Oh those pet peeves

[Sharkey]

Continuing with bitchery about Portland city planning: I love that the Mayor had this great initiative to make it a "bike friendly city," but am not so much a fan of the fact that it consisted of essentially just painting bike lanes on some major thoroughfares without other necessary modifications. It's a damn near perfect study in how not to do that sort of thing.

Ideally you concentrate motor vehicle traffic on major arteries by modifying other more residential routes to be penetrable by pedestrian and bicycle traffic but less so by cars. Motor vehicle traffic can reach parking destinations from arteries, but doesn't benefit from using residential routes to reach more distant destinations. Don't use fucking speedbumps for this: Rotaries and bollards work just fine for limiting car access while permitting access to bicycles and pedestrians. Speed bumps just slow down emergency vehicles.

Meanwhile, Portland puts bike lanes on already congested thoroughfares and drives more vehicle traffic to side streets already so congested with residential parking that there isn't room to pass oncoming traffic without a weird unwritten protocol of pulling over a bit in other people's driveways so other people can get by. And their choice for limiting vehicle traffic in residential neighborhoods? Fucking speedbumps.

Portland is the fucking worst at SimCity.

[Thad]

Sounds an awful lot like Phoenix.

[Sharkey]

Phoenix.

Not least among its many, many crimes was convincing me that if this is where people choose to live, then the whole of Arizona must be Satan's own shit-besmeared farting hole. Turns out some of the parts above Flagstaff don't make me want to cave in my own skull with the nearest rock. It's actually kind of nice.

When I weigh the benefits of air conditioning technology against the fact that it facilitated the existence of Phoenix, I think I'd trade back.

[Thad]

I miss Flagstaff so much.

[Mazian]

Well, I'm pretty sure I won't sit on my porch and tell you to get off my lawn. But that's because I have neither lawn nor porch.

Whereas it's my life goal to obtain those two things plus a cane, so I can wave it angrily at those damn smoochers.

Continuing with bitchery about Portland city planning: I love that the Mayor had this great initiative to make it a "bike friendly city," but am not so much a fan of the fact that it consisted of essentially just painting bike lanes on some major thoroughfares without other necessary modifications.

Seattle loves painting some bike symbols in the middle of what remains a general traffic lane (they even have a name: "sharrows") and calling it a day. Yep, reminding drivers that bicycles may be in the lane is a good solution to having bikers slog slowly uphill on a 30 MPH arterial.

[Thad]

An angled left arm to signal a right turn on a bicycle always struck me as silly.

The reason you angle your left arm to signal a right turn in a car is you cannot point to the right out of a driver's-side car window.

If you're riding a bicycle, you can totally just point to your right, and people will see it! Just do that!

[Mongrel]

Kinda, sorta re: viewtopic.php?f=11&p=34639#p34638 but not really

I know this is only tangentially related, and it's really a minor point, but you know what annoys me about the extreme sort of "beauty" culture we have now? The complete loss of ugly people in movies and TV.

It's strange and frankly downright fucking creepy, and never more so then when you see period shows or films. Like my dad was over the other day and brought some awful recent unwatchable film set in Appalachia or the Carolina backwoods in the 30's or whatever and EVERYBODY WAS SO *PRETTY*. And young! Sure they had tatty clothes and some mud splashed over them, but it was like watching Prince Valiant trying to do his best impression of Mudbug the medicant lunatic, some nightmare world summoned from the blackest grimoires of SoCal modelling agencies.

There's occasional older big-name survivors or guys who've made good as character actors - the Morgan Freemans and Danny Trejos of the world - but it seems like this pool is shrinking and aging all the time.

I'm playing my grouchy old man card here, but I go back and I watch something like Once Upon a Time in the West and those guys are DOG UGLY - and I love it. They have these fantastic faces I can stare at for hours, there's so much going on there, as befits actual human beings rather than fashionably-attired realdolls doing their best to pass their Turing tests. Al Mulock looks like he was scraped out an an alleyway somewhere (and poor bastard did have a rough time), Jack Elam has his pug's nose and a lazy eye for god's sakes - and a hell of an expressive range. Even the supposedly good-looking main characters wouldn't even make it in the door of an agency today - Charles Bronson? Jason Robards? Hell, I'm not even sure Henry Fonda would make it and he was a ravishing man-god by the standards of his time.

But then, to tell the truth none of these people are actually ugly, it's just our standards have become so narrowly focused that there's no room for any sort of variation, like a bad 70's sci-fi novel where everyone in an entire pristine city looks like Lt. Ilea and outside the dome there's savage man-eating jungles. Only a lot more boring. And creepy. It's fucking uncanny valley, Data-please-stop-that, fucking creepy.

[Yoji]

If you're riding a bicycle, you can totally just point to your right, and people will see it! Just do that!

I see people just point lazily in the direction they're turning/veering/drifting sometimes, on the super-uncommon occasion when they bother to signal at all.

I know this is only tangentially related, and it's really a minor point, but you know what annoys me about the extreme sort of "beauty" culture we have now? The complete loss of ugly people in movies and TV.

Mrs. Ideal brought this up watching A Game of Thrones a couple times. She points out that in the books, Tryion and Brienne in particular are not attractive in the least. Brienne is described as much more homely than Gwendoline Christie portrays her, and Tyrion is downright hideous (and that's before he gets his nose cut off in The Battle of the Blackwater, not just a rugged animu face scar).

[Friday]

beauty standards

Yeah, this shit has been this way for a while now. Probably it started really getting bad in the 80s and 90s.

The weird thing is, in real life, hardly -anyone- I've ever talked to seems to prefer that impossible model type skinny twig look. I mean, I know that's anecdotal, but when it's EVERY SINGLE PERSON I HAVE EVER SPOKEN TO, it seems like either they're lying and they really do want to fuck sticks with 4 other sticks coming off the main stick, or the fashion industry lives in this weird hyper-bubble of what's sexy that only they actually think is true.

Yes, I know that (certain) clothes look better or hang better off of a certain body type and I guess that's why being more of the twiggy side is sometimes better when your whole job is to showcase the clothes. They could still stand to feed their models. The rate of anorexia and bulimia in the fashion industry is staggering.

[Mongrel]

Body image and stick-figures are part of it, yeah, and the fashion industry in particular is in this nutcase bubble where that shit is "normal" but we've now also added the fact that we've got a rough mathematical idea of the bounds for a "perfect" face, so that's stacked on the body issues. Both are creepy in their own ways but the faces, man, some movies now look like they're populated by some sort of bizarre clone legion.

[Brantly B.]

Not so much a peeve as a preference, but I find it such an odd behavior that most people who IM me at work will start with "Hi Brent" and will absolutely not go any further until I greet them back. Most will even START typing their actual question and then stop midway if they don't get a hello back. I suppose that's the common idea of politeness (or of not wasting time talking to a nonresposive person), but I'm the opposite way: I'll always put what the hell it is that I want right on the first line, because I assume that everybody has something better to do than establish a handshaking protocol with me. Apparently that comes off as pushy and rude. Whatever, humanity.

When people force me to ask a battery of questions to tease out what they're even contacting me for, THEN it becomes a pet peeve.

[Mongrel]

It's basically the awkwardness of text-based mediums. There's really no winning solution there - if you say hello and then immediately follow it up with a request, your hello can seems like a lip-service formality. If you say hello and wait reply, it's more courteous, but wastes time which might also be taken as rude. And if you just open up with a straight demand, that's got an even higher chance of being seen as rude!

In real life, you can still get those situations where you might wait while being ignored, but it certainly happens much less often.

You clearly already know all that. I just think nobody wants to be the chatty guy asshole who talks over you (unless they're already that guy anyway), so they go for the option that carries the lowest chance of being seen as rude but the highest chance of taking a little more time (and which is incidentally the most common form in real life).

Also, as in real life, if you're close enough friends or coworkers, you can just shoot requests back and forth without any formality requirements anymore. But obv that doesn't work across an entire corporation.

[Sharkey]

"Politeness oils the wheels of life."

Until you use the wrong oil in a high temperature engine and it becomes a gummy mess that makes the whole metaphor seize up.

[sei]

I'm the opposite way: I'll always put what the hell it is that I want right on the first line, because I assume that everybody has something better to do than establish a handshaking protocol with me. Apparently that comes off as pushy and rude. Whatever, humanity.

When people force me to ask a battery of questions to tease out what they're even contacting me for, THEN it becomes a pet peeve.

I really dislike the "hi, how are you" preliminary bullshit that precedes what people actually want. It's intended social lubricant, but just wastes time. They try to appear friendlier/less demanding, but it just imposes more demands. First, (1) humor/tolerate me and (2) give me more of your time than merely fulfilling my request would actually take.


guys i am so fun at parties

[Silversong]

Not so much a peeve as a preference, but I find it such an odd behavior that most people who IM me at work will start with "Hi Brent" and will absolutely not go any further until I greet them back.

The use of "Hi, how are you today?" as a greeting by strangers before stating their business used to be at the top of my pet peeves, and I refused to partake. Until my boss called me on it because I was a receptionist, and it was in fact my job to reply to that question with the same question instead of glossing quickly over it and asking what they wanted. Current bosses also asked me to please put more words in my emails, they sound rude. So now I just try to pad everything out, and then go back over it and add several more unnecessary words, because that is apparently what everybody wants but me.

[beatbandito]

I feel like if you get perturbed by the formality use of it you're the dick. I used to too but that's just how normies talk. If you actually take time to respond, or require someone respond before moving the conversation forward you are holding them verbally hostage.

[Thad]

If I haven't said hi to the person I'm IMing yet today, then I'll open with "Morning, John," and then whatever I actually want. Two words isn't too much to spend before getting to the point.

I've also learned that if somebody asks me a question and I don't immediately know the answer, I should probably at least acknowledge that I got the question, and say something like "Hang on, let me check" or "Let me finish up here and then I'll look into it."

The use of "Hi, how are you today?" as a greeting by strangers before stating their business used to be at the top of my pet peeves, and I refused to partake. Until my boss called me on it because I was a receptionist, and it was in fact my job to reply to that question with the same question instead of glossing quickly over it and asking what they wanted. Current bosses also asked me to please put more words in my emails, they sound rude. So now I just try to pad everything out, and then go back over it and add several more unnecessary words, because that is apparently what everybody wants but me.

This is the closest thing I ever got to an explanation for why PetSmart fired me, except nobody ever actually told me they had a problem with me not bullshitting enough.

Here's what I wrote about it back in '012:

[My agency rep] added that I'd been sacked because they thought I didn't schmooze enough with the end users over the phone -- something that nobody had ever actually complained to me about. I wasn't rude, or even brusque; I was just, in my rep's words, "too focused on getting the job done". I'm used to support jobs emphasizing getting the task done quickly, because the user doesn't want to be on the phone and wants to get back to what she was doing. But apparently that's not how it worked at this company; they wanted me to slow down and shoot the breeze -- except nobody ever bothered to tell me that. Come on, guys, if you want me to talk about the weather, just say so -- I have quite a lot to say about the weather in Phoenix in June, even when half the state isn't on fire.

My point is, fuck PetSmart.

[Joxam]

So the only time anything like this has ever been an issue for me is our local Taco Bell. Their drive thru starts every order not with "Hello welcome to blah blah can i take your blah blah" or something similar to that, no, they start their transactions with, "Hello, how are you today?" and then they just stop until you respond. Now I don't complain because its something that upsets me, its just, in that context I never have any idea how to actually forward the conversation that doesn't involve me awkwardly fumbling around for words and eventually just mumbling, "o...oo....ok i guess.....?" :D

[Mothra]

I do the "wait for response" thing if it's the kind of person who will not respond to your question if you just state it and wait. Sometimes I need the guy to establish he's there, otherwise it will never be answered.

Some people are annoying like that.

[sei]

So the only time anything like this has ever been an issue for me is our local Taco Bell. Their drive thru starts every order not with "Hello welcome to blah blah can i take your blah blah" or something similar to that, no, they start their transactions with, "Hello, how are you today?" and then they just stop until you respond.

The local El Pollo Loco now plays a pre-recorded upsell/promotional message before someone asks for your order.

I'm here to order food. Remove barriers to that. I saw the shit on your menu already.

(I bet Thad has fun stories about upselling from GoDaddy.)

I was just, in my rep's words, "too focused on getting the job done". I'm used to support jobs emphasizing getting the task done quickly, because the user doesn't want to be on the phone and wants to get back to what she was doing. But apparently that's not how it worked at this company; they wanted me to slow down and shoot the breeze -- except nobody ever bothered to tell me that.

Were you blowing lonely grandmas off? That breeze-shooting is their weekly dose of human contact. It's the thin thread of humanizing recognition that separates them from the void.







jk fuck smalltalk