Other What Makes Your Life, Meh?

**** Ticketmaster and **** Live Nation.

**** them for how they’ve destroyed live music.

**** them with a cricket bat and no lube.

Almost the entire live music scene is dominated by them. There are still independent venues that handle their own ticketing, but bands & artists often have their hands tied. There are often exclusive deals with Live Nation or Ticketmaster through their promoter, record label, etc, which mean that they cannot play in those independent venues.

There was a WWE event in Cardiff late last year, where, thanks to Ticketmaster’s/Live Nations’s unmitigated greed, the top-tier ticket price was around £2,500. A few quick searches revealed that it was cheaper to have a two week all-inclusive holiday in Tokyo. One of the most expensive cities in the world in one of the most expensive countries in the world to travel to. And a 2 week holiday there was still cheaper than the top-tier ticket to watch a bunch of sweaty ‘roided-up dudes pretend to grope each other for a few hours.

 

TOLERATE IT!
Paul Foot - Food Allergies

 

Lol.

I guess it is a choice. Between feeling crap and not feeling crap.

 

Still waiting for Big Ouch, something's holding up the process

 

Dynamic ticket pricing needs to be banned and, selling any ticket for more than the marked price needs to be banned too. Touts will still be a problem but, it is up to ticket buyers to refuse to buy from them and, that’s not going to happen.

I saw an article earlier about Bouncy* tickets. Stupid prices…

*Dawn French’s name for Beyoncé.

 

I broke the cardinal rule of IT; never update anything on a Friday.
Since I'm bored and seemingly hate myself, I decided to update the CCTV server. A thoroughly easy task and near-zero chance of it going wrong. It went wrong. Well, I say it went wrong. It won't boot back up after a restart, which may or not be related.
It won't take long to fix, it's just currently 15ft in the air because it lives on a shelf out of reach. I can't just pull it down myself because 1. it weighs approximately the same as a small moon, and 2. I haven't had the training to operate the scissor lift myself.
I also have some form of man-flu cold.

 

Dynamic pricing is just the latest attempt to push the greed as far as they can. It should have never got to this stage in the first place.

Dynamic pricing does need to be banned… And Ticketmaster/Live Nation needs to be broken up and regulated heavily.

Given how far greed has progressed in just the course of my own relatively short adulthood, I’m likely to be long dead before Western governments truly make a stand against the corporate oligarchs pulling the strings.

 

Outbid for the 4th time in 2 months on yet another house. Everything going to closing dates within a week, offers 20-30k over asking, how the hell is housing pricing so mental just now

 

This needs be stopped legally, or at least seller pays your fees.

 

A regulatory framework like that in Scotland, could help a lot.

 

I wish mate, already hard enough that you can only get a mortgage to the home report value now, having to add 20-30k ontop of that is damb near impossible for most folks

Yep, defo help alot of people, i can see why more people are trying to get on the ladder now though, its to survive, my parents have never owned, they pay rent to a private land lord, and there £750 a month for a 3 bedroom house, granted i have a 2 bedroom but my mortgage is less than half that, its mental, they however are too old to get a mortgage now. Everyones feeling it

 

Awaiting a delivery which doesn’t look like it’s coming… I had a Royal Mail text over the weekend to say it was due today but so far it’s in that delivery window but not out for delivery.

Kind of annoying because I happen to be off work today and the Mrs is working until 9 which gave me the whole day relatively undisturbed to be getting on with it…

 

Yeah the home report system is great in theory but I bought during covid and after missing multiple times like yourself ended up adding an extra 20+% I think it was on the offer to try and avoid missing yet another, I'll never know if I didn't need to go that high and could have saved thousands but ah well a bit late to worry about it now!

 

My ex and I finally have a custody agreement in place.

We've been separated two years. To get divorced, we need two things; a custody stipulation and equitable distribution. I've wanted to focus on one thing at a time because when my ex doesn't get exactly what she wants in one place, she'll often try to use it as leverage somewhere else: "I agreed to 50/50 custody, so I should get more money in equitable distribution."

That's not what "fair" or equal looks like. I'm actually a pretty good person. I want things to be fair and equal. My ex is extremely emotionally immature and thinks "fair" is her getting her way. When I insist on something that's actually fair, actually equal, she treats it like I'm being unreasonable. And then I look stubborn because instead of asking for more than half and settling toward the middle, I ask for what's fair from the beginning and then hold my ground and repeat my reasoning over and over again.

Usually, I end up having to say something like, "Well, if you think this is equal, then you can have my half and I'll take yours." She really hates this because it reveals how deeply unfair her offers actually are.

Anyway, after practically a year of negotiation, two court dates, one of which got pushed back, and me having to spell out exactly what I thought was going to happen if it went to court, she agreed to the custody stipulation we had practically a year ago, except for one minor edit to the language to bring it into alignment with the plain-English document we had agreed to prior to sending it to the lawyers to draft up. Yes. One year to fix a tiny part of the wording of the legal document so that it reflected what we had already agreed to.

I'm saying it's "meh" and not "amazing" because my ex is already making it extremely difficult for me to be equally involved in our children's healthcare. This is in opposition to the custody stipulation we just signed. So, I'm already in evidence-gathering mode. This will inevitably end with me suing her for contempt of court. She'll lose as long as I can gather enough evidence. She'll have to pay my legal fees and a fine to the state. If she doesn't shape up after that, I'll have to sue again and will probably ask to be given sole decision making power.

 

I believe the realtor I chose may have committed a GDPR breach (in my favour slightly). I did everything I could to secure a property we viewed locally which we both loved. My partner and I scheduled separate appointments to see it, which gave us a 30-minute slot to talk with the owners and build some rapport. Interestingly, their kids attended the same school where my partner's aunt is the headteacher, and I was able to chat with the guy about football, chatty folks. They mentioned how much they liked their realtor, so I reached out to them and had them come out to do the sale of our house. The guy that came was quite chatty and let slip that they were the ones who outbid us on the last house, though he didn’t say by how much. He did mention it was more than 20k over our offer (the house needed a good bit of work). I chatted to him a bit about how it was on their recommendation we asked them to come value and list our home, hoping it would help us when it came time to close the deal (Put in a good word and that). The house was listed for 100k, with a home report at 110k, and I offered 127k, was out bid.

What was odd was that I received a call from the realtor about the unsuccessful offer instead of my lawyer which is who i normally get the call from, they let me know that it went for 130k. I’m not sure which is more frustrating, knowing I was outbid by a small amount or realizing I was significantly outbid (last time). It’s a cruel system.

The home report for my house is scheduled for tomorrow, and I’ve spent the last two weeks preparing it to be move-in ready to attract first-time buyers, just as it was for us when we had our first kid and needed a place pronto. From the realtor's perspective, the value has increased a good bit, we bought it for 55k, and it’s now worth at least 80k. We’ve been here for seven years and still have about 45k left on the mortgage, which gives us some flexibility if the numbers align for a new house. I’m worried about overpaying for a mediocre area or underpaying for a bad one. I really dislike this balancing act, not something I think I am ever going to master, but I have my fingers and toes crossed something comes up soon, houses round our way are going really quick, so the likely hood is we will go on the market, and it will be up for a few weeks, ending with a closing date.

 

It's WSBK season, and I'd forgotten that Eurosport was being canned, so no more free M-Cycle racing, and I'll be buggered six ways till sunday if I'm paying 30 quid a month to watch it

 

Oof, that’s steep…

 

About the norm for sports subscriptions, and with TNT you would also get MotoGP, but nah it's a slippery slope I'm not even contemplating.

 

Picked up my auction winnings this morning—took a shortcut, slipped on a wet embankment, and ended up covered in mud before work. My fault but not the morning I had planned!

To top it off, the box I was most excited about collecting contained a Powershot G9 and two Ricoh GX100s, no batteries in sight and just one Ricoh charger. Maybe the previous owner (likely deceased) stored them separately for charging, or they were removed deliberately by a vendor to avoid testing, meaning they’re all likely faulty. My money’s safe in parts, but would have been nicer to come away with an opportunity to test them later. Will need to order from Amazon and hope they arrive in good time tomorrow.

All I have now is a sore back...

 

Went on a Teams meeting, to be greeted by another colleague and a customer,

...and one of the Commercial Team's note taking AI.

I don't like that last part. Seems rude.