Old Dork Yells at Clouds

In Plano a couple of weeks ago, some company opened a goofy licensed Minecraft LARP in an abandoned Buy Buy Baby. For some reason, the company decided that our plain suburb should be the first stop for their "experience". Seems inconsequential right? No one would notice its coming and passing besides some Minecraft enjoyers.

Wrong. Local social media has been flooded with free tickets to this thing. Why?

If you buy a ticket and attend this experience, they e-mail you a code for cosmetic DLC for Minecraft. A cape. A really ugly cape. That is selling for 200 dollars. The catch that you can't get the code without actually going to the event and getting your ticket scanned. So people who live all over the world are spamming local social media with free tickets. Locals go to this dumb thing, and the buyers get a $200 item that they can scalp online since the code is sent to the e-mail that bought the tickets.

Hey, kids, you can mod Minecraft and put any texture you want in there. It's one of the selling points of the game - modability. Please don't incentivize the Internet to scam locals in my city, Minecraft Experience. I hate our lame cyberpunk present.

I haven't bought a car in 7 years. The last time I bought a car, I bought it from Ewing Subaru in Plano. It was simple. I didn't even have to haggle much, and I got a great deal as it had some very minor hail damage. It was a good experience.

That was not the case for me yesterday. After a 6 month experiment of going car-light in a sprawling Texas suburb, my family and I decided it wasn't working. Expect a post on this at a later date.

I wanted a car that was reliable, and preferably electric, since I have gotten spoiled driving my wife's EV. Right now, the best deal for the majority of EVs is to lease, since many of the cars on the market do not meet the requirements for getting the Inflation Reduction Act's $7,500 tax credit.

The base model 2024 Subaru Solterra is easily the best deal in car leases right now. You can get one for 329 down, 329 a month (plus tax and title). It is this low because it is selling really badly - at least until they announced this deal a couple of months ago.

Interested in this deal, I called Ewing Subaru. They said that they had what I wanted - even if they didn't have a car on the lot. They claimed there was a car that they could get from another dealership in the garish color I wanted. So I decided to head down there on my day off. On my way down there in an Uber, they called me and said that the car was sold the night before but they did have one in a higher trim. Classic Bait and Switch. They said they might be able to find another base model (spoiler: they couldn't).

Since I was already on my way, I figured I would humor them. I did a test drive, and got the numbers. It was $6,000 down instead of $0 and $329 a month. Needless to say, I walked out.

I ended up with a Fiat 500e later that day. To be honest, it's what I wanted in the first place. I always said that my next car would be small, bright, weird, and electric. That's the 500e in a nutshell. The Subaru lease deal was just too good to pass up - which ended up really being too good to be true.

I think everyone should write their representatives about allowing direct car sales in the United States and Texas in particular. As Robert Evans has said many times, it would be good for democracy and consumers.

I was in a weird spot in Plano as I was fleeing from a bait-and-switch at Ewing Subaru. Behold, the saddest DART bus stop in history:

You are standing in an undeveloped field. No sidewalk and no bench. Nothing around it except a gas station and a plastic surgery clinic. The stop is only served by the 239, which comes every hour. You can do better than this.

The general consensus of people who grew up on the early Internet is that it is dying. At least, the places on the Internet that still capitalize the word as if it was a proper place. However, folks slightly younger than me insist that the Internet has been dead since September 1993. I don't think either is the case, but the independent spirit of the Internet is gone. Everyone is siloed in the one site that they regularly use. For the olds, it's Facebook. For the kids, it's Tik Tok and the walled garden of app stores. My generation, the older cohort of Millennials, really doesn't have a place. Our places have nearly died out - the loose collection of blogs and forums on the open web. The perpetrator? The same thing that kills everything good - capitalism.

It's time to fix it. You can still host a blog on a box in the closet like this one. You can still federate via RSS, or if you are on the COPE-ing edge, something like the Fediverse. That's not me. I don't really care about amplifying my voice. If people somehow find this, that's cool. If people don't, I'm fine with that as well. Is yelling into the digital void better or worse than social media shitposting? If I write and no one reads it, that is far more ethical than writing junk that is consumed by the multitude through social media amplifiers. Perhaps a Hippocratic Oath for the Internet is needed - post, but do not amplify or publish beyond your network neighborhood.

I tried to find a platform to write on that I liked. I tried cohost. That didn't work out very well. I still like their anti-software manifesto, it's a shame that it didn't work out. I tried writing through Listed, the Standard Notes blogging platform. I didn't really care for their style options, but other than that, Listed was perfectly cromulent. Standard Notes has a less radical longevity statement than cohost's anti-sfotware manifesto, but that doesn't seem to have stopped them from being bought by Proton. Maybe the idea that capitalism ruins everything isn't so radical?

It's time to tap into the old Internet's DIY spirit. Host your blog in a box in your closet. Don't even try to be sustainable or ethical. Just post.