if you normally fit well in the seats, why do u normally purchase 2 tickets" SWA tickets are cheap enough to afford it.
Had three seats/whole row for me & Jen. She skipped SF, so I went solo checked in and was given the 2 tix there & return 2 (for that p.m.).
Going out, even with 2 tix, I only sat in one seat, sleeping against window, w/empty seat between me and follow passenger. Coming back would
have been the same, at 7pm. But I got to the airport early enough to try to bump-up my flight to 5:20 - a practice @SouthwestAir does often.
I was told 5:20 flight was packed, but I could go Standby. They sent me to gate. Told lady whole story, and she said there wouldn't be two
seats on that earlier flight. I said I only needed one seat & that I didn't buy an extra seat because I'm fat (which I am), but because I'm
anti-social and didn't want to sit next to someone & possibly have to make convo (in person, I'm very shy). She said she understood. I was
issued the solo ticket. I get on the plane: open seat in the front row. Put my bag away, the sit between two ladies. As I'm about to buckle
my extender-less seatbelt, the woman who issued the ticket to me appeared in the doorway of the plane, came over to me and said the Captain
said I wasn't going to be allowed to sit there because I was a safety risk. I asked for clarification and was given none (also asked "Please
don't do this" but that, too, fell on deaf ears. Ladies on either side said I wasn't a problem. SWA-lady said arm-rests the decider. Arm-
rests come down, and voila! I'm legit! I've passed the stinkin' arm-rest-test. And still, the lady asks me to get up and come with her off
the plane. I get up without a fuss at all, quietly grab my bag, make eye contact with a fellow Fatty who was praying he'd pass, and leave.
You think I wanna fuck around on an airplane? I was right: I fit in that seat. But I can't risk not complying: I'm more afraid of AirFeds.

Here's a cartoon that a fan drew. I think that most of us can probably relate to it. (Even Richard, who is of average height and rather skinny, doesn't have enough room on planes. The problem is with the plane, not with the customer.)

( A bunch of Kevin Smith's Tweets from the plane: )

Dear Other Airlines (including Oceanic, sans Flight 815): I'm in the market for a flight east this Thurs. Which one of you likes fat people?

Look folks: some people seem to think that because I work in the pictures, I should piss away money on private jets or first class flights.
Rest assured: I take LOTS of first class flights. But while I've got some comfortable money, it'd disappear quick if I didn't respect a $.
So for quick, 1hr flights to Vegas or SF from LA, I never minded @SouthwestAir. Never had a problem with them before, either.
But contrary to their claim that I regularly purchase two seats, I wasn't a regular 2-seat buyer until just this week. They SEIZED on that.
In their "apology" blog, they implied (or flat-out wrote) that I regularly purchase 2 seats. Writing that buttresses their lie: 2 Fat 2 Fly.
But, by their own guidelines, I was not, in fact, 2 Fat 2 Fly: the arm rests went down & I could buckle my seat belt w/o an extender. So...?
Hey @SouthwestAir: you bring that same row of seats to the DailyShow, and I'll sit in 'em for all to see on TV.
If I don't fit, I'll donate $10k to charity of your choice. But when I do (& buckle the belt as well)? 1) You admit you lied. 2) Change your
policy, or at least re-train your staff to be a lot more human & a lot less corporate when they pull a poor girl off the plane & shame her.

And there's even more at SMODCAST #106: Go Fuck Yourself, Southwest Airlines. I've got 10 minutes into the broadcast and he's still going on... Apparently it's an hour and a half and features him telling his story "as PRELUDE to real story: the poor girl @SouthwestAir shamed on my flight home."

Does Twitter have an interface for seeing Tweets in chronological order as posted, rather than reverse chronological order? I wonder how people who use Twitter regularly cope with seeing everything backwards. It's driven me nuts in writing this entry!

Those of you who've been online all day will know this already, but for people like me who've just got online: Pakistan's ex-Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was killed in a suicide bombing attack today.

The impression I have is that she was no angel, though to what extent she was genuinely guilty of corruption and to what extent the charges were falsified is a question that can't be answered. But it is really quite scary that the leader of a political party can be assassinated just before an election in a country whose stability is a serious issue for the world in general.

Another fake internet death. Actually, this one was more of a fake internet coma, but they tend to end in fake internet deaths if the person's lies aren't caught in time.

This one didn't take place on a public forum, but in private email, so there's a limit to what I can say without infringing my friend (the victim of this fraud)'s privacy. But I suppose I can give you a general sketch impression.

So, my friend's friend, X - also an acquaintance of mine - is supposedly in business. (I say "supposedly" because the details of the company he allegedly owns reek of bullshit to me - but I can't go into details.) My friend got an email last week from X's "assistant" at "work", claiming that she was on the shortlist of people that the assistant should contact if anything happened to X. Apparently he had collapsed at work and was in a coma. But he was also described as being "stable" and in "good condition health-wise". That would be where my alarm bells started ringing, and I promptly spent a few hours with the Merck Manual to check things out.

( Read more... )

It gets worse. My friend, quite distressed, emailed the "assistant" to ask for a hospital or other address where she could send flowers. She was told "While cards and gifts would be touching under normal circumstances, they could prove unsettling for him should he experience memory failure." Erm... I read the full text of the two emails together as implying that X knew there was something potentially wrong with him, and had left instructions in case the illness flared up. Even if that implication - that he knew about the illness - is wrong, we are talking about a single condition causing both coma and amnesia together.

Um. There's rather a shortage of those. ( Read more... ) Brain tumours could do it, so could strokes, so could being in a major accident that caused brain injury - but nothing where you were previously healthy and just collapse at work. Some serious illnesses like meningitis and encephalitis could do it - but you wouldn't be described as in "good health" in that case! If there is no real illness that could cause this, then my mind says it must be fake.

But it gets worse. My friend managed to find X's postal address that he'd given her once. We checked it out and obtained a phone number. She called the house and asked to speak to X. The housemate said "just a minute" then "I think he's still at work". As I said to Richard "you ring someone's house, ask to speak to the person, their housemate says "just a minute" then "I think he's at work", that means he's probably not in a coma, right?".( Read more... ) Also, when my friend told me the email address X and the "assistant" had used to send the emails, I googled it along with "2007", and discovered that X had managed to make multiple posts to web forums despite being in a coma. The text of some of the posts were cached on Google, and they were apparently perfectly normal posts from him - and not his sockpuppet "assistant" posting on the forum to tell people he was in a coma.

What angers me about this is the sheer level of contempt that X had for my friend. He has totally underestimated her intelligence and resourcefulness, and the resources she has available. Once I had all of the information, it took me less than 5 minutes to discover that, far from being in a coma, he was still making posts on fecking Warcraft forums. But I still had the courtesy to take the time and effort to check up on his story, to make sure I didn't accuse him of lying when it was real.

Why do people play these kind of games? We have no idea what made him do it. They had been close friends, then they hadn't talked for a few weeks, then he pulls this stunt. I've read a lot now about "Munchausen by internet" and attention seeking behaviour on online forums, and I understand that some people find manipulation of real-life people's emotions fun. But I just can't fucking fathom it. It's bad enough when people do it to whole forums, but in private email? Why do that to someone who you previously called a friend?

I have some advice for the internet fake deathers. Go and play with sims. This kind of manipulation is for pixel people, not real ones. Even better, go make some friends in real life that you actually care about, rather than looking for attention online.

One day, you'll be on the receiving end of a prank like this, and it's going to hurt.

( Footnote. )