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

Digital gasoline pumps fuel my IA in that they never seem to follow their own rules.

"ENTER PIN AND PRESS ENTER..." A good chunk of the time, as soon as I press the fourth digit, the pump begins processing my card even before I press Enter.

"ENTER PIN FOR DEBIT, HIT 'CANCEL' FOR CREDIT..." Hit cancel for credit? But there's a "Credit" button right there? What if I decide to walk away from this stupid pump right now? How do I cancel this whole experience without using my credit card.

And I still don't know why I'm still having to scan my Kroger Rewards card under a laser beam while the same card works in the card reader at Shell. Or the fact that the OK light flashes RED when approved.

so UberEats went through some kind of update to where, if it's raining where you live, it constantly works that into the messaging.

I get to the tip screen - "it's raining, so give your driver a little extra love"

my driver goes to pick it up - "<Driver> is out dodging raindrops"

he's on his way to deliver - "<Driver> is bringing your food so you can stay dry".

JESUS, you MADE YOUR FUCKIN' POINT!!!

If $driverinput = “fuck this shit” then

so UberEats went through some kind of update to where, if it's raining where you live, it constantly works that into the messaging.

I get to the tip screen - "it's raining, so give your driver a little extra love"

my driver goes to pick it up - "<Driver> is out dodging raindrops"

he's on his way to deliver - "<Driver> is bringing your food so you can stay dry".

JESUS, you MADE YOUR FUCKIN' POINT!!!

― P-Zunit (Neanderthal), Sunday, April 18, 2021 7:02 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

lmao. offloading care onto consumers, you love to see it.

md state bar association, of which i am not a member, sends me emails every day. i click unsubscribe link and it directs me to log in. so i can never unsubscribe from these emails about stuff i don't care about like free estate law webinars and will receive them until i die.

i'm just angry all the time in general these days
not coincidentally, i am moving

moving anger is highly rational anger

Holy crap, the guy across the street finally removed the sticker residue from his car window! OK, which one of you is my neighbor? Fess up.

Thing I don't like: people with really fast cars that drive them really fast on the highway, weaving in and out, so that when you look in your mirror there is no one there but a second before you are about to change lanes some asshole going 110 suddenly zooms into view and past you. Like, buddy, you just came really close to learning how quickly your zero to 60 in 3.8 seconds car can go from 110 to zero.

This weekend I was reminded repeatedly that there is a special place in burning hell for those who leave little baggies of dogshit on the side of the trail.

Take all your dogshit, leave only footprints.

Hate to say it, but having them in baggies would be improvement on a local trail we like to use. Unfortunately it's also a horse trail for a big portion (there's a stable nearby) and this has led dog owners believe it's A-OK to just let their dogs shit wherever and do nothing with it.

aggressive drivers and dogshit bag litterers are both 100% rational objects of anger IMO

hm, you may have a point jon, I guess I'd rather step on a baggie than an actual turd, but still

I bought a beer glass at a brewery last year (the last time ate/drank indoors before the pandemic) and it holds 12 ounces. This brewer only sells beer in 16 ounce cans so none of their beers fit in their own glass.

Joygoat, just get three cans.

3 * 16 = 48

48 ÷ 12 = 4.

That's kind of like how milkshakes often get served in a glass with the leftovers that won't fit served on the side. Or how hot dogs traditionally come packaged as 10 but hot dog buns come in packs of 8.

https://img.cinemablend.com/quill/0/c/f/2/1/d/0cf21d52f1fde5334a50a85e88f46df7a2c02bcd.jpg

That's kind of like how milkshakes often get served in a glass with the leftovers that won't fit served on the side.

The place I get empanadas used to serve frozen fruit drinks this way, with a little styrofoam shot glass of extra. I hated it. Now they have a fancy machine that seals the cup (instead of putting a lid on it) and no little shot glasses and I am much happier.

I am very angry that this program in New Zealand does not sell a t-shirt with its logo on it:

https://www.birdlife.org/sites/default/files/styles/1600/public/predatorfree.jpg?itok=4-VBmEFN

CafePress, my dude. They'll make you a shirt with anything

Yeah, but with a logo that good this program should really be selling shirts to raise money!

"Angry" might be overstating the point here, but I've been really annoyed about some experiences we've had with my son's baseball team that I am helping to coach this season. Irrational, in this case, really depends on the observer.

Trying to keep this brief. This age is the first time they are having "kid pitch", the previous season (pre-COVID), these kids were all still at the age where coaches tossed the ball to the batters. Obviously this means we have a ton of inexperienced pitchers trying to learn the ropes. This is also the age where they start keeping official score and win/loss records, the whole ball of wax. Which is fine.

My annoyance comes with how different teams/coaches are handling this. Our head coach (and I agree) believes that this age is all about the kids having fun and continuing to learn how to play the game (this isn't travel or try-out, every kid who wants to play gets to play), so we encourage them to swing the bat at reasonable pitches on two strikes and try for hits. Yes, this sometimes means wild-ass strikeouts that shouldn't be, but it also means these kids have more confidence to swing and make contact.

So far, two other coaches have taken a wildly different approach. Knowing the pitching is pretty terrible, they've taught the kids to just stand up at home plate, bat on the shoulder, and wait for the walks. As a "winning" strategy, this works. We lost both of these games, as they walked in quite a few runs on our less experienced pitchers (we have to rotate and can't have the same kid pitch for more than two innings in a game).

There's no rule against doing this and the umpires don't seem to care, but it annoys me to no end. First, because it makes for boring games but, more importantly, the kids don't learn anything. Our team gets discouraged and annoyed that they didn't get to field any hits at all, the other kids don't get any confidence in swinging the bats, it makes for longer games, all of that. We have no intention of our strategy, even if we lose more games, it's more fun to watch the kids get excited when they finally get a hit and I know our team is learning way more about playing the game. I just wish all of the coaches felt similarly.

my dad used to get angry over this shit when he came to MY games.

one day we were watching a video of one of my recent games where pretty much everybody walked and stole several bases or struck out, and he heard a teammate yell "we're winning, we're winning" on the video and he said loudly "that's not winning!"

it's tough, because the pitching is literally so bad at that age, a third of the balls are in the dirt, and maybe a pitch or two is hittable, and any team that has a pitcher who elevates above mediocre immediately rises to league champion. being that it's not a highly competitive league, I would think 'win at all costs' is a lame strategy, especially since the fun of baseball (and why we played it in the street growing up) is hitting the ball and fuckin' running. Walks are boring.

when I was a kid I hated talking about the game if all I did was walk and strikeout. "so how did you do?" - "I scored two runs". "ahh, someone walked you in, huh?" "fuck you!"

IMO go back to a pitching machine or coach pitch is the way to go, esp if they lost a year of development

My friend was just telling me that his daughter's softball games are basically 95% walks.

phrases a baseball parent has to learn early in their kid's life:

"Good eye! Good eye!"

"Make him pitch to ya!"

"You gave it a good ride!" (for any time you make contact with the ball)

"Outfield is the most important position on the team"

Thankfully the other two coaches for teams we've played are much closer to our approach, which has made for some really exciting games and I'm really glad my son is back to sports (the loss of his usual four sport leagues a year was a huge blow for him), but that "wining is everything" mentality just bugs me. I mean, christ, these kids are in third grade.

There are going to be a ton of walks! A ton of bad plays! Kids throwing to the wrong bases! Kids running to the wrong base! They are learning! Let them play, learning how to take a strikeout on a bad pitch is a good lesson. I just don't get what the point of playing baseball is if you are just going to stand up and take a walk every at bat.

lol Neanderthal otm, I've had to use the first and last a TON already this season.

shit, half my teammates didn't know you had to tag up on fly balls. those double plays made the games go faster

That was a big portion of our last practice. Well, that and making sure they pay attention to the coaches to actually advance when your teammate hits the ball.

I knew it from RBI BAseball

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.