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

when people demand to know your opinion on something, then start a debate on it w/ you after you reply, and then accuse you of being judgmental afterwards.

(co-workers amirite)

Goodreads has just restyled. So it looks naff and harder to look at in the way I was . Dunno why they did it. Or is this just supposed to make it more auspicious , conspicuous or something.
Used to be somewhat good for checking out other people's opinions on books I had just grabbed from charity shops etc . & keeping a database of what i had bought.
It is an Amazon product so probably one I should be avoiding. But was somewhat useful.
Maybe still is, just hate the interface i don't seem to be able to get away from right now.

Too many different NBA uniforms for each team/too many that lack continuity with the team's historic look

Customer service on a gas supplier I'm leaving. Endless hold which rang off after 20 minutes waiting with my phone on loudspeaker a few weeks ago.
I phoned again to try to pay off a bit of what I owed as balance on leaving. Get through to sales Dept who proceed to put me on hold. I gave up after like 10 minutes anyway.
Wanted to make sure I had part paid off and didn't have a large direct debit coming off when I'm broke.
Stupid place has only just set up a website account system that you can pay through. So I am stuck trying to pay this way. Glad I'm leaving but I think I am going to run into trouble over this leaving balance. I don't even get to see what it is until physical bill arrives.

Plus energy prices just rose as of the 1st of May quite massively. 27% roughly. Glad I swapped to a different firm on the 3rd. But this is going to be a pain when I'm already broke.
Looks like Ireland followed a rise that UK had a month earlier. Rising costs and inflation all round.
Plus had slipped out of contract at some point so had no reduction in cost up til then. So did manage to get a deal that means I am paying a lower tariff than pre the rise just shame I didn't get on top of that before. Reduction will only last at rate for duration of this contract so assume standard rate going to be even higher by next year. Partially assuming Eastern European war feeding into this too. So could somebody just erase Putin or sumfin.

I would like to nominate 'things that topple'. Prime suspects are usually located in the bathroom and the kitchen, particularly on the draining board. So, the electric toothbrush, which only needs me to whisper near it to fall over and set off a chain reaction of other toppling bastards, and essentially everything on the draining board: cutlery holder, I'm looking at you, always spilling your guts all over said draining board and into the sink, and also stupid top-heavy saucepans, who cause inevitable LOUD toppling excess.

If you are posting instructions in a FB group for a rehearsal the next night...

And after your initial post last night, you edit the post to add a fairly major important instruction at 1:15 pm today, when all of us are working, which DOESN'T trigger a new notification telling us of the edit...

You don't get to be mad when I show up not having done the thing you asked me to do

this is where i complain about microsoft word's new (?) auto-fill feature. i type 15 and a gray "U.S.C" appears. you can hit tab and it will type it! but not U.S.C., you have to supply your own .

an older feature is when you write approx it gives you a free . so i end up with approx.. thanks so much!

Android changed "exclave" into "enclave" the other night in a chat.

harbl, not to defend the software sucking, but you absolutely can define specific autoreplacements. I usually tweak how it treats dashes because I am persnickety about em vs. en with and without spaces

i know! this just appeared, i wasn't sure if my agency had preset it or not but it's stupid. i won't use it anyway because having to hit tab means slower typing. also i just fixed someone else's document today that was half -- and half em dashes ugh.

one thing i do like is using the wildcard feature of find and replace

My tv refusing to provide the English subtitles for the 5th episode of Russian Doll. They showed up on my computer easily enough. Just would prefer a larger screen.
Odd that, I tried to cycle through the options on the tv subtitle listing no sign of them. Which led to checking order on the computer. Clearly there.
Ho hum did eventually settle for the monitor screen.
Hope that is only necessary for that one episode.

& checking the file on the memory stick on my computer it recognises the presence of a subtitle in English.
So not sure why it didn't on the tv.
Assumed it somehow hadn't transferred or something but no its just skipping things that are there.
Hope that isn't something that repeats with other files.

think my last convo with a friend fits IA (note by "I can't understand you", they mean 'it's muffled/jumbled/quiet/hard to hear', not me simply not elocuting properly)

Friend: I can't understand you

Me: (repeats self)

Friend: I can't understand you, you're not talking into your mic.

Me: my mouth is in front of the microphone, it might be a reception issue

Friend: No, it's the microphone. I can hear you now

Me: I didn't move the phone at all.

Friend: Now I can't understand you again. I don't see how it could be 'reception'. you're the only friend I have this problem with.

Me: I....don't know what to tell you, I haven't moved the phone at all.

Friend: Ok now I can hear you.

(10 minutes pass, we resume talking)

Friend: I can't understand you.

Me: (tries to repeat what I said louder and slower)

Friend: (interrupting) I still don't understand you.

Me: I haven't moved the phone at all - you keep saying I'm not talking into the mic but the phone has been in the same place and I'm talking at the same volume and one moment you say you can hear me, the next you can't.

Friend: You're getting very defensive, I don't appreciate it, I'm going to let you go.

......?

idk maybe Occam's razor = one of us has bad reception and let's just call each other back?

The shape of this type of drumset.

https://48r18hv56p93dbg741fo98ui-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/VOXTELSTAR-main.png

just fucking why

why is the bass drum melting?

it's sad

Fat bottom bass makes the world go 'round.

blob

That's a sat on testicle. You don't play it, you reposition it.

There was an ostensibly serious purpose floated for that - you can reposition the kick pedal to get different tones. Move it to the narrow end for higher frequencies; to the wider end for lower ones.

Mostly that is silly (as there are way easier ways to get there).

Generally my attitude is that it was a case of "we realized we could, but didn't ask whether we should."

I picture Stimpy playing it and Ren angrily dancing

when a genuinely sad distressing accident happens to a friend’s nephew & the kid ends up in hospital with fractures concussion etc

… and for the next week my friend’s social media is daily paragraph long updates & photos of the nephew in bandages & invocations for everyone to pray and it just becomes this performative obsession that makes me back away slowly

i hate it

Let me preface this by saying I don't begrudge any artist, musician or band doing whatever it takes to promote their music in this fucked up social media/streaming dependent age...

...but, it's really annoying to open Twitter and have to scroll past 67 straight tweets from an official artist account that is just retweeting every casual mention of the artist in question over the past week. Maybe there's a setting for this I need to adjust or something, but I've unfollowed more than one artist I really like in recent weeks because of this.

Posting too much is the cardinal sin of twitter, accounts that post 100+ times a day either dominate your feed or get muted

“turn off retweets” setting for retweet-heavy accts is your friend

Anyone listening to any speech or other audio at anything apart from 1.0x.

No shade directed at anyone here, my wife listens to stuff at 1.5x and I love her dearly, but if I could somehow jam this function for everyone in the world, I would hammer down that button in a heartbeat.

films on uk tv run 4% faster - 25fps rather than 24...

yes 1.04x is just about acceptable

I live in the southern United States, where I wish everyone would speak at 1.5.

at volume 0.0

Yes.

Anyone listening to any speech or other audio at anything apart from 1.0x.

No shade directed at anyone here, my wife listens to stuff at 1.5x and I love her dearly, but if I could somehow jam this function for everyone in the world, I would hammer down that button in a heartbeat.

As long as podcasts can also be banned from exceeding 1 hour in length.

Nah, the 1 hour + podcasts I've listened to in the last few months have all been deserving of full listens, I know there are plenty of podcasts which are two dudes jabbering on for 90 minutes, but I don't want to even listen to 5 minutes of that.

This is irrationally angry, so don't need to justify my logic here, but I think it's down to a love of sound and a feeling that it's cheapened by being used as a high-density info dump. None of my business how other people consume their audio, of course, but it still annoys me.

I caught my 10-year-old son boosting his virtual lessons to 2.0 during COVID.

"Son."

"I've got the captions on."

the way my kids "boosted" their lessons was to have youtube videos running constantly and quickly switching tabs whenever we walked past

I saw so many ceiling fans during those class times.

can I get hell yeah for: people (who arent visually impaired) describing listening to an audiobook as “reading”? actually that just makes me kinda sad.

the idea of "irrational" is an interesting one for me, does it mean "disproportionate"? sometimes i redirect my all-encompassing anger to a smaller, more focused point, heap upon that single point the full force of my rage, simply as a survival mechanism

latest example is me being IRRATIONALLY ANGRY at a specific quirk in google's autocorrect function:

https://www.alanauch.org/wtob/2022/08/08/wheel-of-rage/

I have one real book on the go and one audiobook on the go at any one time, I will call both "reading", it saves having to explain that "actually I'm listening to this one" every time.

When dealing with news, the way some people read information and then say they’ve ‘heard’ something. No, you have ‘seen’ something.

Also that perennial of saying ‘on the floor’ when talking about ‘on the ground’ - especially when the speaker is a police officer.

cosine the last one, and now the first one is going to bug me forever, thanks i hate it!

the lone “HI” message on Teams

…followed by 5 to 10 minutes of ….nothing …but progress dots …. as they type their message

DO ALL OF IT IN ONE MESSAGE for crying out loud!

or reimburse me for all this wasted fucking time waiting for you to tell me what you want ffs

cosine the last one

I HATE it when voice recognition does this sort of 'wrong homonym' insertion.

Speaking of Teams, I know it's been said to death but those new emojis omg. Maybe they're there to be a difficult lesson for me to stop using emojis at work but Jesus they're just a little too fucking expressive

twice in the last hour the fire engine has come and silenced next door's alarm. twice it has restarted as they have driven away. it is 5:51.

As a frequent pedestrian, I'm increasingly IA about what I would call the Blind Diagonal Cross, wherein someone on the opposite side of the road will cross to the side I'm walking on, but not perpendicularly, oh heavens no. No no, they instead cut a diagonal swath across the road, somehow without ever really checking out the space around them at all, and they then wind up swooping just ahead of me on the sidewalk but at a pace just slightly slower than my own. Like the kind of maneuver that, in a car, would all but guarantee a fender bender. This may sound like a niche concern but I swear it happens multiple times in a given week.

(The variation on this which I love with just as much of my heart is when someone is stopped on the sidewalk, say to browse through a shop window, and then obliviously swings back into the middle of the sidewalk and begins walking directly ahead of me but only once they've somehow sensed that I will have to come to a dead stop in order to avoid running into them. This is also a frequent occurrence. I fear that I'm being Punk'd.)

have you checked lately to make sure you’re not a ghost?

Oh shit wait