busybee fluffy rambles

Today I finally got in touch with Kia’s corporate customer service after filing a complaint yesterday, and they said that they also haven’t been able to get in touch with the dealership.

I asked them how I can go about getting a loaner, and they said that it’s up to the dealership to do so. If the dealership doesn’t have a loaner available, then they have a rental reimbursement program.

I asked about that, and the answer was that from the time the car is diagnosed, if there’s a long-term repair that needs to take place, then they will reimburse the rental fees. However, they will only do so after the car has been diagnosed, and as far as I can tell, it has not. I asked them why the policy was based on diagnosis time rather than dropoff time, and their response was that it is Kia’s policy to be that way.

I said that for me the issue is that I’m without a car, and that it shouldn’t matter when the car is actually diagnosed, what should matter is when I am without a car. It seems to me that the service center has absolutely no incentive to actually move forward on things based on this policy, because it means they can just hold on to my car for months without any forward progress and any compensation to me.

The CSR said that she would file a complaint on my behalf about this policy, but that for now, Kia’s policy is that the reimbursement period only begins when there’s a diagnosis. And she will try to find out if there’s been a diagnosis, but the dealership hasn’t been responsive to Kia Corporate either.

So, yeah. Kia has great cars but their customer service is FUCKING AWFUL and based on this series of interactions (and lack thereof) I can no longer recommend Kia vehicles. Which is sad, as of all the current EV manufacturers available in North America, they have the best value proposition (and some of the best EVs available in general).

I took my car to the local Kia dealership to get TSB ELE234 taken care of on Tuesday. I still don’t have my car back or any indication of when I’ll be getting it back.

Stuff continues to happen!

It’s been a little while again! I think I like these collected updates rather than doing daily micro-dumps, and it’s also nice posting it here instead of on Mastodon or whatever. Timeline-based social media kinda bums me out these days.

But yeah today I’m feeling pretty accomplished!

I’m still trying to figure out the best way to get my music copyrights properly enforced on YouTube.

The problem is that I’ve released pretty much all of my music under CC by-nc-sa, which means that people are free to use it as long as they credit me, use it noncommercially, and also put their content under the CC by-nc-sa license.

However! People never fucking do. It’ll never be credited, is often used in a literal fucking advertisement (EDIT: I got the advertisement taken down without challenge, but it was just someone using my song “Come Out” to advertise disposable placemats for some reason), and is also absolutely never put under the same license.

So, you’d think this would be a perfect use case for YouTube’s copyright enforcement tools, right?

Time for another tedious life and project update-ramble!

For quite some time I’ve had my music site hosted by Bandcamp, since it was a pretty low-friction way to get my discography up and online, albeit with some annoying limitations. Previously I had the main domain host a “micro-site” for whatever my most recent release was and then used a subdomain for the actual Bandcamp page, but updating that got to be obnoxious and nobody really cared about the microsite thing anyway.

There’s a bunch of reasons, though, why I’m going to go back to running my own site, and hopefully downplaying Bandcamp as My Main Music Presence online. Here’s some of the reasons.

So, there was a COVID outbreak at my choir. At first it seemed like it was isolated to folks who participated in one extracurricular thing after the last rehearsal, but it turns out that it’s been affecting a lot of folks. We were going to have a talent show and fundraising auction this Friday but that’s been postponed until May. So it goes.

Anyway this morning I woke up coughing, and while that cleared up quickly I’ve been feeling pretty under the weather all day, with occasional respiratory stuff and general fatigue/malaise.

As usual, home rapid tests are turning up negative, but for whatever reason I’ve never had a positive rapid test even when I very clearly had COVID, so I don’t know what’s up with that.

I’m hoping that this is a fluke and I’m not actually coming down with COVID for a third goddamn time, and that I’ll be well enough for our big Benaroya Hall concert next Friday, but I’m not terribly optimistic about that right now given how things like this always go. In the meantime I am, of course, isolating. Fortunately I’m pretty well-stocked on groceries right now so I don’t think I’ll need to get anything delivered (although I did order a bunch of cough drops just in case).