Hello everyone! I'm writing this from my cabin, where it's now past midnight because finding a firmware update for my Sharp Blu-Ray player took so long. While I can usually trust the Wayback Machine to find me a 2000s copy of a webpage that includes whatever download I'm after, this was much harder.

Actually, "much harder" is a massive understatement. What I meant is that it'd probably be easier to find the lost city of Atlantis and the lost city of Eldorado than it would be to find any updates for this thing. Not only did the 2000s version of the site have a bunch of Java bullshit that can't be archived, but the new Canadian site refuses to believe that Sharp ever sold BD players, let alone show any firmware updates for them. This whole thing feels a lot like when Samsung sold their printer division to HP, who inexplicably decided not to host the Samsung drivers.

The US site on the other hand, literally doesn't even work. Not only does the search bar not work, but if you Google "Sharp BD-HP21 Firmware update" and click on Sharp's site you'll land on a support page with no manuals, no downloads, and once again, no firmware updates.

I looked at blu-ray.com, where I'd gotten a firmware update for the cheap Best Buy BD player in our living room at home, and the download button just redirected to the Canadian Sharp website, which once again didn't work because of that stupid Java bullshit. Of all the places to find it, I ended up finding a download on Softpedia, a site that I almost never tell anyone to use because of how awful the people behind it are at preventing malware from getting updated.

Fortunately, the player updated successfully, and I'm sure glad that this is something I'll never have to do again. Those bastards in Atlantis and Eldorado probably have a thumb drive with every single firmware update for every single Blu-Ray player out there anyways.