Author Topic: The Thread of Excessive Rage  (Read 20224 times)

Spectere

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The Thread of Excessive Rage
« on: July 18, 2020, 01:06:12 AM »
So I realize that I made somewhat of a tactical blunder when I locked the existing happy/anger threads. I figured that it would encourage more long-form discussion through the creation of new threads, but by in large all it's done is remove a means of minor celebration or venting. While there are some things that have worldwide relevance (hello there, COVID-19) and are more than deserving of their own thread, things like my FedEx escapades really don't need more than a couple of posts to get the point across.

This is where you people rant about your fleeting moments of rage. It's sort of like the old thread, except…FUCK, there's nothing different at all about it, is there? Dammit!
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vladgd

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Re: The Thread of Excessive Rage
« Reply #1 on: July 18, 2020, 08:56:57 PM »
Well since this is back, I had a drink that lead to like 8 other drinks and may have said some things to some people...

NOTHING BAD...just yknow, embaressing. Playing damage control the next hungover morning before working all day is always fun, but I did it to myself so I can't really complain. At least the victims of my drunk talking found it funny.

Spectere

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Re: The Thread of Excessive Rage
« Reply #2 on: July 22, 2020, 01:11:41 PM »
Facebook decided to throw their weight around and require a Facebook account to use social features with the Oculus Rift. I had a feeling it would happen, but I figured there'd be some warning about it. They just sort of did it and hoped that everyone would fall in line.

Suffice it to say, I'm now on the waiting list for an Index.
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Spectere

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Re: The Thread of Excessive Rage
« Reply #3 on: August 10, 2020, 04:00:24 AM »
I had the misfortune of having to download a large file from MEGA. Since the method they use to handle downloads is fundamentally incompatible with Safari and Firefox, I had to download Chrome.

Even though I have the application hidden, Chrome's renderer is consistently stealing 50-60% CPU. While this isn't as bad on Linux and macOS (they typically consider 100% utilization to be a equal a fully utilized core, not all the CPU time available to the system), it's not doing my battery life any favors. I normally get between 8-12 hours out of my laptop. If I used Chrome I'd be lucky to get 2 (I'm not exaggerating—after 20 minutes of using Chrome it went from 100% to 85%).

How is Chrome still so fucking bad at this? I'm actively using Firefox and it's using less CPU time and (by extension) less power. You'd think a company that brags so much about their green datacenters would give more of a shit about the energy consumption that's directly caused by a product that they foisted onto a majority of the Internet using people.

It's almost like that's all just meaningless posturing or something.
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vladgd

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Re: The Thread of Excessive Rage
« Reply #4 on: August 11, 2020, 02:20:17 PM »


I know this is FAR FAR FAR FAR FAR from new, but are there really that many bots on the internet trying to advertise viagra to forums with like 3-4 active users?

Say I made my own website, with it's own forum, and 0 active users. Would it just be bot spam? Where do they come from, and who is the beneficiary? It's like the internet version of leaving food on the ground and as a little time passes, it's covered in ants.

Not rage, but not worthy of it's own topic, more curious than anything.

Spectere

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Re: The Thread of Excessive Rage
« Reply #5 on: August 11, 2020, 04:36:30 PM »
Yes, there really are that many. Just yesterday alone there were 111 accounts created by spam bots, and that's with some (admittedly minor, by today's standards) protections in place. It's nuts.

There are a few harmless bots that swing by, like the search engine bots, the Internet Archive bot, etc, but yeah, there really are that many spambots hitting this site at any given time.
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Spectere

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Re: The Thread of Excessive Rage
« Reply #6 on: August 14, 2020, 11:12:33 AM »
I'm so irritated with Google's insistence on burying perfectly good products.

When it comes to streaming music, I generally prefer Apple Music. Works great, integrates well with most of my hardware, it works as a music locker, and in general it works great. As far as web players go, there's Musish and Apple's web player, both of which use the Apple Music streaming web API (MusicKit) and generally work quite well, but there's a hard limit of 15 minutes per song. You can stream music to your heart's content, but the second you put on 2112, Thick As A Brick, or Octavarium (and I listen to all of them fairly often), or even the first track on Periphery's latest album, you can get part of the way through before it just completely seizes up and refuses to do anything. There's already an open issue on Musish's GitHub for it, and I just submitted a bug report to Apple about it, no doubt joining a tiny chorus of progressive and classical music fans.

Obviously, playing long songs works fine on both iTunes and the macOS Music application, but that doesn't help me much when I'm running any form of Linux.

What does this have to do with Google? Well, they're killing off Google Play Music at the end of this year in favor of YouTube Music. Google Play Music is a mature, functional, and reliable web app and music locker. It works well, has excellent audio quality (sounds as good as Apple Music to me) and has a solid UI.

Clearly, Google doesn't want any part in having a finished, reliable product, since they're shitcanning it in favor of YouTube Music, which is kind of a piece of crap. It features the same sound quality, sure, but that's about the only thing it shares with its predecessor. It supposedly lets you import your existing library and uploaded music, but I couldn't get that to work. The UI is a mess, with everything appearing overly large like it was designed to be used on a TV, with an ugly light gray on black font which offers way too much contrast, with no light theme available (which doesn't impact me, admittedly, but it's awful for people with certain vision problems). Not sure why they didn't just use the same light/dark theme as YouTube, but hey. Google.

The way it handles user accounts is a complete disaster as well. Instead of being tied to your entire Google account like Play Music, it's tied to your YouTube channel. This is kind of a big problem. For one, it will only let you upload music to your primary Google account, which is generally under one's real name, and when you change your channel on YouTube Music it changes your channel on YouTube as well! Second, I couldn't even get music uploading to work at all, even when I tried using Chrome. It would take its time uploading music before just coming up with a generic, impossible to troubleshoot error. Third, whenever you follow an artist on YouTube Music, it automatically follows them on YouTube as well. Uhhh, yeah, way to inflate my already unmanageable subscription account, Google. In addition to that, their subscription system is just buggy. It auto-subscribed me to Don Henley on YouTube Music (note that I'm not subbed to him on YouTube itself), isn't giving me the option to unsubscribe. Apparently it felt like I listened to the Boys of Summer enough to warrant that. What's worse is that it also auto-subbed me to The Ataris because I made the mistake of listening to their cover version once (an uptempo cover of a song about wistfully looking back at the past? Really?).

I tried for a week to use it before just outright giving up. It sucks, and knowing how Google operates they'll have it to a semi-functional state by around 2026, by which point they'll have damned it to the ever-growing graveyard.

I wasn't particularly keen on paying for another service (I pay for Apple Music, and I get Google's weekly offering along with my YouTube Premium subscription), but I decided to pay for Spotify for a month to see how it's doing in good ol' 2020. Let's just say, I'm more than a bit shocked to hear that they're using 320kbps Vorbis. Either Vorbis is really that much worse than AAC (doubtful!) or Spotify is doing something really, really wrong in their encoding process. Mids and treble sound overly harsh on everything I play, with the bass being a muddy mess. I've tried listening using both speakers and my headphones (Focal Elex, with a JDS Element II amp) and I get the same results on both. I figured it might just be an issue with the Linux Spotify client, but it sounds the same on the iOS app as well (with my phone connected digitally to my amp so that there's no headphone adapter bias). I'm not exaggerating when I say that I have 192kbps MP3s that I encoded in 2002 that sound better than that.

However, Spotify can play songs more than 15 minutes in length, and has a far better UI than YouTube Music (even if it is a little quirky compared to literally everything else). So, what do I do for my Tux Boxes? Use Spotify/YouTube Music for my progressive bullshit and use Apple Music for everything else? Ugh. Thanks, I hate it.

Oh, and I already tried running iTunes in a Windows VM (under both VMware and KVM). Yeah, that doesn't work particularly well. You either end up with stuttering for days (direct console into the VM) or a severe drop in sound quality (RDP audio forwarding).

Kinda thinking that the best long-term thing would be for Apple to fix their damn API. I have a hard time believing that they wouldn't have run into this at some point during their internal testing. Who knows, maybe their testing involved throwing the Billboard Top 100 at it and calling it a day. :|
« Last Edit: August 14, 2020, 11:21:02 AM by Spectere »
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Spectere

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Re: The Thread of Excessive Rage
« Reply #7 on: September 24, 2020, 07:56:50 PM »
The Arduino IDE is so unbelievably good that I'm doing everything in my power to limit how much I have to use it. I've been mostly successful so far.

It's a shame. The Arduino hardware itself is generally good (pretty much the cheapest and most hassle-free way to get into the AVR ecosystem, really), and AVR itself is fine, but the software ecosystem around Arduino just feels kind of hacky by comparison.
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Jupi

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Re: The Thread of Excessive Rage
« Reply #8 on: October 08, 2020, 01:18:39 AM »
If one more customer gives me shit about our store's mandatory mask policy, I swear to god I'm going to disappear from this board for another four years.
actually fuck you guys just kidding keep my quote in your sigs

Spectere

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Re: The Thread of Excessive Rage
« Reply #9 on: October 08, 2020, 04:30:56 PM »
If one more customer gives me shit about our store's mandatory mask policy, I swear to god I'm going to disappear from this board for another four years.

I would rant about how stupid and wrong covidiots are, but I don't want to run my server out of disk space.

Sorry you have to deal with dumbasses like that. :/
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vladgd

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Re: The Thread of Excessive Rage
« Reply #10 on: October 08, 2020, 09:17:51 PM »
I had a guy a few months ago do that to me, he derogatorily called me a "Democrat" even though I had said nothing at all political at all. I swear he came from the ass end of georgia, was in cryo stasis for the duration of the pandemic, and my store was the first people he has seen in a few years, because even in my small ass town, it's M A N D A T O R Y to wear a mask in public places.

I hate masks as much as the next guy, always have, even when I see a doctor or dentist wearing one, it always has and always will creep me out, and I still fucking do it, suck it up people, it's not supposed to be fun.

Spectere

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Re: The Thread of Excessive Rage
« Reply #11 on: October 09, 2020, 01:32:44 PM »
I love when people try to make masks a political issue. At the start of the pandemic our state's governor was very quick to mandate business closures, encourage social distancing and work from home (where possible), and things of the like. He also criticized Trump for not wearing masks, long before he was infected. It would have been interesting if he and that specimen you had to deal with ran into each other on the street since Gov. DeWine is a Republican and all.

It's funny how some people are so stupid that they have to be reminded that viruses don't give a shit about who they vote for.

As far as masks are concerned, considering that people working the front lines in essential businesses have to wear them for their entire shift, I'm pretty sure I can handle wearing mine for a half hour while I shop or pick up food.
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Spectere

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Re: The Thread of Excessive Rage
« Reply #12 on: October 13, 2020, 12:42:04 PM »
I love how no matter how many times I tell certain people "CIGAR SMOKE REALLY FUCKS ME UP" they insist on smoking them around me. I don't know what it is. I don't have any issues with cigarette smoke, but the second I smell cigar smoke I get a really bad reaction.

It's also kind of telling that my mom, who is a lifelong cigarette smoker, can't stand cigars.

I'm more than a little annoyed that instead of being able to work from my office, using my nice keyboard and monitors, I'm stuck with a near-boiling hot laptop on my lap (the CPU has been running at nearly 100°C for the past two hours, so the case is incredibly hot), in a room with the windows shut, typing on a mushy keyboard and using a single above-average quality 1080p screen. Fucking brilliant.
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Bobbias

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Re: The Thread of Excessive Rage
« Reply #13 on: October 14, 2020, 02:38:55 AM »
Wow, that sucks hard. I smoke, and I have smoked the occasional cigar, but I always try to be as respectful of non-smokers as possible... other than when driving. I keep the window cracked, but unless theres a damn good reason I'm not forgoing my smokes in my car.

Also, fuck my employer. They fucking asked me to switch from afternoons to days for Friday and Saturday (they have us working 6 days a week right now) to fill in for someone in my home department (I'm lowest seniority, and there needs to be at least 1 weekend worker for me to actually get to work there) 2 weeks ago. I said yes. It fucking sucked. Then they asked if I wanted to go back on afternoons when I was scheduled to be on midnights so I could fill in again on Monday (last week). I said yes (afternoons is my preferred shift). I fucking knew they would ask me to switch to days again. This time I said no.

Well then as I was bitching about that before the start of shift meeting the... duck I dont even know his position's official name, head supervisor/douchebag extraordinaire decided to make a sarcastic remark as he was walking by.

I'm fucking sick of this place. With my recent depression and such I just dont have the patience any more. I've decided to quit and go back to college for programming.
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vladgd

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Re: The Thread of Excessive Rage
« Reply #14 on: October 30, 2020, 09:38:46 PM »
65 hour week + drinking + sharp objects to take the edge off = ill take my weekend whenever i can get it plz

I don't care how you slice it, how long you work on average, 9am-11:30pm is too long to work, when you gotta get up and do another 10 hours on your day off the very next day.

resorting to childish methods of relieving stress and i'd prefer to not going back to it.

*edit*

another 13 hours, idk how people do this on the regular without going crazy. one more day.
« Last Edit: October 31, 2020, 11:15:00 PM by vladgd »