or, First World Problems: The Page.
Netflix. Ten years ago they had some great stuff available. Their original series are not appealing to me (I hardly watch TV shows, more into movies) and the price just keeps going up and up. People complained about paying $100 a month for cable and yet these days, if you want to watch everything you have to fork over at least $100 to different streaming services. Gonna stick to my DVD and VHS box sets...
Flimsy “eco-friendly” DVD cases. You already destroyed the environment to extract prehistoric remains out of the ground to make the plastic for the case just to ship it to a factory in China to get made and then ship it to a store so I can buy it off the shelf. At least make the case thick enough to last!
Facebook/Instagram/Tik Tok (social media in general). The opium/parasite of the masses...blah blah. I don't care for social media mostly because every profile looks the same. They're just a bunch of whitewashed pages with slots for your pictures and there's no real freedom to show off your personality. The adtech algorithms work better than anyone could have ever imagined twenty years ago, and have messed up society in ways that I don't think anyone fully appreciates yet. I think algorithmically-fed content is a contributing factor to the spikes in depression, cults, tribalization, etc. – see more of what you want to see, not what you might need to see or what you might not want to see. Anyway, I'm not giving you my personal information for you to sell and psychoanalyze so get lost!!!
Text messages. There’s no context to anything, just words on a screen. If your message is too short you’re being curt. And if your message is too long you’re a pushover. If I respond in a minute it’s too early. And if I respond in an hour it’s too late. And don't get me started with emojis. Apparently they have a different connotation for everyone and go out of style every two weeks. Fuck!!! Just call me on the phone or e-mail me. Thank you
Nontransparent images that have the the checkered background. Don't waste my time.
Computer Modern (the font). This font is readability and pretentiousness at its worst ("My paper is better than yours because I wrote it with LaTeCH! Yeah, I'm kind of a genius. I got a LaTeCH tattoo I only let the ladies see...”) As a screen font it's obnoxiously spindly and hard to read. As a print font it does looks slightly better, especially with old printers and photocopiers that thicken what they copy. But given that we live in the 21st century, it's unfortunate that academia has stuck with this horrid print font when we should be using something more screen friendly (STIX is a personal favorite of mine). Speaking of which, what the hell happened to Times New Roman? Plenty of old math books used it and it still looks good today.
Electron applications. I avoid these like the plague. Electron is the new Adobe Flash – it's bloated as shit and is overall just a poor design. Not to mention, I still haven't used an Electron app with a competently made, native-looking UI on Mac OS.
Django (the framework). What a schlocky piece of shit. If you're a DIYer (huh huh) you might be into it but otherwise it's just a timewaster. Fuck the virtual environments, fuck the nested projects/apps folders (the verbiage is backwards to me), fuck the database management, and fuck the obtuse error messages. Every time I have to do anything with Django it feels like I'm driving a car put together with duct tape, and I'm all out of duct tape. It makes Ruby on Rails look like a fine Italian sports car.
Python package management. It's ugly, unintuitive, and virtual environments are ridiculously annoying.
Web sites that only work in Google Chrome. Why the hell do so many sites refuse to work correctly in Firefox? Even desktop Safari has similar issues. The only reason that I can think of is that web devs simply aren't testing their sites in anything that isn't Chrome. It's "This site is best viewed in MSIE" all over again.
Overcomplicated, bloated Web sites. This goes along with the last one. If your site takes up hundreds of MB of memory, then you've done something wrong. Keep it simple stupid!!! This Web page sums it up perfectly for me
Picture CAPTCHAs. Fuck CAPTCHAs. The old text ones were a bitch to fill out but these are especially awful. It's a free response test, where you must figure out which of the nine inscrutable jpegs contain cars, planes, stoplights, etc. Didn't see the little hatchback in the corner of the picture? Guess what, you get to do it all over again! Those single pictures overlaid with the grid are the worst. “Click on the squares that have part of a motorcycle on them!” So what the hell does that mean? Do you click on the square where a few pixels of the mirror are on it? NO!!! Do it all over again, and this time with a new picture! FUCK! Not to mention, we're training the bots with these. Fuck them too!!!
Flat design. No texture, no shading, no contrast, just bullshit primary colors and eye-watering bright white backgrounds. What a waste of talent
Corporate Memphis (with the big heads and limbs). This goes along with the last one, just look it up... gross
Sticky sunscreen. What kind of market research do these sunscreen companies do? What sick fuck said, “I like walking around with Crisco on my skin all summer long!”
Black car interiors and rubber floor mats. They look sweet for ten minutes after you clean your car. Then they just look like you smeared Nivea cream and dusty dog shit everywhere.
Hard car seats. Fuck these, especially when they're in a big sedan or SUV. I'll admit, I'm biased. I like old-school cars with cushy seats and a soft ride, but who the hell wants to feel uncomfortable in their own car?
Tiny car windows. This goes along with the last one and is one of my biggest pet peeves of late model cars. Why is the fucking beltline so high? All sheet metal and hardly any window. It feels like I'm riding around in a coffin (ok that does sound kinda metal) and the visibility sucks.
Blue LEDs. No, I don't feel like I'm in the future, or like I'm rolling around in the Tron car. Blue is actually my favorite color – my main pet peeve is that blue LEDs are inexplicably too bright. I'll take soothing green LEDs any day.
Fahrenheit (ºF). Why anyone in the USA still prefers it to Celsius is beyond me. 32-212 degrees or 0-100 degrees. Hmm which one sounds more intuitive to you?? Don’t get me wrong – water is just as arbitrary as… ammonium chloride brine? The human body temperature? The lowest recorded air temperature in winter 1708–09 in Gdańsk, Poland? But to the average human being, who thinks of temperature in terms of weather and cooking, having the temperature changes for water occur at 0 and 100 is simply more convenient. (Yes, the Celsius scale is now based on a definition of Boltzmann's constant and not the melting/boiling points of water, but this isn't relevant. The old definition still matches up.) The only possible use case I see for Fahrenheit is when having "smaller" degrees gives you more precision because your digital thermostat doesn’t support inputting decimals, just integers.
Obnoxious teacher assistants. You think the professor is gonna give you a wet kiss for being a tough grader? Fuck off Quasi-Assistant Managers, I’ve got better shit to do
Professors with no social skills. I’m not saying people without social skills don’t deserve to work in academia. But if you’re in an outward-facing position, like that of a professor who has to teach a class, then you need to have the people skills to communicate effectively to the class and not stutter after every two words like a damn moron. Oh right, it turns out he's an excellent researcher and earns a lot of money for the university. Capitalism wins again.
Whiny people. whoops!!!
↗ a little late for that now isn't it
go back home...