NPO #17: How I Got Here

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. The Ticketmaster

Happy New Year, Ticketholders!

It's 2023, I'm a new me, and one of my resolutions (that I've been trying and failing to keep for years) is to consolidate my old blogs into the Just the Ticket mainline.

I'm starting this year off with some old content from a blog that began its life on Yahoo! Groups under the name SW@ the Hell?, was reborn as its own blog on this platform, under the title, Piece Offerings. Now retitled on this blog as New Piece Offerings, it is where you have found random pieces of my mind being doled out on an irregular basis.

We begin 2023 with some content that I composed on old MySpace, way down in San Diego, ON August 19, 2008, when my Current mood was artistic. You'll see why. And yes, at the time, I was using a computer with Windows Vista, a media remote, LightScribe, and the cheapest, second jankiest printer that I have ever owned. Welcome to a fourteen-year-old rant about bad teaching styles, paperless instruction manuals, and now-defunct technology, complete with some old sketches that I did while waiting for customers at a coffee kiosk that doesn't exist anymore. Did I give enough hints that I'm old?

I hate VISTA!!!! "The Computer is Personal again" my ass! This Computer's operating system is making this Person feel like a retard. It seems like only a year ago, just about everything your computer came with had an instruction manual. I understand that we need to save the trees and otherwise live green, but there's something about becoming a paperless culture that takes the interest out of learning.
When I take a class at SDSU, I like having a professor who will print out their notes so that every student has a copy to expand upon while the original is projected bigger than life for the class to see, instead of just teaching from a PowerPoint while exasperated overacheivers get carpal tunnel and tennis elbow from their rapid verbatim scribbles of things they won't be able to read or digest when they get home.
And then there are the "notes available on the Web" professors who provide everything they think we should know, typed in their own words, resulting in the same level of incomprehension but without all the writing-related injuries; that is, assuming the student even has time or bothers to download and print those technojargon resources.
There is so much I could continue to harp on about teaching styles, but then I'd have to submit this as an essay. I guess the point I was originally trying to make is that with great online resources comes a user with a great feeling of not giving a damn. Give a man a manual and he'll at least try to read it. Send a man a huge pile of junk mail and he'll have to find out what it's about and throw it away so he'll have space for something more important. Mail him a bank or credit card statement and he'll feel responsible and inquiring enough to want to know. But give him spam and direct deposit and he'll run his life into the ground through ignorance. Books, money, snail-mail, and all other things paper-made are necessary inconveniences that we need to be hit over the head with every once in awhile to keep our lives straight. If you give a man something that he doesn't know how to operate, he'll wonder why in the hell he needs to know how to operate it in order to access the information that teaches him how to operate it.

With that said, many thanks to Lexmark for putting the instruction manual for their printers on PDF. I now know how to print and scan well enough to have uploaded two of my sketches onto MySpace. If you work at Ralphs, you've probably seen them in hard copy, but they are now online for the whole community to see. Both are from covers of Entertainment Weekly: one is a picture of Robert Pattinson, who plays Edward in the upcoming Twilight movie, and the other is Dwayne "Formerly The Rock" Johnson, who starred opposite Steve Carrell and Anne Hathaway in the big-screen sendup of Get Smart (Piece Offerings Update 2/18/2012: In the Blogger incarnation of this issue of Piece Offerings, I have included two additional sketches from my previous efforts with pencil and paper. One is the album cover of Kid Rock's Cocky album; the other is from Nickelback's Silver Side Up).

Roughly two years after composing the above Moron Vista, Scanner Skills, and Webcam Ills, I composed the following informational tourist trap piece, peppered with the occasional Dark Tower-ism, about My Prodigal Fun (FROM December 30, 2010):

Well, folks; a lot has happened since I last showed my face on MySpace (lol). I graduated from San Diego State by the skin of my teeth and my dad was laid off from Alpine Auto Repair, so in an effort to lower our cost of living, my parents were making plans to move us out of state; 1320 miles north to the small town of Soap Lake, WA. And by the end of 2009, we had packed and rented a moving truck ($4,000 on American Express, say thankya and gawd-bomb and holy shit) to do just that.
A little side-note: when renting a Mayflower truck (or whatever moving company does ya right), don't be a lazy ass about your packing. Buy a shitload of boxes of every size that your local Home Depot has available. Assuming you know where every single thing is in your house, decide ahead of time what you're taking with you and what will fit in your car (include pets in this, too). With that bit set aside, throw away any remaining chemicals and perishable foods. Likewise with the cheap furniture; it'll just get broken in the move and you can always buy more. Disassemble your remaining furniture as much as possible. Appliances and tool cabinets can go on the truck by themselves. Otherwise, if it's not animal or human, PUT IT IN A BOX! The movers will thank you.
Then, there's getting the house clean so you get your security deposit back, but that's a whole other story that you can avoid by hiring a maid service. If you rent in San Diego, you'll more than make up for the cleaning bill with your deposit.
We sold the '86 Buick Century wagon for $250 and left for Washington the night before New Year's Eve, making the drive through LA a breeze.

Soap Lake is a small town with a lot of history, which I may tell ya later, and some pretty spectacular views (not to mention that property values are good enough that we were able to buy a 3/1.5 house for less that $80K).
Thanks to the folks at Barrett Business Services and WorkSource, I was able to get a temp job remodeling the Wal Mart in Othello, WA, which paved the way for me to get a permanent job with Wal Mart as a cart pusher while I intern at the Columbia Basin Herald, helping to maintain their website and the various other technologies the paper uses to generate revenue. Hopefully, a better permanent job will come out of it.

Ticketmaster's Note (New Year's Day, 2023): I lost both the Wal-Mart and Columbia Basin Herald jobs for various reasons before temping as a referee for high school sports, spending two days working on an apple farm, and getting a job at Safeway that I held for over five years. You can learn how that ended in New Piece Offerings #1: State of the Ticketmaster Address FROM August 7, 2017. You can also learn about my more amicable transition from Subway to Akins' Fresh Market in the State Of the Ticketmaster Address, 2019 FROM March 23 of that year, read my gambler's confession at the beginning of Isekai "Quartet" #2: Overlord (The Anime One) FROM June 14, 2021, learn about my 2021 relapses and their consequences in Back From Burnout? (MCU Edition) and Back From the Hospital, respectively, and finally, read about how the rest of 2022 went for me in yesterday's State Of the TicketVerse Address 2022.

And that's How I Got Here. Stay Tuned and save those Ticket Stubs as tomorrow, I give the first four parts of my "What If GOKU Was NEVER BORN?" story a little re-write in Dragon Blog Z! A new Zenescope - Omnibusted will release on Wednesday, and I'll start circulating Throwback Thursday links for my early Blogger posts onto Facebook, Reddit, and Tumblr...on Thursday.

Oh, and like, comment, subscribe, follow, and all that other good stuff because it's good stuff to do.

Ticketmaster,

Duh.

I mean,

Out.