UK Cinema's have been doing since at st when I was a child (and I saw Star Wars in the 1970s when it was a released), Cineworld (the same company as AMC) ads/trailer lasting 25 minutes so reliable that pre-pandemic at least half the audience regularly would show up 20 minutes after the ticket time. They clocked this and started showing some random screenings with only ten minutes of adverts . Post pandemic they stopped this. Their new trick seems to be randomly mixing trailers and adverts. It used to be ads, then trailers, then a "please turn your phone off" before one final advert and finally the movie.

.... 23.5% of the previous cost...? No? I thought not.

As a game user I can relate - but stop making your UIs so frakking non-standard. And when you cant connect to the server give me some kind of meaningful error message, dont make me trawl through forums finding out what to check.

Roll your own geek. No, serious. A friend of mine is married to a beautiful young lady and she wasn't a geek when she met him. After 10 years she's almost as much a geek as him - she followed battlestar, and knows why the Minbari surrendered on the eve of victory. Another friend's girlfriend knew nothing about computers (neither did he!) but when they got one she became an net geek ( the late 90's amateur kind ), all IRC and Napster. Proper little nethead she was. You can take a regular girl and if you're lucky you can turn her into a geek. Just take a slowly and make it FUN. I suspect World Of Warcraft might be your starting point.

Call me an old software biz cynic but when I see the phrase "didn't see any need to implement a voter-verified paper record" I read that as "given complete assurance by the sales team that the system was 100% accurate". Never attribute to malice that which is just as easily explained by incompetence. Never attribute to incompetence that is is more readily explained by a bunch of lying sales weasels.