A failure to communicate, or Darkftar Rifing

I don’t use eBay very often. Once or twice a year, at most. I don’t have the patience to get into bidding wars, and on the few recent occasions I have dipped my toes in, I’ve wound up with an acute case of buyer’s remorse: I wound up with a Nintendo Wii that I didn’t particularly want last January because I placed a bid that I didn’t expect would actually win the auction. That’s nobody’s fault but my own, of course, but it illustrates why I generally pay little attention to online auctions.

With the holiday season here, however, and my finances tighter than usual, I figured I’d dust off my old account and see if I could locate a few deals in order to check some people off my gift list. I logged into to my old account (after several failed attempts at remembering my old username/password combo), and immediately noticed that the e-mail address I had on file was defunct. For going on three years. No problem, I thought, I’ll just update it and be on my merry way.

Not so fast! Apparently, eBay thought my e-mail address was too similar to my user name (seancdaug), and wouldn’t let me proceed. So I changed my user name by tacking on my birth year, which is what I’ve done for a few other sites (seancdaug1981). What eBay’s errors messages didn’t tell me, however, was that this was still too similar to my e-mail address. Only now, I was at an impasse: eBay only allows user names to be changed once a month, and if I waited that long to update my e-mail, I’d miss the holidays entirely.

So I had the choice of setting up a sock puppet e-mail address for the express purpose of receiving eBay announcements, or phoning eBay’s customer support and getting them to resolve the issue. I chose the latter, and eventually got through to a helpful woman who did manage to resolve the problem, after a fashion.

The problem is, she had a pronounced accent, and I’m apparently not as clear over the phone as I’d like to think that I am. The solution we devised was to have her manually change my user name, after which I would (at last) be able to update my e-mail address. In search of a suitable name, I went with my secondary fallback, “wildfire-darkstar.” Only she didn’t hear “wildfire-darkstar,” even after a somewhat humorous spelling attempts (“fish indigo rose epsilon,” and so forth). And so, for at least the next 30 days, I shall be known to eBay merchants and bargain hunters as “wildfire-darkftar”! I can’t help but think of the pre-1800 tendency to typeset “f” in place of “s” (e.g., “Congreff” instead of “Congress”).

Honestly, I’m more amused by anything else. As I said, I don’t use eBay often enough to care whether or not my user name makes any logical sense, and the most important thing was to get my e-mail address working properly. And the support woman was, despite our communications problem, so helpful and conscientious that I didn’t have the heart to inform her of the typo. The only real complaint I have is that eBay should’ve made it more clear in their account management interface how dissimilar the user name and password needed to be.

My, my, my, where does the time go?

Well, here we are seven and a half months later, and I’ve completely blown my promise to keep to a more regular update schedule. In my defense, it’s been kind of a messy year so far. I’ve gone through an unpleasant phase, and I’ve only recently started to feel like myself again. I’ve also moved into a new apartment, bought a new computer, and learned a valuable lesson about not placing eBay bids as a lark.

I’ll tell you more about what I’ve been up to later on, but I thought I’d first post a few video gaming-related updates. Towards the end of last year, I wound up with both an Xbox 360 and a Wii. The former I wanted, the latter was the result of the aforementioned ill-considered eBay bid. I’ve gotten a fair amount of mileage out of the 360, actually. More than I had expected. I bought it primarily out of interest in two or three games (Eternal Sonata, Mass Effect, and Rock Band), but I’ve managed to find various other things to keep me playing. I still haven’t beaten Mass Effect, though. I made a good amount of headway into January of this year, but then I somehow managed to corrupt my user profile and lose my saved games. I haven’t been able to make myself sit down and start over as yet. But I’ve lived the Rock Band lifestyle, and I’m absolutely loving it. Harmonix and Activision’s devotion to making new content available online is great, and despite the higher-than-usual price tag for the whole set, I’ve never once felt that I wasted my money.

The Wii, on the other hand, hasn’t seen much action. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m primarily interested in role-playing games and turn-based strategy games, and neither is in great abundance on the system. The handful of Virtual Console games I’ve any interest in I’ve already played on the original consoles, and WiiWare’s original online content has been very slow to match the quality or quantity of material available on Xbox Live. I enjoyed Wii Sports, to be sure, Super Paper Mario was a decent little diversion, and I’ve been meaning to pick up the new Fire Emblem game, but not much else really excites my interest.

On the handheld front, I’ve played the rereleases of Final Fantasy Tactics and Disgaea for the PSP, and thoroughly enjoyed both of them, even if they weren’t particularly original. Jeanne d’Arc was fun, and I found myself enjoying Brooktown High more than I probably should have. At long last, I’ve started to feel that the DS is holding up its end of the bargain on the games front, with a succession of pretty good titles, including Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings, Final Fantasy Tactics A2, Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja, and the remake of Hoshigami taking up much of my time. I also finally managed to snag a copy of the elusive second Phoenix Wright game, so I’ve been catching up on that front.

For the PC, I’ve been playing a great deal of Europa Universalis III and it’s quasi-sequel/spin-off EU: Rome, which are the sort of games-for-history-nerds that you never thought they actually made. I’ve also been playing a bit of the Total War series, and I’ve been eyeing my old discs of Planescape: Torment. It’s been almost a decade since I played through it the first time, and I’m having nostalgia pangs.

Anyway, that’s it for now. I’ll try to be back in a day or two, where I’ll share my springtime gardening experiences. That should be worth a laugh or two. In the meantime, swing over to Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog and support Joss Whedon’s (creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly) first attempt at a straight-to-the-web musical comedy.

Feliz Navidad!

Not much to say at the moment other than merry Christmas and happy new year! Please enjoy the scariest Christmas carol of them all:

Pardon me for a moment of self-indulgent whining

Okay, I’m suspect this is going to turn out atypically depressing. Honestly, I’m not sure why I’m writing it: I can only see it garnering two kind of reactions, and neither put me in a good light. You’ll either think I’m being overly pessimistic and possibly even worry about my emotional stability, or you’ll actually agree with what I have to say, which would do nothing to make me feel any better. I guess, under the circumstances, I’m lucky that no one reads this thing.

Anyway, as I may have let slip in a couple of prior postings, I’m a proud left-winger, politically, economically, and socially. In general, my attitudes would probably be classified as radical as things are determined here in the U.S.A. Obviously, the United States of America nowadays is not the most encouraging environment for an extreme left-winger, but I’m used to that sort of displeasure, and if I didn’t admire and respect the ideals on which my country was founded, I wouldn’t still be here. But for a variety of reasons, both personal and political, 2007 has been an unusually upsetting year for me.

I’m at a bit of a crossroads in my personal life, having just finished grad school and started looking for not just a job but a career for the first time in my life. I feel like I’m in a really unstable position, looking at an uncertain future and twenty years of student loan repayments. I’ve got a fair share of health problems stemming from a poor hand dealt to me by genetics, and I’ve had numerous run-ins with a health insurance industry that vacillates between disingenuous concern for my wellbeing (“we worry about you: let us send an adviser with limited medical training to assist you in taking care of yourself”) and downright hostility to my attempts to get them to cover my medical expenses. I still can’t find any other logical way to connect these two positions without resorting to malicious conspiracy theorizing. Given how little my insurance seems to care about covering the medical supplies necessary to keep me alive, I’m not sure what an insurance-provided “health coach” (or whatever the heck they call them) is going to do except to try to convince me that I don’t really need to see a doctor about any gaping head wounds I may contract in the future.

That’s not the extent of my worries, though. As bad as my health concerns are, I take some small comfort in the fact that they are, at least, my health concerns. I may not be able to control them, but at least I can take out my frustration directly with typically unhelpful telephone support people. I also worry about things almost completely out of my control. Like, for instance, the environment. I do everything in my power to have as little impact on the environment as possible: I don’t drive, I rely on public transportation. I try to avoid unnecessary heating in the winter, and air conditioning in the summer (which, given how much I hate hot weather, isn’t easy). But none of these measures practiced on the individual level does much to change things, and doom-and-gloom predictions of catastrophic global climate change and peak oil-induced economic disaster seem less outlandish every day. And all of this feeds back into my overall sense of uncertainty. It’s bad enough that I’m not sure how I’m going to make it with the world in its current state. I can’t begin to imagine how I’ll survive following periods of persistent economic downturn, global pandemic, and mass food shortages.

I realize I’m not unique in experiencing some minor anxiety and depression about the future. And I hate to think how self-absorbed and whiny this all sounds. I guess what I’m really trying to do here is to exorcise my personal demons. I don’t want to dump all this on my family or friends directly, but I need to get it out there somehow. Undoubtedly, all of this will fade from my mind, and this ebb and flow will have very little to do with whether my situation has worsened or improved. The holiday season is supposed to depress people, so I guess I share that with everyone else.