This one could be fun...

A thread where you can just complain about what grinds your gears, and it doesn't even have to be audio-related.

Some ideas to get you started:
- RIAA / DRM / The Recording Industry
- Artists / Songs / Genres that are underrated or overrated
- Buggy Programs
- Politics
- Examples of Irony
- Crap in Modern Sociaty
- Anything Else

All forum rules apply, so no subjective sound-quality statements without an ABX test.
Also, try not to flame other people's rants no matter how opinionated they are because it's just an opinion, just don't take any of this TOO seriously becouse it is just people venting. Feel free to post help or a link to a related thread if somone's rant is a fixable problem.

And now, some of my rants:

- Why has the recording industry been doing this recently:

If I want my CD 'loud' then I'll turn up the volume. One word: Normalize!

- If 80% of the music player market is iPods, the shouldn't Apple's slogan be 'Think The Same'?
A few links: PC Magazine Column and iDon't.com (but this site is sponsored by SanDisk Sansa, go figure)
We shouldn't be too harsh on iPods because even we had our Walkmans...

- Is the whole copy-protected CD thing over yet? Haven't the class-action suits, dropped sales (maybe not to the ignorant, but ratings for that album get bombed online) and returned merchandise, and the un-effected piracy of those CDs meant anything to the record labels. I've had to go around a few copy protections already and It's just a pain in the butt.

- I don't like this whole Internet-Required push by software companies where they try to get you online more and more for everything. I think that we all can agree that being online all the time is a bad thing. You should be online only when you need somthing online.

- I haven't warmed up to cell phones yet because they're expensive to buy, use, and maintain. I just can't see myself using a phone for a camera, video recorder, or music player (considering that cell-phone data plans and downloads are expensive too), and everyone is always yakking away on one, it seems. It's quite annoying.

Ah, so it's not just me.

I thought I was the only person without a mobile.

I cannot think of anything worse than someone being able to contact me 24/7. Personally, I like it when people can't contact me.

I'm not saying that mobiles aren't a wonderful invention; their safety value is terrific. I just don't get this need to be in constant contact with your nearest and dearest. I guess you could say peace and quiet are my nearest and dearest and I try to give them as much attention as I can.

But that's the best thing about the phone! You can turn it off! So even though you are theoretically available 24/7, you in fact are not. It makes you appreciate the peace even more. And I use that feature a lot. I love it. And it absolutely drives my friends crazy. That, I love too. But maybe I'm just weird...

You know that mobiles have a button named Off, right? And anyway, you don't have to anwer

I'm weird too then.

I'll admit that I do 40hrs/wk. at the local Taco Bell (It's my first job, leave me alone) to keep the bills paid and the car working and a good chunk of that time is spent on drive-thru (or the 'bubble' as me and my work chums call it). There are common things that customers do that really grind my gears like not know what they want or be stoner-giggleboxes with 3 of their friends in the car or order twenty crunchwraps, but there is nothing worse that cell-phonies in the drive! (or worse if they're two-waying: You want a taco? BEEP BEEP yeah? BEEP BEEP anything else, honey? BEEP BEEP)

A few more rants:

- Been to the theatre lately? I went for opening weekend of X-Men III and waited a half-hour for tickets to a show two hours later and I went in a half-hour early but still got crappy seats and payed too much for popcorn and fountain pop and babies cried and slobs smelled and douchebags yelled and cell-phones rang and the movie was good but not worth that and I was broke afterwards... VS... Sitting at home and downloading a bootleg and buring it to a $1 DVD-R and inviting a few friends and eating a $2 mega-size bag of popcorn while we watch it in my living room... And the MPAA wonders why people do the latter.

- I was on the Alienware website looking at what could possibly make a PC cost 10 GRAND+ DOLLARS when I found out: FOUR BLEEDING-EDGE GRAPHICS CARDS + PHYSICS CARD!!! What friggin' beefed out game are you about to play that ACTUALLY uses all those?!?! Total waste of power there. The only logical reason to get one reminds me of that Volkswagon commercial: "Because Daddy never hugged me... Because I'm compensating for somthing... Because I make more money than you..."

Anyways, enough of mine for now, I want to hear some of yours...

I want a cell phone and an Alienware.

And a crunchwrap.

Heh, here I order my seat tickets online. So I don't have to worry about getting them and I get to sit wherever I want. And people are extremely nice, no yelling etc. But I'm with you on the popcorn thing. Now hate that.

But that's the same as not having a phone, albeit temporarily. Just think, I get that joy all the time!

I guess my view of mobile phones is tainted by the fact that I work with geeks who all have to have the lastest model. Also, the guy who sits opposite me, his misses calls him at least four times a day, sometimes more like ten. Thankfully he changed his phone recently, as his old ringtone was always going around in my head, and I would often sing along (read: make weird trumpet sounds) when it went off. I can always tell when it's about to go off as my speakers start making buzzying noises, and continue to do so while he gives his misses directions, or just consoles her because the cat has been sick again. That f***s me off too.

Mainly though I dislike people holding phone conversations when they are in company.


I have no idea what a crunchwrap is; I don't think that we have Taco Bell here. I am a vegetarian, so I'm not very familiar with fast food "restaurants". I had never actually been into a McDonalds until about two months ago; a fact that I was quite proud of.

People calling Vorbis Ogg (or even worse: OGG) really make me go AAAAARGGGGGGGGH!

very funny if you picture it.

anyway, it's kinda funny if someone nearby answers the mobile. you learn a lot of what they think they have to represent.
example:
"yo. yeah, sure as hell. aye. shizzle, my crip then. for real? aye, later." *end of concersation* often followed by spitting out or generally looking dangerous or even more funny by slipping into another role and pretending that the overheard conversation never happened.

yeah it's often a little annoying if ppl have to have the weirdest ringtones and answer the phone loudly so everybody knows they are important. on the other hand it's their good right to do so, so why bother beeing annoyed.


what sickens me the most ATM are ppl who desperatly try not to be happy and need to tell the whole world about it.
same as depressive people. while this is nothing to be taken lightly it still makes you angry, partly because you are often helpless in the beginning aswell as they they drain you if you're not carefull.

so you hang around Hungry Jack's most of time then, eh? make it supersize.

If you guys have never seen Trigger Happy TV (or even if you have) you may find this amusing. Dom Joly used this idea in various situations where it was just really out of order.

I don't think we have Hungry Jack's either. That said, I don't get out much. I'm too busy sat by my land line waiting for someone to call.

LOL... cellphones... that reminds me of a story (hope I'm not breaking any TOS here )

Scene: A gym. Everyone burning their fat out.

BEEP BEEP BEEP ... a cell-phone rang. It rang for several tens of seconds, before a burly guy walked to the bench and picked it up. Conversation:

Hullo? Who's this? Oh honey, wassup?

What? Persian carpet? How big? Hm.... on discount? What price? $5000? Buy it then.

What? New BMW 328i? I don't know... oh, 3-year warranty? How much? $30,000? Get it.

Anything else? Oh, mountainside villa... Don't they get washed out in avalanche? ... What do you mean great price? Oh, 2 million dollars... okay, I think worth it.

Yeah... yeah... love you too....

*clap* end of conversation.

The guy looked around coolly, waved the phone, and asks,

"Anyone knows whose phone is this?"

very very OT:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....topic=45729&hl=

@ pepoluan:
yeah, a classic one

you wouldn't like me... I'm never happy and i don't like anyone who is.
If i had the power it would be night 20h a day, people would wear black uniforms, emotions would be forbidden, everyone would be sterilised and all new kids would born from the same DNA, getting the same names (ideally numbers) and education, etc. And the same gender. Ideally something between man and woman, just not to annoy the feminists. The perfect word acording to me

Dude... just... dude...

Hey... I dig the black uniforms, you now rarely see me in bright shirt anymore. Except in my house.

... and 20h nights... that means I can have 20h of club-outing-goodness

yeah...

You have to admire a man who can look on the bright side of such a morbid future. Kudos.

You and your fifteen asexual clones can have a dance marathon!

LOL ... hey the most oft-repeated complaint in the clubbing scene here is that the nights are too short...

And besides, daylight is overrated anyway

Annnndddd about asexual... since we are all genderless, we'll definitely find other ways of enjoying ourselves ... looking at the plus side (it's night, no brightness )... hey, you can no longer classify guys & gals as Slash/Straight anymore! Strike the sexual-preference-discrimination there!

Also, while I was living in an apartment with some friends for a while, my roommate Bill would leave his phone in his jacket outside my room and his brother would call every morning before anyone was up and he just called every five minutes untill Bill finally got up. That annoyed the $%^& out of me.



I don't think I could say the same about being sterilised and being clones and having a number instead of a name and having no gender. Sounds like somthing out of a George Orwell novel... I dig black clothes and nighttime, though.

(takes deep breath...)

Rant: coming to HA, clicking View New Posts since last visit, getting 6 pages, and probably 5 of them are Foobar-related, and I have no interest in Foobar.

(steps back warily)

in other words:
you have a careless and boring life

You can view new "Audio Topics" only.

I'm sure you have. It's just called "Burger King" outside of Australia. Different name, same thing.

Sebastian

Why are we ranting against Burger King / Hungry Jack / whatever? (referring to the thread title) LOL

Ah, thanks for the info. Burger King did used to do a good bean burger a good few years back (shit, around eighteen actually ), but I haven't been in one for approximately the same timeframe so I couldn't tell you if they still do.

I'm sure that there are numerous reasons to rant against Burger King and McDonalds, but I'm not a militant vegetarian so I'll leave that to others.

That's the good thing about the Off Topic forum, you don't have to worry about TOS #5 too much (I hope).


Boy, people in McDonalds, sitting with friends but talking to their girlfriend on their mobile phone about their cat, really piss me off.

I don't think this will ever happen. And that's pretty much the reason why I didn't like the movie Equilibrium.

Speaking of movies.... I visit the movie theatre every once in a while and one of the few things that's getting on my nerves are the anti-piracy ads. IMHO they're targeting at the wrong audience (paying movie theatre goers).

Sebastian

Yeah... basically they are reminding the movie-goers what fun it is to be pirates...

Right now I think that power adapters such as this are one of the worst failures of humanity. Plug one into your outlet power strip and at least one more socket becomes unavailable. grrrr

Whoever invented these power adapters deserves to be flayed and rolled in salt.

But it depends on the power strip. Here in my country we have single wall outlets and you have to use a cross-shaped junction. Plug it into one port, and the other two are free.

What irks me is... why must every darn region has its own plug standard???

US <> Japan <> Europe <> UK <> Aus/NZ.

Even each country in Europe have their own plug! See here, and here also.

actually i wanted to post this on friday, but i've been disturbed:

My view of the world is greatly influenced by thinks like 1984, American Psycho, The Fight Club and Equilibrium...

Diversity is surely nice, but when you think about it, almost every conflict has been and is caused by diversity. Often when i look around i feel that it would be worth to gave up that diversity and achieve something what's...it is had to formulate but maybe just working more effectively. If everyone's the same there's nothing to envy. It may sound like a comunist ideology but in fact it's true.
Sometimes when i get pissed off i have even more radical theories, so some people are comparing me to Eichmann...



I never tought of watching copied dvds as piracy. In the year 2004 i've seen 30 movies in the theater (i know, because i've documented it ). Nowadays i don't go so often due to lack of time and company (and i've realized that there are better ways to spend my money).
Assuming that i've been in the theatre every 2 weeks i don't feel any guilt when i'm watching some illegal copies (most of them i saw in the theater before). These copies often come from a videotheque, so me or one of my friends payed some money for it, and after watching by the way the dvd was copied and it's distributed between us.
Other factor: most of the movies were quite succesfull in the box office and earned above 100 Mio USD...

The situation is completely different with music: i have approx 250 downloaded discs in my collection. These discs can't be considered mainstream, so probably the artists/publishers (mostly outside of the RIAA empire) are missing my money.

Yes, i know i should buy the music i like, and i really would like to support the artists. But: considering an average price of the CD: 20$ x 250 = 5000$. Thats roughly the 80% of the average yearly wage in SVK. Not to mention my income wich is way below...
Mp3 as a format is much more confortable for me than an audio CD, and when i have an album in mp3 already, it is hard to convience myself to buy it as a real cd. (But i'm definetly going to buy Pain of Salvation's Remedy Lane or BE, because the booklet contains essential info to the music)
Another weird thing: i've experineced that i can much more enjoy downloaded music than a bought cd, because i always have the feeling that it was not worth the money. Actually i've became a music fan when i started downloading...

I hope i didn't violate any TOS here, i was just trying to express my opinion on piracy

and also great thing like love and coorperation are (also) caused by diversity. the whole planet in it's form exists because of evolution... diversity.
don't you think the way you want to change your world has a coward touch? what about all the people that actually enjoy their life? would you be the one that should have the power to destroy their lifes?
your view seems to be marked by fear and anger, nothing good will come out of ideas based on that in the long run (no offence meant).
while diverstity surly has it cruel and mean aspects there is also the other side. the way I see it, by your argumentation you position yourself on the 'dark' side, the very side that you assumingly want to get rid of.

further more, if everybody was the same there would be nothing special about it anymore. there would be no meaning anymore. and humans need meaning in life to be happy, whatever that meaning would be.

Digga made some very good points. Achieving a soulless mediocrity is no way to solve the issues that we have. You may as well be dead.

That is a really good call; they are hideously annoying!

It certainly seems that way.

I second that. We achieve greatness, trying to become better, because we see others that are different from us and (in our point of view) better than us. So we try to become better, while they try to stay better.

Diversity begats inspiration.

LOL

This is enough to ruin my day:

They say a picture paints a thousand words. Good work.

Very true also.

the funny thing is, that you act like i had an army just behind the door waiting to put the evil plans into practice
yeah, i'm sure i'm on the darkside, because the bright one seems hypocritical to me: just like that bag with almost no chips inside. Everyone seems to be beatiful, happy and clever but of course there's a second side not seeming so bright
I'm just sometimes over-emphasizing that hidden word, just like the happiness is over-emphasized in our (my) world.

Btw. we had elections this weekend, so for almost three months there were ugly politicians smiling at me from billboards promising 'promised land'. Influented by this i was just presenting my political agenda - i would surely vote myself
Just imagine a billboard: A guy with thick beard, strict face dressed in black before a sky filled with dark clouds saying: WITH ME THE DARKNESS ARRIVES



A fictional quote from Joseph Stalin, actually made up by novelist Anatoly Rybakov. True and funny

In fact i'm the guy who's "Always looking on the bright side of life", but doing it from the dark side and i'm finding the positives of things that are by everyone considered to be bad/wrong/sad/etc.

Your dream travel destination may be a Caribbean island. Mine is Chernobyl (it can't be excluded that i've been exposed to the radiation )
You may be joking about policeman and lawyers. I'm joking about death. A stupid policemen is not so funny. But a 'deadly joke' may help you to get through certain situations

exactly. without it there would be little progress. and we need to progress to become better and to survive in the end. maybe it's just me but I want to evolve (well, in some areas ).

@ skelly831:
you still have the sauce, do you? hmmm... yummy.

I'm just walking the road you built a few steps further

I'm glad you're making your first statement invalid by your own words.

my dream location is right here where I am for now. I may go somewhere else if I managed all problems here, including my own with myself.
location is not everything.


somethimes you just have to say what the fuc* and do your own thing. you'll see how far and where it get's you. just drop the clone idea, will you?

edit: uhm... damn, this thread is about ranting. ah well...

Kewl! I dig the slogan

Diversity is not a moral characteristic of humans, it is very much a physical one. Therefor it shouldn't be called right or wrong (unless you are a racist), it is just a given unchangeable fact. The conflicts you mention very much stem out of the fear of diversity, not out of diversity itself.

From bash.org:



BTW, I love this thread.

Err.. US and Japan have the same plug standard. Not necessarily the same electricity (100VAC vs 120 VAC, and in some places, 50 Hz vs 60 Hz), but its close enough for most devices that regulate power intelligently.

Rant: Tailgaters. I just don't get it. I really dislike the mentality of the majority of people when they are driving.

Do you know that sticker on the cars/trucks saying: IF YOU CAN READ THIS YOU'RE TO CLOSE

I have a relaxed view on piracy as you have probably gathered from my other posts. I actually buy about half of my music, movies, and software and I spend what money I do spend intelligently, for example I by the CDs of the artists I most like and I pirate all games made by EA (I don't like them too much because they are a buy-out company that bought out some of my favorite dev teams), and I will by games to keep EA away from dev teams like Benthesda Softworks and I've yet to give Microsoft a dime. (for software anyway, I do own an Xbox) I couldn't possibly afford to buy everything and I'm sure that's why most people casually pirate.

As for the power adapters rant, they make small 6in extension cords for that now. The ones I saw were called Liberators, but I'm sure they go by many names.

Tailgaters bug me, but not as much as ppl who cut in behind a truck really fast and almost run into the front of my car. It will make my day when one of them over-shoots it and blasts the back of a semi-trailer.

When I have a tailgater on me I usually slam on my brakes (depending on closeness and size of tailgater's car, I don't do it with an 18-wheeler behind me). I love the look of their faces on my rear-view mirror.

My rear bumber is a little dented though.

I used to do that too to on speedways to 'teach em a lesson'. just tap on the break so the rear lights flicker a bit and pretend to really break hard.
you are moved into a position of pressure and stress by the car behind you. that's a way to turn the tide and make them stressed out. pure satisfaction. also it demonstrates that such a situation can actually be very dangerous. what if you really had to do a full break for some reason? crash, both dead (in the worst case).
I stopped doing this though when after such a situation a Benz overtook, got in front of me and slowed down rapidly form like 140 km/h to 50 or 60 (on purpose). I myself had to break real hard in order to avoid a crash then. my adrenalin was still pumping for like 2 min.

bottom line: guys who drive up (yeah it's kinda like a real drive up) real fast and close for whatever reason are dangerous. I decided to not risk my life for an ego boost. it's just not worth it.
alltough sometimes my foot still itches.
and they lived happily ever after


great pic tough skelly831

that reminded me a quite funny story. i'm living in a small town near our capital city, where a lot of people work, go to school, etc. Now, between my city and the capital are two smaller villages and the highway is perfectly crossing them, no ring road or something.
The people in the villages realized that they want to get from the one side of the village to the second, so they built some traffic lights.
Now these lights are causing a kilometer long convoy every morning.

To get the whole story i have to say, that recently many people from the capitol moved to out town and they are pretty disliked with their big houses and fancy cars.

Now to the topic: one morning, traffic jammed as usual, one of these guys with a BMX X5 started to pass the convoy at approx 120 km/h. Another guy in the convoy saw him in the rear mirror, got annoyed and simply drove his old car into the way of that X5. You can imagine a huge car like an X5 breaking from 120 to zero... Thankfully they didn't crash, but they certainly made my day

I usually don't tap the breaks or slowdown abnormally fast when somebody tailgates me. Whenever I have it never seems to matter. I just don't understand why people do it. I guess nobody understands the simple physics of stopping your car. Whatever.

Todays rant: Friends who don't know jack about their computers and being the friend of theirs that does. Needless to say I'm always fixing people's computers.