Little things that annoy the hell out of you

[orange808]

When you go to the local arcade, start playing a game, and discover that you're playing "fan made" fucking rom hack. That lame shit belongs in your basement at home, not in an arcade.

Same thing with pinball, when the table isn't tilted correctly or they've added posts to block drains. That's not the real game.

[vol.2]

Same thing with pinball, when the table isn't tilted correctly or they've added posts to block drains. That's not the real game.

Added posts??? That's insane. Nobody around these parts would partake in such tomfoolery.

[Arino]

When you go to the local arcade, start playing a game, and discover that you're playing "fan made" fucking rom hack. That lame shit belongs in your basement at home, not in an arcade.

Same thing with pinball, when the table isn't tilted correctly or they've added posts to block drains. That's not the real game.

Every single time I play an arcade machine here in the UK there is basically no sound at all. So fucking dumb. My assumption is that they set them up at night when it's dead silent and make it just loud enough until they think "I can hear something", then consider that setup as tested and working. But when you go there to play it, there are not just other people around who are loud, no, they also blast music so it's impossible to hear anything from the game you are trying to play. I have experienced this at so many different locations, so many times. Never changes. Half of what they have is not that great anyway but if there is something fun like House of the Dead Scarlet Dawn or Let's Go Island, the whole setup becomes useless if there is no fucking sound. I just hate all of those fucking assholes so much who are responsible for that mess. And don't even think of telling me to let them know, not that I haven't tried.

[Blinge]

They/Them pronoun has apparently become the default for a lot of people online. It's dumb AF, I see it all the time.



here's a comment on my video about "patches"
The idea is that you never know what someone's pronouns are I guess, so safer to default to they/them.


why the fuck would you look at this guy and think " oooh better say they/them incase he doesn't identify as a he"

It alarms me how many people have accepted this as the new norm.

[BIL]

tbh, even as the most violent Shumps Hitler - #1 suspect when the latest rapist in a skirt to attack the woman locked in his cell is savagely misgendered - I wouldn't register much off that sentence alone. The offhand "they/them/'em" is a comfy old habit. I've used it thousands of times in my embarrassingly vast post history, having grown up with it as the norm even in a region infamously brutalising of non-heteronormativity. I've even used it in the commission of said internet war crimes.

"Did the target have any last words after you PWNed them Herr Biruford?"
"Yeah they called me Literally Hitler and I said they were fat LOL"
"LMAO"

Not to say it hasn't been hijacked by zealots and useful idiots lately, like many other benign things! And not to suggest any truck with said dipshits. It's a convention for my own convenience. I just tend to assume other English speakers are the same, unless they're demanding I derange my speech because some annoying twat is in their Ziggy Stardust phase. edit: another reflexive they

[neorichieb1971]

That moment you realize you have too much gravy on your plate and a big sausage falls from your fork, does a belly flop on your plate and gravy goes all over your shirt.

I completely ruined a guys flight when I pressed the recline button for my seat in front of him, not knowing he had food and drink on the tray behind me. All I could hear was "FFS" "FFS". Felt sorry for him.

[Arino]

That moment you realize you have too much gravy on your plate and a big sausage falls from your fork, does a belly flop on your plate and gravy goes all over your shirt.

I completely ruined a guys flight when I pressed the recline button for my seat in front of him, not knowing he had food and drink on the tray behind me. All I could hear was "FFS" "FFS". Felt sorry for him.

hahahahaha I wish I could see this

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Vampire Survivors is way too popular for a game that's the entertainment equivalent of a fruit machine, and I have to grit my teeth and be polite instead of expressing what a kusoge it is when my not remotely hardcore gamer friends and acquaintances mention it. I imagine the popularity is due to how braindead the game itself is? There's minimal player input required to kite the hordes as you auto attack them, aside from the occasional upgrade pick. And to top it off, the title art is widely known to be plagiarized from multiple sources.

[TransatlanticFoe]

I had to Google it when it was first mentioned here, and to this date I've only ever seen it mentioned here. Who is playing it and where is it being talked about? Because clearly it's not in whatever my "old man yells at cloud" news sources are

[orange808]

Vampire Survivors looks like it might be a good brutal twin stick shooter, but it's not. I'll stick to Galaxy Wars.

[vol.2]

I think it's well past the point where "switch your brain off" games have reached their own level of comparison in video game discourse. We shouldn't be comparing it to epic action games, we should be comparing it to fruit ninja.

I honestly didn't even know it existed either, but I can relate to just mindlessly blowing stuff up for awhile. It's like people who listen to ASMR videos or whatever, it's just done for comfort.

[Arino]

I've actually played this game once because someone showed me and I have also noticed it seems to be extremely popular. Most of the times I don't even know the games people talk about, or I've never played them at least

Vampire Survivors is way too popular for a game that's the entertainment equivalent of a fruit machine, and I have to grit my teeth and be polite instead of expressing what a kusoge it is when my not remotely hardcore gamer friends and acquaintances mention it. I imagine the popularity is due to how braindead the game itself is? There's minimal player input required to kite the hordes as you auto attack them, aside from the occasional upgrade pick. And to top it off, the title art is widely known to be plagiarized from multiple sources.

First time I just read your post I misread the second word and thought you were talking about Vampire Savior. I thought WOW, this guy really must be on another level if he thinks the game is that dumb!

[Daytime Waitress]

Vampire Survivors is way too popular for a game that's the entertainment equivalent of a fruit machine, and I have to grit my teeth and be polite instead of expressing what a kusoge it is when my not remotely hardcore gamer friends and acquaintances mention it. I imagine the popularity is due to how braindead the game itself is? There's minimal player input required to kite the hordes as you auto attack them, aside from the occasional upgrade pick. And to top it off, the title art is widely known to be plagiarized from multiple sources.

First time I just read your post I misread the second word and thought you were talking about Vampire Savior. I thought WOW, this guy really must be on another level if he thinks the game is that dumb!

You ain't the only one, Kachou. I do that every single time someone brings this newer game up. Jedah and Q-Bee are just memorable designs, I guess.

[RGC]

Getting covid for the second time in 7 months.

Shouldn't be too surprised -- I had shingles in my 30s, an indicator my immune system was already f*cked.

[orange808]

A person that laughs at an IE joke with Chrome open on their laptop.

[Daytime Waitress]

A person that laughs at an IE joke with Chrome open on their laptop.

I had to use a Chromebook the other day and you can't convince me that everything that corp does isn't just to troll the living piss out of end users.

I wanted to migrate a bunch of text from a spreadsheet into several hundred individual (Legally Distinct Powerpoint) slides.
I know this has arse-backwards workarounds in Office involving copying the target column data into Word and importing from a third, wholly unnecessary document - criminal given that Office is a suite, but technically doable.
So I hunt and peck around the three million pictograms that apparently have relevance to the graphic designers embedded in that ecosystem but mean dick all of shit to anyone else living on planet Earth, but, no - there's no big shiny button that will import it automagically between these allegedly integrated programs in G's suite, either.

This was enough already enough to boil my piss, but then I started searching the interwebs for a solution.
Every single result was directing you, the end user, to write a short programming script yourself to perform this trivial operation.
Or an outright ad for a "consultant" to write such a script on your behalf.

Teach a man to fish and he'll eat for the rest of his life?
More like hand a bloke a pile of scrap metal and tell him the local library three miles down the road has instructions on how to construct an AGA, when all the poor cunt wanted to do was heat up some fish fingers.

[Lander]

Idle games are my bugbear of the month. Come play! Over 500 appealing characters to waste resources on running in the background!

Every single result was directing you, the end user, to write a short programming script yourself to perform this trivial operation.

Oh yeah, Chrome OS is great - but first *wheels up blackboard* let me teach you some basics of the Unix shell

Graphical programs as a whole are a bit of a mess, really. Nerdy command line stuff benefits from communicating in plain text, so can be strung together to accomplish all sorts of nifty automation where the worry is less will the machine allow me to do this? and more how many manuals do I have to read to make the machine do this?

But GUI never saw that kind of standardization, so there's no equivalent 'lots of small pieces that do one thing really well and cooperate nicely' - you have to hope the DevOps goon in charge of your monolithic software package spared a thought for your use case, and wasn't too busy shipping some useless soon-to-be-forgotten gubbin in an effort to apply their own stamp and leapfrog their career to upper management.

Ironic, since many popular modern programs are just fancified HTML sandboxed inside a copy of Chrome sporting a pair of Groucho Marx glasses. Anti-standard by way of the one standard we have - shit web pages

Infuriating as the learn2code angle is (and not helped by the oft-present smarter-than-thou tone,) it's the only definitive escape hatch from the ridiculous degree of obfuscation that's been layered on top of useful personal computing. And that's only going to intensify as the walls between ecosystems rise higher.

Anyhow, at the risk of sounding like those people, you might be well served taking a look at Emacs to soothe modern office woes.

Warning: Actual advice

Think of it as a halfway house between executing your own 'human program' by manually wrestling with various crap corpo tools, and the untenable just sink hundreds of hours into learning bash bro sysadmin answer: It bills itself as a customizable text editor, but - having been around for ~40 years - now encompasses more or less anything you could want to do with text on a screen.

In particular, Org Mode is probably of interest; that's the part that subsumes all the MS-office-a-like functionality - documents, spreadsheets, presentations, agenda, etc. You could import to Org, munge it around in a nice standardized form with a featureset that puts MS and Goog to shame, then spit it back out in whatever legally-distinct format you're mandated to use. Chances are, someone out there has gotten pissed off enough at said format to write a package for it

Calling it simple would be sugar-coating, but it's a better effort-to-payoff ratio than learning to program if you have no interest in it. Admittedly, it starts out looking more like grandpappy's hackerpad, but there are lots of tutorials and premade configs out there (Prelude, Doom, Spacemacs, many others) that can fast-track it into looking as modern as big tech's pretend powertools.

[neorichieb1971]

When you turn off your Nintendo switch for 3 months and you buy a new game. The battery is dead so you need to charge the machine for 15 mins before it comes alive, then you find your controller needs charging as well. Then when you get both up and running you need to perform an update. Then you get the game running and that requires an update, then you get what I call unnecessary storyboards in the game.

I went to my game room to play a game at 8pm, didn't start playing until 10pm then got a bit tired and went to bed. I did plug the SNES in play a few rounds of Tetris to kill the time. You know, plug it in, put cart in, connect a a controller, off you go... I know this is sore point for modern gaming but it does seem like you cannot wake up a left system and just go these days, its like planning a holiday, setting it all up before you can enjoy any of it.


Has anyone got a friend who makes every conversation a competition? Like you'll say "I bought 2 new tires for my car yesterday" and suddenly go off telling you you over paid, should have gone to this place or that place. His brother was exactly the same we had a chat once about car stereos of yesteryear and he came out with "I had a car stereo once that was so powerful it drained the car battery in 7 minutes". I find these people exhausting and that you have to pick your conversations carefully. These people come to my house and tell my wife these kinds of stories and she's like lapping it all up as fact, may or not be a fact, but the fact is its like THEY never want to end the conversation feeling inferior.. when to be fair I don't really care about that.

[Daytime Waitress]

Has anyone got a friend who makes every conversation a competition? Like you'll say "I bought 2 new tires for my car yesterday" and suddenly go off telling you you over paid, should have gone to this place or that place. His brother was exactly the same we had a chat once about car stereos of yesteryear and he came out with "I had a car stereo once that was so powerful it drained the car battery in 7 minutes". I find these people exhausting and that you have to pick your conversations carefully. These people come to my house and tell my wife these kinds of stories and she's like lapping it all up as fact, may or not be a fact,

Yeah, that part - the part where other people don't recognise how needless, full of shit or just plain mentally unglued that kind of CHALLENGE PISSING is - that's something that does my head in. As you said, that kind of person is exhausting at the best of times, but when you side-eye other folks during such a conversation and they're genuinely like this if fine.jpg, you start to feel a bit gaslighted and even more drained.

[vol.2]

Has anyone got a friend who makes every conversation a competition? Like you'll say "I bought 2 new tires for my car yesterday" and suddenly go off telling you you over paid, should have gone to this place or that place.

I just can't be friends with people like that. If it's one specific thing that they feel like they're an expert about it's tolerable, but people who turn everything into a competition stress me the fuck out and I can't take them. I immediately look for an exit and don't come back.

I do have friends who are like "the bicycle guy" who knows every little thing about bikes and will argue and talk nitty gritty about it because that's their passion or whatever and I can give it a pass because it's easy to just not talk about bikes. Of course, if they can only talk about bikes, then that's a problem too (unless you're going to fix your bike and then it's cool). I mean this as a metaphor for like "whatever they are an expert about."

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Has anyone got a friend who makes every conversation a competition?

I knew someone who always liked to tell stories and talk about himself as if he were holding court. The last time I saw him after he'd distanced himself, it kinda solidified it wasn't worth trying to reconnect with him. He talked about himself and his life problems for like a solid 2 hours, then seemed to realize he'd dominated the conversation, asked me "so how's your life been, how are things with you?" but he only lasted 15 minutes or so of me discussing what I'd been up to before he changed the subject back to himself for another hour or so.

Strikes me as the same kind of energy.

[vol.2]

Has anyone got a friend who makes every conversation a competition?

I knew someone who always liked to tell stories and talk about himself as if he were holding court. The last time I saw him after he'd distanced himself, it kinda solidified it wasn't worth trying to reconnect with him. He talked about himself and his life problems for like a solid 2 hours, then seemed to realize he'd dominated the conversation, asked me "so how's your life been, how are things with you?" but he only lasted 15 minutes or so of me discussing what I'd been up to before he changed the subject back to himself for another hour or so.

Strikes me as the same kind of energy.

We don't have an effective way to teach social skills in the US for sure. It's something that you can't really do in schools, and if you tried to then parents would start rioting. I think these people (let's call them assholes just for the sake of convenience) learn that kind of behavior from their parents in most cases.

[neorichieb1971]

My friend that competitive talks is a friend of the family and is genuinely very kind and giving. If your in a pinch he will help you out and my family loves him.

I called him out on the tires pricing as I paid £180 per tire and he said he could get them for £130 each. When I googled the mark up price for a tire it said roughly 40%. Which means they are selling it for no profit.

I distanced myself on a 1-1 basis and just saw him at family gatherings but he still overstepped a few times. My most memorable time was when I wanted to show my new 4k blu ray player and TV and I picked a movie to watch and invited the whole family. They invited my friend who came round with 900 movies on a hard drive, he convinced everyone to watch one of his movies instead of my choice which was the only choice because it was my gaff, my invitiation and my movie choice. My friend chose Hardcore henry. I gave in and got a massive headache. The movie was alright but on a big screen it makes your head spin, if you've not seen the movie its an experimental affair that is completely FPS. (first person mode). I've never invited him again. One time he even told me i'm a bad husband because I don't buy flowers for my wife in front of my wife. Talk about ballsy. The guy can't hold down a relationship himself. I'm of the opinion if you're going to talk shit down to me at least do it from high ground. Oh well thats my rant over

[null1024]

Oh yeah, Chrome OS is great - but first *wheels up blackboard* let me teach you some basics of the Unix shell

Graphical programs as a whole are a bit of a mess, really. Nerdy command line stuff benefits from communicating in plain text, so can be strung together to accomplish all sorts of nifty automation where the worry is less will the machine allow me to do this? and more how many manuals do I have to read to make the machine do this?

But GUI never saw that kind of standardization, so there's no equivalent 'lots of small pieces that do one thing really well and cooperate nicely' - you have to hope the DevOps goon in charge of your monolithic software package spared a thought for your use case, and wasn't too busy shipping some useless soon-to-be-forgotten gubbin in an effort to apply their own stamp and leapfrog their career to upper management.

Ironic, since many popular modern programs are just fancified HTML sandboxed inside a copy of Chrome sporting a pair of Groucho Marx glasses. Anti-standard by way of the one standard we have - shit web pages

Infuriating as the learn2code angle is (and not helped by the oft-present smarter-than-thou tone,) it's the only definitive escape hatch from the ridiculous degree of obfuscation that's been layered on top of useful personal computing. And that's only going to intensify as the walls between ecosystems rise higher.

Anyhow, at the risk of sounding like those people, you might be well served taking a look at Emacs to soothe modern office woes.

Warning: Actual advice

Think of it as a halfway house between executing your own 'human program' by manually wrestling with various crap corpo tools, and the untenable just sink hundreds of hours into learning bash bro sysadmin answer: It bills itself as a customizable text editor, but - having been around for ~40 years - now encompasses more or less anything you could want to do with text on a screen.

In particular, Org Mode is probably of interest; that's the part that subsumes all the MS-office-a-like functionality - documents, spreadsheets, presentations, agenda, etc. You could import to Org, munge it around in a nice standardized form with a featureset that puts MS and Goog to shame, then spit it back out in whatever legally-distinct format you're mandated to use. Chances are, someone out there has gotten pissed off enough at said format to write a package for it

Calling it simple would be sugar-coating, but it's a better effort-to-payoff ratio than learning to program if you have no interest in it. Admittedly, it starts out looking more like grandpappy's hackerpad, but there are lots of tutorials and premade configs out there (Prelude, Doom, Spacemacs, many others) that can fast-track it into looking as modern as big tech's pretend powertools.

I am constantly annoyed at the lack of simple GUIs for various tasks. In particular, it really shouldn't be a third-party thing, it should be something provided by the actual developer...
On Windows it is genuinely the work of 15 minutes to open Visual C#, throw some buttons on a form and have them run some command line stuff when you click on them. I should know, I've done it!
On Linux, Zenity is generally installed on most systems, so you can write a shell script that pops up windows for you to enter shit instead of bothering ordinary people to remember command line switches and what have you. I do wish there was something as easy as Visual C# [maybe there is lol].
If you're shipping a CLI tool that isn't some specialized technical thing, at least give ordinary people a way to use it.

As an aside, you can string together GUI programs on Windows at least... hope you feel like writing black magic AHK scripts though...
It is amazing just how powerful AHK is, but getting two fully GUI programs to talk to each other deep magic that no non-programmer should ever be made to deal with, scraping text from forms, automated clicking/typing, and all kind of hyper-hackery at every corner. It is much, much more hideous than getting someone to write a shell script and read some manuals, since there are no manuals here, and AHK syntax is terrible.

[Lander]

I am constantly annoyed at the lack of simple GUIs for various tasks. In particular, it really shouldn't be a third-party thing, it should be something provided by the actual developer...
On Windows it is genuinely the work of 15 minutes to open Visual C#, throw some buttons on a form and have them run some command line stuff when you click on them. I should know, I've done it!
On Linux, Zenity is generally installed on most systems, so you can write a shell script that pops up windows for you to enter shit instead of bothering ordinary people to remember command line switches and what have you. I do wish there was something as easy as Visual C# [maybe there is lol].
If you're shipping a CLI tool that isn't some specialized technical thing, at least give ordinary people a way to use it.

Not unreasonable, for programs with a manageable set of verbs; if it only does a few things, then they might as well be easy.

The real trouble tends to arise at the extremes of the spectrum - monoliths like git (or most big GUI apps) that have spawned countless attempts at UI-fication, and primitives like grep or sed that are so simple as to appear useless to the UI-oriented onlooker, despite being super powerful in the context of standard I/O. Both tend to trip and end up creating myriad do-thing-specialized-to-* actions when the underlying system is actually expressed in terms of highly-composable atoms.

I think KDE has some generalized widget stuff for scripting up a visual interface, though that's coupled to a desktop environment - not entirely unlike winforms, I suppose. Maybe GNOME has an equivalent, but I haven't touched those ecosystems since the era of compiz and wobbly windows being the graphical flex-du-jour!

Tcl/Tk is interesting as an agnostic solution - bit creaky, since it's as old as the digital hills, but tends to be installed by default and dodges the now load up your IDE and import our GUI library problem by having/being a domain-specific scripting language.

And then there's Emacs, which is lovely for building interface since everything is just text with annotations that make the characters look special or act like UI in some way - light-bending mega-rich text, if you will - but it loops back round to being an environment-in-an-environment-specific kit.

As an aside, you can string together GUI programs on Windows at least... hope you feel like writing black magic AHK scripts though...
It is amazing just how powerful AHK is, but getting two fully GUI programs to talk to each other deep magic that no non-programmer should ever be made to deal with, scraping text from forms, automated clicking/typing, and all kind of hyper-hackery at every corner. It is much, much more hideous than getting someone to write a shell script and read some manuals, since there are no manuals here, and AHK syntax is terrible.

AHK is really something - I wrote a more-or-less functional tiling window manager in it, back before MS' FancyZones powertoy became a thing.
Bloody nightmare as I recall a perfect storm of awful control surface and a backend that really doesn't want to be puppeted.

Though I always found the UI hackery side of it too brittle to attempt. Like trying to scrape webpages, something gets updated and the whole thing shatters. Just today, I wrote a function to nab an RSS feed URL from a given @Whoever youtube handle, and I know in my bones that it's a ticking time-bomb no matter how fancy the regex is

[spmbx]

Being stuck in some wrong youtube algorithm where i get mjr's "hidden gems" and linus techtips horrible "look at me making a weird face" thumbnails in my recommended list constantly, no matter how often i click on "don't recommend this channel" on some page i can't find half of the time. Among others...

[BulletMagnet]

Being stuck in some wrong youtube algorithm

Every time I let some random YT video auto-play because I've got my hands in a sink full of dirty dishes or something I get that dreadful sense that the algorithm interprets it as "wow, he must really like this video, I'll totally send him more from now on!"

[TransatlanticFoe]

Bands/record labels, clearly label the A/B sides of the record will you? This afternoon I had to look up the timings for the tracks on Discogs to establish which side was which, not even the matrix runout was helpful on one (indeed it was the opposite of helpful because it ended B for the A side and A for the B side ).

Special thanks also to Pavement's Crooked Rain - because the labels were the wrong way round on the original release, reissues have the same problem. My brain is too old now to maintain an index of all this weird shit Clearly mark your damn record sides!!

[neorichieb1971]

Companies who advertise cheap services on the way in, but charge you the earth on the way out.

[Arino]

when you're done with the chores and finally free to play, but it's been a long day and you're too tired to play so instead of playing SHMUPS you just spend time on SHMUPS.COM