(no subject)

A few years ago, I went totally legit on TV and movie access. I got it legally or not at all, and if that meant waiting until HBO shows arrived in DVDs at the library, and then 6 months of moving up the queue, so be it. I'm an adult with a good job and it's fair that I only watch shows on terms the creators have agreed to.

1.5 weeks ago, I signed up for cable tv, because it came free with the faster internet. Once I had the TV subscription, I was willing to $5 or $10 more to get HBO, because that would give me HBOGo, and HBO's entire back catalog, accessible from anywhere, was totally worth $10/month to me. Comcast countered with $20 for all the premium channels. At least, I think that's what I signed up for. Let's assume this set of mistakes were due to the representative's shaky grasp of English and a call center producing so much ambient noise I found it actively stressful. So that excuses the 20 minutes on that call and the semi-wasted 2 hour appointment that installed several (expensive) things I didn't want and didn't give me the things I did want, and gave me a package much more expensive than what was originally offered, with many fewer things, and cost $100 for the visit, which I never agreed to.

That go me access to on demand through my TV, assuming I was willing to tolerate their terrible interface, but not the channels or price I wanted. Let's take a moment to discuss how horrible this interface is. Switching between menus takes detectable seconds. I have to re-find the show I want every time I want to watch it. When I finish an episode of a TV show, it takes me to a list of things I've watched. It retains memory of what I have watched for a less than two days. It has commercials, both during the show and while I'm trying trying to browse. If I pause a show, it goes back to the browsing menu frightenlingly fast, which wouldn't be so bad if the browsing menu didn't contain ads. Ads with sounds. They have only a few episodes of most shows up at a time, which is horrible even before you know there's no saving or subscription, so I'd have to remember when shows were airing.

I spent another fourty five minutes on the phone arguing, and ended up with the installation fee waved, a cheaper plan that what I originally agreed to (without ALL the channels, but hey, cheaper). We'll see how that shows up in my next bill. But I still can't access HBOGo. They said let it reset over night, I called the next day and had another half hour conversation where I explained the problem to them and they completely failed to understand. They filed a tech support ticket. I think that was Thursday. Today, at 6:30 Christmas Eve, they called me back. As it turns out, I don't have plans, and I guess there are lots of people who don't celebrate Christmas. Nonetheless, it annoys me. It extra annoys me that we had to have a long protracted discussion in which they asked for nothing but repro steps (which I already gave them when I originally complained) and then said they'd call back in an hour. I'm waiting for that now.

So just to be clear, for 5 hours of my time, extremely frustrating hours that leave me tense and edgy afterwords, I got access to their g-dawful interface, with commercials, and I still don't have the hopefully better HBO interface. In the time it took me to do this, I could have pirated every show known to man. One could argue that I'd be doing all of us a favor if I just started pirating now, because it would save them the effort of troubleshooting.

So Comcast, the reason you are dying is not piracy, or even Netflix/Hulu/Amazon video. You are dying because your service is terrible.

Hobbyfest 2012: Trapeze

Hobbyfest got slowed down a bit with my SEVERE GUM INFECTION, and will clearly be carried on into 2013. But I managed to get Trapeze in under the wire.

Overall: I'm glad I did it, I plan on doing it a few more times, but it is never going to be a regular hobby. First, it is expensive. s $48 for a two hour class, and for most of that class you're just sitting around, because there's only one trapeze. If you're going to do it, I highly recommend waiting for a groupon and going two days before Christmas, where you can work until your arms fall off.

The scariest part is not the actually flying, because at that point you're just sort of doing it. The ladder you climb is much, much scarier. They attach you to a line for it, and all I could think was "great, so I'm going to break my back instead of cracking my skull. That's much better." then you stand on this tiny, rickety platform, and there's a moment when you have the ladder harness off but don't have the flying harness on yet and all I can think is "YOU DESIGNED THIS WRONG". Then you catch the bar. You're leaning with your center of mass way over the platform, holding something shockingly heavy in your outstretched arms, and the only reason you don't fall is some idiot is holding on to your harness.* Then there is the jumping, which is done on their cues, not yours, which made the whole thing more nervewracking for me.


The good, I guess, is that I got some really cool pictures, and I have some really pleasant muscular exhaustion today. The first time I do anything is often the best, in terms of body response, because I haven't learned how o be lazy about it yet. I find ways to cheat efficiencies shockingly fast. There is something hugely symbolic and powerful about waiting and holding the bar, and I think I have to keep going under I've unwrapped that. Hopefully I can do that in two classes, because that's the discount pack they offered me and I'm not going to pay full price for it.

Trapeze either never gives you time to get in to a flow state or drops you in it immediately and then kicks you out just as fast. That is probably also a good thing to experience.

I was really reluctant to go to trapeze because I thought it was just going to be one long slide of hitting my limitations- I wouldn't be flexible enough or strong enough to do anything. I got talked into going by a friend, who lived up to her promise to relentlessly cheerlead everything I did. This gave me enough space to realize that if I'm angry about not being able to do all of the things in a set, refusing to do any of them is more likely to make me angrier than it is to make me feel good about myself. That lessen was totally worth the $30 the class cost.

*Surprisingly, this doesn't become less stressful if the holder is an attractive member of your gender of choice.