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The Pirate Ship / ARR! / Re: Juice Newsea Becomes a Paysite
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on: 2009 June 17, 17:33:00
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@ Darqstar: All my previous roles have been either minimum wage, or a salary not too far removed from it - these are office job involving a lot of typing, presentation-reparing and fielding a lot of abuse from pissed-off people. If £14k a year is big bucks, then why couldn't I even afford to move out of my parents' home? Hell, the two jobs I've recently been interviewed for (and a third next week) are only paying 1,000 more, and once tax and National Insurance are taken out of that (along with travel costs), I'll come away with about £9,000 - barely enough to pay rent (average rent in Manchester is £350-£600pm, not including utilities and insurance), let alone food. In other words, although I'm earning - as long as my parents don't kick me out, or sell the home, I'll be ok in the short term, but in no way would I be in a position to lead an independent life. The fact is, here in the UK, wages are low. They've always been low. Minumum wage is shockingly poor - It's supposed to be a livable wage yet it doesn't even come close. it is actually more beneficial for a person claiming Jobseeker's Allowance to sit on their arse all week instead of taking on temporary work, because when you factor in daily travel expenses and lunch, you don't get a great deal out of the £40 you come away with, especially after it's all been taxed. I'm not on JA, but I was last year and it sucked - I came off it because 1) the Job Centre staff couldn't give a fuck about finding me a proper job and expected me to travel from Manchester to London for a minimum-wage telesales gig and 2) Depression set in fast and I felt completely worthless. I could work at MacDonald's - except, around here, rather than hiring new staff, they've just laid a load off. It seems that with the economy as fucked as it is, even going to MacDonald's is seen as extravagant at the moment. Growing up, I was fed a load of crap about going to college and university, about how it would open up the best jobs and the rest of it. The reality? I'm five years behind my fellow classmates who left high school and worked in MacDonalds and are now managers and supervisors in other companies. All I have is a giant student loan. I used to slag off the unemployed all the time. Now that I've been there, it's given me a whole different outlook on life, and throwaway comments from people like Austere, i.e. people who are in work and have nothing to worry about simply piss me off now. Darqstar, I'm sorry, but you're wrong. Just because your company is hiring that doesn't mean other companies throughout the country are hiring. 2-4 people a month doesn't put much of a hole in the unemployment problem anyway. There are tons of applicants for every position, and skilled people can't get jobs at places like McDonald's because they're rejected for being overqualified. That's when the local McDonald's is hiring in the first place, which around here, they aren't. And it's not like McDonald's would pay the bills for people with houses and families anyway; they're better off on unemployment and looking for work than working for minimum wage.
Just how low are people supposed to stoop for a job, anyway? I could go dance at a topless bar and get paid well, but I am not going to do that.
Unfortunately, if I go topless, I think I'd end up scaring the punters away!  Also, some companies CLAIM they're hiring, but they play games. Lots of games. Some are looking for a "particular fit", which is often business-speak for "We want a particular profile, and you're not it." For instance, the company might be looking for a man or woman, or someone under 30, but they can't actually SAY that because they'll get their panties sued off, so they use the "perfect fit" bullcrap. Some companies are scouting out prospects "just in case". They're bidding on a job, and they want to see the talent out there. But they don't get the job, or someone wants that "perfect fit" for that job, and there you are at Square One again. Some companies ARE hiring, but with your luck, the hiring committee happens to dislike overweight men with red hair because they remind them of someone, and surprise! You're an overweight man with red hair. Too bad for you.
My husband was out of work for five years, and I can definitely say that NO one worked harder than he to get a sustainable job. We just about saw it all, including the hiring clowns mentioned above. Often. Way, way too often.
I've seen this sort of stuff first-hand too. One job interview I went to a couple of weeks back had a roleplaying session that had nothing whatsoever to do with the job. It seemed that the interviewers simply viewed us desperate jobseekers as some form of entertainment. The only advice I can offer to anyone out of work is that unfortunately, you might have to be really flexible in this economy. You may have to work in another area far from your home, or in another country. Many of these countries, unfortunately, ain't exactly tourist attractions. And even if you're willing to do that, you might have a hard time finding something. I truly hope that anyone seeking sustainable employment finds something soon. To use an old expression, poverty sucks. Not really an option in the UK. The whole country is in dire straits, and the further south you go, the more expensive it becomes just to survive, and I can't speak any other language than English (and a bit of Welsh) so going over to Europe's out of the question - Plus, there's no jobs over there either. As for the retail/food service trade ... we both worked in that field to survive. Back in the olden days, you HAD more leeway in setting your hours. (I worked in retail back in the 90's and again, about 8 - 9 years later.) Now, these companies demand "flexibility". They want you available any time, any day, and schedules vary all over the place from week to week. You often can no longer say that you can work from 5PM to 10PM on any day but Monday and expect to be hired. When I worked for a particular company, I had informed them that I could work any day, almost any time, except between 8 and 9 AM and 2 and 3 PM on school days, and I got a lot of grief for that. And that was for a part-time job! I did get hired, and worked there for a while, though the company constantly "forgot" I listed those times and attempted to schedule me to work during them, no matter how often I mentioned them. But from what I'm seeing, some retail companies are even more picky about availability now.
It's not impossible to get a job, but it can be darn hard.
On most days, it really does seem impossible though. In the last interview I went to (last Friday for a university), I asked how many applications they'd received. Around 800. THAT's how bad things are around here.  |
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The Pirate Ship / ARR! / Re: Juice Newsea Becomes a Paysite
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on: 2009 June 17, 13:11:16
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From what I've read, Juice is a guy, I think. But that's debatable.
Some of that was hard to read (I take it they have some English trouble?) but I got the general message. I don't see how one can live off of making stuff for the Sims - my mom calls me obsessed because I like playing the game. Obsessed is when it's the only way you're living - seriously, it's not that hard to get a job. And there's ALWAYS something good from free creators - has Juice even checked the Ugliest Paysites thread? Some of the shit the pay people make is worse than the stuff beginner free creators make!
Oh really? Then I must be a retarded fuckwit then because I've been trying, and failing to find work for over two years now. Sure, I get as far as the interview stage, but that's about it.  |
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The Pirate Ship / ARR! / Re: Your Ugliest Paysite Creation Find: Round Two.
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on: 2009 May 12, 21:43:14
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Ron's face just makes me think of the second movie after they drink the polyjuice potion and their skin starts to bubble and all that.
I strongly suspect that the "creator" had drunk one too many butterbeers when he was working on that set. Or at least, I hope he has.
I have a feeling that this was mentioned already, but I think people would take evi a bit more seriously if she could learn to damn spell that right.
And surprisingly, either all of the comments about LOL SPELLING have been removed, or the TSR bunch are too dense to notice that.
Well, you could argue that English isn't her first language. Actually no you can't. She just sucks. |
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The Pirate Ship / ARR! / Re: Your Ugliest Paysite Creation Find: Round Two.
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on: 2009 May 11, 21:11:06
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Yay, another shitty "creator"...
Check this out:
<snip>
It seems that the "creator" spent more time airbrushing the preview pic than he did on the actual sims. Harry's barely passable (at least you can sort of tell who it is, although the wand was a bit of a give away), but what the fuck have they done to Ron and Hermione? |
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The Pirate Ship / ARR! / Re: TSR: In Ur Accounts, Deletin Ur Stuffs!
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on: 2009 April 10, 17:49:30
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Really? Where can this metadata be found, I'm curious. Unfortunately, my limited knowledge of computers has made it hard for me to explain to anyone what's going on, without saying, "Well, you just have to understand..." So, any hard information I can find out and understand is really helpful to me.
"Metadata" is probably the wrong word to use, but some image formats allow you to save additional information with the image - typically PC name, comments etc, which can then be viewed in any graphics program under "image properties". In the early days of Coconut's blog, some of those images (not all) carried such information (usually a computer ID name or something like "Created with..." because most people don't bother filling in the rest of the data), and this information varied from one image to the next. Nothing incriminating, but enough to show that the images at the time came from two sources - the original source (i.e. whoever had passed on the images to Coconut), and the other, (presumably) Coconut him/herself where they had blurred out private data and re-saved the image. At the time it got me thinking that if anyone accused Coconut of faking these images, then this data would disprove such claims right away because there's more than one source. Annoyingly, I've just gone back to have a look, but there's a lot more screenshots there now, and the ones I've just looked at lack this information. |
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The Pirate Ship / ARR! / Re: TSR: In Ur Accounts, Deletin Ur Stuffs!
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on: 2009 April 10, 13:08:39
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Indeed, just look at my avatar. It didn't look like that on the page I scraped it off.
It wouldn't bother me if the Coconut 'screenshots' were just cut'n'pasted text. From what I've seen, Coconut has integrity. She doesn't post made up shit. If Johan wants to try to discredit her by saying she faked a screenshot then just stick to the facts and have the person who alledgedly had words put into their mouth come forward and deny it. I've missed it if this has already happened, all I've seen is futile diversions.
DOT's faked screenshot comparisons look like the kind of posts you see on web developer forums saying "Why doesn't my webpage look the same in browser X and browser Y?"
The answer is that unless the person uses the same OS, browser, browser settings, fonts etc., then there will usually be subtle differences.
DOT can be forgiven for this misunderstanding as it appears she lacks logical thinking, wisdom, and is blinded like some teen groupie of a talentless pop band. (Is she really a 12?). Johan, who it is rumoured has some technical knowledge, cannot. Talking about faked pixels instead of faked words does fit well with the current smoke and mirrors campaign.
Yep. For example, the Phorum renders its fonts differently depending on what OS, browser and font aliasing settings you use. For instance, on my WinXP setup, I have all font aliasing turned off where possible (it gives me a headache thanks to MS's general cluelessness on how anti-aliasing is supposed to work), so fonts appear sharp in Firefox (IE crashes so I don't know how it looks on there). On my Eee PC running Xandros linux, again I have aliasing turned off, and Firefox renders this page slightly differently because the default fonts are different, and all the fontsizes are 8pt or 9pt because of the lower screen resolution. Finally, in Ubuntu, I have aliasing turned on (because the people behind Ubuntu actually know what they're doing!) but again, in Firefox the default fonts available are different, so the page looks different. Add to this that every PC (or Mac) user uses whatever screen resolution they see fit, and then you have a situation where no two screenshots will ever be the same. It's got nothing to do with "fake" screenshots, Photoshop or anything like that, but a lot to do with understanding that every person's PC setup is different, and renders fonts and layouts differently in whatever browser is being used, something that DOT seems incapable of understanding. Faking a screenshot is fucking easy, and involves no clever photoshop pixel manipulation. Notepad is all someone would need if they wanted to fake something, and it would look more convincing than anything touched up in a graphics editor. However, you cannot fake the memories of the people that saw the page. If Johan actually pointed to a screenie that was supposedly faked, then I suspect that more TSR people on the fence would see through a blatant lie. True, and even if, for a moment we were to believe that Coconut's screenshots were faked, there's a few minor problems. One, the metadata for the screenshots show them as originating from different hardware. This makes sense because they were capped by different people on different PC configurations. Two, if Coconut was faking every single screenshot she had posted on her blog, then she'd have no time whatsoever to do her day job, and she would need several PCs to make sure it looks like all the screen caps came from different configurations. Plus, it would mean she would have to fake the personalities of the people writing those posts to keep them consistent. Now, unless she's a writer in real life, there is no way she could maintain the same level of stupidity and imagination that goes on in those conversations she had posted unless they came from TSR itself. A 'professional company' pointing to irrelevancies to draw attention away from the accusations of plaigiarism, incompetance and other illegal activities reminds me of the desperate tactics politicians use when they know they are at the end of their career. So sure, TSR can throw some doubt around about the accuracy of the Coconut Blog if they like. Without the 'professional company' public apologies, warnings of their database insecurities, and a place where concerned TSR fans can discus the allegations openly on the TSR forums, they will continue to stink.
+1 |
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The Pirate Ship / ARR! / Re: TSR: In Ur Accounts, Deletin Ur Stuffs!
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on: 2009 April 09, 22:28:07
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When johan asked for proof besides coconut's word, how come no one linked him to this: http://tsr.mustbedestroyed.org/?p=273From Blackgarden's own mouth in a private forum. Johan, are you going to tell me that coconut somehow made up this screen shot and the response from the very disturbed mod? Are you going to say that coconut is SUCH a good writer, she can make up two different posts with two different posting styles, voices, word usage, sentence structure etc? I know he will ignore it or proclaim it fake, but I had to at least throw that out there. And not just any old private forum, but TSR's very own private forum! Actually, is that the FA forum or a different one?However, Johan would probably do a DOT and spout some gobbledegook about odd-looking pixels and displaying a shocking lack of knowledge of image compression formats.  |
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The Pirate Ship / ARR! / Re: TSR: In Ur Accounts, Deletin Ur Stuffs!
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on: 2009 April 09, 02:33:39
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Scourge - every single person who plays the game whether or not you create content or mods, or run a site is of value to the Sims community THANK YOU. The idea that someone is somehow nothing and should just keep their mouth shut unless they're a modder is a pernicious one in the Sims 2 community. It is not that way in all other gaming communities, and it's an attitude needs to die yesterday.And its definitely an attitude that doesn't exist here on PMBD. Modders or gameplayers, we're one and the same: United against TSR!  |
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The Pirate Ship / ARR! / Re: NEW TSR LEGAL THREAT!
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on: 2009 April 08, 17:04:39
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as requested
Sincerely,
Thomas Isaksson
The Sims Reource
Pfft. Noob can't even remember how to spell his own business. Even assuming for a nanosecond that this "legal threat" is real (I doubt it - I think Atwat's arseing around again), this isn't anything in there that represents a real "cease and desist" order, so it means diddly squat. Besides, if Thomass tried to take PMBD to court, then I'm sure the judge will be just as interested in those IP addresses that links Thomas to the scenes of many cybercrimes. |
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The Pirate Ship / ARR! / Re: TSR Sharing your infomation!
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on: 2009 March 18, 14:32:11
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Actually, for all of MaxoidDrea's hot air, my old sig is still intact over there. I have links to Reclaim Your Game, and the .mustbedestroyed.org version of Cocunut's link, as well as a not-that-cryptic advert for PMBD too.
The hot air coming out of MaxoidDrea's mouth over at the BBS is simply that. Hot air.
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