Things that piss you off that shouldn't

[Follyfoot]

On 02/10/2022 at 12:17, mottaloo said:

A mate of mine (now sadly departed) was an experienced door man and ran his own security firm for years (he also "did" the top gate on trinity Road on matchdays) well.....he once popped in to the Fort jester pub, near that shopping place, for a couple of beers during one early evening....said he couldn't wait to get out of the place and he wasn't exactly the run away from trouble type.

The one on the Vale? Looney bin 

[mottaloo]

8 minutes ago, Follyfoot said:

The one on the Vale? Looney bin 

That's the one.....well, not on the estate but down from the collector road island. I used to work on the Vale for about 15 yrs and left as the estate was halfway through the regeneration (new builds, demolitions etc). At one point they had 7 boozers and it dropped to about 2 maximum so I guess - apart from the Tyburn House  - they had to get their stella fix somewhere else !

Edited October 3, 2022 by mottaloo

[Xela]

2 hours ago, Genie said:

My MIL (bloody nightmare) was overpaid when she left her job. They are chasing her for it after she spent it all. They are threatening all sorts of legal action, debt collectors etc.

I was helping her with it, agreed a lower sum to be paid back and a payment plan and then I found out she’s still not paid any of it back. 

You just can't help some people. Hopefully they'll send bailiffs around to her house. 

[Xela]

On 02/10/2022 at 12:17, mottaloo said:

A mate of mine (now sadly departed) was an experienced door man and ran his own security firm for years (he also "did" the top gate on trinity Road on matchdays) well.....he once popped in to the Fort jester pub, near that shopping place, for a couple of beers during one early evening....said he couldn't wait to get out of the place and he wasn't exactly the run away from trouble type.

A colleague at work mentioned they went there on Friday night. Called Manor Farm now and they do a carvery. Said it was nice

[Genie]

47 minutes ago, Xela said:

You just can't help some people. Hopefully they'll send bailiffs around to her house. 

I’d bloody love that, she’s a proper Hyacinth Bucket and would be mortified. 

She thinks they don’t know where she lives (she’s moved house recently) and can’t find out so will be fine.

I’d love them to slap a load of interest and fees onto the bill too which they haven’t done yet.

[Stevo985]

Speaking of bailiffs, I got a letter to my flat recently from some random company asking me to confirm if I lived here and I had I previously lived at such and such an address (my old address, I did live there)

Did some googling and found out they're a debt collection agency, and they're likely looking for me to confirm my address so that they can chase a debt. 

Which is fine, but I can't for the life of me think of a debt I'd owe. At all, let alone from when I lived in my old house. Only thing I can think of is it's something to do with energy bills because I had tenants move out before I sold the place so maybe there's a discrepancy on the bills.

Anyway it pisses me off because I'm worrying about it when I don't owe anyone anything  

 

 

(Edit: I ignored it)

Edited October 3, 2022 by Stevo985

[Xela]

1 hour ago, Genie said:

I’d bloody love that, she’s a proper Hyacinth Bucket and would be mortified. 

She thinks they don’t know where she lives (she’s moved house recently) and can’t find out so will be fine.

I’d love them to slap a load of interest and fees onto the bill too which they haven’t done yet.

She's being a bit naive if she doesn't think they can track her down. When I worked in repossessions at the bank, the agents we used could find anything or anyone! 

[mottaloo]

26 minutes ago, Xela said:

She's being a bit naive if she doesn't think they can track her down. When I worked in repossessions at the bank, the agents we used could find anything or anyone! 

I had a phone call from a debt collection agency asking about my next door neighbour who was in the shite with money.

Anyway, they were assuming I knew all sorts about the geezer just cos I lived next door and asked me about his employment and if he "did foreigners" and how much he charged ( he was a landscape gardener) and so on.

The cocky bint on the phone didn't see the problem in calling me at 8am and to grass on my neighbour who was a decent bloke, trying to support his family.

She didn't even apologise for asking either. I told her unless I was gonna get 25% cut then she could eff off. She snottily told me that's not how it works (bear in mind the call started with her asking for me to do her a big favour) so I told her to do one, put the phone next to my arse and let a proper knicker ripper blast down her earhole. 

[bickster]

1 hour ago, mottaloo said:

I had a phone call from a debt collection agency asking about my next door neighbour who was in the shite with money.

Anyway, they were assuming I knew all sorts about the geezer just cos I lived next door and asked me about his employment and if he "did foreigners" and how much he charged ( he was a landscape gardener) and so on.

The cocky bint on the phone didn't see the problem in calling me at 8am and to grass on my neighbour who was a decent bloke, trying to support his family.

She didn't even apologise for asking either. I told her unless I was gonna get 25% cut then she could eff off. She snottily told me that's not how it works (bear in mind the call started with her asking for me to do her a big favour) so I told her to do one, put the phone next to my arse and let a proper knicker ripper blast down her earhole. 

If that was me, I'd have tried to convince her he was Charles Manson and David Koresh roled into one

[Sid4ever]

1 hour ago, mottaloo said:

 

Anyway, they were assuming I knew all sorts about the geezer just cos I lived next door and asked me about his employment and if he "did foreigners" and how much he charged ( he was a landscape gardener) and so on.

So that’s why @Xelawears the comfy joggers.  Makes sense now, always quiet and having holidays in the winter.

[Chindie]

On 04/09/2022 at 22:26, Chindie said:

This could almost be it's own thread.

Obviously, I'm a bit of a geek. I love lots of low media pop culture - comics, superhero movies, the Lord of the Rings, Discworld, gaming in various guises. My hobbies besides gaming are nerdy - I collect figures, I build Gundam models, I'm slowly learning 3d modelling to make custom figures. I'm a real geeky guy.

Because of that I consume a lot of media about these pursuits, and it's become a complete shitshow. A YouTube search for the latest big show on the Marvel world will quickly be infected with diatribes complaining how it's rubbish because it's 'woke'. Why is it woke? It's got a female character who is strong, or is got a diverse cast, etc etc. I saw one get recommended recently on She-Hulk, the current Marvel series, that declared the Marvel universe 'is dead' because there's a scene of She-Hulk twerking. I'm not actually watching the series so I didn't know the context, but on investigation it turns out the show, which is basically a sitcom and has a similarly light hearted tone to it's comic inspiration, had a joke scene at the end of an episode where She-Hulk and a friend twerked. So it's nothing. But it's being used to push this right wing conservative agenda that just boils my blood.

There's dozens of these things. The new Lord of the Rings series has had a cottage industry going for months peddling the same shit because there's black people in it. Star Wars is woke because there's a powerful black woman in it. And so on. And it's obvious it's all a cynical cash grab to get views and clicks, but worse than that it's incentivising pushing this right wing culture war narrative, using the popularity of these brands together with the popularity of YouTube and the flaws of the algorithm to normalise this rubbish.

And the really scary thing is it's a quick journey, via YouTube, to the nonsense spouted by the likes of Jordan Peterson and his conservative Christian crap packaged up as new guru philosophy and life guidance, to James Lindsay and his increasingly anti-intellectual right wing nonsense that claims, amongst other madness, that even acknowledging diversity is a communist plot to enable paedophilia and the overthrow of the world order. And so on - the ur-atlas to all of these words removed being Rogan.

This shit really got going with the Gamergate crap a few years back, but it's infiltrated wider and wider pop culture discourse in a deeply cynical and groom manner in the last couple of years, and is getting worse. We need to combat the dangers of 'the algorithm', with its ability to perverse discourse, and there's an increasing problem with socialised media that it becomes very easy to become a propaganda agent posing as a movie commentator or games critic.

It makes me **** angry.

Connected to this.

For about a decade I was a fan of a games website, called Giant Bomb. The site was set up by a bunch of guys that left a bigger site to do something different to the usual games review/preview/news format, and became more about the personalities involved. They pioneered a way of showing games with extended play videos with a couple of guys discussing the game as they played and demoed it. And they had a huge weekly podcast, and lots of random pissing about videos, and they were genuinely funny, and they became one of the premier gaming sites. 

Over the years a few people left and it got sold multiple times, and it lost its way. I stopped watching. Today it got sold again, and that prompted one of the original engineers in the site to comment. He was involved in the original development of the site, including its creation of is own video streaming solution, but his comments are more focused on the failings of today's internet ecosystem

Quote

...

The sad reality is the Internet publishing is dead and as a business that business is nearly impossible to operate if you have any moral compass. In its place we have various traffic to ad scams and a creator economy built on the backs of a couple large platforms like Twitch, Reddit and YouTube. While the later option seems freeing for some creators, the reality is that soon those too will become hard to make a living from as those large platforms start slowly squeezing their creator class outside of a couple few who play nice. It's only slightly better than the journalism field because at least some of the personalities can shoot over to Patreon and work directly with their audience (albeit still tied to another large platforms).

...

With video though, it's extremely hard to run independently. Hosting video for Giant Bomb in 2008-2012 meant home rolling our own streaming service, chat service and edge-based video platform. We had an all-star engineering team. We had one of the largest podcasts in the world and the hosting bills were killing us. Getting an audience with good content was easy. Monetizing it was very difficult. That's only continued over the years as I've seen various companies buy Giant Bomb (CBS, then RV, now Fandom) looking to pick up a premium brand that they could use to mask the giant volume of dead, but trafficked content they had in the background. The shill back then was was to sell Giant Bomb or GameSpot ads, but serve it on GameFaqs or Comic Vine (which had huge traffic at low cost). Various SEO tricks were pulled to hide traffic. For example, Comic Vine moved to a Gamespot subdomain to make this seem more legitimate. I anticipate similar dark patterns every time these sites are resold to cheaper owners. Likely, these brands will be used to promote a mountain of google-driven traffic in other properties.

The question I haven't been able to solve:

How can good content be monetized in a way that allows it to remain independent and not succumb to warping its content to feed that monetization? How can it be audience driven instead? Is such a thing even possible? Right now good monetization strategies beget bad content. There's got to be a better way than cobbling together five platforms under a Patreon account, giving all of them 10-50% along the way.

Link

I dunno how you defeat the the combined threat of commercial need and the algorithm.

 

[Stevo985]

9 hours ago, Chindie said:

Connected to this.

For about a decade I was a fan of a games website, called Giant Bomb. The site was set up by a bunch of guys that left a bigger site to do something different to the usual games review/preview/news format, and became more about the personalities involved. They pioneered a way of showing games with extended play videos with a couple of guys discussing the game as they played and demoed it. And they had a huge weekly podcast, and lots of random pissing about videos, and they were genuinely funny, and they became one of the premier gaming sites. 

Over the years a few people left and it got sold multiple times, and it lost its way. I stopped watching. Today it got sold again, and that prompted one of the original engineers in the site to comment. He was involved in the original development of the site, including its creation of is own video streaming solution, but his comments are more focused on the failings of today's internet ecosystem

Link

I dunno how you defeat the the combined threat of commercial need and the algorithm.

 

I watch a lot of YouTube but it's being taken over more and more by content farms. Even accounts that I thought were fairly good, like the Gordon Ramsey Kitchen Nightmares account, has gone down this route. Just releasing compilation after compilation all containing the same clips just in different orders with a funny title and thumbnail.

Even stuff that I put on for my kid. There must be a dozen different Mr Tumble Nursery Rhymes compilations, all from the BBC channel or the official mr Tumble channel, but they all contain exactly the same songs but in a different order each time. Millions of views of course.

It's a massive barrier to entry for people to try and get into those demographics. How are you meant to get views when massive companies/channels employ someone to just churn this shit out day after day

 

And even more annoying is I think content farms are explicitly banned by YouTube, but they're obviously not very good at enforcing it. 5 Minute Crafts is a frankly extremely dangerous content farm and it's one of the biggest channels on YouTube

[mjmooney]

I've just been lectured on Facebook about Villa being 'timewasters and spoilers'. 

By a Leeds fan. 

[Genie]

6 minutes ago, mjmooney said:

I've just been lectured on Facebook about Villa being 'timewasters and spoilers'. 

By a Leeds fan. 

We are appalling to watch at the moment so I can see where he’s coming from. 

[PussEKatt]

3 hours ago, mjmooney said:

I've just been lectured on Facebook about Villa being 'timewasters and spoilers'. 

By a Leeds fan. 

That shows how bad the Leeds fans are if they are the only ones that have noticed it.

[villa4europe]

3 hours ago, mjmooney said:

I've just been lectured on Facebook about Villa being 'timewasters and spoilers'. 

By a Leeds fan. 

they had a player sent off for trying to stop us from taking a quick free kick...

but really both teams were as bad as each other, it was a painful to watch game and we were both culprits

[Chindie]

I dropped the car off for a service earlier, and asked that they also look a sudden oil warning I've been getting. That was this morning. They didn't look busy.

...

My wallet is trembling. Baked beans might be the order of the month.

[KentVillan]

When you get absolutely bombarded by an online scam / get rich quick / life guru ad for months on end, even though you’ve shown no interest in it.

There’s a guy called Greg Secker (Google on igcognito mode if you don’t want to ruin your life) who sells a “forex trading system”  via YouTube ads and looks like Phil Brown the old Hull manager.

On my LinkedIn there’s one of those entrepreneur coaches who claims he’s got the perfect system for my industry (he doesn’t).

I don’t mind the ads so much in themselves. It’s the way that one accidental click or maybe even just some keywords on your profile means your are stuck watching these same words removed saying the same things over and over again until the end of time. Always next to a swimming pool or a Ferrari or sitting in a penthouse apartment. **** off!

[Rugeley Villa]

I enjoy our games with Leeds now. Our team really gets under their skin which is great . **** em’ 

[Jonesy7211]

People that book meetings for lunch time. They can see my calendar is packed, with a short 30 minute break most days so I can sort myself out a bit of lunch between meetings.