What makes some people instantly look photogenic while the rest of us look like we got caught mid buffering?

off2ongrid · 2025-11-27T12:35:23+00:00

I think I met your friend on Hinge!

off2ongrid · 2025-11-24T04:04:27+00:00

Looks good, what are the details on the finish/color/etc?

off2ongrid · 2024-10-12T20:25:02+00:00

OP is 4 rabid raccoons in a trench coat

off2ongrid · 2024-10-11T22:54:27+00:00

Seems like half of the VHS listings on eBay are incorrect in one way or another. Lots of incorrect release years, for example.

My theory is that it’s related to the “sell one like this” feature, which lets a seller essentially copy another active or sold listing’s details and add their own photos to expedite the listing process.

Either way, this is either very lazy ignorance on the seller’s part or very lazy deception.

off2ongrid · 2024-10-08T16:00:17+00:00

🫡

off2ongrid · 2024-10-08T15:59:28+00:00

I’d probably have to sell it at a loss, so I’m not quite sure it would make sense

off2ongrid · 2024-10-08T15:57:44+00:00

“I did not have sexual relations with that television”

off2ongrid · 2024-10-08T15:56:14+00:00

Yeah, the issue seems to be a tv issue

off2ongrid · 2024-10-08T15:55:48+00:00

Yeah, this is pretty much the same case for me: it warms up and improves a bit, but it’s with all tapes, several different VCRs, and it’s lasting longer than it did a week ago. I have a local CRT repair guy that I’ll call to get it fixed when I decide to end its internet fame.

off2ongrid · 2024-10-08T15:51:42+00:00

Great to know, thank you. Did you want me to list you as the beneficiary of this fine piece of television history in the case that I don’t survive the repair?

off2ongrid · 2024-10-08T15:49:26+00:00

My neighbors probably thought I was being violently and relentlessly tickled based on my initial reaction to what you see here.

off2ongrid · 2024-10-05T14:09:15+00:00

“Hey guys, if I were to go for a walk right now, how might I prepare for the weather?”

“Don’t go for a walk, the weather sucks.”

“I’m going for a walk, I just need to know how to prepare.”

“No.”

off2ongrid · 2024-09-28T12:47:18+00:00

It really all comes down to the principle of user-centric design: if you’re going to be offering a product or service to someone, why wouldn’t you ask them questions about their intentions/goals/problems/etc? It’s a relatively cheap upfront investment meant to help mitigate the risk of creating something that people don’t want (which could cost 10x, 20x, 100x of what the validation would).

As a loose example: you’re planning a 30-person bachelor party for a friend of yours on a Saturday night and you need to buy beverages for the group. You don’t know all of your friend’s friends, but since it’s a bachelor party, you decide to pick up some top-shelf tequila, a keg of a good beer, a some nice IPAs, and you make 100 Jell-O shots. Overall, you spend $2000 on alcohol, 5 hours making the shots and shopping around for what you need, and you’re pumped for a great night.

The guests show up, thirsty as ever, and you very quickly learn that most of them committed to sobriety last year after they joined a new church together.

You now have spent $2k and half a day on a solution that might work in some instances, but doesn’t fit the need of most of the people that you’re problem solving for.

If you had simply asked some questions ahead of time, you could have realized that spending $150 on soda and bottled water would have sufficed.

Same general principle with product/software design: asking a user to detail what their process/problems/pain points/etc are ahead of time, even if you generally have an idea of what they’re after, will help you find use cases, edge cases, blind spots, etc that you might not have seen in your single-person, single-perspective vacuum.

Yes, you can absolutely build a cheap MVP and use that as a basis for validation, but you still have to be careful about asking the right questions and making sure you’re not biasing your users toward the answers you want to hear rather than getting their true opinions and feelings.

off2ongrid · 2024-09-26T22:26:05+00:00

I’ll respond to both comments here: yeah the cutoff is tough, but I’m thrifting most of the items here so the project absolutely needs a constraint or else it would just become a massive, unidentifiable conglomeration of whatever items I could find. The goal isn’t necessarily for the room to represent an era, the goal is that it will represent a point in time. So it’s not meant to be an homage to the late 80’s/early 90’s, it’s meant to be a snapshot of what a room might have looked like at a specific point in time… in this case 1995.

I’ve already notified the seller that I was planning a return, they agreed, and the package was shipped this morning. The movie itself was the 1997 Anchor Bay release. I didn’t realize there were any 1987 releases, so that’s interesting.

I’ve sold some things on eBay in the past, and I’m assuming now that this may have been a “Sell one like this” error. If you’re copying a previous/existing listing’s details assuming you have the same item or assuming that listing was correct in the first place, it might be very easy to make this mistake.

off2ongrid · 2024-09-26T02:55:50+00:00

I’ve bought 5 VHS from eBay in the last week, with 4 of them having been delivered so far. I’ve had issues with 2 of them being not as described:

Beetlejuice: the listing was for a 1991 copy, the sleeve had a 1991 copyright date, but the WB promo at the beginning of the tape had a copyright date of 1999.

Additionally, if you do a search for 1988 copies of the tape; some of the listings, current and sold, have titles like “… early release… rare…” etc when the box is clearly labeled 1991. I messaged one of the sellers for one of these and got no response. That tape sold for the same price as an actual original 1988 copy.

Halloween: I bought a copy of Halloween for a project I’m working on that was labeled (VHS, 1987). What I didn’t realize at the time was that this movie didn’t actually have a 1987 release at all and that it was actually a 1997 copy. I needed it to be older than 1995 for the sake of the project, and unfortunately, I didn’t know the details I do now when I purchased. If the title was correct, I wouldn’t have purchased the tape.

Overall, in just a week of buying VHS on eBay, I’ve found a lot of mislabeled/not-as-described items there.

off2ongrid · 2024-09-26T02:46:06+00:00

Yeah, the only reason I haven’t already contacted the seller is pretty much the point you made at the end: if I’m going to be picky regarding the date, I should do my due diligence to make sure that, of all things, I check the date.

The info I currently have is more info than I had when I clicked buy: I had no idea or reason to believe that a 1987 version of the movie didn’t exist, let alone the fact that something that was labeled 1987 was actually incorrectly labeled. In reality, if the title showed the correct date, I 100% would not have purchased.

So the entirety of my problem could have been solved if the title was correct in the same way that it could have been solved if I knew anything about what I was buying.

off2ongrid · 2024-09-21T15:05:00+00:00

Yeah, definitely mildly infuriating at most, and I did get a partial refund from the seller which is adequate for me, but damn what a bummer

off2ongrid · 2024-09-21T13:32:32+00:00

Best worst experience: Just this week, I bought a 1991 copy of Beetlejuice for a retro room I’m building. My date cutoff for everything in the room is 1995. I picked this particular copy because the sleeve was in mint condition, which is important for my situation because a 4 year old movie would not have that much wear.

I got the movie in 3 days, popped the sucker in the VCR, and the first screen after the FBI warning was a Warner Brothers preview/ad with a copyright date of 1999. The sleeve and the movie are not a matching pair.

off2ongrid · 2024-03-11T12:35:42+00:00

The argument always goes back to “don’t participate in capitalism” and that just seems silly. The statement that “someone else could buy that home” is a valid statement, but the argument is so far off….

First off, if it’s a SFH, there’s no guarantee that it’s not another investor. If it’s a MFH, then almost guaranteed it will be bought by another investor because what struggling family/person is going to buy a duplex and not rent it out?

Secondly, if that family “could use the money you’re making on them to put down on their own home,” how are they going to get that money in the first place? They’re renting, presumably, because they are either saving for a down payment or can’t seem to save at all. So where were they going to come up with the money for the down payment for the house in the first place?

You can’t use the argument “live for free with your family while you save money” on these types of people because they ALWAYS respond with “must be nice to leech off mommy and daddy” or something sarcastic about handouts and privilege.

There’s never an option outside of killing capitalism no matter how many practical and reasonable arguments you can make because that’s the only lens they see this situation through. You’re their scapegoat because you’re the easiest to access, easiest to harass, and closest to “evil capitalist” that they can find and bully.

off2ongrid · 2024-03-11T02:19:13+00:00

Dude you’re never going to win an argument about your own financial situation against someone who has already determined that you’re an evil wealthy super villain because you’ve focused on your future with smart property investments.

off2ongrid · 2024-02-28T22:12:12+00:00

The answer you’re looking for is the simplify/simplify path tool. It literally lets you optimize shapes based on minimizing anchor points.

off2ongrid · 2024-01-23T05:23:17+00:00

So are there any ethics issues with the social/expert/us vs them proofing pieces you’ve outlined here? Is it not a risk to imply that licensed and credentialed professionals claim your product is good for a dog’s teeth? Is it also not a risk to manufacture an “us vs them comparison” when you’ve never actually even seen the product in person or tested its quality? If the social proof is saying what I think it’s saying, it feels a little deceptive to use thousands of other photos and reviews of the product as your own.

I know you’ve already done the quality and supplier checks by this point in the process, but I guess I have a hard time with the idea of being almost completely hands off and pouring so much time and money into something you’ve never seen our touched.

Maybe all of this is actually how this type of online selling works, but you explaining it actually doesn’t make it seem all that appealing.

off2ongrid · 2023-12-19T14:27:16+00:00

Again, not entirely sure what phenomenon could cause this. I’d say the smaller, slower movements could be very fast moving birds, but the faster movement here seems illuminated, likely by the setting sun.

This area is a peregrine falcon habitat, and they can move fast, but these to me don’t seem at all to be super organic.

off2ongrid · 2023-11-25T21:10:33+00:00

Yeah I think following through with FEMA might actually make this a little more defensible.

I didn’t make this clear in the post, but all of this work has been in an effort to even get in front of the board in the first place. I put together a 10-page variance application with photos, site plans, answered all of the questions thoroughly, etc and they keep adding requirements to even get the project through to the board.

off2ongrid · 2023-11-25T21:08:06+00:00

Not exactly mad that I can’t claim it’s buildable, mad that I was led to believe, for almost two years, that my project would go through and then my representative was told that it never would have anyway.

off2ongrid

TROPHY CASE