August Disgust (Monthly Mini-Rants)

Continuing the discussion from I'm ranting at you, July! (July mini-rants):

Starting off this month’s mini-rants to just talk about how tired I am all the time. I’m trying to get more sleep and going to bed at a regular hour but it doesn’t help. Today was a day off, I slept in, got up late (after going to bed at a decent time) and still needed an hour and a half nap midday.

I used to never have this problem until I got Covid a couple years ago. Ugh.

The MAGA weaponization of, of all things, ‘PokemonGo’ continues: MAGA are filling gyms in my area with pro-MAGA and pro-Rump account names. Reporting these things to the game moderators w/i the system seems to be met with limited success.

Look it’s a Game. Your red hats make me want to vomit enough… I shouldn’t have to see Rump trying to grab Pokemon Go characters by the @@@@@.

< Pika…? >

< PIKA…! >

< pika…> < sob >
< pika…> < sob >
< pika…> < sob >

I slept right through and thought about saying Au Gust of Bad Wind Blows, which ties in to the post above mine.
Fatigue was my covid symptom and it recurred for a few months after I got better.

You know what’s more annoying than the youtube ads for Ground News or Brilliant?
The stupid “paid promotion” warning that youtube also thoughtfully adds to the thumbnail.

Let’s say you go into youtube, and click a thumbnail for a video that looks interesting. Ah, but Simon didn’t Say to click in the top 1/4 of the thumbnail! If you click there, you are taken to this legal page instead of your video.
Worse, when you go back in your browser, youtube re-rolls the video randomizer algorithm, so the video you wanted to watch is gone. Hope you can remember enough key words to manually find it!

I’ve also been sick for a week but last night was my first good sleep and i’m coming out of it.

BUT

I’ve reached an age where it’s hard to determine if i’m still sick or not. “Have I reached my regular level of ‘crappy?’” is a question I been asking the last three days when I wake up.

Someone I casually know passed away and it sucks.

I didn’t know him well, in fact I didn’t even know his name (though I do now). I mostly knew him as the guy who walked his really big dogs in our neighborhood (a German shepherd and a rottweiler) and was really friendly.

One night though, I was sitting on the couch, this was REALLY late at night, like after 11. Just chilling and watching TV and I got a knock on my door. It was him, and he said he was sorry to bother me but he noticed that my next-door neighbor had left his garage door wide open, there was stuff in the garage, and he was worried someone might steal it. He wanted to know if I could help him close it. That neighbor was in the process of moving and at the time there was nobody in the house.

So I slapped on a pair of shoes and a jacket (I still had PJ pants on though, it was late), we went to the neighbor’s house. I noticed he had an automatic garage door exactly like mine. So I asked the guy to wait outside as I went into the garage. I prepared myself, slapped the button for the door, and ran out. I knew that he had an eyebeam thing at ground level, because I had one too, and I had to hop over that because if I tripped it, it would stop closing the door to prevent harming a person or vehicle. But at the same time the door was closing, so I had to get over the beam and under the door. I did it quickly and successfully on the first try.

He said that was amazing, and I said I felt like Indiana Jones avoiding a trap. We waved goodbye, he went home and so did I, both knowing that we might have helped a neighbor (that neither of us knew well) and maybe kept him from losing some items. (Years ago, I had left my garage door open in a NyQuil-induced haze after taking out the garbage and someone stole my backpack with a laptop and other valuables in it, so it wasn’t a completely meritless concern.)

Anyway, just days ago that guy (who I now know was named Shane) was killed in a motorcycle accident. He seemed pretty young too, he seemed like he was in his 30s. What kind of guy asks a stranger for help in the middle of the night to help him with another stranger? He must have been a special guy.

RIP neighbor guy who I now know is Shane. He has a little memorial set up in our neighborhood too, I think other people were acquainted with him since he was a pretty friendly guy.

Oklahoma has revealed their new license plates. Our slogan went from “Native America”, which at least made a little sense to “IMAGINE THAT.” And now they’re red. The cynic in me says that it’s a tip to the Republican party. The cynic in me is usually right.

Ugly stupid plate.

I’m dreading the day this crap becomes more widespread in Jeep ducking. I’ve seen a few Trump-haired duckies on dashboards, but none have been left for me yet.

(In case you’re not familiar: Jeep ducking.)

I welcome the idea of any non-white license plate. The white ones all look pretty much the same.

The problem is that you have 50 states. Trying to distinguish them by solid color alone isn’t going to work.

They should be more complex but not so much that you have trouble reading the license ID itself. Here are a couple of good examples.

Distinctive color combinations that are still easy to read. I like those.

Here is an explanation of what “Imagine That” means.

It literally means nothing.

Never said all 50 states have to have plates of different solid colors. It’d be nice though to have more variation from the white-based theme which is dull-boring.



As far as having “trouble reading the license ID”, do criminals escape justice in New Mexico because cops and cameras can’t read their license plates?

I don’t disagree. I just don’t think a purely red plate is an improvement at all. The issue isn’t the white, it’s that it looks like all the other white plates. If they were all red it would be the same, or if they were all different solid colors it would still be just as bad, because you can’t have 50 different distinctive solid colors that the human eye is going to be able to distinguish between.

Color combos though, that I like.

I have a personalized OK plate. At the time I got mine, you could only get them with a white background even though the “normal” plates had a little color to them. IDK if I’ll be able to (or have to) get my personal plate with a red background.

Didn’t spend much time thinking about it, huh? Otherwise, you’d have a personalized great plate.

My problem with any standard plate being a strong color is that, on a lot of cars, the colors will clash. Imagine an orange car with that red AZ plate.

I read about a guy who could’ve gotten Collector tags for his vintage 'vette, but the Wisconsin Red Type On Blue Plate “would’ve looked horrid”.

I’d agree…

The vast majority of state license plates are butt-ugly (and I say this as someone who designed a specialty plate for the state of Virginia years ago). They just don’t give you a lot to work with.

Thanks for the link (to an NPR story). Now I know that “ducking” is a thing. Even if I don’t have a clue what it means, how it started, or why it started.

I can relate.

What I can’t relate to is why anyone would post a blind link that goes to twitter, without warning us. Hell, people warn about links that go to .pdfs; why aren’t people who want to avoid twitter worthy of the same respect?

Sorry Mr. Dangerfield.

Do people still warn about pdfs?

It says “SWTWF”. I thinks it’s pretty great in a Star Trek kind of way.