Fear and Loathing in the Basement

I couldn't figure out what to share today, so I stared at this blog in despair. Then I started sketching my face. Do I do the ego and cartoonify the Chrispy? (That's right, THE Chrispy!) I don't exactly sit around doodling myself that often, so my Chrispy drawing is primative and raw.

Anyway, this is not a story about doodle Chrispy, this is a story about a near disaster that would have wrecked my life and destroyed my faith in the universe. My DVD player went on the fritz!

This might not seem like a disaster to you, but I only work in two ways: With sports in the background, and while playing DVDs. I need stuff in my TV to distract the stupid part of my brain so the productive part can get things done! Without it, I am lost. Music puts me into a trance, where I sit for hours doing one thing. Stuff on the TV has a finite lifespan, and the constant shifting keeps me moving along. DVDs with me: Serious business. My DVD player is the only one that can satisfy me: A 5-disc darling that was built to sync with my Sony Bravia HDTV! It was perfect for me. During a productive streak, I can burn through TV on DVD discs like no one's business, and it's much more preferrable to do it with a few clicks of a remote than constant disc shuffling.

Last night, put in Tropic Thunder and got out what I needed to ink some comics. BAD HAPPENED. It would skip a bit, the audio would cut out and at one point it was just static. Um. Next disc? Same thing. I pulled out the discs, turned off the player, let it sit, then tried again. NOTHING. All it would do would shudder and blink helplessly. No inking was done that night. Panic and despair took over instead. I had to watch Tropic Thunder on my computer, and all joy was drained from it.

The player was under warranty, but it would still cost me $33 plus time and effort to get it replaced with a refurbished model. Y'know, a machine that already sucked once enough to fail. I was not pleased.

Today I was resigned to suck it up and try to hook in the Bose speaker/dvd system I "borrowed" from my family. This meant lots of switching out cords, and my brain has no desire to do technical stuff like that. So I gave the player another shot. Nothing but that blinking light. The HDMI light. Hmm. I have a spare HDMI cable lying around, maybe I'll try swapping that...

And the light stayed on! I watched a movie! It was the blasted CABLE! A $4 solution is far greater than a $120 solution.

Anyway, this isn't remotely interesting, but I SHARED, DAMMIT!