This isn't weird but it does annoy me *and* I can't keep up with the pace of the other big OT threads like FAWTL and House of Respite or I'd post it there instead.
I'm having an awful time with doing my PbP posting lately. It's weird because I don't feel like I've got burnout - I'm still excited when I think about the majority of my player games and the games that I GM. Heck, my brain even keeps coming up with other scenarios and modules and such that sound like they'd be cool to GM. Yet when I sit down to write, I just...can't concentrate on it. Sometimes I can't concentrate on it at all and other times I may only get through a couple of games before my brain pulls me away in another direction.
I don't know if it's stress (I don't *feel* stressed but who knows), lack of sleep (my sleep patterns *are* kinda wacked out due to my job), or if I actually am in burnout but it's manifesting itself as inability to concentrate rather than pure apathy or actual dread. But no matter the cause, it's frustrating because I take my PbP commitments fairly seriously for a hobby due to the shared investment with other people and I'm struggling to hold up my end of the deal. Even more so because I know I can't try and force it or power through it - past experience in other things has shown me that it won't accomplish anything except to make me actively avoid doing 'the thing' or feel resentful of feeling forced to do 'the thing'.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
If it helps, I don't even try to keep up with FaWtL, just say something and run away.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
I wonder since his friend fell into the water if he had to make an emergency call for a first re-pond-er.
It made the international news. What was weird was that none of the local stations showed up. But Algae-zeera sent a crew...
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Bravo, sir.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
You really ought to ponder the ramifications of this event.
I'm having an awful time with doing my PbP posting lately. It's weird because I don't feel like I've got burnout - I'm still excited when I think about the majority of my player games and the games that I GM. Heck, my brain even keeps coming up with other scenarios and modules and such that sound like they'd be cool to GM. Yet when I sit down to write, I just...can't concentrate on it. Sometimes I can't concentrate on it at all and other times I may only get through a couple of games before my brain pulls me away in another direction.
I don't know if it's stress (I don't *feel* stressed but who knows), lack of sleep (my sleep patterns *are* kinda wacked out due to my job), or if I actually am in burnout but it's manifesting itself as inability to concentrate rather than pure apathy or actual dread.
I have found that even when you don't become burnt out on PbPs, you can become saturated. There's only so much time in a day, and even if you have the time to maintain presence in umpteen campaigns, it loses its luster and becomes hard to maintain such a high level of interest or even excitement in.
I've experienced this both on Paizo, and with a smaller group of online friends that I've been PbPing with since... 2006 or so. The more campaigns I'm in, the blander my involvement becomes in each of them. Too many campaigns takes your excitement and spreads it out among all the campaigns you participate in.
That's my experience, anyway.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
You really ought to ponder the ramifications of this event.
On hindsight, pointing out a couple mallards on the pond by shouting 'DUCK!' could have been misleading.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
Junk mail. Physical junk mail.
I get thousands of pages of it every year. And in over two decades, not ONCE has it turned into a sale for the people who sent it. Not. Once. I estimate somewhere on the order of 40,000 pages of junk mail received as an adult. That's about 400 lbs or 200ish kilos of useless paper. And almost every day, that is all I get in my mail box.
To absolutely no benefit for anyone at all.
Why, in this age of analytics, can the companies that send this stuff out not see how futile the effort is? They're wasting money and effort, the US Postal Service is having to carry the stuff (burning fuel and wasting thousands of person-hours, I'm wasting the effort of digging through the pile of it to make sure I didn't miss a bill or small personal card from someone I actually know, the recycling industry has to use fuel etc. to deal with it, the logging industry...
And I'm just one guy. Figure I'm not abnormal, in the US that's (ballpark) 150 million pounds (75 million kg) of paper a year that is printed out, stuffed in envelopes, flown round the country, loaded onto trucks, driven around cities, towns, and country roads, carried in bags, put in mailboxes, dumped in recycling bins, picked up by trucks, sorted at recycling facilities, re-pulped, turned into paper, loaded into trucks, purchased by office supply companies, sold to offices, loaded into printers, covered in the next formulaic piece of junk information, printed out...
It's this bizarre automated process that exists only for its own sake. It's like that brain parasite that forces ants to climb up to the talk of grass stalks and get eaten by cows and then makes snails eat cow s~$%... a completely self-contained process whose ostensible purpose (to reach consumers to get them to buy stuff) is accomplished so rarely as to be negligible.
And I can't find any way to opt out. Does anyone know if you can stop people from mailing stuff to "Resident"? GAH!
It's maddening. Like, literally. When I try to comprehend the whole of the system that crams my mailbox full of worthless paper, I go a little bit more insane.
And yet... how much of the economy would crumble, how many people would be out of jobs (and the people whose jobs depend on selling things to THOSE people, etc...) if that endless self-perpetuating flood of futility were dammed?
Hopeless... hopeless... hopeless...
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Having worked for the Postal Service junk (or bulk mail as they call it) is their number one revenue generator. Every company pays a premium to have their goods and pizza coupons advertised.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
When counting jobs and livelihoods, you need to understand that every job that exists now also prevents other jobs from existing.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
When counting jobs I've had I need to enlist one of the kids.
I just don't have that many fingers and toes.
Edit: And I'm not talking about different places I've worked, I'm talking about completely different jobs.
|
Junk mail. Physical junk mail.
I get thousands of pages of it every year. And in over two decades, not ONCE has it turned into a sale for the people who sent it. Not. Once. I estimate somewhere on the order of 40,000 pages of junk mail received as an adult. That's about 400 lbs or 200ish kilos of useless paper. And almost every day, that is all I get in my mail box.
To absolutely no benefit for anyone at all.
Why, in this age of analytics, can the companies that send this stuff out not see how futile the effort is? They're wasting money and effort, the US Postal Service is having to carry the stuff (burning fuel and wasting thousands of person-hours, I'm wasting the effort of digging through the pile of it to make sure I didn't miss a bill or small personal card from someone I actually know, the recycling industry has to use fuel etc. to deal with it, the logging industry...
And I'm just one guy. Figure I'm not abnormal, in the US that's (ballpark) 150 million pounds (75 million kg) of paper a year that is printed out, stuffed in envelopes, flown round the country, loaded onto trucks, driven around cities, towns, and country roads, carried in bags, put in mailboxes, dumped in recycling bins, picked up by trucks, sorted at recycling facilities, re-pulped, turned into paper, loaded into trucks, purchased by office supply companies, sold to offices, loaded into printers, covered in the next formulaic piece of junk information, printed out...
It's this bizarre automated process that exists only for its own sake. It's like that brain parasite that forces ants to climb up to the talk of grass stalks and get eaten by cows and then makes snails eat cow s$~@... a completely self-contained process whose ostensible purpose (to reach consumers to get them to buy stuff) is accomplished so rarely as to be negligible.
And I can't find any way to opt out. Does anyone know if you can stop people from mailing stuff to "Resident"? GAH!
It's maddening. Like, literally. When I try to comprehend the whole of...
It works, so they keep doing it.
This reminds me of my recent DMV experience. I saw my state finally has an online feature for tabs. Takes 3-5 WEEKS from payment to get your license tabs in the mail. F#$%ing WEEKS. They also made an error on my address so after waiting 4 weeks I was told id need another 3-5 weeks to get the fixed copy..................................................................
I was offered to go into the DMV myself and PAY 11 dollars more to get them instantly. ugh learned a good lesson just take a damn day off and go get them.
The DMV is an earthly outlet from Hell.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
That comparison seems unfair to Hell.
Edit: Soul-destroying Abbadon? Sure.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
That is an interesting question.
Would the lines at hell be efficient?
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
The lines in Hell are incredibly, almost impossibly, efficient, and perfected through millennia of unbelievably intricate planning and ceaseless revisionism. It's just that it's optimized to be entirely efficient for the devils, not the mortals/petitioners.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
When someone apologizes to me for something I've already stopped being mad about. It just reminds me why I was mad.
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
Former mail man here. Ask your post office to get rid of all 3rd Class or Pre-Sort Standard mail. That will get rid of the majority.
It's not to nobody's benefit. Third class mail pays a huge chunk of postal bills, and the PO is the only US govt office that takes zero tax dollars. Really good jobs that have old school pensions and such are around because of it. When you need to trash something and it takes a few seconds of your time, remember you're helping a family today live like it were 40 years ago.
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
I really out did myself with this shopping cart!
Not only is there gum stuck to the bottom of one back wheel but the other has something wound up in the wheel and not only does one front wheel wobble, it also squeaks and then the other front wheel wants to careen the cart dramatically to the right every once in a while.
Surprisingly, despite twiddling on my phone this whole time I haven't run into anyone or destroyed anything (not that I plan to look behind me).
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
When strong characters in fiction throw their enemy across a room.
If you are super strong against someone weaker, just grappling or doing a bear hug to choke them out and restrict their movement is much smarter and more intuitive.
If you just throw them across the room then they can move around. I suppose against regular humans they wouldn't get back up, but it still seems unnecessary.
I actually really like Fisk's fight choreography in Daredevil. In one scene he picks someone up, hugs them tight, and rams them into a wall, immobilizing them.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Everything everyone does in The Walking Dead.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Firearms in movies and television ignoring classical mechanics. Firing a shotgun at someone isn't going to send them flying if the shooter doesn't experience the same amount of force as recoil.
|
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Apparently when I'm really tired after a long commute, I will still occasionally walk up to the front door, push the unlock button on the car keyfob, and then be confused when the apartment door does not unlock.It happenedI did it again today. Which makes me wonder what possible accidents I may have obliviously caused on the drive home.Man that's weird. I once accidentally stuck my car key in the apartment door lock and the entire apartment building started up. Drove it down I-55 and eventually just parked in the median.
(My sincerest apologies to Steven Wright.)
I've had days like that. Typically after long nights drinking with Aziraphale.
|
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I should totally love how powerful the adhesives used on tape have become, over the years, but I *hate* how the glue on tape is now stronger than paper or cardboard, and attempting to open a package held together by tape means that you *have* to rip the package apart like a barbarian. (Hope you didn't need that box for anything...)
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
...or use a knife...or a set of keys, even...
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
You could get a Tasmanian devil.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
You could get a Tasmanian devil.
Eh' I don't think that's a good idea Doc.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
You could get a Tasmanian devil.Eh' I don't think that's a good idea Doc.
♫♪ "Or would you rather it be a mule?" ♫♪
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
People who say antisocial when they mean asocial. Especially when they’re referring to themselves.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
People who don't understand language is an evolving thing.
Example: "Ain't is not a word" was a teacher's complaint when I was a kid.
Yet when I was in third grade I found it in a dictionary, showed it to my teacher, and somehow I'm the one getting in trouble?
Yeah, technically nauseated is what you are when people sicken you, not nauseous, but come on, we all know what they mean when they're saying it.
If language didn't evolve, we'd all sound like Dickens characters. Or worse. Beowulf. You ever read the original Beowulf? Garbage. I can barely handle Shakespeare.
Verily, for if thine wish is to make sure that words meaneth what they were in originale, thereupon ye should always speak. Forsooth! Art thou not from thy tales of ye olde Shakespeare? Should mine ears deceive me upon listening to thine complaints? Nae, they do not. Thou dost speaketh with the tongue of contemporary, and quicken, for dost thou not worry about changes in the tongue of thine ancestors, lande, and history.
Yay and verily, I do claim to be one intelligent donkey, for tis better than to be, as Red Foreman did share upon the show of seven times ten, descended from the foolish of mules.
Please know, good sers, that t'was all in jest, for nary dost I deign to bringeth the wrath of mine compatriots.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
I hear you, Erudite Vagrant, I hear you. I've made similar arguments to people in the past. In this very thread, even, if memory serves. About that newly coined word, "yeet".
But . . . using antisocial to mean shy?! It's as if someone decided to call water chlorophyll - simply bizarre! And if they do it consistently, the people around them might cotton on eventually . . . but it's still bizarre.
I'll endeavor to be amused rather than annoyed . . . but as of this moment I'm still sorely tempted, upon hearing the malaprop, to demonstrate the difference defenestratively.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
This shouldn't annoy me because not everyone reads or has a vocabulary as others. But when people pronounce "brazier" as "brassiere" it both grinds my gears and makes me snicker like a 12 year old at the same time. This happened in a GenCon game. The DM was doing a great job until he described a hallway lit by flaming brassieres. I had to really force myself to not giggle.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
^My brother was guilty of doing the same thing as DM for our home game once upon a time. I had no problem giggling because I could get away with it ;)
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
To be fair, having only read the word until I was over 25, I pronounced "trebuchet" as "tree-bucket" for a loooooong time.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
To be fair, having only read the word until I was over 25, I pronounced "trebuchet" as "tree-bucket" for a loooooong time.
As an elementary and middle schooler I mispronounced a lot of words, I'd even hazard to say most words. It's the peril of anyone who reads more than they speak . . . all of us antisocial people.
*sound of glass breaking*
I had an actual speech impediment, though, which didn't help. And which also didn't exist. In my fifth year of being educated I was the only person in the grade still leaving regular class for speech therapy. Everyone else had fixed their s#!* over the years, one at a time. But I was still pronouncing s's as th's. I was worried I'd be like that forever. And then the speech therapy teacher (speech therapist?) who'd been telling me how I ought to be positioning my tongue and teeth for half a decade finally expressed confusion that I had no difficulty pronouncing sh's or z's, saying I was the only person she'd ever met who could pronounce sh but not s. That confusion solved my speech impediment overnight, as I'd been laboring under the delusion that the mouth shape for s was basically the same as for th, hence why I pronounced it that way, which annoyed me a little as anyone could have told me that 's' and 'sh' were the same sounds with different lip shapes at any point ever and I wouldn't have had to go through five years of "try and hold your tongue back while you say the word snake for half an hour straight." I'm not irrationally bitter over this roughly a decade later, by the way. Not at all.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
It literally turns me upside down when I hear someone say that language is only descriptive. The problem is that it's both descriptive and prescriptive. Some languages go further, such as Swedish and French, both of which have councils that make up the "correct" form of their respective languages. And yes, the descriptive view is true, to a point.
But languages evolve slowly. Some words are abandoned because we don't need them anymore. Many new words happen, and are lost quickly. And some words do get new meanings. Most of the language remains the same. And there is comfort in this, because the language we use sets our boundaries. It is difficult to understand concepts you have no words for. The words we choose for a concept influences the concept. It is a wet dream for rulers to leave their subjects with a limited vocabulary. They simply find the idea double-plus-good. I will also quote Fading Suns: "Leagueheim, den of iniquity and freedom!"
And when you actually lose something, such as with "literally" no longer meaning "something that is actually as described" but "something emphasized", we all grow poorer. The language loses a little bit of precision, our communication grows that little bit more difficult. It never was a simple question.
Misinformation and propaganda.
Also, FaWtL, at the moment.
| 5 people marked this as a favorite. |
But when people pronounce "brazier" as "brassiere" it both grinds my gears and makes me snicker like a 12 year old at the same time. This happened in a GenCon game. The DM was doing a great job until he described a hallway lit by flaming brassieres. I had to really force myself to not giggle.
Yep. A burning brazier is very different than a burning brassiere. I lucked out figuring out that pronunciation very early, because growing up the mall DeathQuaker Dairy Queen was a Dairy Queen Brazier which meant they served burgers there (which I thought were better than BK, McD's, and Wendy's).
But while I don't mispronounce brazier, every time I see it mentioned in a game product or fiction, my immediately Pavlovian sense memories are the smell & taste of grilled burgers. And then I crave cheeseburgers for the next hour or so.
To be fair, having only read the word until I was over 25, I pronounced "trebuchet" as "tree-bucket" for a loooooong time.
"It's pronounced tree-BOO-kay." - Hyacinth Bucket
Misinformation and propaganda.
Also, FaWtL, at the moment.
Yeah, I'd like them to move on from that topic as well. Mostly because it bores me.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
People who call me for help, who happily and freely admit they're clueless in the field that I'm professionally paid to help people with, and who then argue vehemently that I'm the idiot when they don't like the answers. Look, people, it's not my fault that the software does not magically do what you think it should do.
Woran ran into this today as well.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
People who call me for help, who happily and freely admit they're clueless in the field that I'm professionally paid to help people with, and who then argue vehemently that I'm the idiot when they don't like the answers. Look, people, it's not my fault that the software does not magically do what you think it should do.
Woran ran into this today as well.
That's the wrong kind of level, Cap. I saw on TV...pretty sure it was on Property Cousins Love It Ultimate Remodel an Old House...that your level's bubble is too small.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
LOL. I'm not laughing at your life. But the cartoon gave me a chuckle.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
Players who do the following (near verbatim transcript from a recent session with a player new to me, but long in the hobby):
ME (GMing; in hushed tones): You emerge from behind the wall into a dark corridor. Your lantern barely illuminates the length of the hall and you can see a body--
PLAYER: Oh my god, guys, we should all take Stealth Synergy as soon as we can. *Goes on and on and won't shut up about the feat, insisting that everyone HAS to take this oh, and the guy playing the wizard should also take Craft Wondrous Item so he can make everyone boots of elvenkind and then anyone who doesn't have Stealth as a class skill should dip a level in something that does or take Additional Traits as a feat and get the trait that gives you Stealth because that way everyone could...*
ME: Well f#%! me for trying to build a moment. (┛ಠ_ಠ)┛彡┻━┻
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
Yeah, I got a part time player who's really bad about that. He hasn't caught on as to why bad things keep happening to his character.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Yeah, I got a part time player who's really bad about that. He hasn't caught on as to why bad things keep happening to his character.
Heh heh... I’m trying to avoid unleashing that evil side of myself... it usually ends in tears and wailing....
I’m going to talk with him about it. I’m hoping it’s just over-enthusiasm. He also was planning the party gear purchases through 8th level (at level 2). Bad case of missing the story for the numbers and a mis-directed sense of what a long term campaign is about (at least when I’m running it).
Wish me luck. I haven’t had to be diplomatic in a while... maybe I should just give Monkey Santa a case of Red Bull and let the pouncing take care of the problem.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Pouncing and poo slingin'!