Category: The Digital Feed

Generally I deal with media and my own writing here, but on occasion I’ll branch out into other subjects. Today’s branch out happens to be car repair. Or more specifically the issues people encounter when trying to learn how to handle their own car repairs.

Recently I’ve been replacing various lights on my car, a 2001 Pontiac Sunfire. However, I know very little when it comes to practical car repair. I can change a tire, sure, but when I need to replace something like a console instrument cluster because the bulb for 50mph is burned out on my speedometer, I’m not really even sure where to start. So I’ve turned to the internet in the hopes that there is knowledge out there that is being shared.

I’ve learned that this is often the case. But never quite exactly what you’re looking for.

Often people will have questions that you’ve got. That’s not a big surprise, I hear there’s a rule or something along those lines. If you’ve thought of it, someone else has already thought of it and it’s already on the internet. Sometimes in explicit form. Unfortunately it seems the same does not go for the answers.

To wit, I have discovered that to get at this burned out light, I must in fact remove the dashboard of my car. Obnoxious, really, to replace one single bulb, but I’m not going to get into that right now. Now I need to know how to remove my dashboard. Because I really have no clue where to start. What this particular complaint about is how stupid the people answering that question are.

You see, it turns out that the Pontiac Sunfire uses an instrument light cluster. I can’t just replace the single bulb ( according to some, not according to others ), I have to have the whole cluster serviced. What kills me here is that on about twelve different answer based forums where the specific question was “How do I remove the dashboard of my 2002 Pontiac Sunfire” followed by the explanation of “I need to replace one of the burnt out lights in my instrument light cluster on my speedometer / temperature gauge / tachometer” the best voted answer by other readers was “You can’t just replace the bulb. You have to have the whole light cluster serviced.”

…

Great.

THAT WAS NOT THE [EXPLETIVE] QUESTION.

What the [expletive]. What. The. [Expletive]. Seriously. Even if you know that it’s not as simple as replacing a single bulb, how stupid do you have to be to completely miss that even if they need to have the whole cluster serviced, they still need to remove the [expletive] dashboard anyway.

Fortunately, CdnReaper over at Pontiac Forums ( thread 20855 ) was nice enough to give someone who asked the question the actual answer.

Thank you, CdnReaper. You have what was once called common sense. Unfortunately now it seems that should be called Exceptional Sense.

— Vid

For the most part Malicious Bastards is pretty well self sufficient at this point. There are a few things that I do want to fine tune still, but really I’m happy with the whole of it. However, one of the big things I’d like to add is a forum.

It seems like this would be a relatively simple thing to do, and there are a lot of options out there, but the big issue for me is always aesthetics. I want it to look like it blends to the site well. I want the gateway to go through the site the way I want it to. I’m not looking to have some secondary website set up where you decide you want to go talk to people somewhere else and you can get there from here. I want it to be actually here.

Apparently that’s not so easy. Which is stupid. There’s a whole host of forums out there and it seems like every single one of them wants to work the same way. Set up some other page to be your forum. What the hell, man. Why is this so complicated? I’ve found one or two that will actually work in a page that I set up, but then they completely take over the webpage, and I can’t maintain my current site structure, which still defeats the purpose.

Now, this may seem like a mini-rant, and it kind of is, but really I’m looking to open the discussion about what the best way to handle all of this would be. If you read here, and you’ve got ideas, post a comment. Please. I’m looking to set this up for a number of reasons, and it’d be helpful to get some outside input because every avenue I’ve tried has come up closed off.

— Vid

It never seems to fail that just when I’m able to make the commitment of time or funds to one project, game, or some other activity something else comes along and defeats the whole damn point. Recently I felt the Massive center of my life to be empty. So, with a little pressure from peers, I caved and bought the Wrath of the Lich King and Cataclysm expansions for World of Warcraft. This on its own was quite an undertaking as I did not buy them so much as arrange for their acquisition at Christmas. Of course a game acquisition of this measure also implies a time card purchase. And so I put my chips in for two months worth of game time in the form of a subscription card.

No big deal, it just means focused attention to one game for two months. Any of my friends could easily back up my ability to do that. But then Minecraft also managed to be a plausible time sink. If you are reading this post and do not know what Minecraft is, you likely live under a gaming rock. It is easily the most successful Indie game of all time. If you want Massive, you can’t get bigger than Minecraft.

I found my time split between the two, and then a horrible thing began to occur. At random, the Library [my long anticipated desktop computer for those of you not keeping notes] decided to fully power down. It could be after twenty minutes, could be after four hours, but something inevitably causes the whole tower to hard stop.

This sucks epically.

I’ve narrowed it down to either my power supply, graphics card, or the processor. The first one is no big deal, but either of the other two imply a whole new series of parts. The graphics card less so, but to take advantage of the newer cards really requires a new motherboard, which also means a new processor. New board also means new RAM, and a new power supply anyway. I am likely looking at $1,200ish in parts for what I am temporarily dubbing “the Reliquary.”

Not [expletive] cheap. And all so I can play two games where in my spare time I can find hunks of metal to turn into awesome tools.

Maybe I’ll just play Mass Effect. Where one of my spare quests is to go find minerals with which to build ships for a galactic defense fleet.

…

God damnit.

— Vid