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

on a serious note part of the reason for sundowning w dementia (as i understand it) is a lot to do with the long shadows & low light

dementia affects their eyesight/ability to process light & shadow so as the shadows get longer it causes anxiety because they perceive the shadows as gaping holes in the floor/walls etc - its v scary for them

I would move to Quito.

JUst been ht with teh first Custos charge since Brexit postage took effect. Dang really not sure what is being charged so is An post taking 3.50 Eur for something as well as VAT needing to be payed.
oh my, pretty broke anyway so possibly should take a long break before buying new stuff but god really could do without this.

So for any minor charge on VAT or anything to do with customs An Post can charge an Admin charge of €3.50. Drag like totally.
Won't be buying cheap buttons from China again then. Or free p+p cds from UK branches of cd shops.
Do hope Ugly Things isn't automatically €5+ more to get to me.
Anybody feel like overturning Brexit at all?

Lidl changing its loo roll unit size from a portable, fits in the bag 4 pack to a bulky inconvenient 6 pack. Wonder if that is now too big to fit in people's storage space too.
Now if they'd just asked me I woulda told them NO. It just ain't right like.
May have even worked out cheaper per roll but can you carry and store it? I mean prioritise innit.

Why haven't Lidl done an "Ooh Aah... Just a Lidl Bit" ad campaign yet?

Idiot bus driver yesterday. I pressed the bell for the next stop as we pulled away from the previous one. This driver pulls back out of traffic and opens and closes the doors to cancel the request. I ring the bell again to make sure my request is logged. I think he's actually blocking traffic and manages to miss a light by doing this. I don't get it I've rung bell for next stop as we have just passed or left previous stop for years. I've seen others do the same.
Traffic had just been at a standstill for the previous couple of stops. so I'd wondered if I needed to get out earlier and walk from the previous stop but it had cleared by this point. Wouldn't have been helped by this guy. Doubledecker bus at a narrow point of the road.
I know the layout of streets around there so know where to take shortcuts to get to places. I was also running later than I wanted as it was which is why I'd been looking at the road to see state of traffic.
Just trying to work out if he'd seen me trying to see what traffic was doing so craning neck to see road. Which would be ablist attitude anyway even if it wasn't just nosy. & I don't think has any justification for this. Aargh . I'm puzzled by this cos as far as I'm aware it is pretty normal to ring bell for next stop as you go by previous one or leave it.

Also weird to see traffic full enough to be behaving like that. I don't think it has done for months but I only go into town a couple of times per week.

I now have an irrational hatred of Dutch cooking (which I used to love) because my brother married a Dutch-American girl and at every family get-together, they monopolize the kitchen, especially the stove.

We used Italian recipes, so our family -brother included- has initiated a food war. We use the instapot for sausage and I force my way onto the table by making Italian dishes at home that can be heated in a microwave.

I know it's petty and passive-aggressive, but there are some things you don't do to an Italian.

Plus seeing my brother show up his own wife and her family is hilarious.

lol

I thought the Dutch were good at going 50/50 on everything.

Got irrationally annoyed the other day at the elderly woman sharing a lane with me at the gym pool. It's a reservation system, the lanes next to the wall are extra wide and they let two people in at a time. Pretty much everyone chooses to split the lane rather than circle swim, to the point where splitting the lane is automatic - you still ask as a courtesy, but it's the default choice. This woman got there after me and was like, "Do you want to circle swim?" I said no, I'd rather split the lane, and she looked all doubtful and said, "But if I swim by the wall I bump into the stairs." Since I was there first, normally I would have taken the pool side and left her the side by the wall, but I wanted to swim, not argue, so I said I'd take the wall if we could split. And I did and it was fine; she stayed out of my way. But she proceeded to do the slowest, most erratic old-lady workout ever - a little bit of walking in the water, some resting, a little bit of quasi-breaststroke, resting, some very slow swim, resting, and then she put on her fins and zoomed for a lap or two. And I'm just like, "What in God's name made you think you could circle swim with anyone?" I'm not a fast swimmer, and I still would have had to weave around her on every lap. So even though she didn't manage to ruin my swim, I'm irrationally annoyed that she tried to.

The dreaded "circle swim" used to be the bane of my exercise routine. If you can't be allowed to maintain your own pace when swimming it ceases to be exercise and becomes, I don't know, slapstick in the pool. Will never forget the one woman who thought the idea of circle swim was to swim the length of one roped-off lane, then swim back down the adjacent roped-off lane (and thus presumably to swim a circuit through all lanes of the pool). Which meant she swam right into my face as I was coming up the opposite direction and socked me in the head.

Gah, that's awful. Yeah, circle swim pretty much only works if you're in a class where everyone's doing the same workout and the teacher has sorted you into lanes according to speed. Or if you're in an Olympic-sized pool where there's tons of room. One reason I joined a gym in the first place, instead of going to the public pool, was to avoid the four-people-to-a-lane circle swim where you're too busy dodging people to get any exercise.

Of course someone like the woman at the gym pool has probably always been the slowest person in the lane, so she's never had to pass anyone; she can just do her little routine and let everyone else worry about going around her.

Mindlessly stupid set up with queues in LiDl.
Difficult to tell whether there was one queue for 3 aisles or what.
& that is a stupid set up . I asked what the story was on queues in the shop and got treated like i had 3 heads or something.
I had joined at what I saw was the back of the queue but may have been better heading to the back of a separate queue.
I just couldn't tell if this vague free standing queue was supposed to cover all of them or just a pair or what.
Stupid idiotic system.
Luckily the aisle next to me opened so I got through it .
But jeez you'd think there would be some clarity.
& some help if there was confusion. Not sure if it all got sorted out by the opening of the new aisle and they wound up closing then reopening a different aisle one of the ones I might have joined.
BS System

Now realising that the one response they have for that kind of confusion is to open a new checkout.
Well maybe any form of trying to herd people in a different way wouldn't work. Saying stand here for queue for this checkout aisle. & I think it is a ll a result of pandemic social spacing which I'm not sure anybody is following now anyway.
I saw that Dunnes has a yellow circle with footmarks and a giant cross across it to show where not to stand which is continually seen asa point to stand. But is not supposed to be cos it is right in the middle of the walkway.
& probably should have just walked over to the other aisles and started a new queue which I think I was just thinking of when the new checkout opened.
BUt maybe you just get used to chaos and arbitrary crowd movement when you are working in a place like that. Oh they're all stupid all the time. If people want to act like that they will , if the product is in the shop you will either find it or not.
Gorlumme.

Oh & drag taht it appears that fennel has gone out of season. I was just getting into the flavour being in the mix of the food I prepared weekly. Ho hum.

Just add anisette, Pernod, Ricard, or absinthe in its place

(Or just get really plowed on absinthe. You won't miss the fennel.)

true that, not as healthy though.

Bummer need to learn to speak french and Malagasy before I can watch Tabataba, just not finding English language subtitles for it.
Gorlumme thought it was enough to sit around and watch foreign language films . Make me more conversant with things like.
Now why aren't I being fully facilitated. Can't be a first world problem if it's a film about colonial Africa now can it.

twitter links from here now cause my phone to pop up a "Open in App?" prompt that covers half the screen. 40 times a day.

(images on isn't really an option. maybe logging into twitter will make it remember my preferences. doesn't do it on laptop.)

ime the embedded browser in zing doesn't remember any cookie preferences or login details

zing? do i look like i'm made of money?

this is android firefox opening web twitter and web twitter behaviour seems to have changed in the last couple of days. but logging in seems to have stopped it. plus they can track me and serve me racist tweets about immigrants so win, win?

ahh. hmm

I was looking for a place to ask about what people thought of having to edit SRTs. I keep finding the ones I'm using being way out of sync even if adjusted to fit where the start of conversation in the film starts. Like internal structure is not actually in time with itself anyway.
So wondered if people did actually spend much time adjusting the ones they get either with the torrented video file or from whatever subtitle site they can get them from. Like if you have a reasonably accurate translation that is out of time is it actually worth the effort to get the timing right. I'm assuming that people would automatically want to have the subtitle somewhere in the vicinity of the words spoken in the foreign language. You can't be out of time and still follow how responses etc fit to what is said etc.
I've been finding that in some cases it is possible to get an alternative d/ld of teh film with subtitles hardcoded. Though am finding that my tv can not recognise some of the apparently hardcoded subtitles. had to get a fresh set for O Drakos a few days ago though the subtitles did show when i tried playing teh file on my computer. & the video transforming from d/lding from youtube appears to strip subtitles though may just be my tv. Wondering if that is something I can actually change programming on the tv for though not sure what i can do with atht that won't have a longer term effect that I can't tell how positive it would be.

if the subtitles are getting stripped then they’re not hardcoded. you may be thinking of some container formats like mkv including the subtitles within the same file, so you don’t have separate SRT files. but that’s not the same as “burned in” where the subtitles are actually a part of the image.

there are usually many different rips of movies, and an SRT file will be timed to work with one of them. if you try to use it on a different rip it will almost definitely be out of sync. there are programs you can use to fix the timing but i haven’t done it in awhile. here’s a website that claims it will do it: https://subtitletools.com/subtitle-sync-shifter

could be naive bit I would have thought that a film upped to youtube was there simply as the film. so should be transformed to MP4 with teh subtitles visible on it. Which didn't happen with the copy of Never On Sunday I got from youtube.

Also the O Drakos was one file so I assumed it must have the subtitles burned as part of the image. I tried pressing the subtitle button on the tv remote and didn't get a response. So really not sure what the story was there. I had to get a different SRT down to work with it. Which was thankfully in time. But I had checked the single file on my computer and it played with subtitles visible. So really not sure what teh story is.

oh & I prefer watching films on my tv which is larger and allows me to sit on a couch in comfort. I thought it would be a straightforward process but keep getting this lag happening . It isn't all the time but does seem to have a notable frequency.

many youtube videos have soft subs, which i think they call “closed captioning” or “CC”. you can tell they’re not hard coded because you can turn them on and off. it sounds like they may be what you experienced.

TV remotes can’t handle all types of subtitles. actually in my experience they can’t handle many types at all apart from subtitles on live broadcasts.

if you used something like roku or plex to stream movies onto your TV you’d have better subtitle options probably.

if you had a smart TV, or anything capable of playing youtube directly on your TV, then you could just watch youtube instead of ripping it. but you probably know that already!

yeah, Virgin Tv pulled youtube from its tv package a couple of years back which was a pain.

I think remote just seems to turn on the subtitle facility when there is a subtitle present so will trigger the function inside a file that has them in the actual file or will turn on external file if it is correctly labeled. If it isn't correctly labeled it won't have the interface with it turn up on the tv. I had to work out that the video file and its matching SRT had to have exactly the same name before it worked when I started watching foreign films a few weeks ago. I think Lupin came with several language subtitles included in the file.
& if i'm thinking right more recent transfers have the subtitles included in the actual file as an optional feature. Though may have to do with the way they are ripped.
Would be good to know there were accurate translations one could access and then transform into SRTs since i have come across at least one film where the SRTs available are in a very limited range of languages. Not including English which seems a little odd but maybe ego constraining for English speakers. Would have thought English was still one of the major lingua francas across the globe but maybe healthier if other languages are in competition?
Anyway. Would be good if I could find alternative versions of SRTs or create a perfectly working one if not.
& not been doing this very long. Got turned onto watching a load of foreign films something like a month ago so have been wondering if the experience is the same. I'm still getting torrented versions for a large part. & then having to get SRTs for those taht don't come with them. I mean torrents come from all countries so presumably those from the country of origin for the film so there is no language gap between film ad circulating audience initially but there is for me.

Dead celebrities do not imo continue to accrue birthdays thereafter

Dead celebrities do not imo continue to accrue birthdays thereafter

Agree with this 100%.

Happy Birthday, Frederick II, Elector of Saxony!!

The term is "anniversary of their birth."

my friend this morning asks if they can ask me a small favor, I say "what's up?"

they proceed to record a 12 minute, rambling voice message explaining it.

12...minutes.

i'm halfway through and still have no idea what i'm being asked.

12 minutes later...

it was for a ride to and from the airport. that's it. 12 minutes.

jfc

I can’t even.

Meaning one time I just stopped listening to such a meandering message and only later found out I missed out on an important piece of info.

council tax payment website has pointlessly changed after 10 years of being ok. card expiry date is now a free text field rather than a drop-down and typing 5 instead of 05 gets you rejected. which is annoying.

but it also now also asks for my address, all on one line!, which made me suspicious because it never has before. but look closer and it's an optional field...

hummus recipe final step
“decant into a bowl”

fuck you just say PUT you weirdo

Hummus must be decanted 30 minutes before use to let the chickpeas breathe

i decant into wide, stemmed, crystal glassware and swirl it around with my palm

Can't remember which thread this was in that we bitched about it, probably multiple ones, but stepped foot in a Chipotle for the first time since before the pandemic today and was disgusted to see signs that said "We can only accept cash if is tendered for the exact amount, but you are free to use debit or credit cards". Despise this poor hating bullshit.

I've never thought about it, but it's also kind of a rip that the fare on buses in this town is $1.35.

When we were between cars, you know how hard it was to round up 135¢ in cash?

Of course I tried to use the cards as much as I could, only $1.25 per ride on those. But sometimes, the guy would forget to mail it to me.

The main point being is that I run into plenty of people who ask for help getting some bus fare. And I guess they're going to have to overpay, unless someone actually has a dime in their pocket that they're willing to give.

parcel delivery = basically screaming into the void.

UPS is delivering a tablet my mother needs to use to go back to work, and the senders put the wrong address, but htey corrected this morning.

the driver puts the package is delivered at first, then changes it to Delivery Attempted, Redelivery Rescheduled for 9/20. naturally, nobody came to our door and knocked, there's no package, and no InfoNotice on our door.

every UPS person we contacted (3) seems to not see the Delivery Attempted status and insists the package was delivered and directs us to file a non-receipt claim, which you can't do because it recognizes that the Delivery is going to be attempted on Monday.

more of rational anger but it's like...resolving issues takes such effort that only gluttons for punishment like me that actually are willing to waste hours of a day doing it wind up getting them resolved.

...signs that said "We can choose to only accept cash if is tendered for the exact amount...

fixed

people who don't understand the concept of basic math when thinking about how much time they need to get somewhere.

"you haven't left yet? it's 20 miles away"

"I'll get there in 10 minutes, relax"

"You'd have to average 120 miles an hour to do that"

"No I wouldn't, I'll be there in 10, I've done it before".

*shows up 30 minutes later*

is it a problem with math or with the perception of time?

well, that too.