This page started with a whole lot of shit I've had to deal with recently with regards to *new* technology. First and foremost, was getting seriously fucked by Amazon.com because they were double charging criss-cross between me and my wife's accounts for Amazon Prime, costing us about $100-200 a year. First off, I NEVER signed up for prime, and recieved no notifications that there was any sort of mandatory thing. Then the idiot on the phone told my wife that they no longer had the $15.99/mo. bill and only had a lump sum of $139.99/yr subscription fee that she pays. That's how that mess got started. My account didn't even have any current cards on it so I'm not sure how Amazon was charging my acct for HER prime per month? IT took 2 hours of good cop/bad cop with some poor guy having to undo some previous white nerd's handiwork. Say what you will about the india call centers, it seems this time they were doing a better job than the Americans....but hey, look whose president (4/2025).

Then there's Allstate. I've been with Allstate for Insurance for 20+ years, and they've never wronged me on the insurance side of things, but they sure did with their website. Apparently, there's a secret coup against Firefox going on. I even googled it, and it's mostly pimply faced nerds whining about business decisions and features - oh wow - all the same shit ANY corporation would do. Should I just dump all my x64 hardware and go full x86 with my 486 machine? Christ on a friggin bike! And people wonder why I hate modern tech so much. Basically, I can't use their website on Firefox, regardless of if it's MacOS, Linux, or (sigh) Microsoft Windows. Of coruse, tech support doesn't know anything.

Let's talk about Best Buy/Synchrony too - because I got one of their credit cards...and let's just say, what a joke. I have to change my password that I KNOW is 100% Correct almost every fucking time I go to their website. Why? Probably Firefox. They want me to use Chrome which is even worse. Honestly, if I had my way, I'd just dump all this online shit right now and go back to paying a PERSON at a WINDOW with a CHECK from my CAR!

Enshittification has ruined just about everything having to do with tech. Small, thin, aluminum laptops with no slots for anything but USB External Media, so I have to buy more dongles and doohickeys to connect my SDCARDS, DVD-rW drives. Sure, it's nice having a laptop that weighs 2 LBS and fits in a slipcover, but it also sucks because the thing is built so poorly that I could go buy myself some matzah and it'd probably have a stronger consistancy from a 4ft drop. And of course, it gets old, and it's getting harder to buy parts for it, and they don't seem to care about the standards in I.T. anymore like they used to. I remember a time when people avoided DELL because it wasn't ATX or bTX, a time when people avoided laptops for anything beyond portability because you can't cram a PCI-E graphics adapter into a regular laptop! If you call this progress....suck it. RIGHT TO REPAIR!!!!

Even my hobbies are getting enshittified. It used to be, as a guitarist, you went to a local guitar store on a Saturday, hung around, found your next axe, and met people in the local scene you could start a band with. Now there's no mom & pop stores around, just Guitar Center, where the guy at the tech table only knows what a potentiometer is but doesn't understand the difference between 1meg/250K/500K or audio/logarithmic taper, or short vs. long shaft and what kind of guitars use which. Now I go there and it's like "well, this is highly specialized?" - how, you have 42 variations of carved top Les Paul style guitar hanging on that wall over there, and not one long shaft 500K Logarithmic taper pot in the whole damn store? And I'm not spending $240 on an Epiphone for a $5 pot! Get fucked!

Or how about Video games - you know why I'm so stuck with the Atari 2600 and NES? Because ATARI doesn't make me subscribe to a service to use my 2600! My NES doesn't need a damn cloud profile to play my 40 year old copy of Super Mario Bros.! But I own 2 Wiis and a Wii-U, and I have to resort to "exploits" and questionable things to keep them functional. Seriously, soem games won't even work without the internet. I saw this coming, but christ, you'd think that Nintendo could let go of their old IP if they're not going to use it....nope, they must have some bored Lawyers who need to pay off a huge gambling debt! Actually, Nintendo just pestered me the other day about my account...why? I'm never going to use it again? Unless you re-open the Wii Shop Channel, I don't think I'll be coming to Nintendo for awhile, at least, not until the Switch is used and somebody just gives me one because it's "ooooooold". Honestly, I like a console I can just plop a cartridge I already own into and play the 100% full game without paywalls, DLC, or advertising.

And that's the next thing I'd like to bitch about - Advertising....mainley streaming. A big reason for all us "millennial cord cutters" in the 2000s was advertising. I was sick of watching TV and not being able to pause it, watch when I have time (as opposed to MAKING TIME for a program or ignoring that it exists), and then having the program cut up into tiny pieces by Bill Hicks most hated subject: Marketing. But christ, streaming has ads now that are like an hour fuckin' long! I was sick with a cold recently, and