• LAVA Moderator: Shinji Ikari

Pet Peeves v. u mad?

1. people yelling across the house to attempt to initiate conversation or yield assistance. Just fucking walk over and initiate conversation at a reasonable volume.
2. use of "$", "$$", or "$$$" to attempt to signify amounts of money. Here is the range of possible meanings:
$: anywhere from a small to large amount of money.
$$: from a medium to large amount of money.
$$$: from a large to gigantic amount of money.
"$" is painfully vague.
3. Comments of the form, "[noun phrase] much?" You pretty much cannot use this construction without sounding like a snide asshole.

ebola
 
Ignorance.

With access to all of the information, knowledge and technology that is currently accessible to the Western World, there's just no excuse.
 
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It's rather challenging to spend a lot of one's time effectively compiling valid sources of information for domains outside of one's expertise, no?
...
"thru". This spelling must die--it's ugly.

ebola
 
I hate it when I receive unsolicited advice in the form of (and exhausted by) trite platitudes in response to purporting to be anxious or depressed. In a situation where communication and empathy are desired, advice can be okay, but not pseudo-wisdom that doesn't actually advise.

I hate it when people pose the "nature / nurture debate" as a question of whether one has more influence (ie, additively); that's not how reality works, as both environment and organism exist solely in their interaction (ie, the factors combine multiplicatively).

I hate it that a large segment of people thinks that how someone gives a handshake is important and/or revealing.

ebola
 
I hate it when people laud "common sense" too vehemently.

ebola

Too vehemently? I hate it when it gets used at all. There is no such thing as "common sense". It's an entirely cultural construct. And it's almost always used by right wing idiots to justify some stupid notion of what THEY would like to be correct while being a virtually entirely unprovable, in a literal sense, phenomenon.
 
In general, bad manners and rudeness, but where to start?

1) the old classic, spitting on the side walk. If you need to hawk a wad of phlegm, at least make sure that ball of green goo goes in the street or the bushes where nobody will see it or step in it.
2) broken glass on the road or sidewalk

Next are some pet peeves involving annoying sounds. I'm half deaf. If these things bother me, they must bother people with good hearing even more. It can't be "just me," right?

3) loud eating noises:

  • LIP SMACKING -- Gross! Is that an Asian custom? I see Asian immigrants doing it more than natives.
  • slurping
  • sucking sounds. I went to a coffee shop the other day, and an old lady sat 2 tables away and immediately started attacking a cookie. She would peel the plastic wrapper bit by bit and alternate between nibbling the cookie and doing something that sounded like sloppy fellatio to the inside of the wrapper. It took her nearly an hour to finish and she was busy working at it the whole time. It was a frosted cookie, and the wrapper had frosting and crumbs stuck to the inside of it. The fact that I had headphones saved my sanity and her life that day.
  • tapping and scraping eating utensils against the vessel, especially in public: plate, dish, bowl, cup
    If you are so poor that you need the sustenance form the last morsels of food that are stuck to the inside of your bowl at a restaurant, you should probably be saving your money by eating home-cooked food at home, preferably in private so you don't annoy your housemates.
  • saying "AHHHH!" after every sip
  • eating potato chips in public. This happens most at sandwich shops and is done by college age or younger people who still have a lot of irritating little idiosyncrasies and lack social skills. I don't eat at sandwich shops. The most obnoxious way to eat potato chips is to rattle the bag, stick you hand in it, rattle it some more, get exactly one potato chip, crash it in your mouth with you lips open so it makes that irritating crunching sound, and finally smack your open hand against your jeans or shirt and wipe. Repeat that sequence of irritating sounds around 1000 times. Rattle, smack, rattle again, and wipe -- for each potato chip in the bag.

4) Loud nose blowing in public. If you really need to take care of a runny nose, wipe it quietly. If that doesn't work, excuse yourself and do it where nobody will hear you. If you really can't avoid doing it around other people, GET IT OVER WITH! Don't sit there blowing noisily for 5 minutes. Cold season is here already.
5) cell phones and video teleconferences (Skype) at cafes or enclosed public space.
6) talking too loudly in public (indoors)
7) Proposing a toast and clinking glasses before every sip of a single alcoholic beverage. When it's a pint of beer, that's a lot of toasts. It's excruciating and I'll never drink with you again.
8 ) When you're at a restaurant and your date reaches across the table and helps herself to a bite of your food. Over and over. If you want to sample my food, ask me and I'll set some aside on a dish or on your own plate. If that's not enough, order your own.
9 ) Writing "loose" or "looser" when you mean "lose" or "loser." Why does everybody do that?
10 ) Smileys when I'm trying to make a numbered list 8)
11 ) driving a car when a bicycle or even walking is faster. Bad driving habits such as nuisance driving, cruising, and idling. All this does is make a bad situation worse. America has some severe traffic congestion problems, and San Fran is one of the most congested. And that's without getting into the ethics of wasting petroleum products obtained from war-torn regions of the world or AGW.
12) Nuisance barking. If you can't keep your dog reasonably quiet (multiple sessions of more than 15 minutes of non-stop yapping per day), you shouldn't have one.

Fashion pet peeves of the day:
Here are some sartorial mistakes that hurt my eyes as I sat here and typed:

13 ) Acid washed blue jeans (including the high waistband that goes halfway up the chest) from the 1980s and cut off shirts from the 80s. A 20-something year old female German tourist wearing this get-up just walked by. These outfits were on display a few weeks ago in the window of the clothing store "Forever 21."
14 ) Sleeveless shirts with flabby arms. A decrepit Baby Boomer just walked by sporting a sleeveless vest over a sleeveless shirt. He doesn't have the arms to pull off the look. The effect was of reverse biceps that look like turkey waddle.

15 ) Drumming on the table.
16 ) Extreme extroverts who can't go without talking in between breaths. Being in the presence of someone with this diarrhea of the mouth is exhausting, especially when you can't leave. Silence is a good thing. Why does it make some people uncomfortable?

I noticed all of the above within the past week, and it's impossible not to encounter some of it when going out. I ignore it all as much as I can, but some of it just too hard to tune out.

17) Hats with animal ears. These things just will not go away. Unless the person wearing it is younger than 10 months old, she looks like a like a mentally disabled person. The other day day, a 60 something year old woman was wearing one of those things, and she and her non-mentally handicapped 'helper' sat at a table near me.
I have no idea what the appeal is. They think the hat says fun-loving and care-free, still-young-at-age-60, but all anybody else sees is Ree-Tee.
 
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Next are some pet peeves involving annoying sounds. I'm half deaf. If these things bother me, they must bother people with good hearing even more. It can't be "just me," right?
I'm annoyed by noises, too, but my only pet peeve involving them was left out of your list: subwoofers. I appreciate that subwoofers improve sound quality (hell, I'm a bit of an audiophile, but with headphones) but if you don't have a private residence sufficiently insulated or remote to contain the noise it is extremely selfish and intrusive to use them. Everybody knows bass travels straight through walls, far further than higher frequency noise. Yet it's common. It makes sleep difficult and study or peaceful contemplation nearly impossible for me. Using subwoofers decides for others that they can't enjoy these necessities or near necessities because their thoughtless owners find the luxury of tactile bass indispensible. The type of noise produced in their neighbors' homes fits the description of a disruption delivered on a variable ratio schedule, which is the sort of punishment that induces the highest stress levels in animal behavioral tests (not being uniform like a droning noise, or predictable like the tick of a clock). Further, bass travels through ear plugs and can be heard over fans or pink noise generators so there's no way to escape it if a person won't stop. For an apartment renter, this may literally mean moving (I've talked to people who have done exactly this), rolling the dice and hoping they don't end up somewhere else with appalling neighbors and repeating the bank breaking process.

Prior to deregulations introduced by the Reagan administration subwoofers would have been largely illegal to use in the U.S. as they commonly are today -- i.e., it used to be obvious what was so wrong with the very idea of them -- yet so many seem to think it's not a big deal. It's extra annoying that subwoofers tend to be used in the service of base activities like listening inattentively to mostly terrible music, blowing away friends in an online shooter, etc., while it undermines the ability to do self-enriching things like read, focus, reflect, sleep ...

...

10 ) Smileys when I'm trying to make a numbered list 8)
Heh, yeah, I remember thinking WTF because of those. Here's how to get rid of them:
1:) Click the "go advanced" button
2:) Below the text box under additional options you'll see the disable smilies box
3:) Check it
4:) Marvel at those beautiful parentheses and colons, unsullied by the intrusion of insipid emoticons
 
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Movies where 1000 bullets are fired, that can't pass through a car door, or a thin wall, but can shoot off a high-tensile steel lock.

Several issues in that - can nobody aim a gun? Even the cops are doing it now, pouring shots out as if they are just shooting randomly in the hopes one of those slugs might hit something. Perhaps it's an ammo-led economic recovery they are trying for?

Then of course the 'hero' will take one long range shot, while doing a somersault across the gap, and kill the bad guy.

Bullet + 2 very thin metal layers, plus 2 vinyl layers equals holes in idiot hiding behind car. Bullet + boards, drywall, and plaster (pretty much anything except solid bricks or concrete) equals hole in idiot standing to one side of door. We have schools here with pebble-concrete walls - when I was 10 a cracker (explosive firework) gun I made put a ball bearing through that wall AND the next interior wall of the school. Imagine what a real gun could do?

Oh... and guns that shoot so many bullets you'd need to be a body builder to carry the magazine around. And that run out only when there's a plot point that needs it.
 
socko said:
5) cell phones and video teleconferences (Skype) at cafes or enclosed public space.
Years back when GSM phones were all the rage, you could buy a little device, about the size of a large coin. It had a button. Pressing the button would disconnect every mobile phone within about 20 -30 feet. SOOO much fun, particularly as they all try to reconnect and you keep pressing the button just as they start talking, standing nonchalantly, hand in pocket, leaning against the rail. :D

Ah... the good old days. I don't know if it can be done with digitals...
 
I have recently been working on a government contract, which had been going for 5 years and still not finished, to upgrade the train radio system from analogue to digital (GSM). It is similar to the European EIRENE model used. By the time it is finished, the technology will be obsolete, if not already.

That being said, the government is a major peeve of mine.
 
I'm annoyed by noises, too, but my only pet peeve involving them was left out of your list: subwoofers. I appreciate that subwoofers improve sound quality (hell, I'm a bit of an audiophile, but with headphones) ....
That brings back memories of my freshman year at college. I was in a dorm and it seemed like half the students had subwoofers. They played them all day every day. It was Hell. I've avoided living in apartments all my life because of that - until now. Thankfully nobody in my building has them.
 
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