Venting thread

[Linguoboy]

Ugh, I suppose the only way to avoid social media drama when booting someone from your feed is block them after you defriend them. I don't like doing that--it seems unnecessarily harsh--but the alternative--having a conversation foisted on me which I knew from the outset would go nowhere at all--is worse.

[Raphael]

Why are there people who, when you acoustically didn't understand something they said, and ask them to repeat it, will assume that you didn't understand their meaning, and will, then, instead of simply repeating what they said, provide you with clarifications that are completely useless for you if you didn't understand anything they said the first time?

[MacAnDàil]

I think they will have misunderstood your request. Maybe a different wording could work better? Or maybe they did understand your request and they thought that you might hear better if it was differently worded.

[Civil War Bugle]

Why are there people who, when you acoustically didn't understand something they said, and ask them to repeat it, will assume that you didn't understand their meaning, and will, then, instead of simply repeating what they said, provide you with clarifications that are completely useless for you if you didn't understand anything they said the first time?

My father is guilty of this all the time. I continually tell him I simply didn’t hear the literal words he said but he continually elaborates instead of repeating them.

[Man in Space]

I just tried depositing $360 into an ATM. It rejected $40 of it, then took my money and rejected the transaction entirely. Now I’m out $320.

[Ryusenshi]

You really should complain to the ATM operator! You can't just lose $320!

Very minor vent: apparently, it's impossible to find an affordable stereo with a headphone jack. Did everyone switch to bluetooth headphones while I wasn't looking?

[Raphael]

I just tried depositing $360 into an ATM. It rejected $40 of it, then took my money and rejected the transaction entirely. Now I’m out $320.

Wow, that's really fucked up!

[Travis B.]

I just tried depositing $360 into an ATM. It rejected $40 of it, then took my money and rejected the transaction entirely. Now I’m out $320.

I once was not given sufficient funds that I had asked for by an ATM but it still deducted it from my account, so I called the company running the ATM, and they refunded me the funds I had lost.

[Linguoboy]

I'm having one of those days where I feel like everyone around me has been taking stupid pills.

First, there was a discussion in one of my groups about terminology and one of the participants was just being unbearably thick. He kept referring to cover terms like "queer" as a "box", but whenever I pressed him on how these terms were acting as boxes, he just kept repeating "a label is a box" as if that was some sort of meaningful statement. Dude, unpack your metaphor; maybe it doesn't actually mean what you think it does.

Then a friend asked me about a friend's Morrissey tattoo. Since the tattooee is Central American, I mentioned in passing the extreme affection in which many Mexicans, Mexican-Americans, and LA Latines hold the music of Morrissey and The Smiths and shared a WaPo article on the topic. The article is titled "Why Do Mexican-Americans Love Morrissey So Much?" He response was to ask me "Why do Latin men love The Smiths?" and I'm like, "Did you freaking read the article I just shared that literally answers that very question?"

This all comes on the heels of two acrimonious discussions with old friends---one over the use of a phrase which he characterised as "racist" even though almost everyone else I've talked to doesn't consider it to have any particular racial connotations and another over a post I made condemning body-shaming because somehow he thinks body-shaming is the best tool we have to fight fascism? (I confess to not fully engaging with his arguments.) So all in all I'm kind of done talking to anyone about anything more complicated than doughnut flavours.

[alice]

Will no-one rid me of these turbulent after-effects of covid???

[Raphael]

Will no-one rid me of these turbulent after-effects of covid???

Get better!

[Moose-tache]

Since we don't get snow days anymore, the first day of this school year was canceled due to flooding.

[alice]

Will no-one rid me of these turbulent after-effects of covid???

Get better!

I wish I could. The damned thing is hanging around like an unttached VP node.

[doctor shark]

Minor vent: I recently ordered some coins from the Vatican City, like I normally do every year. You know, shiny things and all. This year, however, unlike previous purchases, they decided to charge import taxes on the package! Despite, you know, the coins being legal tender euro coins despite their shininess and most of my numismatic purchases within the Netherlands are subject to VAT at 0%... and even if they should be subject to import VAT, it shouldn't be at the 21% general rate (but the reduced 9% rate for "collectibles").

So now time to figure out how to lodge an objection... and if I have to fight with Customs or with the postal service...

[Travis B.]

Okay, in the saga that is my attempts to get SDHC cards to work with zeptoforth... For a while there, despite my best attempts, after initializing the SDHC card it was outputting $00 consistently (this is not correct behavior). I tried it with two different SDHC cards, 32 GB SanDisk Ultras. Then, I got sick of it, so I went off and played with multitasking on Racket some. Eventually I decided to revisit it, and despite initializing the SDHC cards it was outputting $FF consistently (this is also not correct behavior)! I tried it with two different SDHC cards, with two different SD Card readers (because one person reported this problem as being due to defective readers), and they both behaved the same way! And I don't recall what I did to change this behavior, because the only changes I recall making recently were to remove upping the clock on the SPI peripheral to 1 Mbaud after initializing the card (which occurs after the point where this problem occurs), changing the number of dummy bytes to send in a number of places back to eight bytes from one byte (it had previously worked differently with eight dummy bytes), which I had previously set it to, changing the message timeout behavior to rely on the SysTick timer (which I changed after this problem arose, to more predictably handle timeout behavior), and changing the initial block of the SPI peripheral to 125 kbaud (which I have since changed back to 250 kbaud, to no effect). So I am stumped as to what is going on in general, w.r.t. its initial $00 problem or its current $FF problem.

[Raphael]

So, this one time, yesterday, a particular spot on my lower right leg was itching a bit. So I rolled up my trousers and scratched the itchy spot a bit.

Problem is, it had clearly been a bit too long since I had last clipped my fingernails. This is how the result looks like today:

aua.jpg (241.84 KiB) Viewed 3959 times

Ouch.

[Linguoboy]

How about a petty linguistic gripe?

I'm reading Amitav Ghosh's Ibis Trilogy about the Opium War and enjoying it quite a bit. As a bonus, he includes a lot of various vernaculars--there are entire lines of dialogue in Bhojpuri, Bengali, Hindustani, Cantonese, Chinese Pidgin English, Mauritian Creole, and who knows what else. As far as I can tell, these are pretty accurate. So it seems petty to complain about what he gets wrong, but I'm not above pettiness.

The Chinese official generally credited with provoking the First Opium War is Lín Zéxú (林則徐), a Fuchowese scholar-official. Most of the conversations about him take place between various Indians and Englishmen living in the Thirteen Factories on the outskirts on Canton. Only one of these characters is shown to be literate in Chinese; most speak no Chinese beyond a few Cantonese phrases and communicate with the locals primarily in Pidgin. Other Chinese figures (historical and invented) in the work are referred to almost solely by anglicised versions of their names in Cantonese (e.g. "Lam Qua" for the painter 林官 Làhm Gūn).

Logically, if the English-speaking characters are learning his name orally from Cantonese-speakers, Lin should be referred to by some version of the Cantonese pronunciation of his name, Làhm Jākchèuih. Perhaps you could argue for code-switching, since he is a high official from outside Guangdong. That seems like a stretch to me, but if Ghosh had chosen to consistently referr to him by some anglicised version of the Mandarin form of his name, I wouldn't complain. He does, in fact, occasionally use "Lin Tsê-hsü", which is the Wade-Giles transcription.

However, more often he uses "Lin Zexu", which is Pinyin and, thus, a massive anachronism in a story set in 1838 (more than a century before it was devised). It's the only Pinyin in the book and it makes me grit my teeth every time I see it. And it probably wouldn't bother me at all if he hadn't gotten so much else right. (He also anachronistically has his Indian characters drinking masala chai, but he invents such a charming story to explain this that I'm more than happy to forgive him.)

tl;dr: Pinyin in a historical novel.

[Travis B.]

How about a petty linguistic gripe?

[snip]

tl;dr: Pinyin in a historical novel.

That is petty, yet it would annoy me just as much myself.

[Richard W]

He does, in fact, occasionally use "Lin Tsê-hsü", which is the Wade-Giles transcription.

...

However, more often he uses "Lin Zexu", which is Pinyin and, thus, a massive anachronism in a story set in 1838 (more than a century before it was devised).

...

tl;dr: Pinyin in a historical novel.

Wade-Giles is also an anachronism.

[Linguoboy]

Wade-Giles is also an anachronism.

Much less of one, though. It has a lot in common with Legge's romanisation and the various 19th-century missionary transcriptions whereas Pinyin represents an attempt at a clean break from them. (For instance, Legge and Wade both write hsü where Pinyin has xu.)