RAGEQUIT! Or: I Went to Target

On September 17, 2018September 17, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy3 Comments

target I had a moderately– but only moderately– stressful day at work today, which made me think when I got home that a nice way to relax might be to spend some time playing the vidya gaemz. And did I play Spider-Man, with its soothing and fun web-slinging action? No. I played Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin, which is a fucking bastard of a game.

I played Dark Souls II to relax.

Those of you who have played this game are laughing at me right now, and you are right to do so.

So here’s the deal with the Dark Souls series: first, it’s balls-hard even just in the basic gameplay. It doesn’t matter how big, rough and tough your character is; lose focus and even the lowliest scrub enemy is going to be able to kill you in a few hits. On top of that, you gain experience by killing bad guys like you do in a lot of games, but you actually spend that experience like currency to gain levels, and you can’t do that just anywhere; each game in the series has one place where you can gain those levels. And if you get killed, you drop all your experience points in the place where you died. Want those thousands of XP representing a few possible levels back? You gotta get back to where you just got killed without getting killed again and pick ’em back up, then escape to get where you can actually use them. Die again along the way? Too bad so sad, them shits are gone.

And DSII: SotFS is a special edition, one where they added a bunch of enemies, because apparently vanilla Dark Souls isn’t fucking hard enough.

Long story short; I got killed like three thousand times in a row, in a very enemy-heavy area, where none of the enemies are very tough but if you quit paying attention even for a couple seconds you’re dead, and the last time I left like four levels’ worth of XP on the table when some fucker I’d missed and walked right past stabbed me in the back, maybe three feet from my damn green blob of love.

And I did something I haven’t done in something like 35 years of gaming: I broke my fucking controller. I spiked the thing like a goddamn football and then watched as the PS4 helpfully told me that it had lost contact with the controller.

Fuuuuck.

Fifteen minutes to dinner. Well, I can’t turn the damn game off without a controller, and the boy’s gonna want to play Spider-Man later, so… Target is pretty close. I can totally go to Target and get a new controller in fifteen minutes.

Off to Target. I’m on a mission and I know exactly where I’m going, so I don’t pay too much attention to the young lady who smiles at me and says hello as I’m walking past her, and I say hello back but I’m probably fifteen feet past her before I realize that I’m pretty sure she’s a former student, one who I haven’t seen since sixth grade (she moved) and who just graduated high school. But I don’t realize it until I’m well past the point where I can turn back around and say hi, plus I legitimately haven’t seen the kid in six years and I’m not 100% sure.

I find the video game section. I find PS4 controllers. They’re locked up. And someone else smiles at me and asks me where the Xbox controllers are.

And I realize I’m in Target in a red shirt. Sigh.

I know the answer, so fuck it, I answer her question.

A moment later, someone in a blue shirt asks me if I need any help, and I have a brief split-second of pure confusion– because I don’t work here, and someone just asked me for help, and you clearly don’t work here, so why are you asking me if you can help me?

And then I see the Target Security logo on his blue shirt. Oh, OK. Fine. Gimme this controller.

He goes and gets a guy. The guy is maybe 25. And by this point I’m sort of laughing at myself, so I tell the guy that I’ve been a gamer for something like 35 years and I just rage-smashed my first controller.

He laughs, and– I swear to God, and these games are old enough that it makes no sense that he said this– says “Dark Souls or Bloodborne?”

“Dark Souls II. The No-Man’s Wharf.”

And he knows exactly what I’m talking about, and we commiserate for a minute or two, and he offers me a protection plan on the new controller, which I decline and I probably should have bought.

And then I see a second former student, also looking for video game paraphernalia, although this one doesn’t immediately recognize me. And he’s got a bunch of friends with him so I don’t bother saying hi.

And then I leave. Or at least try to.

And then I see a third former student, this one also an employee, and we talk for a moment. And then I see the first former student again, and yes, it’s her, and she laughs and tells me she’d just sent a text message to someone else from her class who she knows I’m still in touch with to ask her to ask me if I’d just been to Target.

I, of course, had been thinking that I’d text that exact same person to see if the first girl worked at Target, so this plan makes perfect sense.

And then I went home, ate dinner, resolved to go directly to the boss of the stage without bothering to go get my souls along the way, because fuck them, died while doing that by falling off a Goddamned bridge, then finally made it to the boss and not only beat that bastard on the first try but I didn’t even get hit.

The moral of this story is that you shouldn’t break controllers, and if you do you shouldn’t leave your house afterwards.

The end.

In which I wasn’t mad until you apologized

On January 19, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized11 Comments

I haven’t talked much about the Great Target Data Breachenationing of 2013, mostly because, honestly, I haven’t been terribly concerned about it– I was one of the ones theoretically affected, because there’s a Target basically in my back yard and I shop there all the time, but I also generally keep a really close eye on my bank account and so I would have noticed any suspicious charges basically immediately. I feel like for the most part Target has behaved as a relatively responsible corporate citizen while all this has been going on, my bank hasn’t made the decision to fuck me unduly like some other banks did; no big deal, right?

I got an email from Target a few days ago; so did my wife and so did, very likely, a whole lot of you, offering me a free year of credit monitoring as a way to make amends. I’d love to know how much coin Target had to shell out to make this happen or if Experian is just figuring they can make it up on the back end by convincing a shitton of new customers to keep going after that year is up. I don’t currently have any kind of credit monitoring turned on, although I have in the past, and I’m considering taking them up on their offer. The email is, generally, very apologetic about the whole affair, and it appears that they’ve located a seventeen-year-old (of course it was a teenager) in St. Petersburg who wrote the malware that made the hack possible.

It didn’t hit me until yesterday that, at least for me personally, there’s sort of a big question hanging over my head about the whole thing, and that question didn’t come to light until I got that email:

How the hell did Target get my email address?

I have never ordered anything from Target.com. Target doesn’t ask for emails as a part of doing business. I have– and I checked, and since I use gmail my email archive goes back to forever— never received any emails from them before. I don’t have a Target credit card, and never have, and certainly didn’t in December when the breach happened. We had a wedding registry with them six years ago, but that was with my wife’s email; mine wasn’t on it.

I can think of one way and one way only that they might have it, which is that I applied for a Target field trip grant for the DC trip this year– but that wasn’t attached to any bank or debit card information, and the address and phone number I provided them was my school address and phone number, so even if they’re cross-matching databases the address and phone number wouldn’t match what they (might?) have through my debit card. They could, maybe, have done a match with my name and town and made an assumption– but that itself assumes that they’re willing to have a pretty fair number of false positives, and also that they’re working their asses off to collect and consolidate customer data that they have, in turn, then never used until this data breach. If they got it from my bank, I kinda feel like my bank ought to have told me that, and they didn’t.

I find myself more curious about how they got my email than I am about how the hack was able to happen. I don’t know if that indicates skewed priorities on my part or not. And maybe if you’re going to send a giant email to millions of people about how your data collection process got screwed up and compromised, you include a line somewhere about how you got the information that allowed you to contact them in the first place.

On venturing into public

On September 19, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, TeachingLeave a comment

My belly is full of pizza and my brain is full of nonsense. At the moment I prefer the contents of my belly; ultimately the pizza will cost me less. That said, it’s been a very long time since I was getting any kind of exercise regularly– and, despite my near-permanent status as a professional fat dude, I actually enjoy exercise. I got a weird little thrill when my wife pointed out that the current bathroom mirror (which is six feet wide and about four high, with no borders– just a big piece of mirrored glass) ought to go down into the basement as part of our as-yet nonexistent home gym. I was actually angry with myself that I hadn’t thought of it on my own.

I ran into three different families’ worth of students during the ten minutes that I was buying pizza, by the way, which makes me think maybe living in more or less the same neighborhood as my school isn’t that much of an advantage.

One of them asked me what I was doing there, which tells you the caliber of kids I’m dealing with. (Yes, this is an unfair thing to say. No student anywhere thinks his teachers are real people, and running into us in public, thus confirming the unwelcome truth that we exist outside of our classrooms, is always an occasion for wonder and mystery. But it’s still funny.)

“I’m here for pizza,” I told her.

“Really?” she asked.

I leaned forward.

“I actually live here,” I whispered, and pointed under one of the chairs by the door. “I slept there last night. Don’t tell anybody.”

Her eyes tripled in size. Her mother got their pizza (I was waiting for a Deep Dish pizza, which takes longer even though it’s more of a Deep Ish pizza) and shot me a weird look as they left.

By the time the third family said hello and left, I think the employees thought I was some sort of rock star.

The pudgy, bald, talentless kind, of course.

I tried to spend part of last night applying for a field trip grant through Target. Have I mentioned the DC trip yet? I take a group of seventh and eighth graders to Washington, D.C. every two years, and this year is a travel year. The trip is hella expensive so we’re trying to find a good way to pay for it that doesn’t involve me having to run a fundraiser. First it took twenty minutes and two changes of my password to log into the site, which is justweird, and then after taking three thousand or so characters to say I want to take my kids to DC so they can lern history gud, it lost my entire application except for the biographical part at the beginning. Frustrated, I tried to flip to the last section of the application, which asks me to break the trip cost down in ways that are frankly impossible (it costs, roughly, $800 per kid, but that’s a flat fee– they don’t break it down by transportation or food or lodging or whatever. It’s just $800. Target wants everything broken down specifically– I can’t even realistically estimate those numbers– and I doubt they’ll like it very much if I just put $32,000 HOLY FUCKING HELL ARE WE SERIOUSLY PAYING THEM THIRTY-TWO GRAND into one of the boxes.

Holy shit. How the hell are they making thirty-two thousand dollars off of us? That’s fucking insane. Mental note: redouble plans to become a DC tour guide once I decide I can’t teach any longer.

Jesus.