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

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

cmon man this is basic stuff

This happens at the grocery store all the time. Someone will be stopped, checking out the Pringles, but as soon as I begin to pass by them, they start pushing their cart.

So now here comes Pleasant Plains and his new friend as DOUBLE TROUBLE, taking up both lanes and coming right at you at the end of the aisle.

Perhaps I’m also a ghost. Or a magnet. When I’m trying to browse a mostly empty shop, lingering in random but interesting places (it’s my alone time,) without fail, another person will come to stand literally between me and whatever I’m looking at. Counter productive to mental state to say the least.

Oh my gosh, grocery stores and shops are just IA-generators in so many ways. My increasing fave is the thing where I round the corner of an aisle, just need to quickly grab that thing right there...oh, someone else is in the way. No problem, no problem, they'll be making their selection any second now and I'll be able to jump on in there... Hmm, they're really deliberating on their options, huh. Maybe I'll just grab that other thing in the next aisle and come back. Okay, got it, and now...wait, they're still there? And...they don't appear to be actually deliberating. Or exactly conscious. They're just staring blankly at the shelves ahead of them. For like several solid minutes. What is this, just what, where am I right now

you say “excuse me” and get your thing

unless you’re a ghost, in which case all that would come out is a distant whistling echo

This ghost supposition is explaining so much.

I think at least some of this (and I hasten to add that the A in my IA is almost always more Annoyance or Amusement than like legit Anger) is COVID-related. I noticed early on once people were going back out into the world again that they'd forgotten how to occupy space alongside other people. And so for instance the thing where people will just stand transfixed, gazing upon a box of pancake mix like an infant watching a mobile rotate overhead. Bystanders don't exist in such a solemn moment.

You know, the Clash wrote a song about these kind of grocery store stories!

I believe it was called "Straight to Hell".

One time at the supermarket a man became a wolf

Can't believe you got to meet Conner Smedley

do ghosts even eat Pringles?

has anyone mentioned one of my top irrationally angry things yet

when your finger is dropping on the mouse button and some fuckin element loads and you end up not clicking what u wanted to click

it's like THEY KNOW

(tbf it's not always that they "know" it just happened to me on ilxor.com which i don't think was designed to get me to go to a tweet. IRRATIONAL)

Will M, YES that is the actual worst. I love going to websites on a mission to click or search specific thing, but have to click battle a parade of special offer pop ups and fucking chat bot helpers before they will let me even see the screen unimpeded. I’m getting angry just thinking about it.