COTC - 19 Dec 2025 - Ads are everywhere!

0:00 Good morning, Northern Michigan, and happy Friday. And, yeah, we'll talk about the weather. It, was really warm and rainy yesterday. A lot of the snow melted, and then it froze overnight. And a little dusting of snow happened, which, was enough to close the schools this morning. At least the Traverse City Schools and a whole bunch in the surrounding area are closed today. So a snow day without a whole lot of snow, but, that's alright. And let me get to the weather here today. Snow showers mainly before 1PM. Patchy blowing snow between 10AM and 3PM.

0:42 High near 24, blustery. Love that word. With a northwest wind of 15 to 20 miles an hour, gust as high as 40, chance of precipitation is 90%, total daytime snow accumulation around three inches. I don't know. We'll see. Doesn't look like it yet, but, yeah, it is what it is. Tonight, chance of snow showers before seven and a slight chance of snow showers after 1AM. Mostly cloudy with a steady temperature around 22. West wind five to 10 becoming south in the evening. Chance precipitation is 20%. And, let's see tomorrow on Saturday, 50% chance of snow showers, mostly cloudy high near 35. South wind, 15 miles per hour becoming west in the afternoon. Winds could gust as high as 30 miles an hour.

1:35 And, you know, doesn't look like it's, too much different for Sunday. So, anyway, full forecast in the show notes over at cupoftravertcity.com. So as promised, I wanted to rant just a little bit. The amount of advertising, excuse me, the amount of advertising that somebody's exposed to lately, and this, by the way, is not a local story. This is everywhere, mainly on the Internet, but, anywhere else. But it's just amazing to me. I I not I don't watch a lot of regular TV, you know, like, cable channels or anything like that. But every once in a while I flip on the local news. That's not too bad ads wise, but it, you know, seems like they do run a lot of ads which, you know, I guess that's their business, selling ads, but other places where ads pop up. If you try to watch YouTube now, if you're not paying them and I am paying them because I don't want to watch all the inserted ads when they insert it halfway through a sentence, and it's a completely irrelevant ad.

2:53 They're not good at this. Google, come on. You you should be better. But, you know, just all the freaking ads and and in podcasts, you know, I I have a couple of shows that I absolutely love, but they have the most insane amount of ads. And I understand the podcasters need to make money and I'm in that business, you know. I don't make money from my podcast necessarily but working in the business, but it's getting to the point where it's ridiculous. I mean you get a weather app on your phone and there's gonna be banner ads and there's gonna be pop up video ads and things that cover the screen. The one that ones that really bug me are video games. I mean you just cannot get any sort of casual video game on your iPhone, iPad, Android, whatever without having these insane ads. You get to the end of a, you know, end of a hand, so you're playing a card game or you get to the end of a level in a in a regular game, they have these video ads of, you know, other video games and you can't close them for thirty seconds or even a minute.

4:15 And that's not so bad. I mean I get that as well. I don't like it and I don't pay attention to those ads on purpose because I don't want them to work because I don't want them to keep happening but they do. You know, I have a Euchre app, and I actually have to turn off the you know, I put it in airplane mode, put the iPad in airplane mode, and then that does sort of prevent the ads in between hands. But what really annoys me, I'd as soon as I turn on the, Internet again, it there's the ads again. The one that really, really ticks me off is I have a security camera system.

4:57 And it's you have to use the proprietary app to look at your security cameras. And that app puts up those stupid video game app ads where you gotta sit there for thirty seconds. I just wanna look at my cameras. I bought the cameras. I wanna look at my cameras and I can't for a minute. You You know, what if I hear some noise out there? And I wanna see what's going on. Nope. Gotta wait for the stupid video game ad. And and it's prohibitively expensive to remove the ads. I think it's, like, $29 a month for the the security camera system I have, and that's just not right.

5:41 You know? And now even Netflix is, putting ads in certain shows. I mean, you're paying Netflix for the privilege of watching the stuff on there, and that should be enough. But nope. They gotta have ads. Paramount plus, you gotta pay them extra to get rid of the ads. For me, it's worth it because I watch a lot of Star Trek. But, you know, everything has ads. And couple other things related is now, Stellantis, which is, you know, Chrysler, Jeep, Fiat, 100 other company brands, whatever. Now they're putting ads in their cars on the infotainment screen.

6:23 You know? Excuse me. You can't use your, car right now because you gotta watch this ad or listen to this ad or read this ad. Like, come on. That's beyond ridiculous. And on top of that, some car companies now are charging you to use a feature that is built into your car that you bought. That that's going over the top too. You know, this number of subscriptions you have to have now, you know, no. I don't pay for cable. I don't pay for cable TV. And I don't pay for cable TV, and I watch other TV. You know, I watch, you know, my wife watches Netflix. I watch Paramount and and YouTube.

7:07 So we pay those three, subscriptions. I pay for, Amazon Prime mainly for, you know, the the free shipping and all that stuff, but on top of that you get the video app or the streaming app. But guess what? Every single movie I wanna watch. I come up, you know, I said, oh, I haven't seen this movie in a long time. I type it in. The only place that has it is Prime, and you have to rent it or buy it from them. Even though I have Prime, I can't watch hardly anything free. Anyway, enough for my rants. Everybody have a great weekend. I may have a special episode this weekend. I may not. I don't know.

7:51 Look for that on Sunday if it happens. Otherwise, we'll see you Monday. Happy Friday.