Things that piss you off that shouldn't

[mottaloo]

56 minutes ago, mjmooney said:

Sorry, but any Tolkien scholar will tell you that Mordor is in Birmingham - it was inspired by Moseley Bog (aka my old school playing fields and cross-country route). 

That place was a "games" option in my school for 5th year and above. It was aimed at those who hated real sport (my school was rugby only, no soccer) so i guess they were happy clearing up the bog in the lashing rain and cold. Other options from that year were squash, golf etc.

I could never get my head around the fact that these kids would gladly travel across town on two buses just to be knee deep in mud and freezing dirty water, pulling twigs, bramble and all manner of crap out of it every week. They proudly called themselves Moseley Boggers.

I guess i should admire them for their public service really. I just hated all things to do with gardening and that side of nature.

Edited May 6, 2020 by mottaloo

[Chindie]

Today generally has **** me off.

I was in a poor mood anyway, for various reasons. But then I had a solid batch of data entry crap which started the reality irk me. Particularly because the system we use, when we do a postcode search, lists the name of businesses at that address on the first line of the address. So if I need to enter Joe Bloggs Architects at B1 1AA, but theres some other business there, each time I've got to delete some other accountant or coffee shop or whatever. Which is just annoying.

Then I took a call chasing something that was needed urgently. I took the details, put the phone down, went to pass them to the person that deals with that particular kind of request, when next to me there was a crack, like an airgun pellet hitting a tin roof, and my computer died. Bollocks.

The electric had blown. And annoyingly the trip was to the side of my desk. Which I couldn't get at. So, I try to move the desk. The problem with that is the desk is a piece of shit flat pack thing the better part of 20 years old that's been taken apart and cobbled back together multiple times that I hastily chucked together when I needed to get back to work last year. So it broke. 

I then spent the better part of an hour trying to put it back together. Which was accompanied by increasing amounts of rage and foul language. I've never called an inanimate object a word removed quite as much as I did in that 40 minutes.

Eventually I decided the desk needed to die. So I ripped it apart and threw the bits in the back garden to burned in ritual fashion on the coming weeks.

I luckily have the other half of the desk in bits upstairs. So I lug that out of the spare bedroom bit by bit and fight to cobble it back together again, then put the computer back together again. The better part of an hour after the power blew, I was back up and running.

But the internet doesn't work. Check the connections. Still doesn't work. Restart the computer. Still doesn't work. Restart the router. Still doesn't work. Restart the network stuff. Still doesn't work. Check the service status. Fine. Run the diagnostic tool - 'looks like your internet isn't working'. Thanks. Restart the router again. Wait. Order a pizza. Wait. Check the internet again. It works!

Realise I've not had a drink for about 4 hours and all the pissing about with the desks had left me sweating like Gary Glitter in PC World. Get a drink.

...

The fridge has died.

[il_serpente]

6 hours ago, VILLAMARV said:

Assuming the anti smoke in my air lot are on about potential health risk. Out of interest are you also annoyed with the factories and cars around you? I'm not trying to be argumentative ( it comes naturally eh!) Just, as a recently ex smoker, it seems rather selective if you're not also against, say, aeroplanes. Or people with open fires. 

Edit: I want to add (so I don't start some sort of holy war) you can think what you like, I don't care, I'm not criticising, just interested

Death by a thousand cuts is less painful and noticeable.

[Chindie]

This is probably quite fitting for this thread. It absolutely shouldn't annoy me, but it does a little...

Todd McFarlane is a well known comic book artist. He became famous through his work with Marvel in the late 80s, he sorta co-created Venom during that time and redefined how Spider-Man was drawn forever after. A few years later he founded his own comic book company, Image, which became most well known for Spawn, a gritty urban Batman with loads of Christian mythology and hell related matters that mostly existed to be edgy and cool in the 90s. Spawn became a phenomenon and McFarlane is a wealthy man who went to set up a toy company that became renowned for highly detailed extremely well painted figures at quite reasonable prices.

Skip forward to today. McFarlane is still a wealthy man, Image is still going and has had more or less every big name comic book writer run a title or two through it, and the toy company continues apace. However, the toy side of things had changed over the years and they'd started mostly making semi articulated statues really which sold weakly and got poor reviews in the main. So trying to get back on the horse in the last year they have started gunning for the popular, articulated 1/12 scale market - a market that Hasbro dominates with its (pretty good) Marvel Legends and Star Wars Black Series lines. So far, so good. McFarlane has picked up some licences (the biggest being Fortnite, because of course it is, Mortal Kombat XI, which funnily enough gave them to go back to their roots and make a Spawn figure, and DC, which they've kinda **** up).

So what pisses me off that shouldn't? McFarlane has started a Kickstarter. A Kickstarter for a Spawn figure. A licence he owns, because he made the character. Made by the company he runs, a toy company. McFarlane is a wealthy man, who owns a company that makes action figures. He wants to make a somewhat prestige throwback figure to the original (insanely popular) Spawn figure they made in the 90d, and there's nothing stopping him doing that. He doesn't need a Kickstarter. He doesn't need to raise capital to get a figure made - his company literally makes them all day, and is aggressively ramping up its productions. He doesn't need to prove a market either, because he isn't beholden to a licence holder or an investor. So going to Kickstarter just feels... wrong. Kickstarter has a couple of suitable uses - small scale projects where people are going to struggle to get good investment options, and niche stuff. I don't necessarily have an issue with, say, a small game company starting a Kickstarter to try to get a sequel to a beloved but low selling game off the ground, but if Nintendo had a Kickstarter for the next Mario game that's taking the piss. And that's kinda what McFarlane has done here.

And yet the campaign has raised over $2.5m. It hit it's initial finding target in about 10 minutes, which was never in doubt. And it's riddled with little snide moves to make people buy more - there's 3 variants available, each of which having some unique feature, each of which missing something to slightly hamstring a fan or collector. But you can always buy all of them... To his credit McFarlane has gone mad with chucking in other stuff at various goals, but still if you want a modern style Spawn with a masked headsculpt you can't, you need to buy a modern and a classic to get that, etc etc...

I don't even like Spawn.

[maqroll]

i just unsubscribed from a website's emails, and they sent me an email to tell me that i just unsubscribed from getting their emails

[VILLAMARV]

Not sleeping. 

[Genie]

12 hours ago, Xela said:

Fed up of hearing about sport being restarted being good for the country and how it will give everyone a boost. Just piss off. Sport is way down my list of things. What would give me a boost more is being able to see my family or friends in person and enjoying a drink in a pub beer garden or a coffee and a cake in a coffee shop. Football can wait!

Pretty much every single comment I’ve read on social media says that football should not be restarted. The people don’t want it at the moment, so this is taking a health risk of the players, staff and many others who are needed to put a game on, to fulfil financial commitments.

[It's Your Round]

Having to go back inside for a three hour team meeting on Microsoft Teams, when I’ve just had a nice half hour sat in the sun munching a ham and mustard sandwich. Is it too late to pretend I’m sick?

[It's Your Round]

Also, the stupid words removed next door behaving like the lock down is all over is still pissing me off. 

[Stevo985]

18 hours ago, maqroll said:

i just unsubscribed from a website's emails, and they sent me an email to tell me that i just unsubscribed from getting their emails

Websites and companies periodically resubscribing you to their mailing lists that you've specifically unsubscribed to in the past is something that pisses me off. I don't know how they get away with it.

[HanoiVillan]

On 06/05/2020 at 17:49, chrisp65 said:

Second best town in Wales right there.

Left of that photo, the big black expanse of a spoil heap: I put in a planning application there for a renewable energy complex and power station, to reduce pollution and guarantee a power supply at predictable costs for the steel works, thus helping ensure its future. The application was rejected. Reason? The council had earmarked that space for a future tourism development.

Ten years ago that was. Still waiting to see what the tourism development might be...

Planners eh?

What a depressing lack of vision and common sense.

[bickster]

On 06/05/2020 at 18:03, VILLAMARV said:

I'm over in Swansea now fwiw. You can still go on our beach and everything. There's a wind and a solar farm over that side from what I can see and the steelworks is nowhere near as rampant as it used to be in our living memory when all the chimneys were rocking. Still mordor though.

Its an absolute pimple compared to what it was in the 70's. My Uncle worked there. Every third weekend, we'd be at my Granddads Every Saturday we'd go to Porthcawl so he could see his sister, We'd drive by the Steelworks in both directions but as soon as you got to the end of the Neath Valley you were in this weird industrial doomscape, the smell was horrendous, especially around Skewen but at night the lights and the smoke were fascinating to me as a kid.

But you think back... and my parents used to take me to Afan Lido on a nice day and I'd swim with my cousins, they were fun times but over there, literally just over the way was the Steelworks bellowing out much more than it does today, hell it was about five times the size... nobody thought about pollution back then

[mjmooney]

38 minutes ago, bickster said:

literally just over the way was the Steelworks bellowing out much more than it does today, hell it was about five times the size... nobody thought about pollution back then

In my student days (early 1970s) I once got a lift home from a guy who worked in the then-still-extant Sheffield steel industry, and I asked him about how the massive amount of filth being spewed out could be reconciled with the 'clean air' acts that had already been in force for several years. He explained that it was totally illegal, and they were accordingly fined fairly hefty amounts every month, virtually as a standing order payment. It was still worth their while, and a nice earner for the treasury. Made me question what the actual point of the legislation was. 

[chrisp65]

1 hour ago, bickster said:

Its an absolute pimple compared to what it was in the 70's. My Uncle worked there. Every third weekend, we'd be at my Granddads Every Saturday we'd go to Porthcawl so he could see his sister, We'd drive by the Steelworks in both directions but as soon as you got to the end of the Neath Valley you were in this weird industrial doomscape, the smell was horrendous, especially around Skewen but at night the lights and the smoke were fascinating to me as a kid.

But you think back... and my parents used to take me to Afan Lido on a nice day and I'd swim with my cousins, they were fun times but over there, literally just over the way was the Steelworks bellowing out much more than it does today, hell it was about five times the size... nobody thought about pollution back then

People bang on about Man Utd / Liverpool rivalry, or the second city derby.

You just know none of these people have ever been to Afan Lido vs Port Talbot.

 

But yeah, totally agree, 30 years ago it was a dystopian treat for the eyes to drive through P’talbot. The lights in the sky, the flames burning off any number of different poison gases from the various flues. I lived 40 miles down the coast and we’d regularly have yellow skies from the fumes from the steelworks. On a really exceptional day back in the 70’s you’d get the perfect storm of the atmosphere keeping the steel works smoke low, mixing it with the Aberthaw power station coal smoke, throwing in a bit of Rhoose cement works smoke and then getting it all to combine with our own industry here, BP, Dow Chemicals and Nitriles.

There were a few incidents in the late 70’s when it literally took the paint off cars. My old man got compensation on one car, only for a similar event 3 months later to take the paint off his new car.

Kids today eh, with their air.

[bickster]

Robert Fripp and Toyah during lockdown. Do us a favour... F*** OFF!

[mjmooney]

2 hours ago, bickster said:

Robert Fripp and Toyah during lockdown. Do us a favour... F*** OFF!

What they done now? 

[bickster]

32 minutes ago, mjmooney said:

What they done now? 

They have been making lock down videos every day, todays version of Heroes was just the final straw

[mjmooney]

40 minutes ago, bickster said:

They have been making lock down videos every day, todays version of Heroes was just the final straw

They are a very odd couple. 

[bickster]

33 minutes ago, mjmooney said:

They are a very odd couple. 

And then some, Swan Lake by the river at the bottom of their garden was also pretty mental. I honestly can't tell if they think it's good / funny / art / erm...

They clearly have no sense of inhibition and are craving some sort of attention, The cynic in me says they are attempting to get a sort of "At home with the Fripps" TV progamme deal

[mjmooney]

1 hour ago, bickster said:

And then some, Swan Lake by the river at the bottom of their garden was also pretty mental. I honestly can't tell if they think it's good / funny / art / erm...

They clearly have no sense of inhibition and are craving some sort of attention, The cynic in me says they are attempting to get a sort of "At home with the Fripps" TV progamme deal

Well they did do Celebrity Mr and Mrs, so it would fit.