•  deadbeef   ( @deadbeef@lemmy.nz ) 
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    1 month ago

    I got a pretty nice Yamaha bluray player that was an appropriate match to my home theatre amp.

    Put a bluray in it, got a piracy warning, a few unskippable ads for other movies, an obnoxious excessively drawn out animated menu screen that stuttered like hell and was laggy to use.

    Pulled the bluray back out of it, stuck it back in the DVD drawer and proceeded to download a copy of the movie to watch. Been doing that ever since.

    • Wanted to re-watched something I couldn’t find on torrents in good quality, so I bought a cheap Blu-ray player and holy shit it was painful.

      I’d forgotten how annoying all the warnings and menus were; JUST PLAY THE BLOODY SHOW!

      • As great as just playing the show is, I actually really like DVD/Blu-ray menus because of the little extras you get on some of them. It makes the disk feel more special compared to straight up video files on a storage device. The warnings can be a little annoying, but otherwise I don’t mind as much.

        Also, I’m lucky enough to have yet to find a DVD/Blu-ray that stutters or has audio glitches on the Vizio Blu-ray player I got at a thrift store, so I’m lucky.

        • The deleted scenes and commentary audio tracks were cool, but idk if I’d actually watch any of it now. I heard years ago that there’s a whole system for “MST3King” a movie manually with community commentary tracks that effectively do the same thing and I’ve never cared enough to figure out how to set it up and try one, so I don’t know if I’d ever actually watch a DVD commentary even if I had the option.

          Maybe it would be cool for Taskmaster, since I’ve seen every episode so many times and continue to rewatch it? But I rarely re-watch anything anymore. And I don’t think TV shows got commentary tracks anyway.

          And deleted scenes could probably just be found on YouTube, I assume? I don’t know because I haven’t cared enough to search, lol.

    • Years ago when I worked in audio production I would sometimes just sit in my studio to listen to music on my monitors. They’re technically not supposed to sound “better” but they certainly tend to sound more detailed. If you’re too busy to mix, you could at least do that. (Plus you’ll get a better frame of reference for the monitors/room.)

    • Just play it, my dude. I bought a fancy PRS because it fit my hands right, and it had a ding on the neck so the guy didn’t want it.

      I straight up suck at guitar and can only play shitty 90’s alt and some pentatonic stuff, but it’s still fun.

      If you want to get better at just making stuff up on the guitar, learn the pentatonic scale, pick four to six notes, and just jam with those notes. I like (2) 4-6, (3) 4-6, and (4) 4-6. You can bounce around between those and sound pretty cool.

    • I would 100% recommend taking lessons. I waited 25 years to start lessons and wish I’d done it much sooner. It’s amazing how much you can improve in 6 months. And even professional touring musicians in really big bands still take lessons. It’s only theoretically possible to self teach yourself, but practically very hard, especially if you have no musical background. If nothing else it gives you a motivation to practice whatever you’ve been set the previous 1 or 2 weeks.

    •  megabat   ( @megabat@lemm.ee ) 
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      1 month ago

      Same. I bought a fixer upper and haven’t moved in yet due to the very messy renovations I’m doing slowly on evenings and weekends after my full-time job. I’m almost to the point I can move in though.

  • Akai EWI Solo

    My partner insisted on getting me one of these as a gift because I like playing music. It’s cool for sure, and I enjoyed the little bit I’ve played on it, but there’s just no time. So it’s left to gather dust now.

    • I paid around US$700-800 for a nice Neumann mic that I’d researched pretty well, but like a dumbass didn’t realise that it required power, meaning I couldn’t just hook in to my amp like your basic Shure.

      So later on as a solution, I got myself a Focusrite powered amp-interface that has a bonus of being able to route guitar and mic input in to USB. Spent hours trying to get everything working and kept running in to problems. IIRC the USB signal was barely received by my computer, and the only way the amp received a signal is if the computer was powering the thing, which shouldn’t have been a requirement as it already had power.

      I just went back to my Shure while that fancy stuff gathers dust. Similar thing with my Ableton.

  • I bought some kit for running TTRPGs just before COVID hit: wet erase markers, Chessex mat, extra dice bags, DM screen, and some cheap minis. Then when COVID hit I adopted a Virtual tabletop (Foundry). Over the course of the pandemic, my gaming group evolved to include people from all over the province, and so now there’s not really any hope of playing an in-person session. Not to mention I switched to playing PF2E, which is really hard to run in-person because of how much crunchier it is. So now I have this stuff and don’t really know when I will get to use it.

  • Back in December I spent $550 on a refurbrished home theater projector. After actually thinking things through, I realized that in my current living situation, the whole idea isn’t going to work. I went back to watching movies on my TV and sometimes even my monitor.

    I still haven’t taken the projector out of the plastic wrapping, and I’ve been contemplating re-selling it on eBay so I can at least get my money back…but I highly doubt that will happen.

        • But, like, cats wear out by use, not time. (For the most part.)

          A car is good for, say, 300,000 km. If you drive 300K in it, then you “fully used” the car.

          That’s like saying a pad of paper isn’t used when it’s sitting on your shelf. Technically true, maybe, but the pad is used up when it’s out of sheets. It doesn’t make sense to measure the utilization time for a consumable, like paper or a car.

        •  Hyacin   ( @hyacin@lemmy.ml ) 
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          1 month ago

          100% agree on “car” and came to the comments with it in mind.

          As much as it sits unused the majority of the time though, that isn’t what I was thinking - what I was thinking is how I’ve never get to “fully use” it, or any sports car I’ve owned for that matter, as to me fully using it would entail bringing it to a track, REALLY putting it through it’s paces, and pushing it to the limits it was actually designed for. While it is great fun to drive (safely) around town, and comfort and luxury were absolutely large parts of the engineering that went into it, it’s hardly living up to it’s full potential!

  • 2020 Shelby Mustang GT350R. I paid $80k for it and then another $25k at Shelby American in Vegas for the signature edition package. Bought it new in 2020 and it now has about 1500 miles on it.

    It was my dream car but I just never have the time to drive it.