0.015 more seconds of internet fame

Yay. I'm kinda sorta famous for something on the internet again.

https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/11/04/some-pixelbooks-were-bricked-by-a-recent-chrome-os-beta-update/

https://chromeunboxed.com/a-recent-beta-update-bricked-some-pixelbooks-and-google-really-needs-to-respond/

My Pixelbook got bricked. What was really strange about it was that I had literally just gotten off my desktop to switch to my Pixelbook before getting ready for bed, and one of the last things I read on my desktop was a Reddit thread about the exact same thing happening to someone else.

I lay down, open my Pixelbook and 3 minutes later, it's all gone wonky.

Two units, different specs, identical failures within 24 hours of each other. Yeah, this isn't a hardware issue.

After a lot of hand wringing and finally getting around to buying a debug cable, I was able to find that something in their (pulled) update process appears to have broken the secure boot chain process of ChromeOS. Contrary to most reports, I actually wasn't on the Beta channel (some people affected were), the only thing I could have been accused of doing was putting off rebooting to apply the updates. 

The second article really nails the point home: When Google sends software updates out to users that cause problems that they cannot recover from, why are customer service representatives still telling users "Nothing we can do, you're not in warranty" when they are contacted? This situation also shows just how broken warranty policies are, not much good 8 years of ChromeOS software updates are going to do when one bad update can brick your device in less than a year after your warranty expires.

Fortunately, those articles up there (thanks, duke!) and the information I've gathered from my serial console outputs may have finally turned the right heads. It still took two weeks, two articles and debug logs before someone started taking me seriously. At this point, I've been requested to 'discuss moving forward with an RMA" so the Pixelbook team can capture more data from my bricked Pixelbook.

So despite customer service's best attempts to sweep me under, turns out there actually was something of interest to the development team.

Hopefully I'll be privy to what they find.

Goodnight, sweet prince.

 The incomparable Oliver. You couldn't have been a better buddy. Thanks for leading us home.

Phew.

Man, the future is much shittier than it was supposed to be.

Then again...

This Union Street promo was one of the last items I desired to have before things happened that made me stop being a collector of Erasure releases.

Mainly for one reason. One of the URLs at the bottom of the CD is Erasure.org.

David and I put a lot of work into Erasure.org. Our work on the site got heavy focus in stateside and online promotion, even getting enough attention to do giveaways for other labels that featured Erasure tracks.

For the Retro:Active compilation, we were consulted by the producer and asked to choose a track and we selected the Blue Savannah Out of the Blue Mix specifically due to its rarity and commercial unavailability on CD. (We couldn't pick unreleased non-US tracks unfortunately.) And there was also that Genderfix EP that had a remix of Boom Boom which we were given extra copies of to give out to fans. Then Retro:Active 2 featured the full Madhouse Mix of State Farm, another track that I recommended due to it unavailable on CD at the time.

That was pretty cool to be a part of, to actually be able to be recognized as a fansite that took things seriously enough for other labels to reach out to.

Then someone at Mute NA decided to put us officially on their email press releases and promos for the promotion around the time of Union Street. It was a nice feeling to have that confidence in what we were doing.

Some time after... Mute UK, I was told, basically ordered Mute US to stop giving us info to publish because we ended up scooping the official Erasure updates once or twice.

We ended up completely in the dark. Reduced to nothing more than a site that reposted the EIS email newsletters.

In hindsight, think it was at that exact point that I was done. It was just gone. All of it. The magic. The interest. The desire. The fucks. (2006 was a particularly bad year for me.)

Those who were around at this time may remember shortly after this album was about when I did very last update to Until the Twelfth of Never release which was also around the time of the shuttering of Erasure.org.

Amusingly... When Mute was bought out by EMI, the EMI site for Canada continued to feature the Erasure.org domain on their product listings for new releases.

It only took me 12 years to finally score this promo. And now it feels like the book is closed on that time in my life...

Mostly...

I still kind of want a cease and desist letter from Mute. Just something nice to frame and put on the wall.

Stories

Since my musical tastes tend to vary dramatically (I listened to 50,000+ tracks on shuffle on my MP3 player on a regular basis), I am often fond of things that haven't been done before. Anything new. Anything, even if not completely new, is still a sufficient twist on the old. Mashups that may not be perfectly in key but still sound good enough, two completely disparate genres melding together well... things like that.

During a DJ set at Neo, I tried to introduce as much new-not-new material that would be familiar enough to the crowd while offering a taste of something different.

It did not go well.

Despite being a goth club... I managed to clear the floor by playing the Vince Clarke Remix of Depeche Mode's "Behind the Wheel."

And that was one of the best Depeche Mode remixes in recent memory.

"I don't like this cover," one said to me.

So I tried to steer the set towards more typical versions. 

Even that didn't go well.

I had someone complain when I later played Faith Healer by Recoil, which in itself was a pretty big goth club hit.

"Who is this? I don't like it."

Now, I couldn't just say "Recoil" because that wouldn't have been a satisfactory answer to someone from a fickle crowd. So I said: "It's Depeche Mode and Nitzer Ebb."

"No, it isn't."

Sigh. And this was within 3 months of Douglas McCarthy headlining at Metro in Chicago.

Spud

Valve used to do fun stuff before they turned into a full-time storefront. I was hoping a new ARG would happen in the days up to another announcement of a new game like they did with Potato Sack/Portal 2. However, HL:Alyx was announced without anything leading up to it. Now it's actually becoming difficult to even find a record of the Potato Sack ARG even happening. Most related websites and wikis are gone now. Even the GlaDOS@Home finale wasn't preserved at all. Describing it after the fact doesn't really begin to come close in detailing just how massive the whole event was.

The Potato Sack ARG, for all of its flaws, almost managed to become bigger than the game it was based around... I never saw nearly as much activity or interaction from the community since that time. Seems a shame that something this intricate and involved could only happen once.

It was estimated about 1,800 people managed to get all 36 potatoes. The prize, for a time, was... having 36 potatoes on your Steam profile page.

Later, those who got 36 potatoes were awarded every game in Valve's Complete Pack, plus the newest: Portal 2. I ended up figuring out, a little while after the fact, why there were 36 potatoes: That's how many games were in the Valve Complete Pack once you included Portal 2. This clue was never discovered during the ARG so nobody knew until the ARG was over whether or not there was going to be a prize for gathering all 36 potatoes.

This was one of those times where just seeing it through was enough of a prize in of itself. Hope to see something like it again in the future.

Trust me, it was much harder then...

That time my submission made the Slashdot front page...

Tinfoil costs extra

Friendly reminder that an article on a domain name owned by a magazine that has journalistic standards is generally regarded as a better source than eaglespissandfartfreedom.blog

in the face

Like a toddler throwing a tantrum and deciding to hold his breath until he gets what he wants.
Well, Trump. I encourage you to keep holding your breath until the country turns blue.

Trump refuses to rule out government shutdown if Democrats continue impeachment inquiry

Lower than a bottomless pit

Every Republican in the House of Representatives broke their oath to support and defend the Constitution today. Every. Single. One.

Quote

“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless.

Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.” ― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

physician, heal thyself.

It's interesting how many self-proclaimed "non racist, free speech advocates" who speak out against "violent leftist organizations like antifa" also can't say "I do not support the Proud Boys and other violent groups on the right."

Hiss, pop, sparkle

This is all I have to say about today.

"This country will not be a good place for any of us to live in unless we make it a good place for all of us to live in." - Theodore Roosevelt

Fuzzbutt

Always will miss you, Vin.

Blue Monday in the key of Richard Spencer

Youtube just banned white supremacist content from their site.

Free speech advocates are calling this a slippery slope while obviously ignoring part where free speech does not mean free of the consequences of the things you say.

If going after Nazis is a slippery slope then I kinda wanna see what’s at the bottom of that slope. It’s probably rainbows and fluffy bunnies.

MOO

When it comes to the story of the golden calf... who would have thought that Christians would settle for an orange pig?

Crushed

Holy hell, that took a while. 442 games before I won one. Gotta watch those time zones, Japanese players are brutally good at knocking me out early.

We'll fix it in post

In case you ever wondered how tv and film productions prepare devices for the screen... Found this image on a phone that was used for a video call scene in Sense8. I snagged this from a prop auction hoping I'd see the video the actor (Toby Onwumere) was acting to, but no... Just chroma key masks. Still pretty interesting...

Broken facade

Republicans and other right wingers are calling the children in cages 'crisis actors.' Apparently when one lacks the capability to feel empathy, all suffering that isn't experienced by them directly looks like acting. Republicanism in a nutshell.

All Democrats and Independents in Senate back No Child Separation bill. All of them. Not one member of the "party of family values" supports the bill to prevent children from being separated from their parents. Republicans have ZERO moral ground left to stand on.

PSA

Telling people with depression to 'reach out' is the 'thoughts and prayers' of the mental health world. It's condescending and it doesn't help.

Mental health issues often need the kind of help that those who suffer from it cannot give to themselves or feel like they can reach out to others for.

When a celebrity dies, don't say "Oh, that's so sad," and post a suicide hotline number. Look around you, RECOGNIZE those who suffer... and reach out directly to them instead.

Otherwise we feel overlooked in part of a grander message that comes off like a platitude. Means well but ultimately does nothing.

Photogenic

Oskar standing next to a light panel.

Predicted

The "What the fuck happened?" movie trilogy:

• Network (1976)
• Bulworth (1998)
• Idiocracy (2006)

Bonus supplement: Dr. Strangelove (1964)

History

The last time the Cubs won the world series, women couldn't vote... or as Trump supporters call it, "the good old days."

$199 Add-On

I'm pretty sure Steve Jobs would be rolling his grave right now but the problem is he needs an adapter to do it.

Plague Among Us

Things that encourage piracy:

• Unreasonable prices,
• DRM/Copy protection,
• Lack of availability.

There's a RedBox 1/4 block from my apartment. I was happy to just rent from that instead of downloading movies. I wouldn't buy online 'rentals' or downloads because they were much more expensive than a RedBox rental.

I decided to rent 5 movies for a long weekend at the studio. Our studio is full of professional gear, so we expect our shit to always work. FOUR of the five DVDs I rented would not play. They were brand new, no scratches. They couldn't play because of copy protection. The copy protection was so severe that I couldn't play them on anything we had in the studio. Not the MacPros, not the professional $5,000 reference DVD Player, not the professional kiosk playback machines, not the burner machine, nothing. I couldn't get a refund on my rental fees for the four movies I could not watch.

Thus officially ended my desire to bother with legitimate channels.

Copy protection and region restrictions only affect legitimate customers. When I download a torrent, I KNOW I won't have any issues playing the movie. No unskippable trailers, no warnings in twenty different languages, no annoying menus that cause even the most beefy players to lag, nothing but the movie I want to watch. No hassle, no time restrictions on streaming, no physical DRM to hamper my ability to play it. No blocking of my being able to watch it because I'm in the wrong country. Even if it were to cost me double the cost of a rental, Pirates have a better product.

The industry (of which I am a part and do everything i can to discourage DRM and price gouging) needs to pull its head out of its ass and stop with the bullshit they themselves are causing that drive people to easier methods to consume entertainment.

But wait! There's more!

Now that Scalia is gone, does this mean another one of Reagan's horcruxes is destroyed?

Virulent

I am more afraid of the lies and misinformation spread by Fox News than I am of Ebola.

Pocket Change

Facebook purchased Instagram for $1B, Oculus for $2B, and WhatsApp for $19B. Mystery to me where those numbers come from.

Sniff my Takei

Edit: For the story behind this, see: https://b.v92.org/p/eau-my.html