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

Ha ha I said all of those through many years of Little League, also "One more like that!" on the rare occasion the random process that was my kid's pitching terminated in the strike zone

Re the starting IA, in our league the first season of kid pitch was one BEFORE they started keeping standings, so you weren't really blowing the game for your team when you walked in five in a row; and I gotta say, I don't blame the batters or the coaches, the kids were not so much like "stand here and take my walk because I can" as "I'm not gonna swing if it's literally above my head or behind me or has bounced more than once by the time it gets to me" and that was already enough to lead to quite a few free passes

These guys must lick their chops at Miracle League teams.

Oh I get that you are going to get a lot of that, no doubt, but there's a pretty clear difference between kids who don't swing at crazy pitches and kids who have been encouraged to not swing at all.

I mean, during one of the games most of the kids literally had the bat resting on their shoulders the entire at bat. They didn't even feign being ready to swing, that's what got under my skin.

Pitcher should've beaned him.

That was actually usually the winning strategy when I played. Pitcher would bean 3 kids then nobody would have the balls to step in the box the rest of the game.

Have you addressed the critical issue of strategically replacing your pitcher with a belly-itcher?

At this point in the season, an unintentional beaning happens about every fifth batter anyway.

Concussion protocol

3rd grade is too early to move to kid pitch ime. Kids need to be 10-12 before they can hit the zone enough for a real game.

I always remembered one of my favorite Onion headlines as "T -Ball Stand Pitches Perfect Game," which is hilarious. So I was kind bummed to go back and see that it's actually "Special Olympics T -Ball Stand Pitches Perfect Game." Like, I know it's the Onion, but it's funny without the "Special Olympics" part, and when you put that in, not only does it become clunkier and less funny, it becomes gratuitously mean, since it shifts the joke from the very idea of t-ball stands to players in the Special Olympics, who are probably actually in the *minority* of who uses t-ball stands.

I was in 4th I think, 3rd grade was pitching machine.

Never forget the day the pitching machine intentionally beaned Mickey "Not-So-Quicky" Kroohs. He charged the mound and tore the fuck out of it with his bat, which was plastic and had Fred Flintstone on the handle.

This league actually combines 3rd and 4th, but most of the kids this season are in 3rd grade.

Randos who assume that Eastern Europe is a cultural monolith (a Bloc, amirite?) so if you happen to be from EE country X you will automatically understand and/or be aware of what goes in EE country Y, e.g. 'You're from Romania, right? What do you make of this [insert Polish word/dish/artist/TV series I've never heard of]?' I've never been to Poland (aka the *other* EE country whose existence is vaguely known to you), am not particularly interested in its culture (or rather: I am, but no more than that of countless other nations), and no, I don't speak Russian because even though Romanian features a fair amount of Slavic loanwords due to its geographical location, it is a Romance language first and foremost, whose closest living relative is Italian. I suppose I should try asking 'Oh, so you're English? What's your favourite restaurant in Coimbra and who's topping the charts in Denmark these days?'

*due to Romania's geographical location, rather

It’s kind of racism right? Sure they’re all* Slavs right?

*i am aware this does not apply to your crowd, tyvm

was going to say "these people are clearly fucking idiots" but thinking about how curious people here aren't about the world outside the UK & USA, yeah this is probably fairly standard.

90% the time there’s no ill intent ime, but it does get exhausting after a while. I imagine this is also extremely common when you’re of East Asian descent: ‘Oh, you’re Vietnamese? Ni hao!’

Poorly structured "riddles" that circulate on social media. unlike good riddles, these are so confusingly worded that different people presenting the riddles will disagree on which one is the correct answer, and people who get it right act undeservedly smug about their correct answer.

aforementioned organization i can't unsubscribe from is inviting me to a summit at which madeleine albright and amy klobuchar are speakers. you would have to pay me at least a million us dollars to sit through this.

military-adjacent "mental health awareness" messages / campaigns. mental health is absurdly individualized when the elephants in the room (climate change, wage slavery, the fucking military / the brutality of american empire) are the biggest drivers of depression, anxiety, ptsd afaict. it is ultimately even more depressing and maddening imo to see this kind of messaging insist that there's basically no cause and effect when it comes to mental health, or that these big obvious social causes can't be a problem.

100% otm/truth bomb

I get mad when I see memes about suicide awareness with a picture of Robin Williams on them, when Robin Williams had Lewy Body Dementia and at the time of his death had already started a steep mental and physical decline that was going to kill him within the next eight years anyway.

i never encountered this until recently but people who use the abbreviation BB for “be right back” instead of BRB

i have 3 coworkers who do it regularly chatting on teams like “out to lunch bb”

stop calling me baby

use the right abbrev

AGH

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvpz6YM2Xc0

people who say "brb bio". i don't need to know something is coming out of u, that's already implied

I had signed up for Paramount Plus for my mother through Prime, but didn't like it as you can't access it via the Paramount Plus Roku/Firestick app, you have to access it through Amazon Video. my mom is technologically challenged and I wanted to save some steps, so I let it expire at the end of its billing cycle, and signed up directly on Roku. showed her that she just had to click on the icon, and boom.

the other day, I get an email telling me I signed up for Paramount Plus on Prime. for whatever reason, mom took the long way around through Amazon Video instead of clicking on the Paramount app, didn't read the message that said she'd be starting a paid subscription, and signed up. so now I have two Paramount Pluses. woohoo.

(not really *angry* about that, just more annoyed that like two days after the subscription expired, she restarted it lol)

I get irrationally angry about people repeating the following common misconception: Roman month names don't match their place in the year because the Caesars added months named after themselves. Also Romans were dumb and didn't have enough months.

1. Because the year began in March, September being the seventh month, October being the eighth, etc. was exactly as one would expect.

2. The months now known as July and August weren't added. They were already there and they already had sensible names (Quintilis and Sextilis, for fifth and sixth).

3. While it's true that the Roman calendar occasionally drifted quite a bit from astronomical cycles, the Romans knew about the problem and worked on various ways of correcting it. It's not like they were idiots who forgot to have enough months.

people who answer a simple yes/no question with a goddamn MONOLOGUE

^^^^^^^

i deal with one of these regularly and the infuriating part is that the monologues get so lengthy that this person ends up answering the question as "yes" at the beginning but "no" by the end and i'm left more confused than ever!

people who, when you say something relatively unambiguous, will reply "I just want to make sure you aren't saying (insert offensive thing that could not remotely be inferred by what you said unless you're willfully misreading it)"

^^^ new board description.

kinda long

I hate when I ask somebody about an important date or time or task, and they respond with some variation of "I already told you." And then you ask again, and they're all, look on the calendar. And I'm like, I don't want to have to look it up, that's why I'm asking you!

I have had several managers like this over the years

What happened to them?

Every piece of luggage that closes with a zipper and also has a second zipper to slightly expand its volume drives me insane with irrational anger because I never need to expand the volume yet always do that by accident instead of opening it

^ THANK YOU

Mark that zipper with tape/nail polish/etc.

epistantophus at 6:21 24 May 21
What happened to them?

Disappointing. I had made up a scenario in my head wherein you kept “disappearing” your managers in a fit of irrational anger, but each new boss that came in did the same thing.

Overlapping "hold time" messages. I can't stand this

"While you're waiting, check out our website, at....."

"You are now #7 in queue - your estimated hold time is 10 minutes"

"our website, at www.brosbeforehose.com, available from...."

"ALL ASSOCIATES ARE ASSISTING OTHER CALLERS. PLEASE STAY ON THE LINE, YOUR CALL WILL BE ANSWERED IN THE ORDER RECEIVED"

"7 am to 10 pm, East-"

"You are now #7 in queue, your estimated hold time is 9 minutes"

I hate it when you need to wait for somebody out in the car, like at the airport, where I am now, and it is 90 something degrees outside, and your windows are cracked but you're still sweating because you don't want to sit there with the car running and the AC on like a dick head.

i hate airport pickups simply because either you sit there for 20 minutes or if you wanna get there at the exact time, you have to factor in deplaning time, baggage check time (if they checked one), etc.

not a big deal in like afternoon to get there early, but one friend likes to take late flights and I don't like hanging out bored at the airport at 11:45 pm.

challop: if you're kind enough to pick up a friend, it should be the norm that you get there 15 minutes after flight arrival time so you don't need to deal with airport bullshit like people telling you to move on from pickup areas

my airport used to be militant about that shit, threatening to ticket my friend once, and now they just don't give a shit at all. it's so weird.

if you're teaching a class and don't know the answer to a question and you message me to see if I can answer it for you, don't sit in silence and make the class wait 5 minutes for you to read my response and understand it, then explain it to them. move on and come back to it!

Stickers. Buying something that has a sticker on it that either won’t come off, or comes off in like 1000 pieces, or comes off but leaves a residue. Drives me up the wall. If you put so much time into making, marketing and selling this product, at least take a couple minutes to pay attention to the type and quality of sticker that you’re slapping on it. Haven’t they made any advances in sticker technology in the last 50 years?