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

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

starting to get innocuously angry at my word reptition tbh

i have a co-worker everyone likes and i can't stand. i mean a couple people agree she's overwhelming. i don't like her fake feminine voice and her perfume. i hate when people smell like things. anyway today she talked to her husband on the phone, then called the doctor to make an appointment for him, then called him back. this made me IA for several reasons (1) she literally just had an argument with him last week during which she said "it's not my job to make your doctor's appointments for you!" (2) he demonstrated his ability to use the phone during the relevant time period (3) she had to answer their questions and describe symptoms, wouldn't this show her how stupid this is? and (4) it's just fucking stupid i'm sorry

I wouldn't even trust someone else enough to make an appt on my behalf for fear of getting my symptoms wrong or setting it at an inconvenient time. husband sounds like a toolbag.

i hate when people smell like things.

This is prime IA for me.

^^^

also (5) our job is way harder than his. if he was a fireman or something i could see making an appointment for him. if i told you what his job was you would kill yourself but i don't want to identify him.

We replaced the old microwave with the new microwave a few months ago.

Pretty much the same class and style, but on the old microwave, I could hit "1" and "30 SECONDS" in a fluid doot-doot motion to set the timer for 90 seconds.

On the new microwave, I can just about do the same thing except instead of a fluid doot-doot, it's more like doot-(pause)-doot since once I hit the "1", the new microwave feels the need to display the letters

E X P R E S S

I can sort of get back my rhythm by typing "TIME COOK", "1", "30 SECONDS" in a fluid doot-doot-doot motion, but it still ain't the same like the old microwave.

Also, in typing that last sentence, I just noticed that the CEO of Apple Inc. very nearly has name on every microwave sold in North America.

hi, i'm tim cook, the timecook

*Puts burrito on plate*
*Enters in amount of time*
*Chuckles to self.*

I realized a big part of what bothers me about what I posted upstream about my cousin's heroin-addicted kid is that my family is the first to hurriedly repost all those DRUG TESTS FOR ALL WELFARE RECIPIENTS memes, but if I were to say "How do we know Tyler isn't just going to take our $600 and spend it on heroin?" they'd be mortified.

that's why they don't shell it all out themselves, spread the risk

just calmly explain to them why that is a much more rational question than why shouldn't we drug test welfare recipients

On the new microwave, I can just about do the same thing except instead of a fluid doot-doot, it's more like doot-(pause)-doot since once I hit the "1", the new microwave feels the need to display the letters[E X P R E S S]up in the window before allowing me to hit the "30 SECONDS" button.

> E X P R E S S

the irony

I have been testing our new website with the new Google reCaptcha on and what with deliberately failing the captcha several times Google no longer believes I'm not a robot and is showing me the image challenge, which is making me irrationally... something

"Select all images of rivers!" - uhh I don't know, there's some water, is that a river or a lake or the sea?
"Select all images with trees in!" - (squints at shot of distant possibly wooded headland which I'm probably not supposed to identify as "trees", but maybe I am?)
"Select all images of storefronts" - ok so "store" is the American for "shop" so I click on all the shops but then there is, like, a restaurant and idk a cat-worming clinic or something, not sure if "storefront" is "any commercial property" or "just shops" or "shops and restaurants and anything else open to the public with big windows and awning and bright colours"

Even "select all pictures of cakes" seems culturally dependent; from a discussion with my German teacher about fruitcake vs Stollen vs hot cross buns I got the impression that the German division between "bread" and "cake" is not where the English one (or my personal English one) is*, so idk how globally foolproof it is to present the user with a variety of foodstuffs on tables and ask them which are cakes

* although actually I do not have any opinion about whether a hot cross bun is cake or not, I mean currant buns are sort of bread but sort of just their own thing. Is a pastry a cake? See I have no idea about even these everyday UK-available cake-like products, never mind where, say, mochi or jalebi are on the cake spectrum, and here we are asking people of all nations to make assessments of cakedom before they can type a comment on a website**

** I know right, if only I had not been allowed to type a comment on a website

And, see, I linked to the Google help page for this thing and it has a picture asking the user to identify the oranges, and I know that every single programmer and data monkey I know is a wilful and pedantic creature (hi) who would have been p. tempted to fill the "not-orange" data set with tangerines and satsumas, so...

ahahaha that sounds awful! /amazing.

"select all pictures of cakes"
did it have a jaffa cake? You'd be there for days

"I'm sorry, the Killer Whale or 'Orca' is not technically a fish, you obviously fraudulent bot."

Is a crabcake a cake?

Is a hot dog a sandwich?

"Actually GWB only did Katrina, not 9/11"

All humans locked out of Google due to Skynet activating still-experimental Project Pie.

"Select only those who played outfield for the '56 Pirates."

I've been IA about those things since first grade, when I argued with a teacher about whether "cherry" rhymes with "strawberry". (It doesn't.)

I can sort of get back my rhythm by typing "TIME COOK", "1", "30 SECONDS" in a fluid doot-doot-doot motion, but it still ain't the same like the old microwave.

And this isn't accurate– what I have to do is press "TIME COOK", "9" and "0" to get the same result in a doot-doot-doot fashion.

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

http://i65.tinypic.com/sw65bp.png

and the colored girls go

http://ih0.redbubble.net/image.15810662.4533/flat,800x800,075,f.jpg

Setting up titling on a tv channel that has a constant streamed headline at the bottom of the screen so that the bottom line of the text is actually behind the strip containing the headlines.
If the headlines are a constant on a channel like BBC News then surely it's an understood design component?

Does whatever show that duplicates what's on BBC news show without the strip on BBC2 or something. Would still think that it counted as not being thought through.