Sound guys at concert venues: You don’t actually have to turn everything up to 11. Especially in a small venue. Make it loud enough to hear the music over the people talking, but quiet enough that we can actually make out the individual words the singer is singing.
Any professional?
Hey! Ron Jeremy! I have this move…
Does it involve…a knuckle?
Absolutely. And bands: you don’t necessarily HAVE to amplify yourself. Especially when you’re in a small room with hard floors and we have to stand out on the goddamned balcony because I can feel the sound waves in my intestines. It was supposed to be a party! I mean, like, a swanky party put on by a publisher!
Better yet: Don’t have non-skippable warnings. It’s not like piracy is made any less illegal by you not telling me about it.
To DVD/Blu-Ray player manufacturers: Ignore whatever flag says “unskippable” on the disc. It’s just the DVD/Blu Ray makers being dicks.
First, I agree completely with everyone who commented about the excessive volume of car crashes/gun shots/explosions in movies and on tv. It is a standing joke in my house that I MUST have the volume control in my HAND to watch tv, so I can constantly monitor the volume.
Second, to all those incredibly highly paid professional basketball players: Go to the gym and practice your free throws. You’re six feet tall, make zillions of dollars to play this game, and you can’t sink a freaking free throw? Get off your lazy ass and practice. When I was a kid, I could sink 50+ shots in a row. And I am GIRL! Are you kidding me? I’d be embarrassed to be you.
This. Don’t preach at me about the evuls of piracy when I just bought your goddam product!.
Don’t put spoilers in the menus or menu transitions.
Actors: there are other ways to appear to be a dark, broody, complex character than mumbling. Discover them.
Writers: stop using an apostrophe when making plurals. And “everyday” is usually supposed to be two words unless it’s an adjective.
NBA players going into the championship playoffs: No matter how good, or highly paid, or spectacularly the team plays during the season, without championship experience they are likely to get creamed when they meet the back-to-back champion in the finals. For a few million bucks the team managers ought to invest in some kind to training to overcome the “first championship” jitters in a team.
You can say that about nearly all cinderella teams that faced Jordan’s Chicago Bulls in the finals (Sonics, Blazers, Suns, Jazz.)
Totally agree about the anti-piracy warnings. Great, lecture the person who BOUGHT the product, while the person who swipes it from a torrent site or some such can skip right over the preaching.
As for the mumbling, this is one reason we favor use of subtitles or closed-captioning (and both of us have normal hearing). Too much background noise in a scene or an actor who can’t be bothered to enunciate can make dialogue unintelligible.
Major League Baseball: Interleague play is maybe sorta interesting, but not in the least bit fun when you realize your team has played all the top other-league teams and everyone else in your division has played all the bottom other-league teams.
Interleague is absolutely not fair unless everyone in the division has the exact same schedule.
There’s room on a Blu-Ray for nine hours of HD content. Stop spreading a TV series across five discs.
Board games: I never designed a board game but I’ve played hundreds of them. So I’ve picked up a few things about game design from seeing the results. Sometimes the designers just missed something so obvious, you want to shake them and ask them why.
For example, I recently got the game Goldbrau. It’s a money making game based on the calendar. You play seven rounds of turns (Monday through Sunday) and then there’s a Sunday evening turn, where you collect all the money from your previous week’s work. And you do this for three “weeks”.
So the game goes Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday-Friday-Saturday-Sunday-Sunday evening-Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday-Friday-Saturday-Sunday-Sunday evening-Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday-Friday-Saturday-Sunday-Sunday evening.
Can you perhaps see how this might cause some confusion? It’s going to be around the thirteenth turn and suddenly players are going to be arguing about whether they’re playing Friday or Saturday. The designers have this complicated procedure of passing a token around the table each turn and figured out when it’s Sunday evening by how many times the first player has had the token (which only works if you play with the standard four player rules).
But here’s an idea: put a turn track on the side of the board. There’s plenty of room. Just put a token on Monday when you start the game and move it ahead a day every time you finish a turn. When you finish a week, move it back to Monday.
+1
I’m amazed at how loud my cows are, even when they’re only a few months old! I think the only thing louder is a braying donkey. That will carry SEVERAL MILES down a valley.
Yes. And please drop all dog noises that are not critical to the plot. I have a Great Pyr and he goes ballistic at the sound of a dog no matter how quick or how ‘far away’ it is supposed to be. Not every neighborhood in the world has a barking dog in it and I’m tired of having my 100 pound dog try to crawl through me to kill the computer speaker!
Oh, and by the way, basketball people? When I was a kid and they made us play it in gym there was this funny rule called “traveling”. Is that not a thing anymore?
Researchers who study the health effects of drinking alcohol: always treat as two separate categories, people who do not drink because they drank too much and then became sober long term, versus, people who do not drink and never drank.
I hear that the claim that a little drinking is better than no drinking at all has arisen from studies in which only the amount a person says they habitually drink is taken into consideration. People who do not drink are sometimes people who already damaged their health by drinking way too much, and who have dried out. Obviously the fact that their damaged health makes the teetotaling population a bit less healthy on average is NOT evidence that a little drinking is better than no drinking!
I’ve probably posted this before, but I watched a decent amount of basketball (mostly NBA) in the seventies, then lost interest and didn’t see any games at all for a long time. Late nineties somebody had a game on and I’m paying a little bit of attention and here I am:
“Wait–he traveled…”
“You can’t run with the ball, pal!”
“Hey, ref, that’s TRAVELING…”
“Hey, buddy, leave the twelve steps for the recovering alcoholics!”
“Hey, CALL IT THE FUCK ALREADY!”
So you’re absolutely right.
Phone manufacturers: don’t put touch-sensitive buttons in the corner of the bezel, where one is likely to touch the phone merely in the course of holding it. On my Android phone, if it’s not in sleep or the lock screen I have developed the habit of nervously picking it up by its edges, lest I inadvertently launch something by pressing one of those stupid corner buttons.
While we’re at it, when the battery is getting dangerously low, maybe emit some kind of distinctive beep to alert me. Don’t fire up the phone from sleep, turn the back light on, and play some kind of animated warning, thereby wasting many of the precious few milliamp-seconds of charge that I have left.
Landscape designers and architects - your majestically composed piece of “art” which has wonderfully clean lines and severely limited plant spectrum looks spectacular in carefully composed magazine photos - but is effective for only about three weeks out of the year. The rest of the time it’s boring boring boring.
You’re so dragged down by Rules, Color Theory and the like that you’ve forgotten what gardening is all about.