Let me preface this one by saying that the blame for this is entirely on me and my carelessness when shopping online. I did not get scammed. I was just being stupid.

Several times.

So I recently bought a synthesizer to connect to my MIDI controller (an 88 key keyboard with some knobs and blinking lights and shit).

I saw that this new device has a 3.5mm MIDI port while I only had the classic 5-pin kind. No problem, I'll buy an adapter.

The adapter arrives, and I discover that the one I bought has the female 5-pin connector and won't plug into the keyboard. Well, crap.

Buy another adapter. Made sure the 5-pin side was male.

Oops. Turns out that the 3.5mm MIDI cables come in type A or type B, and I chose poorly.

So I search for "midi type a to b converter" and without thinking at all, I bought a converter that has two female connectors. Fuck me.

At this point, a sane person would've just cut the first two adapters and soldered the correct ends together, but fuck it, I'm in too deep now. I gotta get a 3.5mm MIDI cable with two male ends to complete this daisy-chain of madness and find out how long it takes for me to get bored and find another hobby.

Not sure what happened to this guy's wings.

I have an app that I released a couple years ago (plus another legacy app that I maintain for one of my company's clients). My game has a long-ish title, but it was fine until some asshat at Google decides that 33 characters is too long. On top of that, every time I'm forced to update the target SDK, I need to spend several hours figuring out a bunch of new build errors. This is not how I wanted to spend my vacation time.

I've been trying to avoid shopping on Amazon for several years. For computer parts, I look at Newegg. For pet stuff, Chewy.

But what about all the miscellaneous stuff? What other websites do you trust when it comes to shopping online?

Sorry about the shaky camera. I didn't take my tripod with me that day.