Technological/practical "backward steps" we all just accept now

nothing wrong with high standards! good producers would count themselves lucky to have such attentive listeners.

It's weird because I've worked for print publications for the past 15 years, and I can read ILX just fine!

^^ lol!!!

🤔

Buying second-hand tickets on the internet. For a while, you'd do it and someone mailed you their ticket, then the standard became someone sent you/transferred you a PDF of their ticket. Super convenient, easy.

Then QR codes show up. At first, that's also fairly easy. You would transfer the electronic ticket to someone else's email, or send them a screenshot of the QR code.

Well obviously the latter became problematic as someone would sell the same QR code 100 times. So they created dynamic QR codes that change every 30 seconds. Screenshots banned.

But lots of places went QR-code tickets only not long after that. So if you're selling second-hand, you can't upload a PDF to StubHub or SeatGeek in advance, can't upload a screenshot. You physically have to transfer the ticket via email once someone buys it.

Which means you have to be attentive to your email all days you have the ticket up for sale, and be at the ready to transfer if you get notification your ticket sold.

Which means sometimes you buy tickets and the seller is asleep at the wheel, so you have to report non-receipt and get a replacement.

OR you get sellers who don't follow the rules. Today for instance, I found a fantastic deal on Jesus Christ Superstar tickets.

I am delivered a PDF file, which turns out to be a PDF with a screenshot of the tickets. Which won't work because it's a dynamic QR code that changes every 30 seconds.

So I had to report that to SeatGeek, they had to call the venue to confirm, and now have refunded me.

Normally I buy direct but second-hand sales often are cheaper and are where you can get last minute bargains. Not anymore!

tbh this is making me glad i haven't gone to a Real Event since the 90s

^^^

Took Beeps to see Hamilton recently. Almost had one of those surreal fisheye moments where the crowd at the admissions window points and laughs Ha! Ha! Ha! at me because their fancy readers couldn't "see" my Samsung Galaxy J3 screen to read the QR code.

yeah at a certain point the spectacle and harshness of the experience involved in going to a 'big thing' overtook whatever pleasure seeing band x would bring me. much more likely to enjoy myself seeing someone at a venue where the experience is relatively gentle, positive, not hyper industrialized, doesn't even matter how "good" or they are as long as there's something creative going on.

Years ago, I may have razzed you for that statement, but it is the truth now. It's a large enough distraction at times where saying fuckit and moving down a notch is more than beneficial to one's mental health than it is to see, I dunno, Jack White with your phone scanned and then placed in a plastic bag.

I know as soon as I say this, people will be jumping in here going "They're such a time-saver!" but those Disney bracelets have more than convinced me that I never want to go within 500 miles of Orlando ever again.

This is why I love mostly going to metal shows where the doorman is the box office and security and your ticket is basically a wristband

otm. also hand stamps ftw.

Even those are expensive now though.

I saw Slayer for $15 in 1999 ffs

Xpost

map otm

Love the classic handstamp

I went and saw the Who at MSG a few weeks ago with an old friend, and managed to get insane seats (3rd row center). But a day or so before the show, I wondered if both tickets being on my phone would be an issue. I started reading stories about people being denied admittance because the ticket wasn’t on their phone. So I thought, ok, I’ll send the ticket to my friend’s phone, but for some reason the transfer option was greyed out. I eventually figured it out — I couldn’t transfer using the app, but could via the website — but it was such a ridiculously stupid thing to have to worry about.

Big sharpie Xs that you can't get off your hands for three days, that's the only way to roll.

Why is it that prescription pickup is more electronic than ever, yet the practice of getting them is so much worse?

I'm not even talking the days where your only option was to walk in with a paper prescription and wait a half hour.

But now places like WalGreens offer ExpressPay and Delivery, but they don't always work.

A few months ago, I waited a half hour while they tried to find my anxiety meds, even though it was confirmed ready for pickup. So I wanted to avoid that this time, so I paid 5.99 for same day delivery.

Day came and went, no Rx. Two days later, still in "Ready to Ship" status. So I can them, on hold endlessly. I'm working, and didn't have the time to wait, and had to hang up. Got creative and FAXED them a message asking them what was up.

They call me back and tell me sorry, their Medline delivery service is having problems (then why are you still allowing people to use it)? They tell me the Rx will be there til the 15th, but I can come in and they'll refund the 5.99.

I come in today, and once again, they have no idea where my meds are. After ten minutes, they give up and tell me they need to redo it and ask if I can wait fifteen minutes.

It takes 25 became it's ready but they let other customers get helped first, and then I get up there and they're asking me to pay, again. I showed them the pending bank charge showing I already paid it, and shrugged and said it *should* expire, but to call them if it goes through.

Spent an hour at the store. Sure glad for convenience!

I’ve nearly given up on Walgreens, and not for technological reasons. I don’t even have prescriptions, I just buy decongestants that require me to show an id at the pharmacy. They don’t have a pharmacist staffing the store at the two closest locations several days per week. My parents maybe rightfully were blaming a doctor for not getting a prescription sent, but I said that they could try a different store because the clearance rate is just crap with that chain.

I’ll give them half credit for fixing their point of sale credit card system which was abysmal, but they don’t have a pen to sign anymore and the cashiers just joke about scrawling with your finger. I would guess Duane Reade stores, being the same company now, are the same? Just thinking about the SF videos of people shoplifting and thinking, yeah, go for it because I don’t picture the employees caring and I doubt their systems know anyway

Yeah, coulda stopped you right at "places like WalGreens".

Wal Greens? Who hurt your autocorrect

I was pleased there wasn't an apostrophe!

This is, tbf, more a problem with several huge corporations controlling a huge section of the econo that’s necessary for survival.

100%

Yes.

Especially when deals are cut with health insurance companies to provide the best prices for consumers at these national chains.

like I was ok with paying 'again' last night knowing the original charge will drop off, but just imagining a lot of friends I know who literally wouldn't be able to afford to do that, wondering how they would have gotten their medication.

and every so often, I see a story like that from them on social media.

same company as Boot's in the UK, yes?

A few months ago, I waited a half hour while they tried to find my anxiety meds, even though it was confirmed ready for pickup.

haha yeah, that probably really helped your anxiety lol!

This is making my highly bureaucratic vertically integrated health provider look better tbh ... there was a period right before and right after covid where they reduced the pharmacy hours and didn't update the website to reflect that. ... So I would show up, about 30 minutes before it says online they were closing, and they would already be closed.

Walgreens, making me need my anxiety meds more and more since 2009! lol

Publix apparently also takes my insurance so I'm going to try their pharmacy out for next go.

more like pubix

That's what it's referred to colloquially

I've always found CVS's pharmacy department to be pretty cooperative and helpful. They're particularly good about calling my doctor to add refills to my prescriptions without me needing to ask.

CVS actually worked FINE with me, but I had problems with my medical carrier (United) and went back to BCBS and their corresponding Rx doesn't work with CVS.

I need to quit making this mistake every 4 years.

venmo documentation/receipts with a shared bank account (esp. business / non-profit ones). One of the useful things about online banking and the internet is that if someone wrote a check, you can see who the check was written out to, almost as soon as it clears. You can see who signed the check. This is compared to the old way of waiting to get the statement in the mail and see what happened. Even paypal will send email notifications that can be set to forward to everyone who has a vested interest in what goes in and out of a shared bank account.

Venmo -- no. It's like in the old days when you would see money leave the account and have no clue what it was (if you weren't the one to initiate the transaction). You don't know if it's fraud or just someone forgetting to communicate.

yep, have had that problem before too.

probably outside the spirit of this thread but...

installed the security thing at work finally and it 'synced' my easy-to-type English word with some punctuation login password with my long randomly generated network password that i only needed to enter twice every three months. and it settled on the strong password everywhere, which is a ballache.

worse still, I've remapped the macbook keyboard to pc keyboard because I'm more used to that. and one of the characters in the password is one that is remapped. so if i want to type #, say, i have to press the : key (or whatever). however, when I'm logging in it hasn't yet remapped the keys so then i have to use the key labelled #. my password is different depending on whether in logged in our not 8(

the touchscreen and wifi enabled water refill station at king's cross which takes six button presses to refill your bottle.

* Blog entries, podcasts, and even videos of lectures at serious academic institutions, all dated "Six years ago" rather than giving you an actual date that you could put in a bibliography.

You can sometimes divine the actual date from the HTML, but yes.

ha this is a similar problem to one I had a while back doing some forensic accounting regarding gofundme contributions where things are listed as "5 months ago" when it would make my work so much easier if they put the actual date.

* Blog entries, podcasts, and even videos of lectures at serious academic institutions, all dated "Six years ago" rather than giving you an actual date that you could put in a bibliography.

― Doctor Casino

given my obsession with doing amateur history shit this drives me goddamn bonkers

Blog entries, podcasts, and even videos of lectures at serious academic institutions, all dated "Six years ago" rather than giving you an actual date that you could put in a bibliography.

I occasionally do research/database work for private investigators where the actual date is of legal importance and I just get furious whenever I have to deal with that.

That's a great point. With news sites, I think "X years ago" is probably a more effective way to signal "beware, this content is outdated." But ideally you'd want to include the actual date, too.

in slack it'll tell you the actual date of you mouse over but cut and paste will give you the relative time

the actual date is of legal importance

exactly!!! this was my problem.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/09/07/streaming-tv-changes-crisis/

Streaming television is going through an existential crisis, involving the people who make it and the viewers who watch it. Its revolutionary zeal has naturally faded, as that initial wave of near limitless expansion, boundless creative opportunities and vast archival choices crashes ashore, after a spate of megamergers and a drop in new subscribers.

Just when streaming has finally attracted more viewers than cable or broadcast TV, its major players are engaged in a long-predicted war for subscribers, who are becoming all too aware of rising subscription prices and, both subtly and directly, a change in what programs get made and how long they stick around. Commercials could soon become more common, and services may be bundled (for one low monthly price!), already triggering visions of a future that recalls the dark days of cable.

my family never had cable. so i guess what i'm comparing the current "tv" landscape to is network tv, analog, abc/cbs/nbc/fox/pbs + some fuzzy WB shit channel. there are so many more choices now. i like that. i can find my way through the streaming hell. i have passwords from friends of friends. it's ok, it's not horrible.

i dunno, i rarely watch tv, regardless, so i don't know what i'm talking about have no standing to comment on it. maybe it's wonderful

I feel like my rule of never being subscribed to more than two streaming services at once is mostly working out.

I never had cable either except for a couple of years when I first lived by myself, but I definitely think "the current tv landscape" is still better and cheaper than cable ever was.

I guess I sometimes kind of miss random channel flipping.

PLEX goddammit

Disney + Netflizzz + Apple TV = what, £20 a month? and live HD tv is free for me in the UK because Freeview innit. my TV has a free app for Al-Jazeera, a free app for Sky News, for tons of things, all in better quality than broadcast. I really don’t see much of a future for the traditional Electronic Programme Guide.

that said, “FAST channels” i.e. fake TV delivered over the internet in a channel-style lineup - like a whole channel devoted to the Beverley Hillbillies - with extremely targeted ads, because they can track everything you watch - appear to be very successful right now - PlutoTV, etc. So I dunno.

The organisation I work for recently upgraded its office equipment. In the past the printers and scanners were directly connected to our PCs, but now we have a small number of multi-function printer-scanner-photocopiers that are connected to a central print-scan server. And we lease this equipment instead of owning it outright. We're way behind the curve, but the security implications of cloud-based print services were a major issue for several years. The base had a psychic incursion several years ago and the continued survival of the project was a close-run thing.

In theory this new arrangement is supposed to save money on servicing and toner cartridges, because everything is part of the lease. But if the central print server crashes, or the connection is severed, we can't print or scan anything. And because the print-scan server is "in the cloud" the servers are far away. I suspect there's a legal fiction whereby the cloud organisation promises not to house our data in a prohibited jurisdiction, but ultimately it can't guarantee anything because the data is spread far and wide. That's not my field. I merely draw up the interrogation lists.

The other issue is latency. Latency. It irritates me no end. I'm a really fast typist, and on the rare occasions when I have to prepare a document locally the difference is like night and day. When I'm using The Cloud it's like typing in treacle. It's like listening to an echo of yourself. It's not that cloud services are necessarily awful, it's just that our service has horrible latency. In contrast, when I'm preparing a document locally it feels as if my soul is flying. Suddenly the saddle has been removed and I am free to run to my heart's content. Like a charging bull finally given its freedom. Who is the matador. Who is the matador.

What is heaven to a racehorse? An endless field without rabbit holes, no jockeys, no whips, no saddles, just speed. Speed and the rush of air. The god-force of this universe created me to lead humanity into a new dawn where there is only love and beauty, but I can't do it if I can't type fast. Are my keystrokes being monitored? If so, by whom? Am I monitoring myself? Is it me?