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

There are days when I will not get a chance to shop during the day and find myself buying beer at conspicuously early hours. Kids leave at 8:00 and then I need to get to work immediately; kids start coming home at 3:00, when I'm still juggling work calls. Then there's dinner and bedtime and housework and reading time. If I know I will want some beer, I either need to buy it at 8:00AM or at 10:00PM. Sometimes one gets A Look from the other patrons at the 7-11 or whatev, the decent cleanshaven people of the world who are getting coffee and a bran muffin and trying not to spill it on their suit.

I hate it when advertisers insist on slapping stupid copy all over products. Like the side of a toothpaste tube listing all its uses: "freshens breath! cleans teeth! prevents cavities ..." Yeah, it's fucking toothpaste! Or when you buy, I dunno, milk and it says "try it in cereal, or in coffee, or even in a glass!" or some shit. Or a pack of batteries that suggests using them in flashlights, or clocks, or other electronic devices. Duh. I'm looking at the back of a pack of Q-tips right now and it's all "Variety of uses: applying first aid, cleaning electronics, baby care, household use ..." They're Q-tips, I can use them for whatever the fuck I want, I don't need your help, and just because you have a package doesn't mean you need to cover it with words. Especially since, in an ironic turn, the one thing people really use Q-tips for - cleaning their fucking ears - is not really a legally approved use so doesn't get mentioned.

q-tips are ostensibly to clean the outer loops and whorls of your ears but you know you want to shove that sucker in there and dig a little

Sir I do not

oh *that's* the hole they're meant to go into...

Sir I beg you

when you cancel plans you’d already made to drive for 45 minutes to some family dinner and the very loud patriarch announces “RIGHT, THERE’S A NEW RULE, NO MOBILE PHONES” and then spouts racist/homophobic bullshit for three hours

maybe that can be my bargaining chip: no mobile phones, as long as you stop being a giant cock for exactly the same amount of time

Ha ha when I have dinner with the in-laws I always have to have a phone ready to investigate the Russian news site stories they present as fact

Do people who get their news from RT realize it's a Russian propaganda site and just not care or do they have no idea?

they probably think Rotten Tomatoes expanded into news

Tbrr, some of my loved ones take Rotten Tomatoes user reviews as written gospel, so it's not much of a stretch.

Apparently there is a trend (I don't know how much of a trend it really is) of parents who bring babies on flights giving out "apology" notes/gifts to their seat neighbors? FUUUUUUUUUCK that shit. But also fuck those people for their passive-aggressive excessive niceness and/or excessive self-deprecation. It's a baby. It's what adults start out as. Sometimes they need to go places, even by airplanes. This has been happening since there were commercial flights.

Apparently there is a trend (I don't know how much of a trend it really is)

Words to live by.

I thought it was bullshit when I first read about it, but a guy just suggested it in a facebook parent group (although maybe he just read about it in the same article, IDK).

I'm willing to give parents a pass who have little babies that cry and scream on a flight, but once they get to toddler age or order, they gotta lock that shit down.

toddlers being renowned for their compliant nature...

It doesn't sound worse than when neighbors stick I'M HAVING A LOUD PARTY THIS SATURDAY notes in others' mailboxes.

But yeah, there better be a gift attached to that note, not just some fancy pompamoose calligraphy.

It doesn't sound worse than when neighbors stick I'M HAVING A LOUD PARTY THIS SATURDAY notes in others' mailboxes.

wish more neighbours did this

I'm willing to give parents a pass who have little babies that cry and scream on a flight, but once they get to toddler age or order, they gotta lock that shit down.

― Moodles, Sunday, 25 February 2018 19:58 (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

No

Don't bring babies

Babies don't need to fly

Babies got by without flying for millions of years

and vaccines! oh wait

First time I took my then-baby from China to the UK (for my sister's wedding) we got stuck in a landing formation for about an hour just as he needed milk, and the crew wouldn't let us stand up to make milk for him as the seatbelt lights were on and he was screaming like he's never screamed before, the whole plane were glaring at us and we'd been up for 36 hours and had just made the mistake of accepting free cocktails. Sure it wasn't nice for anyone there, but would wager we did worst out of it.

I'm sure we have a thread for the argument but I'm not sure it's a comparison exercise that the other passengers had in mind

Lol we rarely take our toddler out in public but when we do I don’t give a flying fuck whether some meat bag is annoyed

No

Don't bring babies

Babies don't need to fly

Babies got by without flying for millions of years

― Simpson L. (darraghmac), Sunday, February 25, 2018 5:09 PM (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

so did whiny adults

However, I hate the twee parents who hand out sorry-for-my-kid goodie bags almost as much as the complainers

When I punch a whiney adult their dad normally isn't around tbf

IA thread making people IA news @11

My parents took me on a plane when I was two years old and it was such a bad idea that I didn't fly for another twenty years.

did they honor your return ticket after so long?

the return trip was the bad experience

No one wants to go home from Disneyland.

it was disney world! good guess

this is irrational nerd shit but modern books that use Wade-Giles instead of Pinyin for transliterating Chinese really wind me up

i’m planning a taiwan trip and that exact thing is shitting me to tears atm

instead of writing “kaohsiung” or “gāoxióng” or “ㄍㄠ ㄒㄩㄥˊ” i’ve taken to writing characters literally all the time because they’re the only universal/transportable standard that exists

Pinyin just feels cleaner and easier to read and i don't know why anybody would persist with the other systems

in taiwan it’s political (even though technically they should have been using pinyin for a decade now, and not bopomofo which is still in alllll the children’s books)

i assumed politics came in somewhere

yeah, you can time the historical split by which standards differ across the strait (prc putonghua is basically the same as roc guoyu, but prc enforced e.g. simplified characters after chiang kai-shek had already fled)

sorry ia chums, this is niche

niche ia's are the best ia's

well, worst

my chinese language ia list would stretch for miles but nobody would care

e.g. that one kid who’s been studying for nine weeks and is all “look i can write!!! witness my genius” and then completely disregards proper stroke order

btw nv i’m super curious about how wade-giles came up in your morning

Wade-giles is still used quite a bit in restaurant names and menus in north america which is weird

Los angeles is pretty good about using pinyin but the problem with that is most people don’t know how to pronounce it so they still end up butchering it

I try to keep up but we have our own problems in japanese that take priority; e.g., hepburn, revised hepburn, nihon-shiki and kunrei-shiki. It’s less of a mess than the romanization of chinese though

xp

i'm reading a translation of the Records of the Grand Historian by Sima Qian and it uses Wade-Giles despite being published in 1994

(this is not work-related, shhhhhh)

wow, sounds like a slog

no it's great i love old history books