Author: Joe-Jim

Joe-Jim is the amalgamation of Joe and Jim, the founders of this site. It's also a shout out to Bob Heinlein's novel, "Orphans in the Sky." The name is a reference to the ambivalent “muty” (being both a two-headed mutant and the descendant of mutineers) who lead the outcasts out of the darkness of religious superstition. Joe-Jim is the editor and co-writer of Pork Circus.

Inappropriate Quotes

Today, I received a recruiting email chock of inappropriate quotes. When an author puts something in quotes, it’s their way of saying, “I don’t really believe what I’ve written to be true.”

In this case, he’s put quotes around just about every important detail of the message, suggesting that he doesn’t believe a god damn thing he’s written…Here’s what it looked like (names altered to protect the guilty, but otherwise in tact):

Hi Joe Jim,

My name is ‘‘Bishnu Vomar’’ and I am a technical recruiter with the ACME Solution Inc, a leading information technology services and workforce solutions company.

Is that your name? You don’t seem so sure… Sounds made up to me, I’m going to guess your real name is Hardvarigan Umpterschpeckle. Let’s dispense with the pseudonyms, Hardvarigan – the game is up!

We currently have an opportunity for a “Analyst” with one of our clients in the “Remote” area.

Sounds exotic! I wonder what I would be “Analyzing” in the “remote” area? I’d like it to be somewhere warm, but it’s probably Uzbekistan… this job is in Uzbekistan, isn’t it?

I came across your resume and noticed that you have extensive experience in “Analyst” which is one of the skillsets required for this position. I am reaching out to see if you would be interested in hearing more about this opportunity. Please give me a call to let me know when I should reach out to you. Also, I will highly appreciate if you can share the best contact number for the call.

I’m glad to hear my extensive experience in “Analyst” qualifies me to do whatever it is this job does… this is amazing!!!  What I don’t understand though is why I would call you to arrange a time for you to reach out to me… and if I did call you, wouldn’t you have my contact number…which is also on my resume? Seems a bit low effort, even for spam recruiters…

I’ve included additional details about this position below for your reference:

Location – Remote
Role/Title – Analyst
Job Description – Full Time

I’m not sure I can handle this much detail!

Also, if you have friends/colleagues within your network who may be interested in this opportunities, please let me know and I will reach out to them as well.

Oh, Hell NO! I’m keeping this gem to myself! …to post on my silly website…

I look forward to hearing from you. Thanks and Ragards!!

~ BISHNU VOMAR ~
“Please feel free to contact, if you have any query.”

Ok, you asked for it!

DROP DATABASE contact_list;

Octopus and the Farce Böök

“We don’t have a choice on whether we DO social media, the question is how well we DO it.” – Someone I disagree with on the internet

I’d like to preface this by stating that I don’t do the social medias. It’s not that I disapprove of them for you, your organization, club or even Big Jim; do what you want, it’s a free country (or at least it used to be)…

Farceböök, Twit, Instant Grams, Oh Snap Chatter…hell, even Taxed Massages; I have no use for any of these – it’s not that I’m a luddite, far from it, but that they simply that they serve no discernable purpose in my life.

If I want to write someone a letter, I use email. I’ve had an email address for about 30 years now, and while names and providers have changed, it remains a perfectly viable way for me to keep in touch with people I care to.

In the late 90s, ICQ came along, and I used that to send “instant messages” to other people. This wasn’t a new idea, I’d been active on BBS chat rooms and IRC prior, but this was different in that it focused on one-to-one conversations. Like my email address, this has given way to other internet messaging services but the core principle remains the same; a non-verbal means to communicate in real time.

Before any of that, if I wanted to talk to someone remotely, I used the PHONE. My first phones had dials, those gave way to buttons, lost their cords and eventually went ‘mobile’. Coverage got better, devices and service became affordable and all sorts of ancillary nonsense became the norm. Nevertheless, the primary reason I have a phone (even a mobile one) is to make and receive phone calls.

As an avid gamer, I could see the advantages of voice communications in team-based games, and embraced Ventrilo, and later Discord, but again – this has a purpose.

#FuckYouMyCrook (Bonus points to anyone old enough to get that reference).

~~~

Fuck your food pics (but not literally...or did if that's your thing...no kink shaming!)

OMFG This congree is Amazballz! Fuq yu if you don’t like it!

As far as I can tell, social media is largely a means to:

    • Share pictures of what you had for breakfast
    • Get into arguments with strangers on the internet, and/or…
    • Get into arguments with strangers about the picture of what you had for breakfast, over the internet…

#ProveMeWrong

Since I have no interest in any of those things, it’s never really bothered me that I don’t have them – or at least I didn’t…until now… 🙁

###

Fuck you bookfarce!
I’d been thinking about getting into VR but have been waiting for the technology to mature and some standards to emerge and codify. While I’m grateful to early adopters for spending obscene amounts of money on things so I can get a better, faster, cheaper model later, I’m not about to throw in and join them.

Sure enough, the prices had come down substantially, and a very good mid-range VR rig can be had in the way of the Octopus Quest 2 for about $300 USD (or if you want to spend an extra $100, you can upgrade from 64GB to 256GB of onboard storage).

Unlike other VR products, you don’t need a fancy gaming rig to hook it up to, you just put on the headset and grab the controllers and you’re good to go. That said, if you happen to have a fancy gaming rig, you can connect it to your PC using a USB-C cable*.

*Octopus sells a “link cable” for $78 – which is an overpriced USB-C cable. You can buy a high-quality 16.4′ Active USB cable for about $25 here, which is what I did (two in fact, one for power and one for the PC). 

So what’s all this got to do with Böökenzifäce (i.e. sitzen affen scheiße schleudern)? Octopus VR, LLC was bought by Foshizzlebizzle in 2014, and until 5 months ago, you could have a standalone Octopus account without having to register a separate Bark Fart account. In October 2020, that stance was reversed, and not only did they require that all users would need to have a Bjork Fork account to use the device, but that it had to be a REAL account (i.e. no fake names or aliases). Those who tried to skirt this requirement ended up with their accounts banned, lost access to all of their software/data and bricked their device…

So what choice did I have?

  1. Send the device back
  2. Following the rules, but as petulantly as humanly possible

I opted for the second. Yes I made a goddamn Face Fuck account. Yes, I used my real information. After that, I locked it the fuck down. I turned on every privacy setting I could find. You can’t find me there, and if you did, there’s nothing to see and never will be.

###

Someday I’ll trade up for one of their competitors but until then, I’ll make due with what I’ve got and chalk it up to another lesson learned.

The Mysterious Holosun HE530GC-RD

Introduction

A little over 3 weeks ago, I ordered a Holosun HS515GM red dot for the Black Adder. Unfortunately, the item never shipped because the vendor listed it as available by mistake. I received a refund but could not find another seller who had one in stock…

Posit

On whim, I went to MidwayUSA’s website to see what they might have available, and came across the HE530GC-RD, discounted down from $500 to $375 (25% off) with free shipping!

It was interesting, but I could not find ANY reference to this specific model on Holosun’s website or YouTube! Google searches only pointed back to MidwayUSA’s ad, so the question was, “What even is…?”

Consequence

Looking at Holosun’s website, there is no listing for this specific model, but there  are listings for a HE530G-RD and HE530C-RD…

Both of these are Holosun’s ‘Elite’ models, which offer premium features like a titanium housing, shake awake, amazing battery life, a nice QD mount, kill flash, clear lens covers etc. The only difference between the two is that the HE530C has a solar panel and the HE530G does not.

In the ad for the HE530GC-RD, you can clearly see a solar panel:

Another odd quirk was that the buttons were on the opposite side of where they’d normally appear on the HE530C’s:

###

The item shipped quickly, and after a couple of days, I had it in-hand and could get a good look at it. There were a few discrepancies…

HE530GC-RD1 Mounted, side view

Note that the instead of battery tray, you have a twist-off battery chamber… The height of the mount was advertised as 1/3 lower co-witness but turned out to be absolute co-witness (i.e. shorter) and does not include any alternate mounts to raise or lower the height.

While the box and case it comes in both have a HE530GC-RD sticker slapped on them, the included manual is for an HE515GTC-RD/GR (the 20mm version)… What gives!!?

Result

After a couple hours of cyber sleuthing, I came across an old blog post (dated April 30, 2017) announcing Holosun’s new Titanium red dot sights. The author refers to these as the HS530G (battery only) and HS530C (battery/solar). Here’s a picture of the “HS530G”with a (you guessed it!) prominent battery chamber:

While the post doesn’t include a picture of the “HS530C”, we can infer that if it did, it would probably feature the same battery chamber, but I wanted to validate that so the search continued…

Using the HS prefix instead, I came across the following German eBay ad featuring none other than the elusive HS530C:

Conclusion

The HE530CG-RD is actually a rebadged HS530C (sometimes referred to as the HS530C Elite) that debuted in Spring of 2017. At some point, the HS530 series red dots were upgraded to include a battery tray and rebranded with the ‘HE’ prefix.

Somewhere along the line, MidwayUSA must have purchased a palette of new old stock HS530C’s that were rebadged as “HE530GC-RD’s”. This would explain the heavily discounted price/limited availability.

As of the writing of this post, MidwayUSA has both the HE530C-RD ($500) and the HE530GC-RD ($375) for sale. As far as I can tell, on paper they are the same optic save for the battery tray (or lack there of).

Regrets, Complaints and Recriminations

Is the battery tray worth $125? Probably not… Tray or no tray, the thing may as well be made of unobtainium because it’s ridiculously stronger than it would ever need to be (especially for any use case I’m likely to explore).

The only legitimate gripe I have is that there was nothing to indicate how this differed from the HE530C or why it costs $125 more…

The Mounting

BEHOLD, a Great Red Dragon!!! Err… I mean Red Dot!

Here’s another shot from the side:

Some other upgrades include a red dot magnifier, weapon light, stubby foregrip, ambidextrous safety and extended charging handle. Someday I’ll fork out $1,500-2,000 for a quality AR, and when I do, I’ll have some nice glass for it. Until then, I’m happy with my purchase, even if it gives me the Coof…

When a Stranger Calls II: Medicares for Everyone!

I received a mysterious phone call from someone calling themselves “Vicky” this evening. The call was in broken Spanish, and had something to do with Medicare (presumably to phish for my personal and financial information).

Unfortunately for Vicky, I don’t speak Spanish, so I told her, “No habla!”

At this point she switched to Engrish, but after about 30 seconds disconnected the call… so I called her back.

“Vicky! I need to know all about the medicares!”
<hangs up again>
<ring ring>
“Hello?”
“Vicky!”
“coño de la madre…” (I’m pretty sure this means, ‘How do you do, sir?’)
“I care about Medicare! I need to know all the things. Things like whether or not my root beer flavored Flintstones vitamin gummies are covered?? This is important stuff, Vicky…”
<hangs up again>

If Vicky didn’t want to communicate verbally, I figured the only other way to get through to her would be to use the Universal Language (i.e. spam her with text messages of Dick Butt)…After about 5 minutes of this, the number stopped accepting messages…

I’ll never know who Vicky is, who she was trying to reach or what she wanted… But I do know that’s one phone number she won’t be using to do it!

Mission Accomplished! Now all I need to do wait for James Veitch to confirm my induction into the Scam the Scammer Hall of Fame…

…any minute now…

Post-Modern Prognosticators: 27 Things I Learned From Watching Demolition Man

…I’m the enemy. Cause I like to think, I like to read. I’m into freedom of speech and freedom of choice. I’m the kind if guy who wants to sit in a greasy spoon and think, “Gee, should I have the T-bone steak or the jumbo rack of barbecued ribs with the side order of gravy fries?” I want high cholesterol. I want to eat bacon, butter and buckets of cheese, okay? I want to smoke a Cuban cigar the size of Cincinnati in a non-smoking section. I wanna run through the streets naked with green Jello all over my body reading Playboy magazine. Why? Because I suddenly might feel the need to. Okay, pal? I’ve seen the future, you know what it is? It’s a 47-year-old virgin sittin’ around in his beige pajamas, drinking a banana-broccoli shake singing, “I’m an Oscar-Meyer Wiener.”
– Edgar Friendly, 2032

In 1993, the cinematic masterpiece, “Demolition Man” made some predictions about what life might be like in the future. It didn’t occur to 27-years-younger me just how accurate those predictions would be… without further adieu, here’s 27 things I learned from watching Demolition Man:

  1. If you’re short on toilet paper, just violate the verbal morality statute!
  2. If you live in a socialist utopia, homeless people will steal all your food
  3. Taco Bell will be the only restaurant to survive the Franchise Wars
  4. John Spartan doesn’t know how to use the Three Sea Shells (I could see where that might be confusing)
  5. Burning buildings are a good indicator that bad guys are nearby
  6. Police are no longer equipped to handle this level of violence

    Behind me is Simon Phoenix’s lair in what appears to be a mostly peaceful protest.
  7. We shouldn’t ask where the meat comes from…
  8. Rat burgers aren’t bad…
  9. In fact, you should be out there hunting rats instead of begging for vegan meat-alternatives (you can thank me later)
  10. Don’t face-time naked unless you’re sure you are calling the right number
  11. Commercials will infiltrate every popular media. Today you can pay to opt out, tomorrow it will be compulsory, and you’ll learn to like it!
  12. Social distancing stops the spread of STDs, the hunka-chunka and other recreational activities
  13. Sandra Bullock enjoys VR sex (presumably with hot anime girls, but will make an exception for John Spartan)
  14. In the future, all meetings will be video conference screens staring at other video conference screens
  15. Wait a minute, this is the future, where are all the phaser guns?
  16. Cars drive themselves (into walls, people and oncoming traffic)
  17. You are an incredibly sensitive man, who inspires joy-joy feelings in all those around you
  18. In the future, there is no more sarcasm
  19. Accusing the savior of your city of being in league with a multi-murder-death-killer is rude
  20. Sewers smell like biscuits ‘n gravy
  21. To catch a multiple murder-death-killer, you just wait around for him to kill another person so you’ll know exactly where to pounce!
  22. John Spartan likes the Chief’s plan
  23. Cocteau reminds Wesley Snipes of an Evil Mr. Rogers
  24. Sylvester Stallone is neither a blow-up-the-bad-guy-with-a-happy-grin-he-man type nor a moody-troubled-past-gunslinger-who-only-draws-when-he-must type
  25. I forgot to say, “Simon Says!”
  26. When you come out of cryo-prison, the first thing you’ll want to do is knit
  27. You can’t take away people’s right to be assholes!

…A Few More Words…

It’s hard to believe that it’s been almost a year since the anniversary of when it all went down.

There have been a lot of new and exciting changes in my life, things I’ve working for and toward for many years are starting to come to fruition. Success is something to be proud of, to enjoy, to look forward to. This seems (to me) to be the natural order of things but that just isn’t true for everyone.

Some people fear success – are terrified of it in fact. They don’t believe they deserve it, they don’t think they can hold on to it – it makes them feel vulnerable;  the more you have the more that can be taken away.

When he first told me about how he burned his school laptop in a bonfire, I assumed this was a triumphant middle finger to the establishment he’d grown disillusioned with. I never recognized it for what it really was – an offering to Damocles, and a cry for help…

“Take a puppy, abuse him, kick him, mistreat him – he’ll revert to feral carnivore. That his litter brother, pet him, talk to him, let him sleep with you, but train him – he’s a happy, well-behaved house pet.

Take another from the same litter, pet him on even days, kick him on odd days. You’ll have him so confused that he’ll be ruined for either role; he can’t survive as a wild animal and he doesn’t understand what is expected of a pet. Pretty soon he won’t eat, he won’t sleep, he can’t control his functions; he just cowers and shivers.”

– Robert Heinlein, Citizen of the Galaxy

I began writing this post over a year ago. At the time, I wasn’t quite sure what happened to the friend I’d lost track of – all I knew was that he was in a bad place, and there was nothing more I could do to help him. I felt angry, bitter and betrayed. In fairness, he wasn’t the first person to make a fuck out of me… and probably won’t be the last – good-natured people are often taken advantage of.

###

In time, that anger gave way to reason. I reminded myself that mistakes are how we learn… or don’t. In any case, they give you pause for thought. It’s not my place to dictate to anyone what they should or shouldn’t do with their life. Everyone has the right to go to hell in their own way. All one can do, all anyone can do, is the best they can.

“…Mate, go do what you gotta do.”
– Sassy the Sasquatch

I Remember

I remember when…

  • I learned that life wasn’t fair
  • I lived a rich life, in my own mind
  • Anything was possible (and nothing was possible)
  • My days were filled with adventure
  • My nights were filled with dreams of what might be
  • I had nothing, and neither realized it nor cared

I remember. I remember when…

  • I lived in a country without freedom of speech, religion or expression
  • I was asked if I spoke English
  • I was picked on for being the ‘American’ kid when I lived abroad
  • I was picked on for being the ‘Foreign’ kid when I came back to the US
  • I believed in God (and other fairy tales)
  • There was magic in the world

I remember! I remember when…

  • I stopped believing in God
  • Phones weren’t mobile
  • Pictures you took had to be developed before you could see them
  • I thumbed through ads for computers I lusted after (but couldn’t afford)
  • I dreamed of making video games for a living
  • I had heroes, and longed to be accepted by them

I remember! I remember when…

  • I swam in a cold river with Ducky
  • I rehearsed Shakespeare with my friend at midnight in the park
  • I was young, beautiful, and accepted (by an outcast rabble in the square)
  • I was hassled by the police for looking like a troublemaker
  • I got serious about my music
  • I did hard labor for a pittance, and dreamed of using my mind for a living

I still remember. I remember when…

  • I stopped believing in heroes
  • People were expected to have manners
  • All we had to protest was McDonalds Hot Mustard being discontinued
  • Racism wasn’t fashionable (or profitable)
  • Only villains demanded that people kneel
  • All lives mattered

I remember.