Imitation of Life in 2021

My family is visiting next week. I haven’t really prepared for it. My car tags were overdue, so I went to the DEQ and took care of that the other day. Just scheduled an appointment to get some car work done that I had deferred in…October. Whoops! Time to get it done now, I’m going to be driving a lot with family in tow. They get in Wednesday night. I’m thinking we’ll go to something nature-y that’s not too far away Thursday, probably Multnomah Falls or Mount Hood. Friday will be a long-ass drive to the Redwoods, hopefully 5 and a half hours if traffic is decent. I guess we’re getting a hotel somewhere near there, and then driving back the next day. I’m supposed to figure all that out too. I have no clue how to book a hotel. I always just stay home, or on someone’s couch if I’m visiting, because that’s free. Still not used to having a little bit of extra money. Saturday we’ll stop somewhere at the coast and then drive back. Sunday, who knows, and they leave Sunday night. It’ll be weird. Family is such an abstract concept to me at this point. I figured I would come back and visit when I had something to show off, something to prove that leaving wasn’t completely in vain…that never happened. Thirteen years went by pretty quickly. Although I would have been far more miserable staying in my hometown. Better to be a free-roaming ghost than a shackled zombie. Logistically, I’m not sure how it will go either. I have one uncomfortable somewhat short foldout sofa, a long couch that doesn’t fold out, and my bed. I’ll probably take the uncomfortable foldout sofa, so my Dad or brother can figure out which of the other two they want. I was tempted to buy another foldout couch, but it’s only for four days, and I doubt I will have more than one person visiting again. Might as well not spend the money.

I had the pleasure of encountering two catfish accounts on Plentyoffish recently. The first one was pretty obvious, since they were pictures of an extremely attractive, young woman. It took several days of chatting before anything money-related came up, but even before then it was pretty obviously a scam. For one, they deleted their profile right after we started texting, which is suspish. Two, and most importantly, they sent a picture of “them”, then later sent another picture, and it was clearly a different person! And then sent a third picture a bit later, that was the first person, but they had two visible tattoos. I’d asked earlier after the first picture, which had one tattoo, if they had any others, and they said no. If you’re going to try to scam someone, at least be consistent. The second was more convincing, and took longer to get to the money-scam point, but was also kind of odd. How are people this bad at trying to scam people? Do they not figure out the scheme first and think of what possible questions the dupe would ask and plan accordingly? With the latter scammer, they said they couldn’t get into their Steam account and they needed a gift card to get into it. I asked how they would redeem it, and they said they’d redeem it once they were logged in, even though at that point, such a non-existent entry fee wouldn’t be necessary. After I told them that that wouldn’t work and that if they actually couldn’t get into their account, they’d have to email customer support, they got aggressive about it. LOL. At least be consistent. With the first scammer, it was easy to reverse image search one of the pictures and find the real person’s twitter, whose age and lifestyle were far different than the manufactured persona. With the second one, I just googled “their” first and last name and occupation and found the real person’s Instagram. Most of the details lined up, except they were using really old pictures when she had short hair. I think that’s almost creepier though, using a real person’s actual name and some details that you’d only learn by stalking their Instagram or Facebook or whatever, and then trying to pass it off as being a real person. Just to try to scam someone out of a Steam card? Like, seriously, is that worth it for the amount of effort it takes to text someone back for several days? And that’s assuming that it would work on someone on the first try. But yeah, it did not work on me. I’m far too distrusting and cynical as it is, let alone when an attractive woman messages me on a dating site out of nowhere and seems far too interested. I couldn’t turn off my bullshit alarms if I tried. Everyone wants something, and I know it ain’t my looks, so it must be my money.

Online dating is pointless at the moment anyway. I need to get my ass back to the gym, assuming that it’s still open. Things are going to be locking down again within a month or two, I’m sure of it. Maybe we’ll maintain this pseudo-lockdown state where we wear masks everywhere but everything is open, but I doubt it. I’ve lost a few pounds just through diet, but I need to add the exercise back in. Appearance is what counts online, that’s just the meta. I have been growing this ridiculous mustache for a couple months now, not sure what to do with that, or if it’s worth growing or anyone would find it attractive. Of course my guy friends say to grow it out, but that could be for entertainment purposes, which is only useful to a point. It does look better than when I started though. Maybe I should just let everything grow out and fully embrace the stereotypical Portland bearded dude look.

I’ve gotten somewhat caught up with websites at work. There was one author that was a total dickhead about the design I made for his site, even though some of it was based on his suggestions or lack thereof and the color scheme was themed to go with the colors of the book cover. My buddy took over working on it after that, and then the guy was just as much of a dick to him, and still didn’t like that design. He apparently specifically wanted the header image of the site to be the book cover, but he never said that early on, or even in the middle. Plus, it kind of looks like shit, since the image resolution isn’t high enough. We have a company account at a royalty-free design site, so that’s generally where I go to look for images when I make a site. Anyway, that rattled me for a bit, but I felt better when I realized that guy was just an egomaniac who wanted to do everything himself, despite paying us to make him a website. I’m going to work every day until Thursday to keep stuff caught up before I take several days off while family is visiting. It’s still hard to stay motivated and focused throughout the whole day, but I’m getting there. I like the job, I just get restless.

Went to the local bowling alley arcade with the roommates and a couple friends we’ve only just started hanging out with after not for a year and a half because of the pandemic. I missed hanging out with them, and going to that arcade. Laser tag always hits the spot, and they had a Virtual Reality version of Overcooked that was insanely fun. When we got back to the house, we were just hanging out in the driveway for some reason, and through chance ended up getting to know the neighbors across from us. Mostly because the wife was out with their super cute Corgi and my friends are very enthusiastic and sociable. The husband and wife and their dogs came to hang out and we just chatted and drank for a bit. Pretty cool, who knows if we’ll hang out with them again but it was fun. I get so into my own head and world, I don’t even bother to try to reach out to people like that. Then again, I assume they don’t want to be bothered.

We’ve been streaming on Twitch recently. We had a house channel when there were five of us in the previous residence, and it sat unused for months toward the end and afterward. I dusted it off and got a setup going so we could play a friend’s Mario Maker world that he had made and he could enjoy us getting trolled by his level designs. By happenstance, right after we started streaming one night, we got raided by a popular Mario Maker streamer, and there were 800 something(!) people watching us for a bit. That of course died quickly, but it was cool, and artificially spiked our numbers high enough to get affiliate. We have a couple regulars who stuck around from that, and usually some friends watching, so it’s cozy for now. There tend to be 5-15 people watching, and that seems perfect. I’m not interested in making money off of it, just seeing how far we can casually take it. There’s a mod for playing some old retro games, and somehow it’s coded so that the people watching the stream can pay coins to affect what’s going on in the game. It’s pretty nuts. I assume normal people try to make money off of it, since you can set how much things cost, and people can pay money to get more coins. I basically set everything at 1, instead of 50 or 100 like it is by default, so it’s been pure chaos. People messing up our controls, changing game physics, making us use certain items, insta-killing us…quite a bit of fun. There aren’t too many games that you can get crazy with, so we’ll move on at some point, but it’s fun for now.

I’ll be getting my next tattoo next month. Well, possible three little ones, if they are able to get a certain ink, if not my friend is working on a backup design I want to get. I don’t want them to all be video game-related, but for now it makes sense. Music and wrestling are the other things I’m passionate about, but I can’t think offhand about any design I’d want to get. I’m not really interested in getting anything referring to a specific person, mostly just abstract designs that might have some sort of slight meaning. And tattoos that are colorful. My first one has faded a little bit, but it’s not bad. The one I got recently is definitely more colorful and pops a bit more, we’ll see how it looks in a few months.