Yep, there's the load problem I was expecting

[jducoeur]

Just went to do my morning run (in the basement, on the elliptical), where I'm currently watching Dark on Netflix. (Which, BTW, is a fascinating, twisty, and, yes, dark time-travel story, dubbed from the German.)

Loading Netflix to begin with took quite a while; loading the show took quite a while; and about five minutes in, it crapped out entirely and froze.

Sigh. I was expecting this to start happening -- even not counting the people working from home who are simply playing hooky, there are a lot of kids, folks out of work, and other people finding themselves stuck inside with nothing to do. And having made themselves the brand for "what to do when you're stuck inside", Netflix is presumably slammed, and starting to have difficulty with the load.

Hopefully they'll manage to scale up quickly. (Although, which China Inc in low gear due to the virus, that may be hard -- I would bet that server supply chains are a mess right now.) And more generally, ability to cope with the increased load is suddenly going to be a big competitive advantage for streaming providers that can pull it off.

And in the meantime, that gigantic stack of backlogged DVD courses from The Teaching Company is starting to look like a fine investment. It was prepping! Sure it was...

(Currently in the middle of "The Italian Renaissance" -- not as exciting as the McWhorter courses, but helps fill in some holes in my knowledge of period culture. Today was basically "So who was Petrarch, anyway?", which I had always been a tad fuzzy on.)

Comments

[sporky_rat]

"So who was Petrarch, anyway?"

Well, you gonna share?

[jducoeur]

Well, it's a half-hour lecture, so I can't trivially summarize.

But it's a rather fun and frank talk about Patrarch: on the one hand, a genius who challenged the standard outlook of the world at the time, and OTOH a somewhat self-absorbed jerk. The teacher describes him as that guy you wind up sitting next to on the airplane, who wants to talk to you but isn't really interested in you -- he's much more interested in his own *reactions* to you, in a constant process of self-examination...

[sporky_rat]

Oh, he sounds lovely.

(Thanks!)

[writerkit]

I have *not* noticed this problem with Hoopla thus far, but then with Hoopla you're limited to however many things per month your library paid for, and some of those things are ebooks or audiobooks. But yes, in general the pandemic is making my existing inclination for local storage (I am actually a book dragon, but to some degree that can extend to other media) much stronger.