The first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club.

Beats “cut it 3 times and it’s still too short” as my uncle said to me too many times… Along with “you hammer like old people fuck”

I don’t know if this qualifies as revenge, or just justice, but it’s a good story, so I’ll tell it.

For background - I live in the Phoenix area, so in the summer, air conditioning is not a luxury, it’s a necessity.

Shady a/c tech put far too much freon in my system, charged me $500 for it, then every time the compressor turned on, it shook the house… The goal, I believe, was to ruin my old unit (a compressor will fail catastrophically if it pulls in liquid rather than gas) so they could sell me a new one for ~$8k. Overnight I went from knowing next to nothing about air conditioning to knowing enough to not take their shit… Gave the company the chance to make it right, but they doubled down, continued to say it was just because my system was old.

So I called another company - they found it was in fact massively overcharged, I had to pay ~$200 to have the excess freon removed (which, coincidentally was about what it should have cost to fix it properly in the first place).

Then I talked to my credit union to see if I could do a chargeback- I had used my debit card to pay the shady company. At first they were reluctant to take it on, since it wasn’t the typical fraud case, they said it would be very difficult to prove- but because I had done the research and had everything laid out for them, they started the process. There was some back and forth, my offense was all technical with sources cited, the company’s defense amounted to “we have x satisfied customers and have been in business for y years”… at one point the owner of the company called me, talked shit about me spending “a few minutes on the internet” and thinking I was an expert, and threatened to take me to court- I said “go ahead, then this will all be public record.” He didn’t sue me. I won the chargeback and never heard from the company or the owner again.

A good fuck should last much longer than a good shit…

I tried an airzound, it was not as effective as the boat horn. Though to be fair, it was a long time ago - so long, in fact, that I could go to RadioShack and buy dust remover spray to replace the canister, and it was significantly cheaper than the official refills at marine supply stores…

Public library where I grew up had full height stall walls, but the doors had been removed. There were always several homeless people shitting in there. But hey, at least they weren’t fucking, right?

It’s because of the puritanical shame- without those gaps, people might (gasp) have sex in bathroom stalls instead of doing their business as god intended.

I used to have one wedged between the brake and gearshift levers of my bicycle, so I could hit the button with my thumb, it was very handy.

I prefer elephantoplasty…

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.