Shape-up your security, folks!

Part of frugality and financial fitness is more than smart spending, folks. I shrug off horror stories all the time about suckers who got got by blatantly poor decisions or planning. I feel like I am above it all. This viewpoint, however, is ignorant as hell, and someone out there will be laughing hard when I land in hubris hot water. However, some of my confidence is well-founded because I take steps to protect myself the best I can. Here is what works for me:

Freeze your credit! Employment, house loans and (don't do it unless necessary!) car loans require a good credit history. Freezing your credit means telling Equifax, TransUnion and Experian not to open a new credit card or loan account without your consent to lift the freeze. This was another one of those things that I laughed off, thinking it would never happen to me. It still hasn't, but this extra layer of protection can be done in just a few minutes. Wells Fargo got busted for creating fake accounts (and subsequently spent millions of dollars asking for our forgiveness via commercials--the audacity of those crooks!) In February, Seattle ICE was caught in identity fraud.

I didn't have luck with TransUnion's website, so I called 888.909.8872 and it was an automated call. Same with Equifax; 800.685.1111, option 3 or say "freeze." It's free in Washington currently and at least 7 other states. Experian was the only website that actually worked for me, though their number is 888.397.3742.

If you have a fraudulent transaction, don't forget to tell your credit card company and let them do the leg work of investigation. I experienced some drama with Frontier Communications (may the company lose all business and collapse into nothingness!) over a bill that was $150 more than expected. I ended up waiting 5 months for it to be corrected (it wasn't) and ended up calling again when I was reported to collections. I should have paid the whole thing with my credit card and sicced my credit card company on them!

Art by dougdougmann@deviantart

This credit report security is especially important because I've been shopping for condos this summer. At first glance, you'd be right to question my frugality in addition to my longing to live overseas again. However, once I can sweet talk a bank into a loan, the monthly payment towards a condo loan (unit+HOA dues) is $100 or more less than rent in the area! You have to go in with a good down payment and good credit, but we're all masters of wise financial decisions, so this is no problem! This doesn't apply everywhere, and I'm leaving out the massive detail that I'm currently in an apartment with sliding scale rent. However, the going rent in Lynnwood is currently $600 for a room in someone's house, $1000 for a 1 bedroom, and $1200+ for a 2 bedroom. One of the banks I asked offered me just over $1100 monthly on a 2br condo. Consider it, folks! To keep with security, a condo means that you can't be suddenly evicted!

Also, as a person who doesn't use cash, it's amazing how more than 99% of my income is digital. That said, to limit liability, I suggest paying your cards and accounts from your bank account. The alternative is to login to Chase, Capital One and Citibank and link your bank account to each individually, creating 4 vulnerabilities instead of one. However, this is a lot of important information to have all in one place, so make sure your password isn't worthless. Make those hackers work to rip you off!

You'll want to put some thought into your password, but not too much that you can't remember. I like to use catchphrases with numbers instead of letters. "Hasta la vista, Baby!" from Terminator 2 is long, but memorable as #4st4l4v1st4b4by. I guarantee you know 10 lines or their approximates that would work very well as passwords.

Two Reddit accounts. One for NSFW, one for general browsing that leaves comments.

That's all I have for now, folks. These are all steps that take a minimum of time and energy.

Update: It's only poetic justice that I get fraudulent charges on my account a week after posting this! It seems some rapscallion used my card via Uber Eats, which you know I'm too frugal to pay for a) a phone that would be able to run the app and b) someone to deliver food I could make or go get myself! It's all good, though. I called credit card customer service, who connected me to their fraud department, and the entire phone call took 3 minutes and I'm not liable for anything. This is a great example of why I use credit card over debit cards, as the week it takes to replace your credit card is a lot less traumatic than having your bank account locked.

Gaming and Graduation

Holy moly, folks! 2018 is hummin along, with my most recent viewing of a seizure-beckoning Incredibles 2, and a significant reduction in gaming time. I just finished up a graduate-level grammar class and Washington heated up a bit, educating me on just how much warmer a TV makes the room. Back to Incredibles 2, the movie was quite awesome save for the one poor choice of a scene involving a really intense strobe light. I don't have photo-sensitivity, but I closed my eyes for sure. Don't let that keep you from seeing it, though I can't really say that it's a big screen movie, since the action is really well directed and you pretty much always know what's going on.

It def gets dicey in this game

Games! I finally platinumed Children of the Zodiarcs, which is an entertaining and beautifully drawn tactics RPG. You're a bunch of orphans making your way through seedy neighborhoods, killing those who need to be killed. My only complaint is that the soundtrack is very minimal, so about half of my gameplay was without sound. If you want a play style that feels like a board game but has the convenience of digital interaction, this game is for you. Also, plus points for having a black female lead.

Art direction +1 Lookit dem colors!

Also finished up everything in God of War. My biggest shame for being frugal is that really good games like God of War that have a shorter path to platinum usually end up getting borrowed, and the dev never sees my money. At the same time, I gotta look after Number One, and I can't be spending emotions on businesses either.

I spent a good deal of time playing Overwatch during the anniversary event, where they unlocked all the skins and even game modes for almost all of June. The game that keeps on giving.

Omae ga mattaku shinisoudaze!

In game-related news, E3's finally shown me more than a buncha zombie survival games, and Ghost of Tsushima is one title I'm very excited for. Sony musta bribed the devil with all the great exclusives coming to the PS4. Assassin's Creed Odyssey looks great, though I haven't played any titles since AC II. Cyberpunk 2077 might be the most compelling of the batch, and I'll know not to rush into it. I screwed up my Witcher experience (same developer) by starting my first play on HARD. I gave up on that playthrough, but might give the game another go before Cyberpunk comes out.

What got you most pumped at E3?

Grow up...sheesh

Salad bowl brain blast incoming! I am a pretty negative person, and that may not always come through in my posts, here. That's the benefit of writing over saying something: you have time to control your ideas. Any jackass who tweets jackass things probably doesn't realize that tweeting is writing, and those people have the boon of time to...maybe not say racist things and lose a bunch of work for a bunch of people *cough Roseanne cough*. So, without further ado, it is TIME TO RANT.

Gaming trends

Fallout 4. Ark. Daylight. Fortnite. PUBG. Terraria. Breath of the Wild. State of Decay 2.
What do all of these have in common? Crafting and survival. Trends have the potential for creators to take familiar routes and hopefully break left when everyone else broke right and make something new. Developers usually rest that divergence on narrative, characters and/or aesthetics. However, if you're like me and really don't value the resources-and-survival genre, it's easy to feel like there's no new content. I personally feel like the developer stopped making the game and left me purchasing their full-priced dev kit. Minecraft looks like LEGO and gets credit for being a big deal early on (though I'm not sure if it was the first.) But the fact that so much of modern releases are now these glorified physics engines is getting obnoxious. Oddly enough, I highly favor RTS games, which have a lot in common with this list of games I started with. Maybe the player perspective is what I don't like about these?

Solution: give me a narrative!

Playstation Network

Speaking of gaming trends: smaller developers have been my lifeblood, especially in the last year. It's incredibly frustrating how rudimentary marketing tactics prevent games that aren't trendy from seeing more money. I'm going to pick on SONY for having a poorly-executed Playstation marketplace for more than a decade. A better system helps everyone! If you're a AAA title, you get your own page: the 5000 people who weren't already going to buy Destiny 2 were treated to a menu option in the store with a huge banner and a neat little video. However, maybe you want to play a game that isn't a shooter or maybe you've grown sick of Bethesda games and want to try one of the thousands of games that don't fit these two overdone categories of games.

I usually go to the sale pages, and filter GAMES out of the ADD-ON, BUNDLE, (dashboard) THEMES or DEMOS. There's a GENRE filter as well, but not on the main storefront page. You have to know what you're looking for: the browsing is so limited, and there's no way to know just how many games are available on the PSN. Also, searching is atrocious. You search, one letter at a time, from a shrinking choice of options. You can't just search by keyword. The ratings should be more robust than a star system. Perhaps with more detailed feedback options, gamers might be willing to spend more money. They could stick with the 5-star system and break it down into categories: Gameplay, Difficulty, Controls, Visuals/Audio and Pace. I'm sure someone who works for the company and gets paid for ideas could come up with something better than me, but the store they've had since even the PS3 days has been garbage. A better system helps everyone. Also, on a technical note, the store crashes all the time from not being able to keep up with loading preview media of games. Also, the video still plays despite skipping over it and trying to go to pictures. This has gone on since the PS4's launch. The volume of movie clips is so much louder than whatever you're playing that it's quite jarring, and I just don't watch their stupid previews unless the remote is within reach. A better system helps everyone: fix your shit, SONY.

Movies

When Avengers: Infinity Wars came out, I was still winding down from Black Panther being the big deal it was, with it's showcasing Black Excellence, compelling villain and strong women. Then, Avengers kicked my ass all over the place with Thanos being THE ultimate badass. And now, some idiot or collection of idiots decided to release a Star Wars movie barely after Avengers, and half a year after The Last Jedi. I really liked Solo. It had my favorite musical score of the movies, other than a few choice tracks from the saga, of course. The movie was really enjoyable and the dude who played Han was as much of a rascal as he should have been. I did my best to ignore the secondhand warnings I got from people who read and value professional critics' declarations of disapproval and saw the movie in a reserved-seating theater with reclining chairs. That is my first gripe with this movie: the critics got to see the movie first and ruined it with their crappy opinions. I realize the irony of this, considering that I primarily review games on this blog. But seriously, between unimpressed critics who only revere old movies and "fans" who were still burned from The Last Jedi not perpetuating some outdated elitist belief that every advantage is hereditary, this movie didn't get a fair chance to shoot first...Also, the idiot studio not waiting until December to release it lost that movie millions of dollars of revenue. These things are external as hell, but they still did affect the experience of seeing Solo. My only gripe with the movie is the trope of absolutely needing to unmask characters that wear masks. Screw that, keep the mask: retain the mystery.

Math

Yeah! I'm on a roll, here. So far I've talked about entertainment stuff, which is easy to argue that I should let it go because we're lucky enough to have access to it in the first place. Grab your Maslov Pyramid for a moment, cause I'm gonna rant on something that has REAL WORLD FUNCTION!
At some point in my early education, I was two years ahead in math. This means that I took algebra and geometry in middle school, and I can see the value of basic formulas and measuring space as life skills. However, high school further explored Algebra and then I studied Calculus, which was completely useless to me, who became an ESL teacher. Calculus is useful in the world, and probably to scientists who don't have calculators or internet connections.

Solution:
However, finances, debt management and credit should be priorities in (middle and) high school. Every. Single. Person. Uses. Money. My point here is that the Math Directive needs to teach students about money and credit before rates and advanced formulas.

Republican Party economics

There isn't one person who is both competent and not evil in that group. How can you possibly believe that Republicans "create jobs" when they slash funding for social programs that...help people work? Planned Parenthood helps people decide whether or not to have kids and...work! Slashing that funding means a bunch of social workers lose their jobs, as well as the parents who were on the fence about working now have to either balance baby life and work life. Whether working more or less, the result is a family that suffers quality of time and life. Same thing for healthcare, except now you've got sick and dead people's debts. Who do they expect to pay for this?

Then there's this nonsense about economic trickle down. Squash. That. Noise. I live outside of Seattle but work downtown. I don't work at Amazon; their AI decided my resume didn't have enough keywords and boom, no job. That's fine, but the only evidence of trickle down with Amazon that I see is that it's now okay for salads to cost $14, and a 400 sq ft studio is $1600 per month. The surrounding neighborhoods are super gentrified and homelessness has skyrocketed. Go trickle-down!

If you're not from here, the recent politics are that the City of Seattle wanted to charge a special tax to large corporations and use it to address homelessness. Obviously they pushed back and said the City should get better at financial planning (true) and the spineless council caved. I personally think that if Amazon left, smaller businesses would have more of a fighting chance, rent would go down, and so would the ridiculous cost of eating. Also, smaller businesses will likely pay taxes instead of keeping their money in Ireland. Amazon is both online and global, so it's not like I can't use their business if they move away from here. I really don't feel like there's any trickle down besides those gorgeous globes they built in the middle of the city.

Solution: Never, ever believe in trickle down. It forces you to pay taxes that corporations should be paying.