So close to being done

One more essay, a couple of letters of evaluation, and several tons of money later, and I'll be done with applications. I should never have let it go this late, but there were some things I could not help. No excuses, though. My fault entirely. But soon, soon they'll be out and I'll be freeeee...

...except that I have my first final the day the applications close, and before that, a lab retreat to survive, and almost no sleep predicted from here to there as a result. I will say this for Chemistry the second time around: they've figured out how to make people study along the way. There are quizzes almost every week in recitation, and when there aren't quizzes, there are exams. They did, however, not bother to set up recitation for Halloween, unlike last time where I had a midterm on Halloween. I think I need to throw a party to celebrate that. Or, just, you know, as an excuse to open the haunted house lit by tealights that my mom bought be because she is an enabler.

Another reason to lose more sleep: I have finally gotten to sit in on some surgeries that are being done here, supervised by the veterinary group. The past two days I've been watching a fairly involved surgery on dogs, which the vets don't do. I've spent some time with a lovely pair of technicians, though, and the one surgeon technician is, frankly, amazing at what he does. It's all dead fascinating. I wish I could say this is my inspiration moment--the much-vaunted "I-knew-I-was-making-the-right-career-choice" moment, but it's not. Seeing how awesome this is definitely makes me think even better of going to vet school, but I'm still not feeling the "this-is-my-calling-in-life" dedication. It may be because I'm too goddamned tired. I've been a 10-to-6 worker for seven years now. Getting to work by 8, which means waking up before 7 am is murder. I don't know how any of you people do it. I don't regret it--it's been awesome and I feel better about my decision to apply to be a vet (though I'm seriously thinking vet techs might get to do more hands-on work with less fuss)--I just am so goddamned tired.

I just need to make it two more weeks. Two more, and I'll be post-exam, post-application, and, hopefully, a little better rested. But it's so far away right now, I could cry. I am spacing out at work and now writing this, so I'll stop.

Oh, and I have a mini-pumpkin (a real one) on top of my black external hard drive at work. It's freaking adorable. I love the fall colors, and this is the most vibrant orange--an authentically Halloween(TM) orange pumpkin. Huzzah.

Oh, and about that Netflix thing

It's fucking stupid. There are a hundred and one reasons that this Qwikster thing is bad news, all of which other people have gone over in detail, and I won't repeat here. For me, it simply comes down to the power Netflix is pissing away in this move. Separating out their business, which I and others think is a sign they're looking to sell off the DVDs-by-mail business entirely, halves their subscriber base, thus giving them fewer voices with which they may shout at studios providing them content in order to get that content more cheaply. Worse, splitting the websites makes it hard for people to maintain their queues. People are fucking lazy. Netflix has heretofore made excuses for that laziness by making everything easier than ever (put it in your DVD queue, and bam! added to your instant queue, too! etc. etc.). Making it hard for anyone, much less people less tech-savvy than most of the people I know reading this is just stupid. They'll drop half your service. I already know one person who's doing just that. More will follow.

And even if you retain the supposed "wave of the future" customers who only want streaming (probably at least one of my siblings), they are called the customers of the future for a reason. They are not "the customers of now." Streaming may be the future, but it's not there yet. There are some big names conspicuously absent from Netflix's streaming library. Perhaps most notable? HBO. HBO will never give over its streaming access to Netflix. It has it's own streaming service, HBO Go, which is restricted only to people who subsribe to HBO. There's zero incentive, no matter the cost of maintaining that service, for them to drop it because maintenance must cost less than losing subcribers who are willing to wait until they can get Boardwalk Empire, Game of Thrones, etc. on Netflix. HBO may be the only half-smart player in this; they probably took a hit when HBO was losing subscribers over Netflix DVDs-by-mail and weren't about to go through that twice. They've been incredibly smart, even, as I've noticed that their shows, while still expensive, are no longer outrageously priced to own on DVD. HBO's the model of the future, as moonlightalice has pointed out: streaming is most likely going to end up being doled out piecemeal among the different studios, who will be incredibly possessive of their content (having learned, much later than HBO, that it's better not to farm out your content to someone who'll make more distributing it than you'll get in fees).

But, yeah, I don't see Netflix as streaming-only being that great until you can break someone like HBO into giving over their content, and their ability to bully for less cost is going to be taken away by splitting up or spinning off their DVD division. That's economicsFAIL! right there. All other considerations--the fact some people can't stream, that some people like special features, that streaming is unrealiable and prone to last-second loss of content--come second to that, far as I'm concerned.

Best summation ever

I have to say that as annoying as Netflix's recent moves have been, the smugness of the "Well, I only use streaming anyway, so ther" folks is worse. This post at Balloon Juice is typical of the breed. It's a hipster-esque poseur posture of cooler-than-thou because he gets this streaming that you pathetic people with your digital versitile discs are helpless to understand. It's fucking annoying and has nothing to do with the cogent point that I and others have made that Netflix's business plan is to screw themselves (and their customers) in some extremely uncomfortable place. It has nothing to do with being a luddite. I have streaming access on four different types of devices--mobile phone, video game system, tablet, and home computer--I think I can handle the streaming. The point is that I want the flexibility of still getting DVDs for times when, say, I'm upstate with no internet connection and shit cell phone reception which precludes my using Netflix's streaming service.

Or, to put it the way a commenter on that post did:
"The streaming catalog is a tiny fraction of their total DVD library, so streaming-only (while convenient) means instead of finding the specific movie you wanted to watch and watching it, you end up searching for something to watch. Instead of having the “whatever I want, when I want it” experience, Netflix streaming-only option re-creates the 1980’s video store experience of wandering through genre sections, looking for something that seems worth watching. That’s exactly the opposite of why I signed up for Netflix originally."

Oh my fucking God YES. THAT IS EXACTLY IT. I have a streaming queue that's easily longer than my DVD queue, and yet, when I go to it to see what I want to watch, I spend longer deciding what I want to watch--from a selection of things I must have thought I wanted to watch at some point!--than I do watching whatever it is I end up picking.