Apparently, according to the popup that I just encountered before leaving feedback for my latest eBay purchase, sellers can now no longer leave negative feedback for buyers. What a great idea!

That's not sarcasm -- I'm being dead serious. Ever since one of my first eBay experiences years ago in which I left neutral feedback for a seller and the seller returned the favor even though I paid for the auction immediately -- as I always do -- I've felt held hostage by sellers with respect to the eBay feedback system. (In fairness, I left neutral feedback for something that really wasn't the seller's fault and probably should have contacted the seller first, so I learned something there. But if I were a seller and a customer had a problem I would respond to the customer via e-mail and see about getting the issue worked out -- and the feedback amended with a satisfactory comment from the customer -- rather than simply issuing revenge feedback.) Sellers would even emphasize their feedback leverage in the shipping notification e-mails: "Once your order arrives in satisfactory condition, please leave feedback for me. I will do the same for you." The unspoken implication? And if you don't leave positive feedback for me, I'll say something nasty and tarnish your record in kind.

There are plenty of sellers I've left positive feedback who probably should have received neutral ratings at best. For example, I once ordered from a seller who shoved the flimsy cardboard-boxed item into a small padded envelope. As a result, though the toy itself was fine (what, did you think I was ordering jewelry? 😉 ), the box itself was pretty crushed -- which would have pissed me off to no end if I'd intended to keep the item mint in box. I didn't, so I didn't really feel like complaining, but I'd still have given this seller a neutral rating for the poor packing job if it hadn't been for the hostage feedback thing. As it went, I left positive feedback and marked the shipping charges, in the separate ratings the seller can't see, "very unreasonable."

And then there was the seller I from whom I ordered a lot of loose Batman, TMNT, and other assorted figures. They were noted as being in played-with condition, so I expected that, but I did not expect them to be sticky. That was fucking gross, and I totally would not have bought them if I had known that I would spend hours scrubbing them in the sink and scraping gunk off of them with my fingernails (and even then I wasn't entirely successful, so I still keep most of these figures separate from my others). I desperately wanted to leave this seller negative feedback, and here I didn't feel like it was my responsibility to contact the seller about the problem since the seller should have cleaned the figures first or at least mentioned of their stickiness (yuck) in the auction description. I mean, what could the seller have done to make this right -- send me more dirty sticky toys? Yet, fearing revenge feedback, I decided to leave nothing at all.

Apparently, however, those days are over! Sellers of sticky toys, your days of having 100% feedback ratings are numbered! But also -- hopefully -- this will encourage sellers to be more proactive about pleasing customers. Instead of writing, "Once your order arrives in satisfactory condition, please leave feedback for me. I will do the same for you," in e-mails (which I admit I pasted from the shipping notification of my latest purchase; true to form, the seller left me positive feedback not ten minutes after I gave him/her a positive rating), sellers could explicitly encourage unsatisfied customers to e-mail the seller before leaving neutral or negative feedback. After all, this doesn't always go without saying -- and based on past experiences, buyers may be less likely to trust a seller to care once the payment has been received or wary about the possibility of a satisfactory outcome.

For example, I once ordered a computer peripheral from Newegg.com that didn't work. When I contacted customer service, they instructed me to ship it back for a replacement. I did so, and they did ship me a working replacement, but it cost me nearly $10 to send the thing back -- and since the main reason I had ordered from Newegg in the first place was that the product was $5 cheaper there than other online sites, it was ultimately more expensive for me to buy the thing from Newegg. Not their fault, but it still soured the experience for me. I haven't shopped Newegg since.

Contrast that with my most recent Amazon Marketplace purchase, where one of the figures I bought broke right out of the package. Given the discount price of the items, I might otherwise have just shrugged it off, glued the broken piece on, and just had a figure with one non-working joint -- which I likely would have done if the seller had asked me to ship it back for a replacement, since the shipping cost here would have been worth more to me than the missing joint. (The shipping would also have been roughly 1/3 of the cost of a small dremel tool that I could probably use to fix the figure myself, not to mention fix other toys and make various figure modifications and even sand Bacardi's nails.) But since I really did and do want this figure in proper working order, I decided to e-mail the seller to see about getting a replacement -- and lo and behold, he responded in less than an hour and apparently shipped me a replacement the very next day without asking me to send the broken figure back. Assuming that it actually arrives (and isn't damaged in some really obvious way that's clearly visible through the windowed box), this guy will have made a repeat customer of me. Heck, I'm already scouring his online store looking for additional figures I can buy with my stimulus money -- figures I don't even want that badly and likely wouldn't buy otherwise -- just so I can give him more of my business as a token of my appreciation. (It's too bad he doesn't have DC Universe Classics Wave 3 available for preorder!) And of course I'll be sure to plug and link to the retailer both here and on Scary-Crayon.

Anyway, I'll stop this here before I start going on about my past experiences in retail or describing in detail the time I bought two meals from a Chinese food shop in a mall food court because of how impressed I was with their apparent emphasis on presenting potential customers with fresh and piping hot free samples, but yeah -- I do appreciate good business practices and attempts to improve the customer's experience. So thanks a bunch, eBay and as yet unnamed Amazon Marketplace seller. I look forward to doing business with you again!

I have a couple other posts in the works (one about a recurrent obsession and its latest manifestation; another on freaking Hillary Clinton and the potential damage she's doing with her most recent comments on sexism and even more explicit feminist slant), but I thought it was important to link to this Huffington Post article on Memorial Day. April Somdahl's heartbreaking experience -- and that of her late brother -- highlights yet another unfortunate effect of the Iraq War on the lives of service members, military families, and the rest of us as well.

I realize how this sounds coming from me, but I hope that you all have (or had, depending upon when you read this) a blessed and reflective Memorial Day. Wishing you a "happy" or "joyful" one doesn't seem quite appropriate in light of that article and what the day signifies.

And a long one, too. It began with me accompanying a young woman to the residence of an aging small-time crime boss. She was supposed to meet with him in private, presumably for some sort of romantic liaison, and I was supposed to keep an eye on the situation and make sure she got back okay. Anyway, I was standing outside the door of the guy's second-floor bedroom sipping from a wineglass when I heard a scream. I rushed in to find the girl bleeding from the neck and the crime boss dead with a wooden plank through his chest -- apparently the old guy had been a vampire and had tried to take a bite out of the dame. Despite her small size, she'd snapped off a hunk of a nearby dresser and dispatch him promptly.

Although I was ostensibly there to protect her, she took charge at this point. She snatched a small gun from the open dresser drawer -- I have no idea what kind of super high-tech weapon this thing was; it fired bullets that looked like cell batteries and never needed to be reloaded -- and, waving me behind her, made for the stairwell. Once there, we saw one of the crime boss's sons standing at the foot of the stairs with an uzi. He ripped loose with a hail of gunfire, and the poor girl was instantly flattened against the opposite wall, riddled with holes and bleeding profusely -- her short, blonde curls now highlighted with glistening red spatters -- and gasping her final breaths. As she died, she pressed the battery gun into my hand.

While the crime boss's son signaled for assistance, I ran back to the old man's bedroom, climbed out of a window, ran across the roof, leapt down into the grass, and dashed off into the night... and the rest of the dream consisted of me running from the crime boss's sons and daughters -- he had a lot of sons and daughters -- and dispatching them in various ambush setups. At one point I hid behind a hedge and blew them away as they hurriedly turned a blind corner; another setup found me hiding in a tree and shooting as they ran into a park clearing. Eventually only the eldest son and daughter remained, and, from my hiding spot, I overheard the son suggesting that perhaps they should just let me go. But the daughter was seething and wanted revenge, so he reluctantly agreed to continue the hunt.

I arranged my final ambush at a 24-hour grocery store, hiding behind a display and waiting for them to rush in several minutes later. But while my gun seemed to have unlimited ammo, the potency of the battery shots had begun to wane -- such that, when the sister ran in first, my multiple shots to her chest failed to kill her right away. And since she now knew where I was hiding, I had to go over to where she had fallen and make sure she was dead before her brother arrived. Just as I finished her, though, her brother appeared with his gun just a foot away from my face. He told me to try to shoot back if I could -- "just to make it interesting" -- and I whirled and fired. We each got off about five shots in the next moment...

...and when the slow-motion second was over, I was unscathed and he was slumped back against a glass door with two holes in his left shoulder and one in his forehead. Yet owing to the reduced immediacy of the bullets' effects, he was still conscious and alive, so we were able to talk a bit before he finally died. He talked about how impressed he was, offered no hard feelings, and said we'd meet again in another lifetime -- as friends -- the usual sort of thing. Then he died, and I bought a glazed honey bun and left.

Another weird dream indeed.

This must be the third or fourth time in as many weeks that I've dreamed about the house being overrun by crocodiles. Quite terrifying, really. And then I woke up and turned to Wikipedia to assuage my lingering fears, only to run into an article about Gustave. Why has nobody killed this thing?!

I like my monster crocodiles fictional and living in the sewers of Gotham or New York City, thanks.

(Note: readers unfamiliar with the case should refer to this prior entry.)

The front of the card doesn't require a closer look (there's nothing written or stamped on it this time, though the image itself is arguably pretty fucked up considering the context), but click on the interior pic above for a larger version with slightly more legible text. I don't know about you, but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be begging for the friendship of someone who "burned me twice in court!" At least I think that's what he wrote there. I'm not entirely sure, particularly since there was only one court case as far as I know. And including his birth year there with the hyphen? So creepy -- it's almost as if he's suggesting that he hasn't much longer to live. Which may actually be true, given that he's got the AIDS and all, but still.

"CAN WE BE FRIENDS AGAIN BEFORE I KICK THE BUCKET?!?!?! FORGIVE ME, DAMNIT -- IT'S THE CHRISTIAN THING TO DO!!!!!!!"