Groovymarlin.com

From Patton’s twitter feed just now (start at the bottom and read up):

Boy, that Courtney Stodden really gets around, huh?

Silly, silly Netflix! I want to love you, but sometimes you make it so difficult. First there was the price-hike. I wasn’t happy about it, but it also wasn’t difficult to simply cancel the DVD portion of my family’s membership. We mostly stream stuff anyway, and DVDs would sit here for weeks and months without being watched. But then you started enforcing your policy (which was news to me, but that’s another rant) of only allowing accounts to stream on one device at a time. Come on! You know that some nights my husband watches something on the TV downstairs, and I want to watch something else on my iPad or PC. What’s wrong with that? I pay you! But no, you gotta make things all complicated.

Then you say you’re going to split off the DVD stuff into Qwikster (seriously – WORST. COMPANY. NAME. EVER.). Then — oh no, wait! You’re not going to do that after all. I went from thinking “oh well, here comes the greedy part as they get ready to sell off the DVD side of the business” to just plain thinking you’re off your meds. Crikey!

But mostly I’m just getting kind of annoyed at you because the streaming selection seems like it’s getting WORSE, not better. You keep touting all these deals for new content, so how come nothing that I want to watch is ever available? Here’s just a sample of the things I’ve searched for, and been disappointed by the lack of, on Netflix Streaming in the past few months:

- The Harvey Girls
- Singin’ in the Rain
- The Black Cat
- Poltergeist
- Night of the Living Dead (1990)
- Alien or Aliens or Alien 3 or Alien: Resurrection
- The Muppet Show
- Vertigo or Rope or North by Northwest or The Birds or The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) or The Trouble with Harry
- Scooby-Doo movies and tv shows (You have ONE currently. My daughter loves these. What happened to the others you used to offer?)
- Fargo
- Return to Oz
- Stephen King’s IT
- The Shawshank Redemption
- The Shining (original OR mini-series remake)
-  The Seventh Seal
- Rashomon
- Kung Fu Hustle
- The Royal Tenenbaums
- Rushmore
- The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
- Any opera or classical music performances or ballet
- The Man Who Laughs

Don’t get me wrong, I do like some of the stuff you’ve made available recently (I love being able to re-watch all those old seasons of “Dark Shadows,” for example), but more and more I can’t find what I want when I want it. And I often end up using Amazon VOD instead. Sometimes even when I have to pay per title! Yes, THANK YOU for making The Big Lebowski continuously available so that I can watch it once a month without digging for my DVD. But come on – no Wes Anderson available at all? And thank you for having Jackie Brown, which I love, but what about Pulp Fiction? Inglorious Basterds? Kill Bill?

I have a piece to say today, and I’m gonna say it briefly. But first read these two posts:

1. Anne Helen Peterson muses on whether it’s acceptable to criticize fashion bloggers, and where do you draw the line between “private” and “public” personas?

2. gluten-free girl shares some rather horrifying stories about hateful comments, tweets, and so on; in reaction to her blog.

I just have a few reactions to these. First of all, what they both point out to me is that when people are anonymous, they feel free to expose the worst of themselves to the world. As much as I firmly believe in the importance of being able to post anonymously, it’s also true that nothing brings out trolls like anonymity. People will say things that they would NEVER say if they were a.) face to face with the target or b.) forced to use their real names. Notice in Anne’s article, she’s having a real crisis of conscience. She has a certain amount of irritation about a particular “fashion blogger,” and wonders if it’s OK to state it publicly. Pretty mild, really. But also notice that she uses her real name. It tends to make a difference.

For the record, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with criticizing a person who has chosen to make themselves a public figure via a blog or other means. It kind of goes with the territory. But there’s a world of difference between “criticizing” or even “mocking,” and pure, hateful vitriol like gluten-free girl has to endure.

And that brings me to that second post. My God. What is WRONG with people? Well, I’ll tell you exactly what is wrong with them:

Given the opportunity, some people will troll anonymously because it gets them off.

Do any of the hateful people mentioned by gluten-free girl REALLY wish her dead? I don’t think so. I think they get off on the ability to send emails, make posts, post comments, or send out tweets that upset the blogger in question, or anybody else for that matter. These people have base instincts, and they follow them because they can.

The ugly truth about most bullies is that they themselves have also been bullied. They make themselves feel better by turning around and bullying someone who can’t hurt them back, whether it’s a younger kid at school, a less-powerful co-worker, or a blogger who will read their anonymous comments or emails and get upset by them.

I say this with all humility, but seriously: I count myself SO LUCKY not to be one of those people. Because if you’re the type of person who gets off on causing others pain or fear or sadness, how can you live with yourself? Do you just pretend that someone else did it? That it wasn’t you at the keyboard? That your anonymous persona is really a different person all together? Maybe there’s some real pathology in there, I don’t know.

Here’s an example of how I handle someone who irritates me. There’s a fashion/lifestyle/mommy type blogger who used to drive me INSANE. The pictures she posted of herself were always posed and flawless, and she had perfected that sort of duck-face pout that all the starlets are so good at. Her family seemingly had unlimited income and resources, or at least she made it SEEM like they did. Her children? Utterly perfect, adorable, well-behaved and always stylishly-attired. In short, she was a smug twat. In fact, she probably is STILL a smug twat, but I wouldn’t know, because here’s how I handled my irritation: I unsubscribed from her feed, un-followed her on Twitter, and pretty much forgot that she existed (until I dredged up the memory for this post). I didn’t post vitriolic anonymous comments on her irritating blog, I STOPPED READING IT.

If more people would stop reading the things that annoy them, there would be a hell of a lot less ugly comments and emails that have to be screened by bloggers. Unfortunately, it’s not likely to happen, because (obviously) people tend to lack self-control. And that is why the answer to the question (do people REALLY suck so much?) is a resounding: “YES. People suck. SO much.”

Prepare to receive my unsolicited opinion on Hulu Plus, Hulu’s $7.99 a month streaming service that is supposed to compete with Netflix:

IT SUCKS.

My husband signed up for the one-week free trial, so we tried Hulu Plus out on our Roku. I was NOT impressed. The interface, compared to Netflix and even Amazon VOD, is clunky. But most annoying were the commercials. TONS OF COMMERCIALS. I tried to watch an episode of Parks and Recreation (Season 3, Episode 1), and before the damn episode even started, I had to watch FOUR commercials. Two straight minutes of irritation right there (at least when I’m watching something with commercials on my computer, I can do other things and ignore them until they’re over). Then there were another two commercials at every normal commercial break in the program.

I guess I’ve gotten spoiled by Netflix, where there are NO commercials at all, but watching an episode on Hulu Plus was so annoying, before it was over I’d decided I would never do it again. $7.99 a month to watch commercials? NO THANKS. For $7.99 a month I can stream shows and movies from Netflix with no commercials, and for $2 more I can have one DVD out at a time too. Yeah, I get that Hulu Plus can offer more recent seasons, but so what? I’m pretty sure Season 3 of P&R will be on Netflix Streaming by this fall when it comes out on DVD. If not, I’ll just get the DVDs as part of my 1 DVD at a time plan. Or I’ll pay $38.99 and stream Season 3 in HD right now from Amazon VOD. It is worth it to me to watch without annoying commercials.

So my summary of Hulu Plus is: TOTAL WASTE OF MONEY.

(By the way, if you have no idea what a Roku is, you really need check it out. IT ROCKS.)

You know how sometimes you don’t realize you had a good thing, until it’s gone? I’ve discovered recently that there’s a corollary to that theorem: sometimes you don’t realize how bad things are, until you get into a better situation.

Of course I’m talking about my new job, which makes me so very happy that I might not have to go on Prozac after all. (My personal life is still incredibly stressful right now, parenthood and what-not, so having a job that thrills me really helps balance out the misery.) Here’s a short history of my work morale that will help to make sense of these observations.

Way back when, in the early 90s, I had just graduated from college and got my first real job. My first job was awful, I hated it, and I shortly quit. My next job was not so great, but I found it interesting, so I worked to make it better – and it worked! My job activities, responsibilities, and relationships got a lot better, and I was very happy (although I was not fairly compensated for everything I was doing, but hell, there was a recession at the time).

Then I moved to Columbus, and had a job in civil service which was both a.) boring and b.) low-paying, with a side-dish of demeaning for extra measure. From there, I circulated through a few jobs, some civil service, some not, most for non-profits, and dealt with my share of psycho bosses and managers and VP’s. When I finally got my first real IT job, I hit my stride – loved my work, loved my co-workers, loved the regular promotions I started getting. Life was good! That was my first taste of what a big difference true job satisfaction can make in your overall life.

After we moved to Northern Virginia, it took a while to find my next “perfect” job, but find it I did, and I happily spent seven years with that company. It was my second job in software testing, but I really grew and learned a lot in those seven years, developing my skills and dramatically expanding my knowledge and experience. Things weren’t perfect, but they were close. Unfortunately, I left because the contract I was on was ending, and I didn’t want to have to work on a different project with a long commute. That’s when things went downhill. I can honestly say that since then, 2006, I haven’t been truly happy at work…until now.

After five years of working in places where the morale was in the toilet, I’m finally working at a company where people are happy, including me. My skills are being used and developed again, and I really enjoy going to work. Maybe most importantly, the work/life balance is very important at my new place, and it’s made a big difference in my stress level. Whew!

The funny thing is, I never realized the full extent of how unhappy I was at my last job, until I started this one. My last job was not challenging at all, and in fact it was pretty boring most of the time. I certainly never had to take it home with me. Some of the management were buffoons, but I was able to avoid the worst of them. And there were always the really generous benefits to comfort myself with – and generous they were, extremely generous for our industry. But while I wasn’t exactly stressed, I also wasn’t fulfilled. My brain wasn’t being challenged, and my emotional well being suffered due to the low overall morale. I think I had some inkling of this, but I kept telling myself I was getting paid an obscene amount in salary and benefits to basically sit around, so why should I complain? And that worked for a while. But now that I have a job that I truly enjoy again, I can see how wrong that was.

TL;DR: Groovymarlin took a 14% pay cut to leave her last, dismal place of employment and go to work at her shiny new one. And hasn’t regretted it for a single second.