Count me in too…

Also known as acts of god- so as long as you’re on god’s good side, those things won’t happen, and if they do, well obviously you did something to piss off god so you deserve it. QED.

Once there was this girl who

Swore that one day she would be a figure skating champion

And when she finally made it

She saw some other girl who was better

And so she hired some guy to

Club her in the kneeeeee caaaaaaap

DVD is better than Blu-ray in that regard - I’ve ripped DVDs that look like they fell off a truck and got run over multiple times and had no problem, meanwhile about 1 out of 5 Blu-rays I got from Netflix would have problems despite looking pristine. It has to do with the data density, Blu-ray packs so much more in the same amount of space, one microscopic scratch wipes out so much data…

Of course some DVDs suffer from bad materials. I was re-ripping my collection recently, and I have a few that have sat in a closet untouched for years, not a scratch on them, but the drive won’t even recognize there’s a disc. Probably oxidation of the reflective layer.

Way back when I used to copy movies to .avi files, my computer was in one room, my TV in another, I had a video card with TV out and a long set of cables, I’d preserve the copyright warning because it gave me time to start the movie then walk to the living room to watch it…

VHS was kind of 2.5 thanks to macrovision…

Yo ho!

That’s just single layer - dual layer is something like 8.4 if memory serves (which it often doesn’t…)

Wow, I don’t even remember that. I’ve been playing DVDs on a computer basically forever, which rarely obeyed such restrictions…

I’ve been doing this since 2008 - although I only recently setup Plex in 2017, before that I just ran a web server and played movies in a browser on various smart TVs, but around 2017 was when my main TV got an update that rendered its browser mostly useless… Fuck Sony by the way. And before smart TVs I just had a video card with TV out and long cables… Or burning VCDs, I still have my 5-disc DVD changer that could play VCDs as long as they were burned to CD-RW discs, though it’s just gathering dust now.

Tell that to my employer… We moved to a bigger office a little over a year ago. The old office was cramped, but it was reasonably quiet. Those of us who are on the phones were in a corner pretty well shielded from everything else. The new place is one huge continuous expanse, and we’re right in the middle of it. And it’s what I would call cheap and unfinished, but a commercial realtor would call it “modern industrial” meaning you can see all the wiring and ductwork and such- and bare concrete. Which makes sound carry throughout and echo. Just the other day my boss had to go hush a gaggle of developers that were congregating 20 feet away and laughing uproariously.

a more useless application of electrons

Microsoft is worse… Have a problem, google it, find a link that has a promising summary, click it- “try Windows 11!” Because that’s what dead links do.

under the age of 40

I’m pushing 50 and I won’t call if there’s a website…

My wife… She will never stop buying from Amazon no matter how shitty they become. She was refusing to go to Wendy’s for a while because they were considering surge pricing, she swore up and down she would not reward a company for doing that - so I said what about Amazon? How often does prime get you free shipping anymore? And with streaming, now you have to watch ads when you didn’t before… But of course that’s all “different”.

Then quick cuts all over the place. Just makes me disoriented.

It’s been like that for at least 20 years… I took a (paid) survey way back when I had a girlfriend who was into that sort of thing, and they had me watch a movie trailer and give feedback on it, and that was my comment, that it was just so much rapid fire cutting every less than 2 seconds I couldn’t even follow what was going on - the survey taker looked at me like I had a third arm and basically refused to take my comment.

Every accusation is a confession…

HE SAID “YOUR SWEET, SWEET BALLOON KNOT. FOREVER, TAKING THAT HOT DEMON GEL. ASK KAGE.”

If people kept setting fire to your house with a flamethrower, would you care about the quality or effectiveness of the flamethrower?

I’m not forced to drive a car either - but if I try to ride my bike someplace, I’m likely to get run over by someone else’s car, so…

If at first you don’t succeed, give up and never try again.