I think it has to be audiophiles - I know one who has gone the whole hog - he buys those very expensive systems that come in matt black cases with only one or two controls on the front - that wouldn’t be so bad, but it’s all the accessories and paraphernalia - the oxygen-free directional balanced triple shielded cables, the noise-suppressed power supply, the thermally-stabilised vibration-damping table (it’s like a table, only very expensive, and apparently needs to be set up by a qualified technician).
He simply won’t even entertain the possibility that he’s being fleeced and that, yes, although there is a certain amount of quality that only money can buy, there is a significant amount of imagination and wishful thinking in there too.
I had to chime in and agree. I knew this guy who built an amazing home theater system and used it to watch the absolute lamest crap: movies like Legally Blond, or Miss Congeniality. I thought it was just him, but now I know better.
Oh, jazzbos are high on the list of tedious wankers, ranking even above Beatles Bores. I got nothing much against jazz - most of it falls somewhere between bland and irritating, to my ears - but there’s plenty of music I don’t “dig”, as the kids say these days, and can live quite happily with its afficionados. Even emo, which with a tailwind isn’t that much worse than The Cure. Chuck on arson goo, as the French would have it. But the diehard jazzbo, on a smug-lipped Gitane smoking mission to proselytise about the virtues of a music which has been not just dead but ossified for forty years - as if listening to John Coltrane {I can’t even say “enjoying”: yer diehard jazzbo doesn’t “like” jazz; he “appreciates” it} makes him better than lesser mortals, who must be patronisingly and lengthily educated about the shortcomings of their musical taste - well, kick out the jams, motherfucker.
I’ll toss poker players into the ring. Bad beat stories (pocket aces, with three to a flush on the board, getting beat is not a bad beat), Outs (the number of cards that can beat them) the odds of winning the hand against whatever you’ve got (they know the percentage, trust me) The amount of the raise over the big blind or the amount of the pot. Or how some guy, some where, played a crap hand and won, or how they are all just waiting to do it for a living. Or what donkeys the players that beat them are. How much they won on a free roll tournament or that day when they were playing online they had AJ suited against a pair of deuces or how they’ve got the Nuts (No, no you don’t, you have the 5th nut, you ignorant wanker)
Oh sweet Jesus, yes, absolutely. I used to work in a Java/Unix shop for a mission-critical application that had, oh, 98% uptime, meaning it crashed several times a week. This is to say nothing of all the security patches and bugfixes for Linux, MySQL, JBOSS, etc that needed to be applied most every Sunday morning. But you should have heard the sneers of indignation when the IT shop shut down the Windows XP workstations for their bi-monthly reboot and patch application. “Oh, Microsoft, (snuckle snuckle) has to be rebooted AGAIN. Why can’t they make good software. Now I’m going to be delayed in recovering our software from the ongoing 2-hour critical production outage.”
To say nothing of the time we switched from proprietary ClearCase to good old open-source Subversion, which turned out to be a steaming walrus turd.
Gah. Martial artists tend to be the same way. I learned years ago to never talk about my martial arts experience in public, not because I am the Hoardkeeper Of True Ninja Mastery (unless 3 or 4 years in and around high school and college count), but because there’s something about that topic that sparks off macho oneupmanship. Every. Single. Time.
And if there’s nothing that makes me want to stab out my eyes it’s any story that begins with “Well, at my old dojo…”.
I’d like to add another group: jam band fans, especially the obsessive tape collecting/trading crowd. IMO, their wankiness and obsessiveness beats jazz fanatics, classical snobs and Beatles nuts by a long mile.
Seriously, why are they all obsessed with recordings of concerts in Vermont? Doesn’t matter if it’s the Dead, Phish, moe, Widespread Panic … they all go gaga over concerts in Vermont. “I finally got a soundboard recording of the May 23rd, 1972 Dead concert in Burlington!”
The thread title has stuck in my head since it appeared and I am now thinking that Tedious Wanker would be something awesome to put on a t-shirt at cafe press.
Never heard about the Vermont obsession, but Phish is from Burlington, and I think of the state as one of the modern-day meccas for hippies. I really really dislike jam band fans, since all of the ones I’ve known have been obnoxious trustafarians and other neo-hippies.
“You should listen to these tasty Keller Williams jams, brah,” they will say, and then force you to sit through half an hour of meandering musical masturbation. Or if you complain about Phish’s horrendous lyrics, they’ll say “They’re mind-expanding, brah. If you aren’t on some substances, of course you won’t appreciate them! That’s your bad, not theirs.” They are smug, drug-addled, and stinky.
Preach it. I am now learning about wine and coming to appreciate it more, but I avoided this whole area of interest for years for fear of being taken for – or worse, turning into – one of Those People.
Fortunately, it turns out there are a lot of non-obnoxious people who happen to like wine and who are able to convey their interest and appreciation without coming off as pretentious tossers. (psycat90, to name one who hangs around here.) But there’s still plenty of pretentious tossers, too, unfortunately.
I like wine, but unfortunately for me I happen to like SWEET wines. The idea of swilling what tastes like sucking on a cork soaked in vinegar is not for me. Give me an ice wine, or a sweet dessert wine, or this heavenly cheap red plonk du pays from this little sidewalk place in Perpignon - thick, red sweet, young and syrupy goodness, and something like 3$US equivalent for a huge pitcher of it… sigh
I ask for sweet wines and the people shopping in the wine stores sneer at me. At least my favorite plonk pusher understands that some people like sweet wines and doesnt sneer…
Hmm. In reading this thread, I’ve learned that, apparently, anyone with a hobby or an interest in anything esoteric is a Tedious Wanker.
:rolleyes:
Lesson learned. Never talk to anyone about anything that interests you. Someone might overhear you and decide you’re a Tedious Wanker.
Unless, of course, what interests you is making fun of other people’s interests. I think I just decided which hobby I think attracts the most Tedious Wankers.
I await the “where’s your sense of humour?” refrain.
Middle Ages aficionados, who think it was the epitome of coolness to live 700 years ago.
“Oh, there were castles, and princes and princesses, and they built huge cathedrals, and they had nice clothes, and they had armors and a sense of honor.”
Yeah, that’s it. And if you walked in the street you risked receiving a bucket of shit on the head, and they died of the plague or just giving birth, and there was no anesthesia, and they burned you at the stake if you looked a little strange. They’re not called the Dark Ages for nothin’, you dumbass.
I think the kinds of people lamented in this thread are the worst-case scenario for each respective hobby. There are millions of perfectly reasonable hobbyists. You never hear about them for the same reason as why there are no Good News programs, it’s all bad news. Some people are knowledgeable in their field and can teach you something if you show interest. Others don’t know how to talk about anything else, and make you want to put an icepick in your ear.
You can’t just make a blanket statement like that. It neither covers everyone, nor makes you look like you do well with reading comprehension.
