I don’t know if it’s all of California. But we get RED in the winter if it’s been too many days since the last rain. Fire danger.
The North had rain and snow, but down here in SoCal just some drizzle.
We need some rain.
First time posting in this thread. I don’t know if my annoyance fits in with the 642 previous gripes.
Somebody says to you something like, “Oh that has been going on for a long time,” or “There were a lot of <something-or-others>.”
And you ask, “How long?” or “How many?” and they reply with dramatic emphasis,“Oh I have absolutely NO IDEA–”
And you say, “Well give me a guess,” and they insist they can’t even guess and have NO IDEA!
Then to the first question (how long) you say, “Has it been going on for days, weeks, months, years?” And 
they say, “Well, not years. Maybe about a month or two.”
To the second (how many), you ask, “5, 50, 200?” And suddenly they DO have an idea, namely, “It was less than 100. Probably about 75.”
Why can people only do this if you pin them down?
Yes, my annoyance is disproportionate. I know.
A sous-chef taught me how to cut onions that way. He also taught me that if I cut myself with one of those very sharp knives he used, to stop the bleeding with ground pepper. Worked!
They sure were. Blanching isn’t mainly to make those vegetables pale, it’s to make them mild-tasting. Unblanched celery is only good for soup stock, unblanched cauliflower tastes strongly of kale (it’s the same species), and endive is really bitter, like old dandelion leaves.
I couldn’t follow that description. Can you link to a video, or add more words? Because it sounds worth trying.
here’s one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCGS067s0zo
Thanks. That’s not what i envisioned at all, from those words.
Yes. Most people who make stuff for YouTube trying to make a buck are shooting for ten minutes minimum. Or at least it used to be ten minutes. If someone beats around the bush for too long I will turn the video off. Some creators, I’m looking at you Meidis Touch, give you most of the useful content within the first 3-4 minutes and fill the rest with garbage.
Or demonetized. I think TikTok has stricter rules about that kind of thing, but YouTube is a problem as well. The reasoning behind YouTube’s decisions are often opaque and appealing isn’t always simple. I get annoyed whenever I hear unalived used to mean murdered or suicide.
I hate receiving an email where the sender doesn’t bother writing anything in the body. They might write something like “I Need Help with My Benefits” in the subject line but leave the body completely blank. Let’s start from the beginning. It just seems rude to send an email with a blank body. Like you couldn’t be bothered to take a few minutes and write something there. Why should I bother replying if you couldn’t take the time to write a goddamn email properly? The subject line usually doesn’t provide enough information for what you want. Help with your benefits? What does that even mean? Are you trying to change your HSA? Update your beneficiary information? Did you have a baby and need to add a newborn to coverage? Give me some heads up.
Yes, that annoys me also. They clearly has SOME idea, they just dont want to think.
I just encountered one. Read about a particular show on a streaming service that interested me and it turns out it is dubbed!
I absolutely hate dubbing.
Most of the time you have the choice to watch in the original language with subtitles which I prefer. This one did not have an option. You have to watch the dubbed version.
I tried but gave up after about 10 minutes.
What I was trying to describe is similar to that video, but holding the onion in the palm root end down, slicing horizontally to get a flat top, for simplicity imagine slicing it in half at the equator. Looking down on that you use a sharp knife to cut just a little deeper than your dice size in two directions, like a checkerboard grid. Then make another slice parallel to the flat top to free the diced pieces. That makes just enough onion for a single saute dish, or maybe cut two layers that way for more. All done with the knife in one hand and the onion held in the palm your other hand. No cutting board involved.
Only about 1/2 the onion gets used in this manner, the remains get chopped up other ways to use in soups and other dishes where consistent dicing isn’t important.
I do not recommend cutting onions this way.
Wow, talk about a thing that infuriates me beyond its actual importance. My God, man, this is just asking for a trip to the ER to get stitched up.
It’s like those people who cut bagels holding it in their hand while they slice downward with the knife. Or the ones poking a big knife at an avocado pit while holding it in their hand.
Keep your hand out of the path of the knife, please.
Thanks!
YES! I get disproportionately appropriately annoyed when I encounter people who just don’t want to think! And there’s a lot of it going around. 
True, pale colour is only one aspect of blanching/forcing - in addition to milder flavour though, there is also tenderness - chlorotic blanched growth on plants tends to be juicy/crisp and fairly delicate.
Apropos of nothing, something that infuriates me nearly every time I encounter it: The Shit Sandwich method of critique - this is where you have something you want to say that you know is not going to land well, so you bookend it with a pair of nice things.
In theory, it’s good, because after all, you’re saying twice as many nice things as nasty, and you’re ending on a high, and all that, except in reality, it nearly always sucks, because:
- It’s generally very obvious that you’re doing it this way, with no actual sincerity
- The ‘nice’ things are nearly always vapid pleasantries that you hastily thought up
- The haste with which the first ‘nice’ thing is delivered betrays your true intention to get to the delivery of the nasty.
- The last ‘nice’ thing is often ‘anyway, as I say, [repetition of the first ‘nice’ thing]’
- The nasty thing is frequently vicious and often completely unhelpful, generally unkind and totally unnecessary, and is delivered with actual feeling, and in far greater detail breakdown than the bookended ‘nice’ statements
Agreed. Someone here said that they can safely skip to 1/3 into any video and get to the actual content they want. That is unfortunately true most of the time.
I enjoy watching Steve Lehto’s lawyer videos where he talks about the latest outrageous thing, but I find myself counting off the minutes before he actually reveals the essential facts behind the clickbait title (totally made-up example: “Woman sued by car dealer after repo man was injured in accident while unlawfully taking her car”… the essence of such a story could be told in a paragraph, with details following of course, but his videos seem to follow the “skip 1/3” rule).
He’s generally good, so I accept it.
My pet peeve for professional YouTubers is the constant “calls to action”…code for “Like and Subscribe!!! Ring the bell!!!” and “Smash that Like button!1!!”.
“Don’t forget to leave a comment” and so on. Better still if they are constantly saying “If you want to know more about X, see my video on that, link here [pointing to upper right]”.
It’s annoying enough to me that I will never (for certain definitions of “never”) utter such words in my own videos. No, I don’t ask people to subscribe or ring the bell. No, I don’t ask them to comment unless it’s something I want to know (“If you know how to adjust the Rollei 35 light meter, please let me know in the comments”)
It’s a bit of a Prisoner’s Dilemma, where if everyone cooperated we would be free of “like and subscribe” spam and viewers would just naturally do so, but those content authors who “defect” (the Prisoner’s Dilemma term) would then beg for the likes in their videos and they would rise to the top, so now everyone has to include this nuisance crap in their videos.
…except people like me, since I don’t make any money off of YouTube 
Me too. I stopped asking people to subscribe quite a few years ago. It’s just needy. I do ask people to comment if there is a thing to talk about, or if I am aware that the topic has a wealth of different views and approaches to it, or if there’s something that happens in my video that I genuinely don’t know - like encountering an object I can’t identify., which does happen quite a lot.
I’d probably have seen more and faster growth on my channel if I went and just did all the YouTuber things, but it’s a genuine slippery slope into turning it into just another dreary job, which I am determined not to do.
Which juxtaposes with “I need to find something to critique and give you an action step in order to justify my job” strategy of feedback.