Last week, apparently Patty and Spencer had some sort of event. Of course, they didn’t e-mail or call anyone; they sent out invitations via Facebook. I don’t have a Facebook account—I have this dedicated virtual host, where I can run whatever I want and post whatever I want, and no disinterested corporate entity can delete my posts, mine my data, change the user interface, or send spam to me every day.
Hm. Saturday, I went to the library and got some more books. They’re doing a lot of construction on the library now, so the southwest portion of it is blocked off and the book drops have changed places. I got some coffee at the coffeeshop, and also got 15 minutes of loud yakking from 4 people who didn’t understand the concept of “inside voice” and were apparently thinking of selling screen-printed T-shirts. I know a few things about screen printing, so I listened in at first. After a few minutes, I wished that they would shut up, because they kept repeating themselves, were overly optimistic, and had a business plan that was either insanely optimistic or relied on a bunch of stupid people buying the stuff they were selling.
Reading The Big Con by David Maurer. This book was published in 1940, and is an interesting historical overview of confidence games as practiced in the USA from the late 1800s to the 1930s. The specifics don’t translate to the present—most of the schemes outlined rely on outdated technology—but the general outlines of the scams are still valid. Basically: Take your mark, rope him in, build up his confidence by having him obtain some money in carefully staged shady dealings with shills, then get him to put up a large amount of money. Then separate him from that money using a number of strategies involving fake violence and/or threats from the police. At all times, the con men must appeal to the mark’s greed and pride. The cons described in the book are far more elaborate than anything Bernie Madoff ever did, yet the con operators got far less inflation-adjusted cash than Madoff managed. I’m not sure what that tells us in the long run.
I downloaded the demo of “Brütal Legend”. Well, it’s still going, since it’s 1.5 G and going quite slowly for some reason. I guess I’ll get to try it out tomorrow and see what an RPG inspired by heavy metal is like.
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Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackI facebook. It is like a mini blog. But I understand refusing to give up control, especially when you have the knowledge to create your own blog and so forth.
But I post my kids photos on there, which is convenient. school photos just came in.
I understand why people use Facebook. But there are just a lot of reasons why I’d rather have personalized control over everything. I didn’t write much of any software for this blog; I took WordPress and modified a theme that someone else built. The stuff I’ve written from scratch is a lot more bare-bones (like the searchable book database).
I also wanted something more than what Facebook delivers, like image hosting, an SMTP server, and a place to fool around with whatever. Most people don’t want all of that.