Tag: wtf

Flix Premiere review: they sent me promo spam and cost too much

Posted on by Jody Bruchon

I got unsolicited bulk commercial email (otherwise known as spam) from “Flix Premiere” at an email alias I don’t actually use for anything these days. I unsubscribed without really reading it because it’s spam so as far as I’m concerned they can go get fucked with a rake, but as I waited for the unsubscribe page to load over my blazing fast connection, I glanced at the email once again to see what they were trying to do to gently separate me from my money without wining and dining me first.

flix_premiere_spam
Behold our sales pitch…now with 93% less lube and 78% more anus crowbar!

I have to admit that for sketchy spammy email this looks more convincing than usual…so I checked to see if they’re a real company with real products and no apparent malicious intent. They are indeed real, though that’s not going to save them.

Strike 1: Send me random opt-out spam like this and I’m already not interested.

Strike 2: I’ll let them tell you themselves.

flix_premiere_header
Half the price of Netflix! Right Guys? …..guys?

Netflix has seen a nasty subscriber churn hit since they decided it’d be brilliant to jack up the cost for existing customers by yet another dollar per month. Netflix (as of today) now costs everyone $9.99 a month for a typical subscription. We’ll round up everything from here by one cent because that missing one cent is a single penny that represents a long-time pet peeve of mine with such deceptive pricing; yes, you weasely marketer assholes, $9.99 actually IS $10 in our minds, but thanks for insulting our intelligence right out of the gate!

So, in actual sane person dollars, Netflix is $10 a month. The header for Spamalot Films…er, *cough* I mean Flix Premiere…is (in sane person dollars) “just $5.” FLIX PREMIERE LETS ME WATCH ALL THE HIGH QUALITY INDIE FILMS THEY CAN CONTRACTUALLY CHOKE OUT EXCLUSIVE RIGHTS TO FOR $5 A MONTH?!

Flixy Downer replieth sternly: “Hold your horses, kid. It ain’t Netflix. It’s Flix Premiere, where we think we’re a cable television provider in 2001! It’s $5 to watch one film.”

Holy shit, Flix Premiere is expensive.

What the fuck were these people thinking? Netflix already has tons of indie films and they let you watch as much as you can cram into your face for $10 a month, be it one film or 100 films. Some brilliant idiot actually thought “we can ‘curate’ films no one has heard of from production companies no one has heard of and charge the same amount per two films that Netflix charges for a la carte viewing of both no-name and big-name films and television shows and make plenty of money doing so!”

No. No no no. The genie is out of the bottle, guys. A la carte streaming for single-digit monthly subscription prices is here to stay. You’re not going to convince the cord cutting revolution to go all the way back to five-dollar on-demand movies, especially when they’re not big-name films in the first place! Redbox rents physical Blu-Ray discs to people and still does it at 40% lower cost than your no-name streaming movies. What are you venture capital hemorrhaging execs smoking, and can you please keep it very far away from me?

On a positive note, it’s nice to see an interest in independent film. If it were $10 a month a la carte with a one-month free trial just like Netflix, I’d seriously consider joining up and sticking around if I liked it, despite the fact that they came to me under the seedy cloak of being cunty filthy spammers. At $5 a pop, you’re fucked in the head, out of your mind, and there’s no way in hell that I’ll even give them that one little sanity cent I’ve generously added to their prices this whole time.

Flix Premiere also runs around the Internet replying to comments to do damage control as any remotely functional company does, but they suck at it. I’m such a generous lord that I shall paste one of their comments here as a response so they don’t have to. I’ll even respond to that!

Flix Premiere squawked: “the great thing about Flix Premiere is that we’re building a carefully screened and curated selection of good films that might never have been seen anywhere else. All the content is also exclusive to Flix Premiere for at least a year! So if you are hoping to catch these films on Netflix you’ll have to wait somewhat longer.”

First off, I have no way of knowing if your “carefully screened and curated selection” or your definition of “good films” match up with my own subjective tastes, so that statement is meaningless. If you mean “we don’t offer up first year film school student films for $5 apiece” then congratulations, you’ve set the bar very near the ground! Anything beyond that is so subjective that you can’t make objective statements about your collection like that. Exclusive for at least a year? Sounds like you could be screwing over indie filmmakers to me; I want to know how much of that exorbitant $5 you’re really giving them. Yes, I know that my grubby a la carte demands may mean less money available in the pool to pass along, but that would require your members to rent more than two movies a month on average every single month and you’d have far more members on a subscription plan in the first place.

That last jab of yours is your only direct stab at getting customers from Netflix, so let’s address it as clearly as possible right now. I’ll have to wait to see it on Netflix?

Guess what?

I can wait.

Sorry, indie folks. You really shouldn’t have signed away the rights to your own films to a grossly overpriced platform if you wanted me to see it. Having made some short films myself, I can sympathize with your plight, but this is the path you chose. As for Flix Premiere, feel free to leave a comment or two. I am a tough god, but I am a fair god.

tl;dr: Flix Premiere is a nice idea that costs way too much and they sent me spam, so fuck them with a rake.

If Newegg says “item was received with apparent end-user caused physical damage to the CPU socket contact pins” here’s how to fix that problem

Posted on by Jody Bruchon

THREATEN TO CONTACT A LAWYER.

You should know that I am not a lawyer; however, I find that when a large company seems to not care, the possibility of getting a lawyer involved when you have been genuinely wronged by them gets you the attention needed to resolve the situation.

For a couple of years now, Newegg has been rejecting RMAs on motherboards with LGA-style CPU sockets and they always say that “item was received with apparent end-user caused physical damage to the CPU socket contact pins.” There are plenty of stories about this bad behavior all over the Internet. In fact, I have experienced this problem personally and written about it from the persepctive of boycotting the people who engineered the socket that allows for such easy breakage and is exploited by Newegg for RMA rejection.

If you receive a notice that your RMA was rejected for this reason, talk to customer service and tell them that you believe that their RMA technicians caused the damage to void the RMA. If they refuse to process the RMA, don’t waste time asking for a supervisor; instead, tell them that your lawyer will be very interested in this situation and ask them for the contact information for Newegg’s legal department. Also ask for the customer service agent’s name and their internal company identification number so they can be subpoenaed to testify if a lawsuit against Newegg is filed.

This communicates a few things that may magically get your RMA problems solved. One, it tells customer service that you are someone who will not let this issue go and will fight it in the legal arena if needed, a situation that no company wants (especially considering the widespread accounts of Newegg’s behavior). Two, it gives the company an added incentive to not screw you over and could cause a “good faith exception” to the policy be granted to you.

Another excellent outlet for getting your problems resolved is to email the VP of customer relations (or public relations)  or someone relevant under the “Investor Relations” section of the website. These people have a very strong interest in the company’s success. Don’t email the legal department. If you need to get your lawyer involved, your lawyer can do that.

If you buy a new motherboard and want to “cover your ass…”

  1. When the package arrives, DO NOT OPEN IT YET!
  2. Get something that takes decent quality video. Most phones will take excellent video if you don’t use an “MMS compatible” recording mode which records terrible quality video.
  3. Record a video of the entire unboxing process, from cutting the packing tape to removing the motherboard box to opening the board to inspecting the CPU socket closely for damage.
  4. That part is important: inspect the CPU socket for damage with the camera. If there is anything wrong, put it all back together on camera, seal the motherboard box with tape, and RMA it immediately.
  5. DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES attempt to use a board that appears to have socket pin damage. This could blow up your CPU and could cause your RMA to have other reasons to be rejected.