Canceling Paramount

I canceled Paramount Plus yesterday. It wasn’t easy.
I subscribed to pick up channel 49, which doesn’t always come in well, Colbert the day after it airs, and Star Trek. I subscribed on the TV years ago (I signed up for Disney+ about the same time for Star Wars, and Prime for “free” Amazon delivery).
Then I discovered that local TV was a few bucks extra, but they claimed that there are no commercials. So I sprung for the extra.
The prompt for “local TV” didn’t lead to channel 49, it led to a list of CBS news stations. Their help desk seemed to be useless, but the show-stopping bug that should have NEVER gotten past alpha was fixed.
Kind of. On the Firefox browser’s Paramount HTML (I have a Linux and a Windows PC plugged into the TV’s HDMI ports) there’s the “menu” icon you dumbassed youngsters always use instead of the word “menu” when there’s plenty of room. Are all of you programmers dyslexic? What do you have against plain English? Hieroglyphics have been out of style for about three thousand years.
Pressing it led to a new menu in the center of the screen rather than under the icon I just pressed, and by the time the mouse pointer reaches the menu it disappears. The second attempt works. Damn it, I don’t want to play a video game, I want to watch TV! Jesus, I’m all for hiring the handicapped, but not the mentally handicapped for a programming or design job! Glad they’re not a bus company, they’d hire Ray Charles as a bus driver. They’re almost as bad as the Illinois tax people’s website.
The TV app is even worse. A 286 computer booted and opened a word processor with all three volumes of Lord of the Rings loaded faster than it takes to get to its first app menu to choose a user. Despite living alone, there’s no way to go straight to the real menu. Really shitty design.
It’s slower and less responsive than anything I’ve used since the mainframe in the late ’80s at work. It often skips and stutters, and it gets worse as time goes by.
Then something changed at the CBS morning news show. It had always been head and shoulders above ABC and NBC (both of which were head and shoulders above Fox), and they really dumbed it down, worse even than Micky Mouse ABC. The info was subtracted drastically and the tainment magnified stupidly. I don’t watch the damned news to be entertained, you fucking morons!
Walter Cronkite is spinning in his grave.
About that time the lying fraud bastards started playing commercials for Paramount movies and TV shows before Colbert and Star Trek. I was paying a premium to not watch commercials, and here they were showing me commercials for their properties that I paid extra NOT to see! Worse, when the commercial is almost done there’s a “skip” button like YouTube has, but their damned app is so unresponsive that nothing happens when you click it until the commercial is almost over.
Then the Epstein-class “tech bro” bought the damned thing, and Epstein’s best buddy hated Colbert’s making fun of him, the treasonous lying fraudster, so he made the new billionaire owner fire Colbert.
At the same time, their news division started kissing Trump’s ass to the point of the tongue to the extent that they made Fox look fair and balanced rather than fairly unbalanced.
Two out of three. What about Star Trek? I had already recorded all of TOS, TNG and DS9 and a lot of Voyager on VHS years ago, but that damned Paramount kept playing “musical network chairs” with Voyager and I missed two seasons of it, including the last season.
So I decided to watch the whole series. By the last season it was clear that not only were they not playing them all in order, they were missing quite a few.
But by then I was steaming. But I found the two missing seasons of episodes on DVD, one at the library and one at Amazon. They’re on my local network now.
Since the new Star Trek is about as much like Roddenberry’s Star Trek as the 1980s Dune movie is like the 2020s version, I’m not interested in that garbage. It’s like they went from The Beatles to Tupac Shakur. No thanks!
The last straw was caving to the White House Nazi and firing Colbert. I’d been paying by the year and it was going to be up in the middle of March, so late February I pulled it up on the TV, went to its menu, and there was no way to unsubscribe. So I googled. It said you had to unsubscribe on the same device you subscribed on. There is no valid reason for this save making unsubscribing difficult! Dishonest God damned sons of bitches... THIS is the Epstein class; steal, rob, defraud, even molest children because they know they have too much money for the law to touch them.
I had subscribed on the TV!
Maybe I didn’t? Maybe I used the computer? Glad I’d not watched Paramount on the Linux box, I logged in on the Windows box, pulled up the site, and it, too, lacked unsubscribe.
Now, I knew I hadn’t used my phone because I never use it for internet commerce, that’s just begging to be pwned. I checked the tablet just in case.
So months later I got to thinking, trying to remember signing up all those years ago, and remembered something about a QR code. Yes! The last step was to log in using the QR code, which is impossible on a non-tablet computer.
Assholes. Anyway, good riddance. Ellison doesn’t need my money, and if he does, fuck him!
I thought, “Disney may be next, they’ve been awful pro-Naziprez lately...” and I hadn’t watched anything on that paid channel for months at least. Then a new sequel to Tron came out on that channel. Cool!
Even though they had pissed me off with its streaming version of the original. When that movie had come out I worked at Disney World’s gas station, so as a Disney employee “cast member” I got to see stuff the customers “guests” never did; like the tunnels, riding the rides before the public (guinea pigs), and movies before they were in the theaters.
So I saw Tron in 72 mm. Great fantasy! I bought the DVD as soon as it was released in that format decades later. Now, one of the reasons I subscribed in the first place was 4k video. I’d bought a fifty five inch 4k “smart” television a year or so earlier, and the only available 4k streaming was Netflix, at $25 a month for 4k it was simply fraud. Disney didn’t even advertise 4k, let alone charge extra like Netflix. They just quietly added 4k, and Star Wars episode 3 was absolutely stunning on my TV... and I remembered Tron!
It was standard DVD definition like the disk on my shelf. Damn.
I watched all of the Star Wars movies, including the Mandalorian ones (however you spell that), The Love Bug because when I had worked for the mouse, Buddy Hackett told me that was his favorite movie and they had all had such fun making it, and then Disney+ sat idle, with me still paying for it, for a long time. Those new 4k movies were just beautiful.
Then I saw a new Tron was out and looked forward to the DVD. Then I heard it was on Disney+ so of course I logged on... nope. Tried to. It hung on the Blue Screen of Disney. At least it didn’t crash the TV, something that happens often with that set, ever since it was fairly new. You would think it was Windows instead of Android.
So I went to one of the computers and logged on to their web site looking for a fix. Their AI, like Paramount and all such AI, was useless garbage; basically chatbots without the heavy databases professional AI uses. But unlike Paramount, you can actually talk to a human. So I called and a live human answered.
He started reading his script with a strong but understandable foreign accent and I interrupted him. “Put down that script, I might as well be talking to a computer!” He then became a real non-computer human support staff. It took an hour to discover that my TV’s version of Android is no longer supported! He suggested using a different device but I told him I don’t want to watch a movie on the tablet.
I left a message for the idiots running that company these days, calling them idiots for throwing away paying customers. Like I told the non-idiot help desk guy, nobody’s going to go out and buy a brand new TV just to stream Disney when there are a lot of other services to throw money away on, as well as free ones, that don’t demand a new television or skip and stutter like Paramount. Disney is the only one brain-dead stupid enough to throw away customers when the customers’ TVs get close to a decade old. I’ve had TVs three times as old as the one I have now!
So tonight I’m watching the new Tron and a science fiction movie I saw advertised, on the Playstation (1080 max definition, no beautiful 4k). Then I’m canceling the dim witted billionaire mouse.
That was yesterday. I got busy and didn’t watch TV, so I turned the PS4 on this evening, figuring I’d get it set up and watch the movies after the news.
I turned the PlayStation on and it said it had to upgrade, so after it booted a few times I clicked on the Disney app, which needed to upgrade.
After its upgrade I ran it, and it sat there saying “Disney” for forty five minutes. So a PS4 isn’t new enough for those moronically elitist bastard children, either. “You don’t have a brand new TV or a brand new anything? Why, you’re garbage, fuck you” is the disrespectful message I get from Disney.
Canceling was hard, but much easier than it was for Paramount. They simply hide “unsubscribe” under a wall of different combinations of service, then run you through a dozen “are you sure?” clicks, trying to sell you all the way.
The new Tron DVD is supposed to arrive tomorrow. It cost two dollars more than a month of Disney.