start a victory garden and ration your IRRATIONALLY ANGRY feelings, part 3

There's remakes, and there's "How many versions of Cinderella does one planet need?"

― Mark G, Wednesday, August 17, 2016 3:09 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

have to wait until Baz has had his turn

sorry i drifted off into a horrified vision of Jack Black playing the comic relief in Peter Jackson's Seven Samurai and now i want to die a little bit

More importantly (heh)

I appreciated this

there are three types of pudding in ireland, viz; black, which needs to be good in order to be even ok but if good can be great; white which even when bad can only get so bad but even when good tends to be a little bland; christmas, which is p much always a y

I think complaining about a shitty remake neednt be about the 'remake' part

i wd find it hard to choose between black and white pudding but i don't disagree with what you're saying about them maybe

my sweet tooth isn't as sweet as yours i guess

xxxpost Vin Diesel in Justin Lin's "Enter the Dragon"

Gerard Butler in Christopher Nolan's Touch of Evil

Far be it from me nv to suggest youre too long away from the good black stuff

i will eat sub-par supermarket black pudding without complaint but there's plenty of the good real stuff in England, it was def a midlands thing when i was growing up

(took me a minute to realise you wasn't talking about booze tbh)

Yuck porter

boozin' noir

I get really disproportionately cross at food that's meant to be savoury but is really sweet. Often supermarket 'morroccan' style soup or whatever or sandwiches with overwhelmingly sweet sauce like hoisin where all you can taste is sugar. I find it really unsatisying like eating a biscuit instead of a proper meal.

Can't wait until the Olympics are over and these friggin' Google doodles are gone.

^^^^^

the worst

I mean they'll be replaced with other terrible Google doodles

i long for the halycon days when a google animated thing was a rare occurrence
seems all the time now

Not getting it together to eat that coconut before it went fizzy. Assume the milk fermented or something while uit sat on the bowl over the last week.
JUst had a chunk of it and now got a nasty taste in my mouth.
Wonder if it was just the effort in getting into the thing that made me check it was ok despite the milk having vanished.
Bummer.

Sunflowers I repotted continually tilting over in the wind even after i took them back out and broke up the roots.

Maintenance guy never turning up to give me a shower rail even with the people downstairs complaining about water dripping through the ceiling.
Should probably have done something about this years ago but hadn't realised teh water thing was any more fo an issue tahn me having to mop up the floor after every shower. I've got a short 2 panel door that means that water from the shower goes both over and around the end of it. Really bad design feature that has been a nuisance since I moved in here years ago.
The bath has at least finally been grouted/caulked which is another thing i should have got onto people about.

The bin unit having had its lock chipped off by the new binmen a month or so back now keeps getting filled almost to the roof with stuff somebody has dumped in it. Seems to be happening at least once a week. & bin area getting emptied n a Friday only to find it almost full on the next Monday. Looks like somebody didn't hear about the dumping until too late.
Oh yeah, the last landlord trying to tell everybody that they'd put a really special lock on the door that would cost exorbitant amounts to replace keys for. I think it was a mid price padlock. Not sure how long it took the binmen to chip it off either.

I'm pretty irked about the hand painted signage of the hippie-ish cafe on our corner - they finally put a plastic sign in where once there were cracked fluorescent tubes, yet the sign is 2 feet too short, so tubes are still visible, and the loopy lettering is crooked in that way that lettering goes crooked/slanted when you are 10 and writing Happy Birthday Stephanie! in a card, so many letters. Are rulers so hard to come by? Do collectives not care about signs and symbols? Did a 10 year old do this? I shout at the sky.

When an article that isn't written by some top long-form journalist needlessly has a long-form style intro, like "At 2:55 AM on a Sunday, Officer Joe McPherson is riding his routine patrol when a call comes over his radio. He puts his half-eaten turkey sandwich on the dashboard and takes a swig from the thermos..." but the point of the article is actually something about a new crime trend or statistical issue or something and you just want to get to the point. Even in the New Yorker it's started to bother me how many articles pointlessly begin with a "scene."

So does the cop finish his sandwich or what?

a startling new crime trend has caused a 22% increase in unfinished sandwiches by cops

Yeah, that trend's starting to get annoying. With a lot of these stories I just want a couple of bullet points, I don't need world building.

I hate when I go to read an interesting article and it turns out to be just a goddamn video

I feel like you only need to set a scene and introduce a character if the story actually unfolds in a dramatic fashion. If it's just like "Here's a cop eating a sandwich in a town, and then he has to respond to x" and the story is just about x, you don't really need Officer Joe and his sandwich.

Speaking of video, it seems like awful, hard-to-stop autoplay videos are back. I thought we killed that trend.

hah yeah it's funny sometimes when I'll be listening to music through my laptop on my headphones and I'll hear a dude talking and I'll be like "oh cool it's a narration part of the song like Vincent Price in 'Thriller'" and then I realize it's some dude talking about how he cured his gout

lol yes that just happened to me when I had rick ross on and there was some finance-related talking head video on bloomberg

for firefox you can go
tool -> addons

set shockwave flash to "ask to activate"

this will mess up ilm youtube embeds however

I'd be ok eliminating the long form of anything. Even novels should just be bullet points and tl;dr's.

J-school 101 is that a news story goes from the general to the specific, and a feature story goes from the specific to the general.

News: More sandwiches are going uneaten, according to authorities. [...] Patrolman Bob Bobberson, 32, of the Burpville Police, recently dropped "a really good reuben" on the 1400 block of Wilson Avenue yesterday.

Feature: Bob Bobberson watched the rye bread tumble to the pavement. "Oh, man," he thought,

If this is a new trend - that is, newer than the advent of Truman Capote / Joan Didion / Fear and Loathing / John McPhee style "new journalism," then it probably has to do with the current economics of news publishing in which journalists need to have a "brand" and a social presence or else they'll be replaced by bots.

News: More M&S sandwiches are going uneaten, according to authorities

An Anatomy of the West in Sandwiches.

This:
http://i.imgur.com/wQ8P01V.jpg

i would love a 20-year moratorium on those anecdote-of-minutiae openers

especially profiles that begin with a horrible description of the person eating wherever they were eating at the interview, or a description of the person's living room and hospitality technique

back on a timeclock at work which whatever, it's fine, it's a website deal ok cool

but

you cannot bookmark the page the timeclock is on, the dumb site logs u out as soon as you leave & it defaults to homepage no matter what you do

RAGE

… nec gemino bellum Troianum orditur ab ovo:
semper ad eventum festinat et in medias res

homer^^^ invents the sandwich thing, horace approves

we have to do timesheets at work and there has been a new system for about 3 months. we also have very small email inboxes. mine is constantly filling up because i send and receive a lot of attachments and don't want to delete right away. now every two weeks forever we have been getting reminders that timesheets are due with a bunch of stupid attachments telling you how to do it. i feel IA that the same job that gave me a tiny inbox also sends me tons of huge, unnecessary emails.

heh when we fail to submit one on time we get an email warning us that if we wait another week, they might *gulp* CC our manager on an email!

oh noes, the horror! I mean I always submit mine on time unless something freak happens and I understand perfectly why it's important, just seems like a very benign threat that isn't likely to get a slacker to move much faster.

under the old system we would still get paid even if we didn't submit them, because we're salaried. now they are threatening that we won't get paid so we get more warnings. still. what are the attachments for.

"did ya GET that memo?"

Why would you list a piece of furniture on Ebay without putting the sizes on? Why? Why would ONE person do that, let alone 50% of people who list furniture on Ebay?

It's the old dollhouse furniture bait-and-switch

yeah don't get me started on that too

Does that happen? I saw it on...something...I was watching recently.

The Middle, maybe?

You're ok if you realise what 1/12 means. After a while you start to think all furniture listed is tiny though.

tbf I think it just doesn't occur to some people that like things aren't all a standard size. Yesterday, my wife was going out to get some window shades for my son's room, and so I handed her a tape measure. She said, "you mean they're not all, like, window-sized?"

Further, the poufy couches and chairs and such that are appropriate for 3,000-sf suburban living rooms probably just register as "couch" and "chair" to many of their inhabitants. But my 1940-ish house is 1,800 sf, with rooms the size of walk-in closets, and if I just went out and bought a couch by looking among the couches and pointing - "yeah, that one" - it would definitely not work.

I mention the redneck/right-wing/god-botherer wing of my family a lot here. One of my cousins, who spends most of his day posting pro-Trump and pro-gun memes on Facebook, has a son who is, apparently, a heroin addict. He recently went into a rehab facility in Florida, which, good for him. I hope he gets his shit together and is able to recover and move on.

Las night, my aunt -- well, OUR aunt, mine and my cousin's -- sent out a message via email and FB private messages to family asking us all for help to contribute the $600 this kid needs to stay in a halfway house for two weeks while he looks for a job.

Now, on its own, this doesn't make me angry. My wife and I are big givers and always willing to help. What makes me angry is:

- Why is this solicitation coming from my aunt rather than my cousin, Tyler's father? I've know the man all his life, and if there's a feeling he's not capable of, it's shame. He's a former addict himself, so he should be leading whatever efforts Tyler needs to get healthy. If nothing else, he could sell one of his precious fucking firearms. (He has a CCW permit and carries a handgun all the time.)

- He's also a three-time divorcee with so many kids I can't count or name them all, but if you guess he complains about all the minorities on welfare and in broken homes, you're right.

- Tyler's grandparents, my aunt and uncle, have money to burn. They're both retirees with HUGE savings, have homes in both Ohio and Nevada (so they can go to Vegas more frequently) and can spare $600 -- or ten times that -- without even blinking.

- When my immediate family (i.e. me, my mother, my sister, my nephews and nieces) have been in trouble, we have never come to the family hat in hand like that. When my mother was being treated for cancer, and my sister STOLE the fucking money from her fundraiser, we never, ever went and begged the rest of the family for money. And we never would.

This whole thing really leaves a sour taste in my mouth, I guess because it's such a perfect case of salt-of-the-earth, self-reliant, good-ol'-boy white conservatives expecting other people to clean up their goddamned messes.

That is tacky.

imo there's some underlying abdication of personal judgment that goes on when it comes to helping those in need for some communities. it's like the church collection plate -- not everyone is expected to donate, but the well-being of the community (and its viability) is gauged by the sum total of the community's contributions

rather than deciding that, yes, we should do what we can do help our son, it pushes the judgment to the community -- should our son be helped? if the answer is yes, people will "come together" in donation and help him out. if a lot of people send a little cash, then the story is that "the family" helped him out. if it's mostly one person, then in the future they're going to be the first one sought out if he needs help in the future.

when you think about that unspoken system of judgment in the context of people who don't have a family community, or are part of a struggling community, then it makes people who deny the necessity of a government social safety net seem even more gross