Can't you make it so you only accept Paypal, which has to go through immediately before you buy it since they're part of eBay?

I don't remember the nuances since this was a few years ago and I haven't used eBay since because, let me stress, it is the worst fucking way to sell anything and I have no idea why anyone uses it, but short answer: either no, or Paypal would've been needlessly restrictive.

Besides, they always funneled it through like ten different identities, each more Nigerian than the last, until eventually I started getting emails from badtinespaul@realebay.ni saying HELLO SIRS GOD BLESS YOU THIS IS EBAY I MEAN BADTIMES PAUL I MEAN EBAY AND I MEAN WE ARE VERY DISAPPOINTED IN YOU AND WILL CONTACT THE FBI YESTERDAY

I've read of so many horror stories from people trying to sell on eBay that I decided it wasn't worth the hassle and so I opted for the local consignment store instead. Yeah they take half but it's much nicer then having to deal with scammers and shitty humans in general.

Not sure how relevant it is, but I'm pretty sure eBay is no longer affiliated directly with Paypal (they haven't been formally connected since 2015 but might be owned by the same interests, I don't care enough to find out).

Anyway, I sold on eBay professionally for about 6 years and have had friends who were doing it as their sole source of income all the way back in like 2002-3 and it has always been pretty rough for the seller, there's no end to ways a buyer can scam a seller and eBay/paypal generally sides with the buyer. One of my friends still can't use Paypal because he sold a drum kit to a shop in LA for $2600, they requested a return claiming his description was wildly inaccurate, and then sent him back a box full of broken drum parts from their basement. They had a shipping receipt which was enough evidence that Paypal sided with them and froze my friend's account until he paid $2600 to the buyer (who still had the drums, which were a nice, early 60s Gretsch kit that was, if anything, worth more) and wouldn't even hear his dispute without him filing a police report and sending them hard copes of all the paperwork. You can imagine how helpful the beat cop was when they sent him over to talk to guy living in a warehouse about how he was scammed in an interstate sale of used drums on the Internet in 2002. My friend says that, for starters, he didn't take any notes at all and was obviously coked out of his gourd (not uncommon for cops around here, at least back then), and just spent the whole time wandering around looking at things and wiping his nose. So unless he pays that $2600 or creates a new identity, he can't use Paypal.

That's the worst one I know of but there were smaller scams that his the record world a lot. For a few years there was a window of time where you could still cancel your payment and get an automatic refund AFTER an item had been hipped unless the seller was pretty experienced and did things in a very specific way, but I forget how it worked and they closed it up around 2007 but it's still heavily weighted toward the buyer in any dispute, which is better than the other way around but still not good.


I've privately listed maybe a dozen things on Youtube, sold no more than half of them, and received payment for maybe half of those at most. I've had better luck setting a high starting bid, letting the auction end, and then having people message me about doing side deals for less than the starting bid after it's over, to be honest.

The absolute worst thing about his tranny phase is the smug, bitchy self-confidence it's given him. You know all his new Internet friends are encouraging him to GET OUT THERE AND BE YOURSELF not knowing that they're giving this advice to Gozer the Gozerian only with a gangrenous taint.

Goddamnit. What ever happened to that gangrenous taint? I can't sacrifice the time to scour his wiki and that always ends in disaster for me, anyways.

That thing watched Chris sleep every night for years.

Chris would roll over in the middle of the night, and through the soft blue and red hazes of his various glowing electronics he would see the outline of his homemade Zuni fetish doll staring back at him. "This is good," he would think as he curled his knees in and turned his face into the pillow. "This is normal."

We now know that the entire time it was like four feet tall.

This is easily the best part for me.

That and the look on its giant face.