Please do not let debt collectors play in your face.

I am super busy so I honestly don’t even know if I should be taking the time to write this, but hopefully this will help those of you who may find yourself in a similar situation.

Earlier this year I received a letter of notice from a debt collector stating that they had acquired a debt supposedly belonging to me and that, per law, I have 30 days to dispute the debt. I immediately drafted a letter and sent it to both disputing the debt and request validation of the debt as well as possible settlement arrangements had they actually been able to validate said debt

I sent this letter via certified mail. Always certified mail.

About a week after the 30 day period for them to respond expired, I received a Phone call very specifically crafted in a way to invoke urgency and panic and suggest legal action. So, naturally, I called this number only to discover this was a different company that had only just recently acquired said supposed debt. I reiterated to them that I was disputing this debt and required validation in writing.

The initial conversation went smoothly, they then called me back the next day and became aggressive. They accused me of lying and did everything under the sun to try and trick me into validating this debt as mine so that they would not have to legally send me that validation. I, knowing my rights, insisted that I was disputing the debt and that they were required to send me validation despite them claiming that they were not and that they already had and many other number of lies. I refused to continue the conversation until someone had sent me validation to which they continually responded that they would be forwarding this to their legal department and blah blah blah blah blah.

Surprise surprise, I get a phone call today from yet another company, this one claiming to be in the process of forwarding my account to the county clerks office. That was an immediate red flag as the county clerk does not handle debt disputes. They would have to hire a lawyer in my state to handle this case. I asked what company this was as they had not stated initially, and when they told me I realized this was now another company who had purchased said alleged debt and we’re trying to collect on it. this one outright illegally threatening to take me to court knowing they weren’t.

Beyond that, he tried to lie to me and tell me that a debt validation was not what I thought it was and that a validation was actually just a notice that they had purchased a debt so when I received a letter stating that they had purchased this debt that would be a validation.

That is not true! Debt companies are legally required to send you notice of an allegedly acquired debt in writing and you have 30 days to dispute and request that validation. The company then has 30 days themselves to respond and validate your debt or the debt is forfeit. This man tried to lie to me and tell me that a notice was the same thing as a dead validation in order to trick me into paying a debt that he cannot validate that I am actively disputing.

This is now the fourth company that has attempted to collect on a debt they cannot validate. They know they cannot validate this debt and instead have relied on trying to trick me into paying it. These tactics would absolutely work if I did not have a sales background and or know my rights.

And this ladies and gentlemen is why you always always always dispute a debt. The last debt I disputed was immediately pulled from collections and that allowed me to get back in contact with the original creditor and work out a payment plan so that it would never hit my credit and keep my account with them current. This debt is invalid and therefore they cannot hit my credit with it nor can I collect on it or I will sue them.

If you guys have any questions about dealing with that collectors please ask me.

I’m not surprised they gave you the long ass run around on this.

For anyone that has a debt sold to a Collections Agency do exactly what OP did and request debt validation (Google-able). Most of the time, the Original company you owed debt to did not give them your Social Security Number or your date of birth; just a good phone number and address. In order to be held legally responsible for it and to be on your credit score, they need your SSN or DOB to prove it’s yours.

Usually, they’re initial call will say “Hey so before we can discuss your debt of $Xxxx, we need you to verify your SSN and DOB.” They’re lying. That means they want you to confirm it so they can legally pin that debt to you. If you send a Debt Validation letter VIA CERTIFIED MAIL, that Collections Agency has 30 days to prove you owe the debt and that it does in fact tie to you. Since in most cases they can’t, they’ll send a letter saying “We don’t have the necessary information to collect on this debt. It is now null and void.” Send copies of that to the credit bureaus, and they wipe it from your credit report.

With OP, they did the shadiest thing possible by constantly re-selling the debt, thus starting over that 30 day response period.

Never pay a debt unless you’re certain that you owe it. Especially if it’s for a deceased relative. Debt collection companies are especially predatory during the grieving period asking you to “Pay down the debt” or “Clear their good name”. Unless you (co)signed, don’t give them anything. The debt will get written off on their taxes. If you do pay, you’re locked in on that debt. You basically showed “willingness and ability to pay” which is all they need.

I gotta say… even if you *are * “certain you owe it”, get it validated. If someone forgot to make sure to dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s and didn’t connect the DOB and SSN and everything… That isn’t your fault. This whole capitalistic hellscape is fucking broken. don’t pay *anything* that you legally can’t be compelled to.

While this is all good advice. It unfortunately takes significant amounts of time and effort to request those validations, have things exponged from your credit history, and most certainly to sue people illegally attempting to collect on a debt.

It's a Vimes Boot Index problem. The poorer and more accosted by debt collectors you are, the less agency you have to fight those things while also providing for your own basic costs of living. And that's not accounting for those of us with mental health or medical issues that make carrying out those tasks all the more difficult. Yes, it should be easy to send a few letters via certified mail, and then forward on the applicable responses. But when you are struggling not to have a suicidal melt down every time the phone rings, because you can't afford to pay rent or keep food on the table - let alone your antidepressants - those tasks quickly become insurmountable.

making fun of americans is pretty much always ok if youre not doing it in an edgelord “you guys have so many school shootings” way or acting like we’re the only country that has racism. but like posts about americans and hamburger get me every time

This is just objectively hilarious

The hilarious part is they think we can afford breakfast

Those videos that are like “sorry millennials but gen alpha thinks side parts/skinny jeans/high ponytails/whatever are cringey” are so painfully embarrassing can you IMAGINE being in your ENTIRE THIRTIES and caring what a twelve year old thinks about you??

There are people in the notes who think my beef is with the twelve year old and I want to assure you it is not: twelve year olds thinking their parents are cringe is a sacred rite of passage. Being a grown ass adult and letting the opinions of children affect you however is optional.

wait.. Millenials are having children? I thought we agreed on this.

Only the SCABs. This is why we need a picket line

have you ever seen a female alien without breasts in a movie

man’s unquenchable thirst for titty is the only thing holding the hard sci fi industry back from actually inventing working spaceships

official boob post

yeah I’ve seen plenty, but they’re usually like… trees with female voices. Or bugs who are pink and fluffy. If they’re humanoid and female they have boobs.

I’ve also created by own Scifi setting with plenty of aliens. Only 3 of those species are mammals, including humans. The bug women don’t have boobs, nor do the lizard women, but the snake women DO have boobs. So do the fish women and the plant women. but only the mammals have mammary glands. for the snake women the boobs are venom sacks, and for the fish women the boobs are air glands for boyancy. I’ve not figured out what the boobs are for on the plant women, maybe some sort of fruit?

Just to be clear, women can also have an unquenchable thirst for alien titty.

F—k off already you MAGA morons.

it's time to start punishing them for this.

Not quite. It's important to time the charges so that Trump's campaign can be hamstrung by repeated criminal suits against everyone involved. We haven't been ignoring them. We have been giving them enough rope to ensure they hang.

I work cybersecurity, this is like half my job.

the whole vaccine deal tbh

antidepressants

Yes these are all the work of wizards

I want a DND plot about a kingdom where somebody build some constructs that can do cantrips on their own, so the king decided to get rid of his centuries old wizard advisor, and abolish the mage's guild in favor of a cheaper to maintain army of really dumb wwarforged.

The players aren't going to help the dumb bastard, but they can have a great time building a new college if magic in the ruined aftermath of the capital.

B̵̞̄ů̵͚͔̬͘͘̚͜g̵̻̟̈́̑͗̎mancer🪲

what's the medevial version of the backrooms? just a dungeon?

My Chronomancer has a subclass for this.

Only Half? It's the entire American population. Mind you, if we are speaking globally, Americans don't make up half the world population. But if you live in this capitalist dystopia they tell us is a society, you aren't *afraid* of the cost. You are Permenantly enslaved by it.

This is so delightful

Man: (exploding with glee)

Snek: (BEFUDDLED)

@bonnettbee i thought you would enjoy his glee for an snake

You are SO CORRECT

I just want to add to this: we have a captive bred northern pine. He is every bit as big, if not bigger, and we love him to death. But he is the absolute fucking Himbo of snakes.

Like snakes to begin with are dumb. They just are. There's not a lot of room for brain cells in there, and most of them are dedicated entire to tasting the air to find food. But gods above and below Khali is *special*. The boi tried to eat a hammer once. The shiny metal end. We feed him live, and I have watched the thickheaded little pasta look at me pleadingly wondering where his meal is while it comes up and sniffs him to see what he is. We don't have to ever worry about him escaping, because he cannot figure out how to climb through his open terrarium door without help.

But dumb as he is, he is the sweetest thing. He has only bitten us once in almost 7 years. It was because there was a tornado coming in close to where we live, and when my wife went to get him out of his enclosure so we could take him to safety in his special backpack, her grabbed onto her hand and tried to pull her into his cave where it was safe.

once you realize its all saying the same thing. water spins generators in dams, car engines spin to make wheels spin, the earth spins in a circle and then spins around the sun which spins around the galaxy once you grasp that its all about spinning you realize why beyblade is so important

That also means they can make so many types of beyblades. Water Beyblades, car beyblades, celestial beyblades...

Beyblade my ass. This is

Spiral Power

Spice up the arcane-divine-martial dynamic by adding in a fourth archetype, nuclear.

Legit, this is just radiant magic in my setting. Sortof.

Technically speaking, Psionic, Arcane, and Divine energy are all just increasingly high energy states of matter-energy, with the fundamental forces recombining towards a single force as you progress along the spectrum. Radiant exists at the state of Arcane matter-energy just before it transitions to Divine, and is thus the most volatile state of Magic. Without Gods to help shape and contain the radiation produced at those levels, radiant magic produces massive amounts of cosmic (beta, gamma, and a number of others) radiation, which can and will severely damage most living creatures. Healing Word is basically a cross between the words most extreme chemotherapy and whatever the fuck they did to Deadpool. Just happens that you used to have gods around using higher energy forces to contain and direct that radiation for specific effects.

That was until the gods were killed off by some vulture with a vendettas and a hard-on for unethical science. There's a reason you don't see many clerics or paladins around these days.

“magic isnt real” — plants just grow out of the ground. for free. everywhere.

"It doesn't stop being magic just because you know how it works."

-Terry Pratchett

If i had the money for a big tesla coil room and some protective suits, I could in theory have a real lightning fight with my friends. Tell me that isn't magic. Witness me fire lighting out my hand at the man in chainmail across the room!

Magic is real. We just live in a dystopian cyberpunk setting where it's all owned by megacorps and licensed back to us along with water and breathable air.

There is no profit or labor value to steal for capitalists, so housing the vulnerable will never change.

We can solve any problem we want once you remove the construct of capitalism.

We can save billions by treating people in need with solutions. Incarceration is a waste of so many assets. Criminalizing the needy is just an excuse to create more prisoners. Beyond stupid.

Here's an idea: turn every empty dying church into housing.

I mean... I'd be down with my taxes going to help people. That would make me like... patriotic, I think? That would make me happy.

For reference, the reason we are ok with housing and feeding people in prison, but not outside of prison, is that prisoners can be exploited for free labor, in addition to tax incentives and government contracts based on the number of prisoners.

With weed being legalized in so many places, a lot of US prisons are having to release large numbers of prisoners who's only crime was possession or sale of a plant that literally grows in ditches across most of the country. To make up for it, they figure "well, how about be just imprison people for being homeless"

And the sad fact of the matter is that there's a non-zero amount of homeless individuals for whome this exploitation is a better alternative to trying to survive in the capitalist hellscape in their own. Don't get me wrong. It's absolutely terrible and should *not*, under any circumstances be considered a "solution". But the system is so fucked that being treated as free subhuman labor with no rights isn't even the worst option for a lot of people.

The Spaghetti one and the spider one could both potentially save your life, but I'm gonna choose the spider one because I hate having to kill venomous spiders that make it inside my home.

I already sorta have the spider one for some reason, so free food is no contest. An entire meal for free? In this economy?

thinking about the original silent hill 2 e3 trailer for absolutely no reason at all

When Silent Hill 2 (original) has a better combat trailer than the remake.

@freevoidman

Please, if you're going to make an argument, do it in the repost not in the tags.

"This is genuinely hilarious"

Thanks, it was a joke.

"SH2 had combat, why are you going the latest trailer shit?"

The first half of the trailer showcasing the quiet ambience of the remake actually got me a bit excited while the combat looks somewhat cookie-cutter. The added action removes tension if that makes any sense. It's like they're trying too hard to compete against the modern Resident Evil games when they should be trying to be their own thing. That's how Silent Hill stood out in the late 90s/early 2000s, which was another era with a lot of horror games.

Honestly, the only one I'm looking forward to is Silent Hill f because every other game we've had since the initial reveal of new Silent Hill games coming out has been bad. And even if f is bad, it's Ryukishi007th's brand of bad, which is still fun.

Man the gameplay of the remake screams 'We wanna be resident evil'

I genuinely thought ole boy (forgot his simp ass name) was Leon.

James and yeah.

Though I'd call James the opposite of a simp. The canon ending of SH2 (In Water) makes his actions morally grey, but I could write a good 600-800 words on that alone.

you're right & you should say it.

James isn't supposed to be mistaken for a government trained ex-cop. he's a random doughy dude that spent the last couple years staying home taking care of his sick wife and drinking himself to an early death. he should suck at fighting. the fact that even the original had a lock on feature to help players aim was more than we should've gotten. game play in games like this should be floaty, unresponsive, unpredictable and weird because he's a normal guy that maybe has never held a weapon before suddenly being given heavy-hitting guns. every pull of the trigger on his shot gun or hunting rifle should come with a possibility of dislocating his shoulder.

the realism of the game play is lost in favor of cool action hero ™️ for mass audience consumption. sh2 was always my least favorite of the original 4 games ( I know I'm an outlier) but you're not gonna catch me buying this game. as usual, the core point is missed. the terrible trainwreck of the HD remake was better than this.

That's actually something I don't think people appreciate about the Silent Hill games. Also if you shoot rapidly you can actually end up missing shots in the older games.

Alex is the only protagonist with a reason to be good at fighting. And Homecoming is the only prior game with a combat focus. Granted, Homecoming is the worst Silent Hill to date IMO, but that's one of the things I actually liked about it.

Fuck, I'm glad someone gets it! Modern FPS gaming has trained us to think that the way a game controls is irrelevant to the themes and context of the game - that anything less than buttery smooth and responsive combat is flaw. But in games where the protagonist doesn't have the superhuman skills and reflexes of a supersoldier, the controls and responsiveness can really do a lot to help tell that story. Especially in psychological horror games, where the protagonist is supposed to be confused, scared shitless, and at the very limit of their sanity.

Now I'm not going to say that anything short of high energy FPS should have shit controls on purpose - but having less optimal controls? Controls that are somewhat clunky or non-standard, to help simulate that feeling of fumbling helplessly with your gun as the creature gets closer and closer? That sort of thing can be a really powerful tool for putting the player in the same terrified or unsteady mindset of the character. Especially in a world where most players are so used to mowing down enemies with ease in other games. Instead of making enemies massive bullet sponges, or giving them attacks that chunk a quarter of your health on a hit, you can make combat (or other situations) something to avoid by just making the character control poorly in situations they aren't prepared for.

Better yet, make those controls adaptive, so that they become more fluid as the protagonist gets a handle on themselves, or less responsive as the character's sanity drops and they begin to struggle with simple things like aiming or moving around quietly. Adaptive controls like that open up a whole new kind of progression, where instead of cutting away to a handy menu and picking the upgrades you want to spend points on, your character just slowly becomes better at the things you do a lot. You take the time to headshot every enemy you come across? Well, your going to get better at aiming steadily and remove that shake from the character's hands. You spend most of your time running? Well, you find yourself getting faster, and the movement controls losing that unresponsive edge.

There were a lot of things that developers experimented with back in the day, and it wasn't always for the same reason. Game controls don't have to - and shouldn't - be this bottleneck evolution towards the same optimized control scheme. There's something to be said for controls as a storytelling device. Controls can be clunky or unconventional and still be *good*. And if you don't get what I mean by that, go play death stranding. Kogima may just be one of the only developers out there today who understands how to use unconventional means to help immerse the player in a story.

#IsBruceWayneBatman: a social media au | Part I

I mean yeah this is exactly what would happen.

Batman has gone to great lengths to create the persona of “Bruce Wayne, upper class twit who could never be Batman.”

If Batman walked into the middle of Gotham Square and pulled off his mask and yelled “I, Bruce Wayne, am Batman!” The Headline would be “Bruce Wayne gets drunk at costume party, driven home by Commissioner James Gordon.”

And on that ride home:

Gordon: You are such a piece of shit you know that right? One of these days that’s not gonna work.

Bruce: *With the biggest shit eating grin ever* I know Jim, but it never stops being funny.

Gordon: So…. out of curiosity, how much money did Ollie lose to you this time?

Bruce: A gentleman never tells Jim, besides, its not about the money, its about the satisfaction of being right….. and the look on his face.

Gordon: Nice.

and you just know Alfred has a veritable host of “embarrassing early morning bruce” pics and video raring to go, like after a “skiing accident” to cover up a particularly nasty bat-injury in the line of duty

“I’m fine Alfred.”

“If you are, then prove it by putting on your socksies by your self.”

(source is Harley Quinn season 2, episode 5, but I can see this as part of Dave Willis’ “Happy Bruce” headcanon

I think the villain reactions would be priceless as well.

Two Face: Look I was friends with Bruce for years. He’s a nice guy, but doesn’t have the brains God gave a fiddler crab. He’s not Batman.

Riddler: I can confirm this. I took him and his board of directors hostage once. He tried to write me a check and got the check wrong. Four. Times. He had to ask his guy Lucius Fox to do it. It was just plain awkward for everyone involved.

Poison Ivy: Bruce is what we in the business call a Himbo, great to look at, a real sweetheart, but not much going on upstairs. I guarantee he’s not Batman.

Penguin: I’ve had Bruce Wayne as a guest at the Iceberg lounge before. Nice guy, excellent tipper, complete and utter moron. If he’s Batman I’ll eat my umbrella.

Joker: What? Oh yea of course Bruce Wayne is Batman. I mean obviously right?

Rest of the villains:……

Joker: Wait, you mean you guys didn’t know? I figured it out like the first day.

Penguin: You…. you’re joking right.

Joker: Penguin you will KNOW when I am joking. Seriously. No one else figured it out. No one. Just me. You guys are dumbasses.

Riddler: *Pinches bridge of nose* Okay…. so if Bruce Wayne is Batman, and you KNEW this the whole time, why not just KILL BRUCE WAYNE?

Joker: *As serious as a heart attack* because I’m not fighting Bruce Wayne, I’m fighting Batman. Obviously.

Riddler: Goddammit I hate you so much Joker. So fucking much. I can literally taste how much I hate you.

Joker's response is the most accurate depiction I have seen in years.

Dendrogaster (a crustacean that parasitizes starfish)

this is how they look

WHAT DO YOU MEAN, CRUSTACEAN.

my tags need to go in the main part of the post actually

this is what im talking about that's fucking horrible. worth noting though that the crustaceans are a broad class of marine animal which include barnacles and such as well as the usual suspects. so the nightmarish vision of a crab evolving into that terrible thing is thankfully not true

IMPORTANT UPDATE FROM @velociraptrix BARNACLES ARE DESCENDED FROM MOBILE LEG HAVING NORMAL ANIMALS. hell world hell world hell world

This is also a type of fetish.