start a victory garden and ration your IRRATIONALLY ANGRY feelings, part 3

Yeah, I've noticed some of my old CD-Rs are starting to decay, or show up as No Disc, too.

seems to read them some of teh time and not others. I don't think I've played anything I've burnt on there in a while . Should be official discs for teh most part.

In general the semiconductor lasers lose output power over time, resulting in less reliable reads, errors etc. I believe the laser assemblies for most makers are available on eBay etc, but I wouldn't really know about how to align them etc. If you want to keep yours going a bit longer, there are usually little adjustment screws near the laser lens which control laser power - you'd need to search for the model to know how to adjust them.
Heat is the enemy of laser diodes, never keep an optical disc player on top of something like an amp which sheds significant heat.

Right will see if I can find a repair manual online.

Happy to help if you can provide the model number. Hi-Fi Engine is the first port of call usually - they require an account for downloading but I've been registered for years with no consequences I can discern. https://www.hifiengine.com

Also the AudioKarma forums are full of helpful enthusiasts: https://audiokarma.org

one of my friends has the uncanny ability to know when I just started listening to music and calls me then every time. it's eerie how often it has happened in the last month.

being how little I get to do it these days, it always makes me mad and then I have to remind myself they couldn't possibly have known

But seriously, FedEx, is it that goddamn difficult to update your tracking information to reflect that my package probably won't arrive at my home on a day that has already passed? If you do have a functioning time machine, though, I apologize in advance.

My husband doesn't see earbuds when I'm wearing them.

It doesn’t make me angry, but my cat always chooses to jump on my lap just when I’m about to get up. I don’t want to hurt his feelings so I change my plans for a few minutes.

I do this too, but usually a few minutes extends into a few hours

leaving collection at work, contributions via website that starts by asking for name and address on first page and then card details on the second. so i entered garbage address details because i didn't want them to know, but proper card details. am now worried the bank will stop my card days before christmas.

put it all on one page. better still, let me use paypal rather than entering my card number into random websites.

How my phone managed to go from 98% pre C-Cleaner to 99% after. & the whole thing of how much memory gets used anyway.
Don't seem to be able to strip it down in a way that doesn't fill way too rapidly

Trying to walk across a car park which is the only way for pedestrians to get across an area.
Walk past a car and it nearly pulls out into me.

I saw a car pull out into another car in a car park elsewhere around town a couple of weeks back and wound up ripping off the front bumper.
possibly more of the external shell.

parking lots are easily where the largest number of collisions happen, but since they are generally minor, people continue to disregard the danger and drive inattentively and too fast

Trying to compile a somewhat accurate list of what I've read this year.
& realisingthat teh option of being able to see what I had borrowed from the library had not been turned on. So can't remember all of what I have read from there this year.

Also the chronology with which I uploaded titles to goodreads didn't have anything to do with when I actually read them. I worked thorugh at one point noting off titles i had read earlier. & don't think I noted everything when i did read it.
PLus added titles as i bought them to my Currently Reading list as i physicallly had a copy I was intending to read. Wasn't just noting books i would read at some future date though the amount i buy does tend to mean that.

I hate hard seltzer. I hate its taste, I hate its very existence.

look mate, I don't know how to say this, but... what even is hard seltzer?

Wine coolers for the 21st Century.

yeah my niece had some hard seltzer on offer at Thanksgiving. I tried a “winter spice” flavored one & it was deeply unpleasant.
not unlike drinking a fizzy Yankee Candle

blech

xpost kinder - flavored sparkling water w alcohol

I sort of guessed it might be alcoholic fizzy water but then thought no-one would buy that :)

It's so gross and infused with live active bro cultures.

The sorry ones are those who buy it more than once.

So it's like an alky seltzer?

I thought I saw alcoholic water on sale when I was in Dublin in mid to late 90s which always seemed a bit obtuse.
Right around the time some firm was trying to bring out a commercial Poitin.

more like soda water in the uk? thats prob closest

looked up to see if my bad pun was seen to be rotten and found that there was an actual brand using the term Alky Seltzer.
would alco seltzer have been a better pun?

(i enjoyed it, fwiw)

people who instead of writing you messages, send you voice recordings.

one thing if they're driving or something, but i have two friends now who on occasion will send me like three 1 minute recordings instead of a message and I'm like, this is harder for me to read when I'm working, esp with a work firewall that occasionally prevents those recordings from playing (so I gotta grab my phone)

block these friends immediately imo

my IA today is magnetic poetry. remember how fun those seemed, how you gave them as gifts to your cool friends? THEY SUCK. they are annoying they are useless as actual magnets except if you use like 30 of them and they are a PITA to remove if they stayed up for 10 years or more

magnetic poetry was like a 'ice-breaker' party game for one participant

lol true

You can get "hard seltzer" in the UK too. The alcopop/cider fridge at my local Co-Op has a shelf or two of it: brands like Mike's, Dash and White Claw, and I think established brands like Smirnoff and Kopparberg have got in on it too.

as an alcopop/cider drinker I disapprove bcz when I see brightly coloured cans promising tropical/candy-like fruit flavours & 5% alcohol I am like "yesss, super-sweet sugary junk booze to pour onto my childishly unsophisticated tastebuds" but nah, it's just some expensive alcoholic fizzy water with a faint tang of metallic chemicals

(concur on how hard it is to remove decade-old magnetic poetry; we moved house recently and I thought putting the other half's beloved old fridge magnets in a box was a nice simple task but the metallic backing had crumbled and welded itself permanently to the fridge, so the first couple of magnets I tried to lift got bent out of shape and left a mess behind on the fridge

also the poetry itself is a great way to sit in a solipsistic drunken haze at a party assembling weird ugly sentence fragments which seem hilarious/deep/euphonious until someone else comes along to look and you're all like "haha you see?" and they look at you like you're a serial killer and you look back on your selected word assemblage and realise that is in fact a very reasonable conclusion)

I've noticed a lot of small breweries introducing hard seltzer, too, because no doubt it is easy money, and they are happy to tap that tacky and (literally) tasteless market, a la whiskey distillers that market so-called "white" whiskey or moonshine.

I stopped drinking beer for health reasons a while ago. I will still drink cider, wine, and spirits enthusiastically. I don't much like hard seltzers, hard lemonades, and hard root beers, but they aren't harming me in any way by existing. I'm watching the emergence of more / better canned cocktails with interest, though. There's a Bombay Sapphire canned gin and tonic that is not bad. I mean, it's not as good as an actual gin & tonic but it isn't offensive.

My problem with hard seltzers, kombucha, etc is that they take shelf space in the beer section of a store, so places that used to have a great selection of beer has less and less of a selection. And it's the low selling "exotics" that get the boot.

Apparently there is a trade publication (of sorts) called Hard Seltzer News, and it wrote something about a shitty country song that mentions White Claw that I heard in the store yesterday:

https://hardseltzernews.com/2020/09/02/pretty-red-lips-working-on-a-white-claw/

Ends with this quote that makes me want to barf as much as White Claw:

When asked about the delicious lyric, songwriter Michael Hardy (who wrote the hit along with Ashley Gorey and Mark Holman) said “I’m gonna try to do everything I can to stay hip to (how lingo and trends evolve)…and that song is a good example. White Claw didn’t exist five or six years ago. But it’s just kinda paying attention to what’s going on in the world, in the realm of style, what people are drinking.”

Indeed, there's a lot going on in the world today. K-pop, fried chicken sandwiches, White Claw ...

It’s honestly kind of amazing to me how the college student neighborhood drink refuse has gone from 100% red solo cups and beer cans to like 70% white claw cans in the last four years.

spotify finding a new way to be annoying. I looked up the Age Of Napoleon which had the most recent episode at the top so I scrolled down looking for the first episode. As i scrolled down it changed direction, so I scrolled back up and it changed again , did that several times. Blooming annoying, what is up with this app.

i feel you! i dont use spotify a ton but the app def has some very annoying quirks

Misinformation from call centre idiot.
Trying to work out why I can't access the details on my phone account , just get some overly cutesy Can't find what you're looking for message. & every attempt at topping up failing.
I tell the text box individual there was glitching at their end and get told that everything is ok and it must be something at my end.
Should be used to this kind of wank probably but thankfully have largely avoided it.
I went off and tried doing various things including wipingthe cache in my internet and tryingto make payment another couple of times and everything winding up with an error message.
Actually go back to the start, I tried topping up through bank account then went over to my phone to check it since I hadn't got a text saying top up successful. Can't access the account other than this can't find what you were looking for page with a cutesy image of an umbrella . Went to sleep , woke up checked phone and still no text. Checked website and did get to details but said taht there were no credit details to show or soemthing which is = to top up didn't work. I went back to bank account and it showed the transaction. I tried looking at phone website and got the cutesy page again.
wah, ate up time and I could have been lying in bed reading. So unfair.

I then got a different text box guy who said there were some major issues at the time. So try back later.
Wonder if these people are actually in one place right now or working from home. Anyway just seems totally ignorant not to know about there being an issue if it is widespread.
bah

EBay listings or other online shopping sales where the multiple different photos you can click through are all the same image and also all tiny.

Phone thing got worse this morning as the initial payment taht hadn't processed did this morning. I tried to get the money returned and tehy said they could give me anothe r months worth of coverage.
Partially because i was being mislead by th e first customer service guy I tried to put payment trhough a few times on a credit card and kept getting messages taht it looked like it hadn't been successful. Then me trying agin a while later. I assumed taht was the end of things. I rang the credit acrd line this morning and got told that several of them were approved. Hoping taht I'm not going to get several texts later saying thanks for topping up like i did with taht payment this morning.
bummer

I take approved to mean that a transaction is completed since it is what is said on card readers when it goes through.
I assumed it only showed when both sides had oked transaction .
Could be reading that wrong.
But after the 2nd version of that transaction succeeded this morning I am on edge about it.

Youtube commercials with people cursing. You've seen these? It seems to be a trend. The swear words are bleeped out - which somehow makes it even more obnoxious - but it's smug Nickelback-looking douchebags saying things like "Your deodorant? it's shit" and "That cardio you're doing sucks." Like, fuck you dude I'm just trying to watch Aretha Franklin videos here

lol otm,it's insane how unsophisticated the biggest ad company in the world is with this shit

Yeah, it's always "People come up to me all the time, asking, bro, how did you get so ripppppppped!?" And it takes all my strength to even try and resist hitting skip and miss out on the secrets of his success, but alas, I'm just not there yet. I may never know how he got so ripped, or what's wrong with my soap, or why he's drinking pond water.