Open Thread: It's Been Bugging Me

Can you guys hear me all the way over there when I chew? It sounds so loud. Especially Pringles. *crunch crunch crunch*

What's been bugging you lately?

OPEN THREAD BELOW!

43 comments:

Patrick Knipe said...

Despite being raised all my life by parents who strictly and sternly told me a thousand times not to talk with my mouth full or to eat with my mouth open, I am now the only person in the house (a house which includes my parents!) who actually follows these rules and it drives me to the point of distraction.

Pringles are awesome, by the way. They're such fun to eat, it's amazing.

chris the cynic said...

I have often had that same concern.

-

So what has been bugging me lately? That I don't know how to make gimp do the things that I want it to do because, while in theory one should be able to, I have no idea where to start.

That raspberry bushes have thorns. I made sure to put on long pants and closed shoes for picking this morning, but didn't even consider long sleeves (do I even have anything, not a coat, with long sleeves?) which means ouch and itch and whatnot because damn those things are annoying. (The thorns I mean, the fruit is nice.)

Time, I never have enough of it.

Stuff? I feel like there's other stuff that's been bugging me lately, but my mind is going blank.

Oh, and that I can't figure out how to make cafepress just say, "You can have this image on any X" for values of X equal to, say, t-shirt, poster, whatnot, without and instead have to list every sub-variation of X as a separate product (last time I tried to make one thing available on any shirt I had to give up and list 43 different types of shirt each as a separate product.) (Brought it up in this post, but you'll have to scroll to the bottom: "Which brings me to another point.")

Smilodon said...

That my body responds to stress by clenching my jaw, which gives me headaches. Seriously, evolution, why did this seem like a good idea?

Patrick Knipe said...

I find it annoying in general that the human body responds to physical problems like a particularly aggressive firewall- with constant messages.

I understand the purpose, but I would love for a 'stop the hurty' switch at times.

How's this for evolution? Sometimes when I'm tired I yawn- as do we all- but sometimes I yawn to the point where my jaw muscles... Cramp or strain or something. BAM! Shooting jaw pains. Did this at school once and fought the urge to scream out loud.

Brin Bellway said...

Pringles are a nice idea in theory, but are unfortunately ruined by the addition of sugar. Potato chips are not supposed to be sweet.

Chris: (do I even have anything, not a coat, with long sleeves?)

Why wouldn't you? What else would you wear in winter? (Plus sweatjackets can be worn as shirts in a pinch, though it feels a bit weird.)

chris the cynic said...

What else would you wear in winter?

A coat. Or layers of coats as the situations require. I have many coats of varying degrees of warminess, so if I keep the house cool I can just wear a light coat inside and heavier coats outside.

Ana Mardoll said...

Seriously. I hate that I have to go to the bathroom every twenty minutes when I'm anxious. The act might make me lighter and therefore easier for me to run away, but evolution needs to realize that the things that make me anxious aren't run-away-able from.

Loquat said...

Oh, is that what that crunching noise was? I believe I speak for the entire state of Pennsylvania when I say - Can we interest you in some nice quiet Jello instead?


What's been bugging me lately is MMO design choices that encourage players to act like they're playing a single-player game, or, even worse, encourage players to actively resent the presence of other players in their game world. It's been particularly bad in Rift's current summer event, because someone on the design team apparently decided it would be a good idea, in a game where thousands of people play in the same world together, to put in special event quest objectives that vanish when someone interacts with them and then take a few minutes to reappear. In other words, there are multiple special quests, doable only within the 2-week period of this summer event, that are reasonably quick to do when you're the only person doing them but get exponentially slower as more people join in. And while some of these quests let you get around that by grouping up with the other players, the two most irritating quests only allow one person to use each objective spawn, which means grouping up does you no good. And for all of these quests, the number of objectives that can exist in the world at once is only slightly greater than the number you have to get to complete the quest.

It's particularly vexing because Guild Wars 2 (final beta weekend starts today!) has "players should never be punished for playing together" as one of its guiding principles. Pretty much every activity you can do in-game is designed so that, if other players decide to come do the same thing, that improves everyone's outcome - or, at worst, doesn't affect you. Even resource gathering is designed this way - all the resource nodes you see are specific to you, so dozens of players could mine the same iron deposit at once without any penalty. And the Rift designers have obviously been peeking at Guild Wars 2 (Rift, a game with 2 player factions, just introduced 3-faction PvP that makes no sense in the context of Rift's lore but is extremely reminiscent of Guild Wars 2's 3-faction PvP) so I don't know if they missed the above principle or just didn't think it was important.

*grumble grumble grumble*

Cupcakedoll said...

I'll join the chorus of those who are bugged by fight-or-flight reactions. There's a certain amount of screaming at my workplace, either unhappy children or a co-worker who yells a lot in a very angry tone that always hits me with unnecessary adrenaline. Co-worker is not angry, she yells like this at her friends and then they laugh, but even after all this time working with her I cannot convince my hindbrain that she's not about to punch somebody, and I won't have to jump out of the way of a fight.

graylor said...

I resent that my father's domesticated raspberry bushes (thornless, whoo-hoo) haven't amounted to anything. Not a single raspberry in three years. The thornless blackberries are awesome, though. Unfortunately the crows are of the same opinion. ;-p

It bugs me that peach trees don't produce anything useable here. We're one county north of the SC border, for pity's sake. Fiddly trees.

*

Some days living stuck in a human body bugs me. Why can't I crochet for hours straight, tendonitis-prone wrists? Why are human knees so sucky? Can I get uploaded to an android body now?

cjmr said...

Pringles contain wheat gluten. *grumph*

My 3 year old can eat raspberries faster than I can pick them. I don't wear any protective clothing to pick them, BTW, the scratches just don't bother me.

The number of categories of callers who do not have to abide by the 'Do Not Call' registry rules is fast approaching the number who do. I think I will stop answering the phone entirely. But at least I don't live in a 'swing state'.

chris the cynic said...

My 3 year old can eat raspberries faster than I can pick them. I don't wear any protective clothing to pick them, BTW, the scratches just don't bother me.

Normally I don't either, and if the scratches bothered me that much I wouldn't have gotten a quart of them this morning, but when I decided to go out in anticipation of the scratches I put on long pants and closed shoes somehow forgetting that my arms would do most of the reaching through thorns.

Though without long pants I probably wouldn't have made it nearly as deep into raspberry claimed territory as I did in several places.

Someday I need to make paths. We started with one orderly row, as I recall, now they've taken over much (most?) of the yard.

depizan said...

someone on the design team apparently decided it would be a good idea, in a game where thousands of people play in the same world together, to put in special event quest objectives that vanish when someone interacts with them and then take a few minutes to reappear.

Why did that design flaw ever persist? That's what I've never figured out. It's so obviously a bad idea - and I say this as someone who has always played MMOs as if they were single player games - that it should've been gone by the second MMO ever.

Then again, there are a number of persistent design choices in MMOs that I don't understand. Why do they almost always include stealth classes/abilities and then botch the use of stealth? (I think City of Heroes is the only MMO I've played where stealth really worked. And even then, you ran into the "if I use this the way a character who had it would, I lose tons of XP because the game's designed around getting XP from defeating stuff.) Why can we never have sexy/practical options for gear* for both genders (as opposed to it morphing from practical to sexy if a woman wears it)? Why do they always balance for PvP, even when it messes up the game in PvE? Why do they tend to make events aimed at the max level crowd, rather than making events everyone can participate in? Etc, etc...


*SW:TOR is probably the first game I've ever gone out of my way to get a "sexy" top for a female character in. I wanted it originally because it was the least "Hi, I'm evil" customizable Sith Warrior top, but it turned out to look incredibly awesome on my amazon zabrak Warrior. She doesn't look sexualized, she looks like she took off her shirt to better beat on her opponents. (You know, like a guy would, except she's wearing a vaguely armored looking sports bra.) And this is coming from someone who spent a lot of time making shirts for their WoW characters so you couldn't tell their tops were *sigh* all belly shirts. Somehow, this time, it works.

Will Wildman said...

(I think City of Heroes is the only MMO I've played where stealth really worked. And even then, you ran into the "if I use this the way a character who had it would, I lose tons of XP because the game's designed around getting XP from defeating stuff.)

I always had great affection for my rogues in WoW, and I had pretty good luck using stealth to skip fights - true, I'm missing out on XP from monster-slaying, but I'm also completing quests much faster than I would otherwise. I was pretty pleased with the tradeoff there. It does, of course, depend on having enough quests to go around, which is not always the case.

On the matter of transfabricatory clothing that inexplicably loses its midriff/thigh-coverage when it touches a woman, we are in complete accord. (This isn't even purely a matter of sexy/non-sexy, since it's a very specific definition of what people should like. I think the coated-in-heavy-plate look is hot in addition to being practical. But if we're trying to please many aesthetic senses, there should be options.)

depizan said...

True, rogues were pretty good in WoW - the stealth wasn't quite as good as in City of Heroes, but good enough.

And, yes, it's both a matter of player aesthetics (for example, I always turn off the show helmet option in games, despite the fact that it makes no sense for a character to be facing people lobbing fireballs or blaster bolts at their head without a helmet) and what makes sense for the characters. I've made characters who care more about looking good than they do armor, and I've made characters who'd object to not being completely covered in armor, never mind what the armor looks like.

If I were going to make a costuming suggestion for MMOs (besides having purely cosmetic outfits), it would be that all armors come in a "practical" and "sexy" option that one can toggle between. Then you've at least covered the fully armored and Conan/Dirty Pair options.

Amarie said...

If you guys don't mind a Baby College Student griping...

The cost of my uniforms bother me: over $140 and it's all due at the end of this month. And there is a lot of pressure to keep our uniforms, clean, immaculate and white. On top of that, we'll have to buy MORE uniforms once we graduate...

And I didn't even mention tuition, books, and gas money.
I shouldn't say this, but it's almost making this Amarie want to drop out and try my hand at, well...anything else that doesn't cost so much money. Like a job at that mall. I'd even take Abercrombie & Fitch at this point. Grr....>.<

Amaryllis said...

If I could hear your Pringles, well, it would be just One More Thing...

On one side of my desk sits a colleague with severe allergies. He's the nicest, kindest person in the world, but when he starts coughing I just want to scream.

On the other side of my desk sits the colleague who likes to eat popcorn and pistachios. How can such small foods make such loud crunches?

And people are always talking...and you know what's worse than talking? Whispering, or talking very very quietly... if it's so damn private, go find a conference room! Only don't turn the ladies' room into your private conference room and go whisper in there, because that's irritating too.

And whoever thought that five-foot-high cubicle partitions create enough privacy for a phone call, well, they don't. I don't want to hear everybody's hour-long technical discussions or conferences with their children's schools or arguments with the man who came to fix the furnace. And I don't particularly want them to hear mine.

I am a horrible person and a rotten co-worker.

Also, I can't even think about getting into a car without needing to run to the bathroom.

Also, my knee hurts.

* grumble *

Amaryllis said...

Hang in there!

If you don't mind my asking, what are you studying that requires uniforms?

If you do mind my asking, tell me to shut up.

Mary Kaye said...

There are a couple of strategies students use on exams that make the graders miserable, and don't really help the students. The Shotgun particularly bugs me: write down everything you can think of, and then when it's marked wrong, point out that you did have some parts of the right answer there! But even worse are the (fortunately rare) people who say "It should be clear that I knew the answer, I just wrote the wrong thing." I have actually gotten this claim on a completely blank subproblem response....

The student who went on past annoying into funny was the one who said, "Why did you make me work out that step? Couldn't you have done it yourself?" Well, yes, dude, I could. Could you? I thought that was kind of the point of an exam....

Brin Bellway said...

Loquat: What's been bugging me lately is MMO design choices that encourage players to act like they're playing a single-player game, or, even worse, encourage players to actively resent the presence of other players in their game world.

What's bugging me is Runescape having large quantities of lag. Especially around the Olympics-expy event. It takes twenty minutes to do things that should take maybe four because every minute or two I get so much lag I lose connection entirely. I haven't done a monthly thing for July because while the lag is much better outside the Olympic area, I can't rely on having 30 - 40 minutes straight of decent reaction time.

depizan: Why can we never have sexy/practical options for gear* for both genders (as opposed to it morphing from practical to sexy if a woman wears it)?

*nod* The first time I tried my usual shirt, I thought that's just how it was. Then my brother's character showed up in an identical shirt that did cover his belly. (I'd change the character gender, but I'd rather have feminine words than "masculine"-but-really-neutral clothes. What I'd really like is both.)

I found out after my last hurried post that our little baby raspberry bushes have produced a small amount of fruit, but my parents picked and ate them all without telling me.

Amarie said...

Oh, thank you!!! I shall prevail and not succumb to burn out!! I shall, I say!!!

And I don't mind telling you guys at all!! I'm currently at a technical college studying to be a certified medical assistant (CMA). We start clinicals next semester, in August, and we have to have professional, brand new set of two scrubs, pants and warmers/labcoats. Aayyyyyy caruuuumbaaaa...>.<

And if I'm complaining right now, I hate to think what I'll sound like when I go for my Pre-med Bachelors. x.X

Loquat said...

...quest objectives that vanish when someone interacts with them and then take a few minutes to reappear.
Why did that design flaw ever persist? That's what I've never figured out. It's so obviously a bad idea - and I say this as someone who has always played MMOs as if they were single player games - that it should've been gone by the second MMO ever.


I suspect it's a misguided desire for realism. For example, one of the worst event quests in Rift has you beachcombing for hidden objects to collect, and if you find and collect a thing in the real world, it is then gone and unavailable for anyone else. Obviously, it's also wildly unrealistic for that thing to reappear a few minutes later, but you have to make compromises somewhere.

There's also the issue that some players would be lazy and just use the same item however many times the quest calls for, but that's easily gotten around by programming the quest to require the use of X different locations, which Rift already does for some quests. So I'm pretty sure it's the realism thing.

Silver Adept said...

The things that give me grief are far above the level of "bug", since they involve things that cause those panic reactions. But minor irritations abound in our lives, mostly involving feeling like I haven't had time to do things for myself lately, other than the parts that can be easily interrupted or picked up and put down again.

depizan said...

I seem to be the last person to hear anything. There was a horrible shooting at a movie theater in Denver. To the best of my knowledge, no one I know was there. But I have four friends who live in Denver and have so far only heard from one. (This is not cause to worry...much. None of them are any better at keeping up on the news than I am. Most likely, they don't know it happened and have no reason to say "Yo, still alive.")

I just can't even fathom what makes a person go to a midnight showing of a movie (or anywhere else) and kill complete strangers. And I can't imagine the horror for the people at that theater. I just... I don't even know what to say.

Samantha C said...

Just feel the need to leave this clip here.
Hope it works, enjoy!

Samantha C said...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWOwI7w56IE or how about just a link instead

BaseDeltaZero said...

How's this for evolution? Sometimes when I'm tired I yawn- as do we all- but sometimes I yawn to the point where my jaw muscles... Cramp or strain or something. BAM! Shooting jaw pains. Did this at school once and fought the urge to scream out loud.


Damn, that's happened to me. I hate it. HATE it... and unlike a normal cramp, you can't even work it out...


That my body responds to stress by clenching my jaw, which gives me headaches. Seriously, evolution, why did this seem like a good idea?

The thing about evolution is that its not actually intelligent - it's essentially a random process. And that results in a lot of weird anomalies, flaws, and redundancies.


Some days living stuck in a human body bugs me. Why can't I crochet for hours straight, tendonitis-prone wrists? Why are human knees so sucky? Can I get uploaded to an android body now?

Seconded. I can has made of robot?

Amaryllis said...

Of course you shall prevail. We have every faith in you.

Out of idle curiosity, I looked up the AAMA home pages:
"Medical assistants give health care a human touch" -- you'll be brilliant.

And your long-term goal is a B.S. and eventual M.D.? I'm impressed. And your future patients will be lucky to have you.

Amaryllis said...

Hope all is well. That was.. well, you're right. I don't know what to say either.

Amaryllis said...

Why are human knees so sucky?

Why, indeed? That's what was irritating me-- not so much the pain itself, which I hesitate even to mention here when our hostess is... no, never mind, Ana, I know you don't like comparisons.

Anyway, what irritates me is that I'm old enough to be having those kind of aches and pains, and that the human knee doesn't hold up for the human life. Bah.

Amarie said...

Ehhh??? *scrolls up in confusion...*

Oh, no!! Amaryllis, I don't want to be a doctor, LOL! No, I just want to be a physican's assistant (PA). It's pretty much the 'next level' after receiving a CMA (certified medical assistant). After my Bachelors, it takes about two years for me to get my PA, which means that it's just a Master's degree. But I'm excited anyway! As a PA, I'll get to do a lot of what the doctor does, such as prescribe medicine, make diagnoses, order referrals, etc. Sorry for the confusion! :D

And Depi...I feel your pain. I know this is horrible and immature of me to say, but I just wish they'd stop showing the shooting/victims on TV. I can't take much more, so I put on cartoons. v.v

depizan said...

Yeah. My friends are all fine, if spending some amount of time reassuring out of town relatives. But, well, other people aren't fine, and even if I don't know any of them, that doesn't really make it any less horrible. And for me and my friends, this hits close to home, both in the location sense and in the sense that we're the sort of people who sometimes go to midnight premieres of movies.

depizan said...

I know what you mean. One can only cope with the horrible for so long, especially when you can't actually do anything about it.

Silver Adept said...

@Amarie - No "just" there - a Master's is a degree that requires work, dedication, and a lot of reading, interpreting, and practicing. In a medical field, no less, which is usually one of the toughest fields to get through without being bounced in a weeder or collapsing under the courseload.

I suppose that's something that bugs me - our society puts very little value on the very real achievement that graduate degrees are, as if those classes are of the same caliber as secondary school or undergraduate education. I get bugged by it a lot, because librarianship is not seen as the kind of work that requires graduate courses. (It's almost all soft skills and not easily visible ones. When it works, you don't even notice them.)

Amaryllis said...

I started to reply to "just a master's", then scrolled down...yeah, what SilverAdept said.

Yes, I interpreted "pre-med" as "pre-physician" but there's a lot more to medicine than the M.D.s

And regardless of which letters are after your name, I still say that the medical field will be lucky to have you.

Amaryllis said...

I know, it's hard to believe that it could have been any of us, anyone we care about. And yet it could.

Anyway, I'm glad your friends are safe.

Ana Mardoll said...

Amarie, without getting too detailed into my ridiculous saga of surgical things, I had to visit my spine doctor this week. The PA there showed me true kindness, while the actual "doctor" left me sobbing for an hour afterward because of some really callous behavior on his part. The *only* good thing about the visit, in fact, was the PA treating me kindly.

So never say "just a PA", dear. :)

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

Post a Comment