I’ve seen some things on Twitter that interested me enough in the way of making this post.

It’s been… a month and some change (I honestly haven’t kept track) since I made the conscious decision to step back in fandom activities, to participate in fandom a lot more passively, and I do honestly have to say that it continues to be the right decision. It had gotten to the point where I did not enjoy any of them, even interacting with those who held the same views as me, and I knew that I was making myself do more than I could reasonably extend myself to do. I didn’t want to commit myself to going at warp speed, and continuing to do so, for any of the things that someone would reasonably consider myself a member of the fandom of. Compounding that was the fact that I am not comfortable meeting many people from the Internet in real life, which almost seems expected — I would have found it to be extremely awkward to discuss the intricacies of fandom with someone that I’d originally met on the Internet. This is not and never will be my forte. And coupled with that was the fact that up until recently, and as a general rule, I did not mix fandom with real-life activities. This was a hard no. With the exception of one person, that stays off of my Facebook account.

I also don’t appreciate being told how to live my life, or being given “good advice” (in bad faith) about how I should live said life, even if it’s by people who are supposed to be “on my side” or my friends. If people are going to do that and tell me what they think I should do — key word there, tell, not ask — and plan the next five or ten years of my life out, the least they can do is pick one or more of my bills and actually pay them for me. That will get my attention. But getting back to what I was saying, there was also the fact that people in fandoms tend to take things much more seriously than I ever have or do, and this became intrusive as it related to my real life and things like how I parent my children (someone scoured my Twitter to find out that Bub is on medication as per advice from his care team and stated that I “drug my kids”, so I must be a “bad parent” or something). That was kind of rich since it came from people who will never get to know me on an intricate, intimate level, let alone meet any of us in real life. My social networking sites are only snapshots of me as a person, and I feel like a lot of people would do better in general if they actually remembered this.

Now the USPS has stolen three separate parcels of mine, because as soon as they got to my state they were… misdirected to cities that I hadn’t even heard of other than being able to see that they were in the same state as me due to the tracking. This was three separate parcels, two of them with tracking that indicated this (as the other one went with one of the others that had tracking on it and thus couldn’t be tracked itself as they were supposed to travel together). I contacted the USPS online about it and they were not helpful at all, refusing to acknowledge that it had even happened even though there is a history of mail theft in this area — try this area in particular. However, eBay was really helpful given that I made all three purchases off of them. Even though two of them were “marked” as Delivered (just not to me), they opened up Item Not Received inquiries since from their end they could see that I had intended to have the parcels shipped to my home address and that had not happened any of these three times. Once the delivery range expires for the third item with it obviously not being received, eBay can then open up an Item Not Delivered inquiry for that one as well, and I should quickly get refunds on all of the items that… wait for it… never came.

This has been my weekend in a nutshell, folks, and let me tell you: I Am Not Amused With Shenanigans.

The parcel that I mentioned did arrive at eight in the evening on the sixth, even though it was already late by that point. However, I chalk this up to the fact that I persistently asked FedEx about the status of it since one item that I attempted to buy in December of 2021 was already stolen from that drop-off point — I wasn’t about to let another parcel get stolen by them if I could help it, even if this parcel was… somewhat larger… in the form of a desk. In the interim I began reading about FedEx, though, and that search led me to their Reddit where apparently a lot of people have complained that their PlayStation 5s have been stolen, ranging from the driver not delivering them (or faking delivery) to them being taken out of the boxes before they were even delivered because Sony puts what they are on the box, instead replacing the contents of the box with similarly heavy things. (And apparently this still happens for people recently buying PlayStation 5s, too…)

When I was a teenager, someone got Final Fantasy X-2 for me a a Christmas present. Upon opening it, I realized that there were AOL discs (yes, this was back in the day when America Online was still a viable Internet option) rather than the game discs that I had been expecting. The person took the game back to get an actual copy of the game, and the place that they’d bought it from almost didn’t believe that this had actually happened until someone came in right behind them complaining that their electronics had been replaced with America Online discs as well. I eventually got my hands on the game that I was supposed to get that Christmas even though I didn’t actually get around to finishing it for… well, quite awhile, but the fact of the matter still stands that this absolutely does happen. FedEx seems like it is the worst in the whole United States for this, though. You can practically doomscroll on Reddit reading about items that FedEx has stolen, and in some of these cases drivers have actually been fired or had charges pressed against them because FedEx could prove that the item had actually been loaded onto their van when the decision was made by them to steal it. Those are the stories that I like reading about since someone is held responsible.