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

Neanderthal OTM*

I'm embarrassed to admit this but I got so sick of this on products (shampoo for example) sold on online retail sites that I emailed one of them and asked what the asterisk refers to. Products like that have tons of 'claims*'.

gah, have been paying £3 a month for a patreon podcast feed for a podcast i haven't been listening to for over a year. i finally have time to check them out again but the lowest tier is now £5 a month and i can't get to them.

(nothing stopping me, other than bandwidth, i guess, from paying the higher level for a month and downloading them all in that month. but it seems a bit cheeky)

went to cancel, it told me there were other tiers and would i like to see them. took me to a page listing my current option and all the things i didn't have access to before.

looks like there are two lists, or something, new customers only get the higher one, perhaps.

june 2020 was the last one i listened to 8(

right now we're doing a stage version of Silence of the Lambs with Elizabethan dialogue, our Clarice's real name is K@therine, but she goes by "Kat". for whatever reason, the director calls her by her first name, but calls her "K@therine" instead of Kat, and everybody else by their character names.

there's a character named Catherine Martin, and for multiple rehearsals, actors have pointed out that it's confusing because every time he gives an instruction to "Katherine", nobody knows if he means the actress Katherine who is playing Clarice, or the actress who is playing Catherine Martin. and despite him being informed of this at three different rehearsals, he continues to do it, and he could easily solve it by either just calling us all by our real names, or calling Kat "Clarice".

it's a stupid thing to get annoyed by because ultimately it's more a mild annoyance but it does simply because it's a stupid problem he created and could easily fix and yet every rehearsal it's the same refrain:

"Next, Katherine will move this set piece..."

"which Katherine?"

"Sorry, I mean the actress playing Clarice"

like an Abbott and Costello bit

This raises a number of questions.

Are the dance numbers more like Jerome Robbins or do they take a Bob Fosse direction?

I hate it when the dishwasher is getting pretty full, but you give it a look and think, hmm, it can definitely wait a little longer, to start it now seems like a waste of time and space. And then a short bit later the rest of the family shows up and somehow instantly generates an absolute deluge of dirty dishes, so many that not only is the dishwasher now full, but there are so many dishes left over that they can already fill a significant hunk of the next load after the one that I now need to do ASAP is finally done. Except now I have to wait two hours for the cycle to complete, with a stack of overflow dishes by the sink, already on deck.

this is pretty much a word-for-word description of my life

may be rational
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/how-to-keep-your-job-and-remain-unvaccinated-within-the-law-v2-tickets-224858416577?aff=ebdssbonlinesearch&keep_tld=1
"How to keep your job and remain unvaccinated within the law."- V2

subtitled: "How to keep your job and your blood clean within the law"

because your body is a holy temple and vaccines defile your innate purity

3cd player is 16 years old and keeps going from playing ok to skipping entire discs. Or cannot start reading a disc so skips to next one. Was flashing up No Disc apart from the one it was playing.
So I need to keep using disc cleaner on it.
Is it dying.
I am a little attached to this thing. It's been in my bedroom all the time since I went there.
Is there a reason why it would skip entire discs? Like it'll go from disc 1 to disc 3 and not recognise the existence of disc 2. Just wondering if there is a good fix without defenestration or seeing if there is a repair shop. Do people even do that anymore?

Is it certain discs it doesn’t recognize? Copies maybe?

Yeah, I've noticed some of my old CD-Rs are starting to decay, or show up as No Disc, too.

seems to read them some of teh time and not others. I don't think I've played anything I've burnt on there in a while . Should be official discs for teh most part.

In general the semiconductor lasers lose output power over time, resulting in less reliable reads, errors etc. I believe the laser assemblies for most makers are available on eBay etc, but I wouldn't really know about how to align them etc. If you want to keep yours going a bit longer, there are usually little adjustment screws near the laser lens which control laser power - you'd need to search for the model to know how to adjust them.
Heat is the enemy of laser diodes, never keep an optical disc player on top of something like an amp which sheds significant heat.

Right will see if I can find a repair manual online.

Happy to help if you can provide the model number. Hi-Fi Engine is the first port of call usually - they require an account for downloading but I've been registered for years with no consequences I can discern. https://www.hifiengine.com

Also the AudioKarma forums are full of helpful enthusiasts: https://audiokarma.org

one of my friends has the uncanny ability to know when I just started listening to music and calls me then every time. it's eerie how often it has happened in the last month.

being how little I get to do it these days, it always makes me mad and then I have to remind myself they couldn't possibly have known

But seriously, FedEx, is it that goddamn difficult to update your tracking information to reflect that my package probably won't arrive at my home on a day that has already passed? If you do have a functioning time machine, though, I apologize in advance.

My husband doesn't see earbuds when I'm wearing them.

It doesn’t make me angry, but my cat always chooses to jump on my lap just when I’m about to get up. I don’t want to hurt his feelings so I change my plans for a few minutes.

I do this too, but usually a few minutes extends into a few hours

leaving collection at work, contributions via website that starts by asking for name and address on first page and then card details on the second. so i entered garbage address details because i didn't want them to know, but proper card details. am now worried the bank will stop my card days before christmas.

put it all on one page. better still, let me use paypal rather than entering my card number into random websites.

How my phone managed to go from 98% pre C-Cleaner to 99% after. & the whole thing of how much memory gets used anyway.
Don't seem to be able to strip it down in a way that doesn't fill way too rapidly

Trying to walk across a car park which is the only way for pedestrians to get across an area.
Walk past a car and it nearly pulls out into me.

I saw a car pull out into another car in a car park elsewhere around town a couple of weeks back and wound up ripping off the front bumper.
possibly more of the external shell.

parking lots are easily where the largest number of collisions happen, but since they are generally minor, people continue to disregard the danger and drive inattentively and too fast

Trying to compile a somewhat accurate list of what I've read this year.
& realisingthat teh option of being able to see what I had borrowed from the library had not been turned on. So can't remember all of what I have read from there this year.

Also the chronology with which I uploaded titles to goodreads didn't have anything to do with when I actually read them. I worked thorugh at one point noting off titles i had read earlier. & don't think I noted everything when i did read it.
PLus added titles as i bought them to my Currently Reading list as i physicallly had a copy I was intending to read. Wasn't just noting books i would read at some future date though the amount i buy does tend to mean that.

I hate hard seltzer. I hate its taste, I hate its very existence.

look mate, I don't know how to say this, but... what even is hard seltzer?

Wine coolers for the 21st Century.

yeah my niece had some hard seltzer on offer at Thanksgiving. I tried a “winter spice” flavored one & it was deeply unpleasant.
not unlike drinking a fizzy Yankee Candle

blech

xpost kinder - flavored sparkling water w alcohol

I sort of guessed it might be alcoholic fizzy water but then thought no-one would buy that :)

It's so gross and infused with live active bro cultures.

The sorry ones are those who buy it more than once.

So it's like an alky seltzer?

I thought I saw alcoholic water on sale when I was in Dublin in mid to late 90s which always seemed a bit obtuse.
Right around the time some firm was trying to bring out a commercial Poitin.

more like soda water in the uk? thats prob closest

looked up to see if my bad pun was seen to be rotten and found that there was an actual brand using the term Alky Seltzer.
would alco seltzer have been a better pun?

(i enjoyed it, fwiw)

people who instead of writing you messages, send you voice recordings.

one thing if they're driving or something, but i have two friends now who on occasion will send me like three 1 minute recordings instead of a message and I'm like, this is harder for me to read when I'm working, esp with a work firewall that occasionally prevents those recordings from playing (so I gotta grab my phone)

block these friends immediately imo

my IA today is magnetic poetry. remember how fun those seemed, how you gave them as gifts to your cool friends? THEY SUCK. they are annoying they are useless as actual magnets except if you use like 30 of them and they are a PITA to remove if they stayed up for 10 years or more

magnetic poetry was like a 'ice-breaker' party game for one participant

lol true

You can get "hard seltzer" in the UK too. The alcopop/cider fridge at my local Co-Op has a shelf or two of it: brands like Mike's, Dash and White Claw, and I think established brands like Smirnoff and Kopparberg have got in on it too.

as an alcopop/cider drinker I disapprove bcz when I see brightly coloured cans promising tropical/candy-like fruit flavours & 5% alcohol I am like "yesss, super-sweet sugary junk booze to pour onto my childishly unsophisticated tastebuds" but nah, it's just some expensive alcoholic fizzy water with a faint tang of metallic chemicals

(concur on how hard it is to remove decade-old magnetic poetry; we moved house recently and I thought putting the other half's beloved old fridge magnets in a box was a nice simple task but the metallic backing had crumbled and welded itself permanently to the fridge, so the first couple of magnets I tried to lift got bent out of shape and left a mess behind on the fridge

also the poetry itself is a great way to sit in a solipsistic drunken haze at a party assembling weird ugly sentence fragments which seem hilarious/deep/euphonious until someone else comes along to look and you're all like "haha you see?" and they look at you like you're a serial killer and you look back on your selected word assemblage and realise that is in fact a very reasonable conclusion)

I've noticed a lot of small breweries introducing hard seltzer, too, because no doubt it is easy money, and they are happy to tap that tacky and (literally) tasteless market, a la whiskey distillers that market so-called "white" whiskey or moonshine.

I stopped drinking beer for health reasons a while ago. I will still drink cider, wine, and spirits enthusiastically. I don't much like hard seltzers, hard lemonades, and hard root beers, but they aren't harming me in any way by existing. I'm watching the emergence of more / better canned cocktails with interest, though. There's a Bombay Sapphire canned gin and tonic that is not bad. I mean, it's not as good as an actual gin & tonic but it isn't offensive.