Warning about the comic book shop on Elm Street in Springfield

I visited the big comic shop on Elm Street last Saturday and noticed about half the back issues were priced way above market value. The owner told me he raised prices on everything after he saw some eBay flips go for double. Has anyone else seen pricing like this at their local shops?

A pro racer told me to "grease the threads AND the seatpost" on a new build and I laughed until I saw what corrosion did to his old frame

He showed me a cracked aluminum frame from a shop in Boulder where the seatpost had fused solid from neglect, and now I smear a thin layer of anti-seize on EVERY threaded part even on basic customer bikes, has anyone else seen a seized post ruin a frame?

I finally figured out why my keypads kept glitching on bigger jobs

Been installing for about 8 years and last month a customer in Austin showed me his old panel had a grounding issue I'd been missing on multi-zone setups... anyone else run into this with 6160 keypads causing ghost zones?

Had a 747 static port get plugged by a wasp nest last month at DFW

Spent 14 hours on a lighting setup that looked worse than my first try

Spent three days tweaking rim lights and fill sources for a character piece, only to realize the default global light in my software looked better the whole time. Is the technical approach worth chasing if the quick result already works, or am I just cutting corners?

Just found out my coworker with the same title makes $12k more than me

I was helping our new hire fill out some HR paperwork last Tuesday and accidentally saw a salary spreadsheet left open on my manager's desk. My coworker Sarah has the exact same job title as me, same level of experience, and she's pulling in $12,000 more a year. I've been at this company for 3 years and thought I was doing okay with raises, but now I feel like I've been played for a fool. I checked sites like Glassdoor and Payscale after that and apparently our company pays way below market for our role in Dallas. The worst part is Sarah and I literally have the same responsibilities and she even asks me for help sometimes. Has anyone else found out something like this and actually negotiated a fix without getting fired?

My AI translation bot kept saying the wrong thing for 4 days straight

I was building a simple chatbot that translates product descriptions for a small shop in Austin. Thought it would take me like 2 hours tops. Nope. The thing kept swapping Spanish and Portuguese randomly, even though I double checked the language codes. Turns out the training data had some mixed up labels from a public dataset I grabbed off GitHub. Took me 4 full evenings of testing and retraining to find that one bad batch of 200 entries. I finally fixed it by filtering out everything that wasn't manually verified. Has anyone else run into sneaky dataset errors that took forever to catch?

I actually like The Last Airbender movie and here's why

Saw it opening weekend in 2010 at a packed theater in Austin. Everyone was booing by the end but I sat there thinking it wasn't that bad. The bending choreography looked cool to me even if they messed up the names. I rewatched it last year with my 6th graders during a rainy day and they actually paid attention the whole time. Yeah the dialogue is clunky and the accents are weird but the visual effects hold up decently for a 2010 film. Has anyone else found a movie they like that everyone else trashes?

Took me 4 hours to fix a dent that should have taken 45 minutes

Was working on a 2018 Civic rear quarter panel yesterday. Dent was small but right on the body line. I kept chasing it with the stud welder and pulling too hard, then having to tap it back down. Four hours later I finally stepped back and used a slide hammer with a threaded tip instead of the glue pull method. Anyone else have jobs where you just overthink the simple fix?

Spent $400 on a rental ground penetrating radar unit for a dig site

We had a hunch about a potential structure under a field in New Mexico, so I pushed to rent the GPR for a week. The data came back super clear and saved us weeks of test pits, leading us right to a buried adobe wall. But my colleague thinks it was a waste, saying we could've found it with traditional methods for less cash. Has anyone else had a tech rental pay off big or totally flop on a dig?