Today I Learned

As someone who's never had an issue with Comcast. I still hate comcast for the pure fact that they have a monopoly in my area.

I used to work at Comcast as a programmer (consultant, never worked directly for them). The only surprising thing about your story is that you were eventually able to do what you were trying to do. Software and apps at Comcast are overseen by a constantly rotating cast of executives and managers, and are mostly written by a constantly rotating cast of contractors, most of whom are provided by InfoSys (who provide workers that can only stay in the country for six months at a time). A few people here and there are competent but it makes no difference as nobody is involved with any project for long and documentation is nearly nonexistent.

I was only there for a few years, but by the end I (a consultant grunt) was constantly having to explain to vice presidents why certain things were even being done in the first place. For example, I had been put to work ensuring that Comcast's suite of apps passed accessibility testing (mainly seeing - pun intended - that their apps were usable by blind and low-vision people). I was on my third VP by the end of this process, and she asked why we cared whether or not blind people could use these apps. Um, possibly because we faced million-dollar-a-month fines from the FCC if our apps failed the accessibility tests?

Fun fact about all the InfoSys contractors: I was there before the second Comcast tower in Philadelphia was completed, working at the company's HQ. There were enormous numbers of InfoSys employees working in the building. You would go to meet someone to talk about some issue, and there would be 7 or 8 people working in an office meant for one person. And this was on nearly every floor in the building. The scuttlebutt was that Comcast executives had gotten mightily sick of there being so many Indians in the building (even Indian executives said this was the case) and that they had commissioned the second tower (called the Comcast Technology Center) to get most of them out of their HQ.

Your first mistake was using a Comcast router. I just use a Surfboard to connect and got my own router that I have 100% control over.

My first IT adjacent job was remote support for Support Dot Com who contracted me out to Comcast. This was just as they were trying to get away from the maligned 'comcast' brand by calling everything 'Xfinity' like they think their customers are idiots. Well, turns out they mostly are. I don't even think I lasted six months. Despite having the best metrics in the company, I just couldn't take the abuse, or the lack of downtime between calls.

Anyway the point is you can call up Comcast and have them put your router into 'bridge mode' making it essentially an expensive modem, then connect your own router.

Terrifying

Along with good reads

I remember when IMDb was fully free and it was normal to download the entire database to run locally on one's own computer.

That's why we have tmdb.org themoviedb ;)

I usually find the tomato review pretty good. There have been times where I thought movies were shite that had a high user score.

But the critics score on there is utterly useless to me, I never agree with their shit.

I used to work at the Comcast Center in Philly. In 2010 they won the Consumerist's "Worst Company in the World" contest (after being the runner-up the previous year). The following year they sent out a company-wide email asking employees and contractors to vote for any other company. They were bailed out by BP and Deepwater Horizon, "fortunately".

They would also regularly send out emails telling employees to download the Comcast and Xfinity apps and rate them 5 stars. I would just assume there's a correlation between rotten tomato scores and ownership of the media.

Fuck Fandom. They recently put registration mandatory even to read comments on a page.

And in turn Fandom is owned by Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales. Which makes me uncomfortable in strange ways.

same... it took me a second to re-calibrate the context

Why doesn't this surprise me? A media conglomerate buying a media rating website so it can control the stats.