They removed Friends this week, and people are up in arms.

this is a story (happens in sequence)

i had them since forever. used to love them.

you could watch any dvd. they killed the video store.

then you could watch disc and online: you could check your disc queue and right there it would tell you if you could watch online.

then the great reed hastings decides to split the company. users riot. he backtracks, keeps a single website for 2 companies- for a while anyway.

understandably there are 2 separate functions, but interconnection between queues is lost. you call tech support it’s the wrong tech support. dvd becomes dvd.com. can no longer cross-reference.

single billing splits into 2 separate cycles.

dvd shipping starts to get SLOW, they hide 8 at a time option, blu-ray starts to get costly.

i cancel dvd torture.

online has shit selections now. the lose criterion to hulu (or they did before. cant recall)

search gets destroyed, thing looks now like a picture album. rating is gone, just thumbs up or down.

ends credits get killed, you get irritatingly auto-shoved to next program before you can even blink.

cancel streaming.

keep getting offers begging to “come back! one free month!”

come back, test the expensive option

witcher looks nice! manage to kill auto-shove. except at the end of the witcher, when they keep shoving me to the irishman. restart 5 times so i can read the fucking credits. ok.

get billed on day 2 of “free return trial”

call cust service about bill

“credit card was used before”

no shit sherlock. was coming back? youve been beggin me to do it?

ooooof. i don’t need the incompetence. please cancel now.

thank fuck for amazon. mrs. maisel is great. bezos runs a business better than hastings.

thank fuck for criterion channel—alone at last!

netflix will die of self-inflicted wounds as much as it will die of murder by competitors.

That's all fine but the Amazon prime interface is horrendous. Just awful.

no, that’s not all fine at all, was my point :D

i have absolutely zero problems with amazon. and their free trials are actually free. not sure which of the many interfaces you’re talking about, the thing runs gloriously on my phones, ipads and roku.

oh, i forgot to tell you about the time i couldn’t watch netflix shit on my tv that had been offlined to an iphone. used to work with apple adapter, one day it worked no more. spent hours on the phone with netflix customer people and engineers asking me “if i had the right kind of hdmi cable.” apple support laughed at the notion when i called them to find out. i should have gotten paid for my debugging efforts. amazon kept working fine btw.

netflix seems to have very amateurish management. which would be acceptable in a startup, except this is no longer a startup. i don’t know who is doing what or why, but as a loooooong time customer (2004 or something?) i can smell the decay. now that they’re just one of many online channels to choose from, they can’t afford to fuck up.

—

eta: fixed some typos and confusion, and came here to add: they might be doing alright as a studio, but it’s the online service part of it that gets on my last nut. maybe their final gameplan is to create content that they license to other providers? hop onto cable? i don’t fucking know. but anyway, rant over.

ps- chapelle was GREAT

Hmm

your memories are being installed in replicants now

Yes, and I had no clue what it was about going into it. I remember being very haunted by that case in those few days during the manhunt, it was so bizarre. I had no clue about any of the cat vids and such leading up to it.

I did think the little "message to the viewer" at the end of it was a little silly and desperate though, for some reason.

Very intense watch though, for sure.

I re-watched the TV show What We Do In The Shadows

HILARIOUS. Cannot wait for season 2!

Re:the Netflix rant

I actually agree with you on some of the issues. The "SOD THOSE CREDITS!" Is a pain in the ass. Especially when you're wanting to soak what's just happened in the episode.

However, I have just as many issues with the Amazon interface. Mixing films that are free and aren't is just pain in the ass. Having to scroll across as opposed to down where you can see more of the film's/shows available is just tedious. The search function is a mess. Type in "scorcese films on prime" brings up the first couple as free then it mix with the non-free films. And so and so on. Netflix has its issues but with the amount of big name directors and actors they've got doing films and series for them it's going to be around for a while longer.

Speaking of streaming I loved Ricky Gervais' dig at the golden globes last night "You say you’re woke but the companies you work for, I mean, unbelievable – Apple, Amazon, Disney – if Isis started a streaming service, you’d call your agent.”

What do you get when you insert Shrek's donkey into a mobster kidnap crime series? Something like this. I've watched 4 episodes tonight, I'm too confused to tell whether I like it or not. I might as well finish it.

This is Grant Morrison’s show yes? Or based on a Grant Morrison comic or something?

Morrison can get a bit much but that’s on account of AAAALLLLL the drugs he’s taken and funneled into his work.

I watched an episode a while back. Didn’t take

oh right right
i handle most amazon things via ipad so i dont have to go through those one-button punches of the amazon fire or whatever.
for the search, there are filters...

but yeah i suppose amazon has the incentive to always sell you extra shit? i subscribe to channels sometimes from them (hbo, showtime, starz, etc), sometimes i rent something i can’t find anywhere else.

but it’s always voluntary. they’ve never fucked me on the billing. one time i couldnt watch a rental stream and they promptly refunded me. didnt even have to call and give a code and shit. punch 3 buttons, done.

also, i love the x-ray thing. it’s tv, you talk back, look up the cast or the soundtrack, pipes to imdb... smart fuckers. i see your problem with certain versions of it, i just don’t have it. and yeha, i can still offline to a phone and plug it into a hotel tv with that apple adapter...

Yes, it's indeed a Grant Morrison based show (not that I actually know who he is). And you can easily tell the drug influences. Have you ever wondered how a unicorn would react after it falls into a bag of coke? Check episode 2 :D
You can also tell that it's produced by SyFy channel, not that we have that channel over here, but everything I've seen from it (especially those low-rated tv-movies that do get airedhere once in a while) looks a bit cheapish, perhaps they don't have the budgets as other studios.
But the combination of the two main characters is strong enough that makes me want continue watching it.

^^yeah syfy channel (their spelling, whatever) is all about the low-rent production hahaha. which i can sometimes appreciate for the lols. sometimes however they come up with good stuff.

sort of like the cw for nerds....

It being a SyFy channel thing is probably the catch-all reason for why I didn’t watch more than 1 episode.

Low-rent is right.

and yet, like the cw keeping buffy alive, and having other hits that elude me personally, the syfy channel had some hits.

they had the glorious battlestar galactica (that was big), aired the original mst3k (not so big but culturally relevant), brought the reboot of dr who to america (which i actually missed in that first run), and have had other accomplishments to keep them alive.

a few years ago they had this cheaply but really cheaply made little show call “defiance” that i liked for a while.

then again of course there have been many duds in between, like one show about people with superpowers featuring this woman who could smell the poo 3 floors down in her office building... man i tried to like it but that show sucked. “alphas” or something? oy...

eta: there also must be something likeable among this wrecks:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...original_films
megashark vs mechashark? i’m interested :D

oh and of course, i forgot cuz ive never been a fan, but didn’t they carry stargate sg-1 for half a century or something? or it carried them...

the Monty Python box finally arrived today! Actually they sent me a second box, the first one got lost somewhere, they gave me a tracking number of it and that was sent to Australia :confused:
It's all 4 series remastered on 7 Bluray discs, and each series comes with an extensive book too! I'll be having fun tonight :)

wat! maybe they thought “netherlands” meant “down under”

anyway, congrats, enjoy, perfect time of the year for absurd comedy

Well, guess what? Today I received the second box!! Pay once, get two :D
(I'll send it back)

I really liked Bottom back in the day, but never knew that thay made a stage show out of it, and toured with it throughout the UK, let alone 5 of them! I only stumbled upon it yesterday on YT where it was in my list of recommendations. Here is an 8 hour vid with all 5 stage shows: https://youtu.be/0kY0E514-mg
But perhaps the most fun parts are where they fuck shit up and do their ultimate best to keep the other one offtrack, such as here: https://youtu.be/G_X_7TrcHGM