following the tradition where, as one thing goes right, another two go wrong — i had my stereo repaired recently and it’s fantastic and wonderful and marvellous and i am so grateful to have it back and that is naturally why both my cassette tape deck and, apparently now also, my dvd player have gone tits-up.

the tape deck, okay, that i can live without. i have used it on average about … twice a year for the past six years or maybe longer. it really didn’t get a whole lot of use. i’m very sad it’s dead, for sentimental reasons (that tape deck is at least 50% responsible, along with my vintage sansui stereo receiver, for getting me through high school relatively sane), but … realistically, i am more than happy to admit that the cassette era is over.

the DVD player, though… that i’m cranky about. it’s a lovely little slim philips model, and it can’t be much more than two years old. it’s multiregion, and does pal to ntsc conversions, which is helpful since i have a fairly respectable selection of Region 2 (and a couple oddball 4) discs. and, also very nicely, it plays DivX and XviD, so i burn things to CDs all the time and play them back on the television, which is great. the player does not seem to be dead-dead-dead, but it has decided to not power on anymore, which is sort of inconvenient since it has a disc in it at the moment. and not just a disc, not even just a rental disc, but a rental disc rented by someone else that we were watching at my place. (A Bit of Fry and Laurie, if you want to know — by the way, i really recommend it; we laughed our fool heads off.)

but, i’m just so tired of always replacing things when they break. it’s always felt very wasteful, but most of the time, you can’t argue with the economies of it — if a new player costs $75, and a repair might cost the same or possibly even more, who’s going to stick with the old and busted one? but now i’m just feeling curmudgeonly, and so i decided that i’m just going to repair the damn player, unless it costs me more than $100. it’s probably just a bad power supply or blown capacitor or something, and that should be totally reasonable to fix. and i’m sick of the waste of just replacing things. so i’m not gonna do it. so take that, cheap chinese electronics imports!