Entries Tagged 'Frustration' ↓

I’m not sure who’s to blame, whether it’s a person or a group of programmers, but whoever decided years ago that AOL Instant Messenger is so important a new message window should always pop up and take control must be killed.

It’s been 13 years now since AIM was intially released. I know it’s expected for it to have sucked back then, afterall, it’s AOL. It’s been long enough to NOT do this. But no, despite all the version changes, despite total overhauls of protocols, despite “Triton”, despite the fact now there’s one unified IM window…god help you if you leave AIM on without something already open, because when you’re on a Team Fortress 2 hot streak, when you and Sandvich are destroying everyone assaulting your base, someone will send you a message.

AIM will decide nothing, NOTHING is more important than it is, and it will force any fullscreen app to close and take control of the keyboard.

Whoever made this decision must now be killed, and if I ever experience the joys of time travel, I will use it to prevent this decision from ever being made. Granted, depending on your theory of time travel and time the fact I’m typing this may mean I won’t ever do it, but causality can suck it I say.

Belts cost more than pants, and I find this inexplicable. Maybe I just buy really cheap pants, but I fail to comprehend why belts cost so damn much. Give me a buckle, a little thread, a need, and some beef jerky. I’ll make a belt. I’ll make a delicious belt, in fact, that you can eat if you’re lost in the desert. You can’t eat a regular leather belt, and certainly not a cloth one! But for 20 bucks, I can definitely make an edible jerkybelt.

So if I can make a jerkybelt for 20, why can’t I just buy a non-edible, single-function (well, I suppose making sure no child goes unbeaten is a secondary function) belt for less than that? I just want my pants to stay up, I don’t need the emergency ration, and I, like my friend, am pretty sure belts are just made from shoe scraps anyway. No excuse I say, not for this pricing!

This one goes out to my nice nerd brothers.

When a girl has a history of dating jerks, she’s going to keep it up. She may express interest in you, and likely will, but that first date will be the only date unless she’s actively been single for a while and worked out the issues that had her dating those guys to begin with.

I know. We’ve all been there. The first date seemed awesome. And then you never heard back. You did nothing wrong, and your female friends will say you did it all completely right, but people rarely break out of their relationship and friendship habits. It takes recognition of the problem, the pattern, the cause, and the will to change it.

The dating world would be a much better place were we all aware of this, and all aware of the progress we have and haven’t yet made. Alas, such self-recognition the realm of fiction, and we nerds continue to try and save girls who have a history of dating jerks who don’t want to be saved nearly as much as they seem to imply.

How egomaniacal have we become? Must we be in every photograph we take, and beyond that, must it always be a horrid squeezed together “arm held out looking at the camera” angle? Is it too much to say “Hey, can you take a quick picture for me?”

Apparently it is. We’re so damn self-important we have to have a camera that shows the picture on the front so we can see every shitty photograph starring ourselves as we take it. At least we haven’t made the Myspace mirror shot an official standard yet, but I’m not sure this is better. Aside from enabling terrible photography and egotism, this makes the dreaded “fat girl angle shot” all the easier, and I think we all know someone with a regretted Myspace hookup due to one of those.

Maybe I should just give up on this whole “quality pictures on the internet” thing, but I really don’t think pandering to the lowest common denominator is ever a good idea.

God damn it, another Saturday Night Live movie. Don’t they remember how poorly this went in the 90s? Aside from an okay Pat movie, you can’t make movies out of a 5 minute bit. In fact, you shouldn’t be making 5 minute bits generally, because they’re dragging on too damn long again.

Nothing over 3 minutes unless it’s really, REALLY funny. Like it makes people who aren’t Jimmy Fallon start corpsing.

That said, MacGruber bits are 20-30 seconds long. They’re funny for exactly that long. I’ve seen 30 second commercials that were already too damn long. Let’s do the math really quick, okay?

5 minute sketch converted to 90 minutes, that’s an 1800% length increase, and it ends up being very, very unfunny to outright shitty right around the 300 percent mark. 30 seconds to 90 minutes? 18,000 percent increase. If MacGruber stops being funny at 200%, and gets bad at 300%…

Well, you can do the math from here, because I’m probably doing this all wrong to begin with, but the answer is clearly the kind of suck the ends the world. You think the black hole the LHC can make is scary? Wait until MacGruber. Rumor is it was, in fact, where all that CERN funding went since they haven’t been able to get enough collisions to form a Higgs-Boson.

When they pay you $100 million for scientific research, it’s easy to think that movie’s a good idea!

So when I want to stay up, I just fall asleep. When I want to fall asleep, I lay there in bed awake.

What gives, depression? The normal self-loathing aspects weren’t enough? Now you’re just fucking with me.

All restaurant bathrooms must have an interior handle or a door that closes in two seconds or less.

You’ve already waited a while for someone to leave or for someone else to come back so your table isn’t left alone like nobody’s eating.

You shouldn’t have to wait 10-15 seconds to gamble on just going immediately and someone coming in (especially if it’s a one person bathroom and thus, no shielding between you and door) or waiting 15 seconds more and letting one slip out of the chamber.

If the door just locks with a deadbolt, that thing better close incredibly fast or have a way for me to yank it shut. No exceptions.

Cable companies are trying to convince me OnDemand is better than Netflix, because I can rent, say, Sherlock Holmes right now.

It’s true, I can. I have to wait a month for Netflix. I also don’t have to pay 7 dollars for the movie when it comes out, fight through the awful OnDemand interface, tiling, and every other problem the cable company can throw at me.

You know what else is shitty about OnDemand? EVERYTHING.

In my attempts to watch The Ricky Gervais Show on it, the episode listing is as such.

The Ricky Gervais Show: Episo…

The Ricky Gervais Show: Episo…

The Ricky Gervais Show: Episo…

The Ricky Gervais Show: Episo…

The Ricky Gervais Show: Episo…

The Ricky Gervais Show: Episo…

Seeing the problem here? No? That’s because you use common sense. You presume the episode listing is number one at the top and six at the bottom, or reverse depending on how they sort. But you, sir, are wrong.

The current order is 4, 3, 6, 5, 2, 1. You can’t tell, however, without another menu dive, and then backing out of it, which takes you back to the HBO series menu, then back to Ricky Gervais, then down to the next episode. God forbid OnDemand actually remember where you were in a menu. Or work. Episode six is actually episode four right now. And for some reason there’s no HD option for HBO. There’s no HD option for a lot of things, but as HBO costs good money, I’d expect it.

But this is the same company who’s DVRs forget to record all the time, and whose buffer is randomly deleted. For those not in the know, the DVRs are supposed to record the last hour of TV on the channel you’re on, so you can rewind or replay. Great idea, right? Doesn’t work. Cox sends out a signal bump three or four times a day that deletes the buffer. If you’re behind you’ll be shot up to the live signal, and what you were watching is gone. Hopefully you didn’t start recording late, because if you did, the end of it just got cut off. For some reason, the software acts like its copying from VHS rather than a digital source, committing information to the drive in real time. If you start recording at 7, you’re done at 8. If you start recording at 7:05, however, even if you’re watching live, the recording ends at 8:05. It’s the same data was was from 7 to 8, but it’s off  by that amount of time. And if the data gets reset at 8, you just lost the last five minutes. It’s one of the many, many things brought to you by shitty Scientific Atlanta programming and Cox’s insistence that the box they’re charging you $12 a month for is high quality.

I’ll have more examples of how this is the opposite of truth soon, I’ve got a nice notepad file of notes growing.

Then I saw this.

Holy. Shit.

Not an SIW ad!

It’s not that self-insert books are rare, self-insert fanfic is common, and lots of companies make audiobooks with someone’s name as the main character.

This, though…they have at least two vampire books. I’m guessing somewhere around ten, in reality. When did vampires get ruined, again? I know there was the original movie jump from terrifying demonic things to charming evil, but when did they become the omnipotent heroes who can do anything but they’re GENTLE WITH ME OMG SO PERFECT?

Is this even necessary, really? Isn’t the whole thing about Twilight that Bella is so completely personalityless (and Edward and Jacob for that matter), that you simply step right into her shoes? Even her name is just a term of endearment.

God damn it.

Forever, really. Every year Valentine’s Day comes and goes, and every year I see ad blitzes for romantic comedies, overpriced teddy bears, and pajama deliveries.

Nobody actually likes the day. People in relationships hate the pressure it adds. Single people hate the reminders of being anywhere from an extra wheel to a second class citizen. Valentine’s is when you remember you are very much alone, that you were passed over for a promotion because you weren’t married and the other guy had a wife to pay for (true story for me and several friends), and that one chick decided instead of spending the day with you as planned she’d go spend the weekend with a guy she met the night before. Or that the woman you went on that fantastic date with will talk about how she doesn’t want a relationship with anyone.

It’s a crappy day for everyone who isn’t selling flowers. Although to be fair, more and more companies get in on the act. Even Sony is offering Valentine’s promotions on the Playstation Network, and NHL 10 has gotten Valentine’s related in-game ads. Really, I find the in-game ads most puzzling, the demographic least likely to celebrate Valentine’s gets the most intrusive ads.

But nobody ACTUALLY celebrates Valentine’s. People just get depressed on it over never living up to expectations. Even Christmas manages to come out as a better day for most people, even Thanksgiving which has two fights built in. There’s no real romance to the day, it’s “Hey, look what I’ve got and you don’t” at most. It’s a damn near objectivist holiday. A purer form of consumerism than Christmas has become, and how better to celebrate the martyrdoms of two Saints named Valentine? Buy some crap you nor your partner will like. A cheap paper sentiment, chalk flavored candy with illiterate scrawling, some bad chocolate, and according to the commercials, sit in adjacent tubs while your resurrected erection goes to waste after popping a pill.

I say to hell with it, it’s time to recognize this day as the blight of a social obligation it is, wherein you’re forced to spend exorbitant amounts of money on shit, or be reminded that nobody will ever love you.That if you buy less than the next guy (and let’s be fair, it’s usually men who have to buy all this), you don’t love your partner as much. But you can ask a Walgreens gift advisor for help fixing that! Buy more mylar balloons! Buy more bags of fattening candy that’s somehow worse than candy corn, but is purchased anyway because of the heart shapes! Enjoy the continued ad blitz wherein every break is composed of Vermont Teddy Bear, Cialis, Pajamagram, Cialis, Vermont Teddy Bear.

It’s my belief that we must immediately begin calling Valentine’s VD. Clearly it IS a disease, leading to poverty, depression, and self-injury, so the moniker is appropriate. Beyond that, given time, it should acquire RAS (redundant acronym syndrome) syndrome, as with PIN number and ATM machine.. Soon everyone will call it VD Day, and perhaps, given the unpleasant connotation forget about it entirely. Nobody’s going to buy a Vermont Teddy Bear or Pajamagram (which, by the way, are part of the same company) for VD Day.