[ot] [joke] [personal]

[Karl]

lemme rephrase this.  it needs a lot of rephrasing, really, but I can
do a little.

On Mon, Dec 7, 2020 at 12:03 PM Karl <gmkarl at gmail.com> wrote:
> note: I have never been involved in a mafia, other than mysterious
> slavery

jokes

a man was recording things with his smartphone while trading on a blockchain.
then he met a kumquat.  he was so happy, to meet this delicious kumquat!
he took a picture of himself smiling next to the kumquat.  he cherished this
picture of such a delicious moment!

then the kumquat said, "I'm an escaped slave."  his smartphone broke, as did the
desktop computer and the external harddrive he'd copied the picture to.
<oh my god this actually happened to me.  skipping a bit and returning
to joke soon.>
and mtgox was hacked.
he bought another smartphone, another laptop, and another desktop computer,
multiple times, and all those broke.  His firmware behaved like nobody
else's firmware,
in that it contacted the network to download a boot image no matter
what the settings
were set to, and he called up the company to diagnose it, and they
said he had a "special"
kind of firmware, and it was supposed to behave like that.

he got 14 mysterious offers to buy his kumquat.  on the news, the man saw media
beginning to discuss trade agreements changing, that kumquats had been deemed
dangerously unhealthy, and changing how everyone communicates, going back to
landlines and paper letters.  when he borrowed a friends' phone to send happy
holidays texts out, none of the phones had camera apps anymore.

> the rat ran away, and the man was sad.  he bought another phone at the store,
> and it broke as soon as he went into the camera app.  he visited his friends,
> and they wanted to take pictures.  the pictures worked out okay, until he
> talked about how sad he was that his rat ran away.  then somebody dropped
> their camera in the toilet by accident.  another person accidentally factory
> reset their phone.  nobody seemed to remember the visit, afterwards.
>
> he went to another store to get a phone.  they told him phones were never made.
> that there was no such thing as a phone!  they seemed to have no idea what he
> was talking about.
>
> the man put on a disguise, withdrew money in cash from the bank, and went to a
> large mainstream store to buy a phone.  he didn't look at the phone
while quickly ripping it from its security lock on the shelf.
> a store worker asked if they could help him, and he replied,
> 'yes; I'm looking for donuts.  do you sell any donuts?' .  he bought some
> donuts.  he went to self-checkout, and obscured his donuts while he bought
> them.  he left a lot of extra cash hidden for an employee to find, and stole the
> phone without checking it out.
>
> at home, he opened the phone, and threw out the battery, the sim card,
> and the sd card.  he made a little aluminum foil enclosure, and put another
> aluminum foil enclosure around it.  he then went on a drive to a very rural
> area, and waited until 4 in the morning.
>
he plugged the phone into a backup battery, put both in the nested toy aluminum
foil enclosures, and turned it on.  He put it into airplane mode as soon as he
was able to, and opened the camera app.
> OMIGOD.  THE CAMERA APP RAN.