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

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

this ebook i bought has a ragged right margin.

(there's an option in calibre that'll do this for you, i guess i didn't click it when i installed it on the new laptop)

ragged right 4 lyfe. it's not about the destination it's about the journey.

the state of formating and proofreading in ebooks is pretty shocking, even in the ones i pay actual money for

this one has 64 pages of TOC. and 250 pages of notes. each page or the text with one or more notes on it has it's own page for those notes. and each page of notes has it's own entry in the toc...

(new penguin classics translation of les miserables - 2 quid from amazon, but i've put it through calibre which probably hasn't helped. also, it was 1500 pages of text to start with. tonight i'm going to pull it apart and make it 5 separate books, one for each volume, which i'd already started doing with the gutenberg version)

> ragged right 4 lyfe.

books don't do this, why should ebooks?

turned up starving for a pathology test, the queue was so long i had to leave. fasted for nothing.

someone could have said “oh hey, bit busy, just letting you know this could go on for fucking hours”

but no

Being in that netherworld outside of your residence - like walking the dog or starting to drive away - where you're still connected to your wifi but are far enough away that it doesn't actually work so you have to shut the wifi off manually to get shit to work.

^^ also still being connected to a Bluetooth device in the house instead of the car stereo.

that nebulous distance where youve forgotten something non-critical and its actually worth going back for

When I'm out or driving around, my phone is constantly trying to connect to various Time Warner hotspots and other free WiFi connections which all provide terrible, non-functional service.

every time a dublin bus goes past

The rail system here has been renovating the train stations to accommodate some new fare collection system, putting in all these new turnstiles in previously open air areas. These are not operational yet, and you have to just walk through them to transfer to the subway from the regional rail. So you get off a train and hundreds of people are moving towards these narrow soon-to-be-turnstile thingies. The problem is that there are a bunch of lazy transit cops standing inside the turnstiles, leaning against them. So there's all this confusion and jockeying around as everyone tries to a cop-free exit. Hate it.

FUCKING traffic signals that they've put up but haven't turned on yet so they're just swaying there in the breeze with burlap sacks over them for a week. JUST FUCKING TURN THEM ON WHEN YOU PUT THEM UP!

Xp to moodles you could turn on “ask to join networks” if you have iPhone. Then it might not connect to yr home network automatically tho, idk :\

so they're just swaying there in the breeze

i can’t even conceive of traffic lights that sway in the breeze

xp

I should just turn off Wi-Fi whenever I leave the house

xp:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfAPnfU16ZM

pisss

not irrational at all but idk where else to put this.

so for whatever stupid fucking reason, my apt complex has never had assigned parking. they just finally turned the carport parking into reserved parking but you have to pay $25 a month. so some nights I come home and cos everybody in the damn neighborhood has friends over, parking isn't as plentiful, so I have to park further down the street. ok, whatever...

tonight I get home from a almost 300 mile round trip to find zero parking in the entire complex. at least 15 cars were parked illegally because of the lack of spots. I saw people parked at the bank across the street from the complex.

finally found a space .1 miles away from my house - wtf did 17 people throw house parties?

and some asshole is blasting shitty music at 3 am downstairs.

yeaaaaaaaah, totally not renewing this lease in November.

though that's largely cos they were having roof repairs and decided to warn everybody not to park in a specific area by sending emails, addressing them to the "Residents of Building S", which I don't live in so I ceased reading. which makes no sense as most of the people that park in those spaces are from Buildings A and B. and the spaces weren't roped off or no signage placed the night before, so naturally I parked there and got towed out of my own community.

reported them to the county, who is investigating, and working on getting them to reimburse me. yeah, new digs in November. it will happen.

Anything "live" on social media (facebook, instagram etc.). Suddenly some acquaintance is performing, or ranting, or whatever RIGHT NOW, with no notice, and I'm just supposed to fucking drop everything

Sometimes they're making pottery, sometimes they're at a concert, sometimes they're eating lunch outside on a cloudy day near some seagulls or rocks.

this one seems fairly rational - was out for dinner last night w my childhood best friend and his female friend. I saw this beautiful woman and discreetly texted my buddy as to not say it aloud. My buddy looks at her, seems to think she's unattractive, and the female friend (who is 18 ffs) agrees. He then proceeds to show me a picture of the new girl he's into, as if to say this is WHAT attractive is. I feel like some people have insane standards, like my friend just wants to date barbies tbh

ugh, I understand that

It's weird to judge people on who they find attractive. you shouldn't have to qualify with "that person is attractive *to me*" so they don't think they're being asked to rate on a scale, but some people never get that

I was explaining to a friend that I had recently met someone who I really enjoyed talking to who was cute, and showed him a picture because he was curious if he'd seen her around and he was kind of critical. what the hell

Never talk about attractiveness with anyone.

^ seems easier

When you're walking at a normal pace down a public stairwell of any kind and can hear someone a couple of landings above you double-timing it down the stairs, and you know they're going to meet up with you so you try to make room for them to pass, and even if the stairwell is plenty wide enough they pass-agg stay two steps behind you all the rest of the way down the stairs. Then as soon as you reach the ground floor they swing around you and start double-timing it again.

I'm fed up of the people I always seem to end up behind on the stairwell who are looking at their phones and consequently moving down them v.e.r.y slowly. Just wait two minutes, it'll be faster and safer.

xp are you sure they're being intentionally pass-agg? I tend to walk/take stairs a little quickly but I'm not going to pass someone on stairs or a narrow walkway, and it's perfectly fine if someone in front of me is going slower

if they're making exasperated sighing noises behind you, that's another thing

^^ Not a "Missed Connections," I swear

if someone's on their phone on the stairs you can grunt at them, definitely