Spiderdevil's Hatred Corner

I hate when my thread falls to page 2.

On the plus side, I just knocked this baby up to 3 pages.

 

We find SD once more at his computer, typing a thoughtful post destined for a thread somewhere in the EUC.

Hi gang. I've been lurking around Community for the past half hour or so, posting here and there, and I've got something I've just go to get off my chest.

2 items today: Thread topics and newbies.

Thread Topics
Have you gone into Community lately? I'm almost ashamed to post in there. I realize it's the miscellaneous/general forum, but come on. Some of the threads are absolute crap.

Some of the threads are actually useful. The official "Plane crashes into World Trade Center" was quite helpful in getting information out to people during the tumultuous few hours following the crashes.

Some threads breed thoughtful discussion (most of the time). Rogue1-and-a-half's "A Different Kind of Movie Topic" is one example. He's counting down the AFI's top 100 movies and each film entry is followed by a discussion on the film.

But of this crap is just ridiculous. I will admit to starting a couple of stupid and pointless threads a few months ago. They sank quickly to the depths and I was glad to watch them go.

I really don't like when people start threads asking for advice on women/whatever. No offense to any of you, but this is not the place I'd go for relationship advice.

I also hate seeing threads with "Quick!" in the title. Someone needs a piece of info in the next 5 minutes so they can write a 10-page paper before they go to their class that started 15 minutes ago! These threads clog up the Community and inevitably stay on the first page for at least 2 days despite the problem being solved within the first 2 minutes of the thread's creation.

And every thread is the "Official" thread for this or that. I'm tired of this ****. Stop starting stupid redundant threads and maybe the rest of us can stop wasting braincells trying to figure out what's wrong with you. People start threads for everything under the sun, and there has to be more regulation than there is now. I personally think you should be warned and possibly even temporarily banned if you start more than one thread a day. This would cut down on a lot of the crap in Community.

Item 2...

Newbies
I think I ranted a bit about newbies a few days ago. Well, I still hate them. I know, we were all newbies once, but were we this bad? People keep telling me "You should have been here around the time TPM's trailers hit theaters, etc." So this is what I have to look forward to in November? Maybe I'll take a hiatus from the boards for a month or so...

I'm not meaning to bash all newbies, because they're not all bad. Relativity, the Haters' Community's newest member, is a rational and sane person. He's capable of posting more than just "I like Star Wars." or "Say, Anakin's lightsaber looks like the one Luke uses in ANH."

We keep pointing these newbies to the "Welcome New Users" forum, but it's not enough. There should be some safeguard against letting them into the forums before they know the rules. Set it up so they must go and post in a thread outlining the rules of the JC before they go into another fourm.

Well, I'm just about ranted out for today. I think I'll go douse my head in a bucket and cool off a bit. Keep the hate flowing, friends.

 

Yeah, Relativity is cool, but some of these newbies don't have a braincell between them, or at least that's how they come across.

My hate for the day. Crappy sodium lights. They may save energy, but the give off a horrid orange gloom which makes the town look **** at night (well, it looks **** anyway, but what are you gonna do?)

 

Doesn't anyone have anything they need to rant about? C'mon people, vent!

 

Well, I was going to rant about something, but then I see where you say I have one of the best threads in Community (!) and that just thrilled me so much, I plumb forgot what I was mad about.

Maybe I could rant about my faulty memory . . .

 

Rant away, my good man.

I meant what I said about your thread. It seems like every week there's a new "favorite movie quotes" or "your top 10 movies" thread being started. But yours is a unique one that stands the test of the finicky poster. Well done.

 

Camera pans in to find Rogue1-and-a-half sitting at a keyboard. He hits a chord, nods and turns to make a notation on a sheet of music paper.

Ah, hey there. Good to see you folks again. Want to hear a little bile? Very well, you shall.

First off, let's talk about papers for college. Typing papers is never a great deal of fun. It's work, plain and simple. Coming up with ideas, transferring them concisely to paper, revising, etc. It's just plain old work.

But that's not enough for those sadistic creeps who make the rules. Not enough that we have to adhere to grammatical rules (a good idea) and spelling (a necessary evil), but they must drop another bomb on us.

Formats! Yes, they, the bane (not Lord Bane) of all college students. You must cite works in your paper, but you must use the correct format. You must set quotes apart, but in the correct format. You must have a Bibliography page, but it must be in the right format.

But just get the right format and fugghedaboutit, right? Wrong! The format changes!

Do we use MLA Format? APA Format? HF Format? Depends. Or what about the prof who comes up with their own format? There's another headache.

Works Cited? Or Endnotes? Or Footnotes? Or Bibliography? Depends.

Do we stick to the book because it's right? Or do we through the book away because it's outdated? Depends.

Depends on the class, depends on the teacher, depends on the type of paper.

Blah! Again, I say, Blah!

Why this mess? Why? Let's have one format and make it law. The teacher can not come up with their own. No association can come up with their own. No revisions to existing formats.

Take one format, say APA, and shoot the others out the hatch. And stick with the APA as if it were set in stone. That's what should be done.

But will it? Nah.

Why not? Because, nothing is so difficult that it can't be made worse by stupid committees.

At the very least, this situation has helped my composing immeasurably. The suffering artist and all that.

Excuse me.

Strikes a progression of minor chords as we fade to black.

 

I couldn't agree more, Half. Don't you also hate when the professor's personal politics don't jive with yours, and you feel conflicted when you sit down to write the paper. If you go against them, you risk getting a poor grade because of their bias. If you agree with them, you feel like you're betraying yourself.

 

The best thing to do is to write both sides of the arguement. That's what we're always told to do.

 

We're usually told not to straddle the fence; to pick a stance and defend it. It sucks, since it's much easier to do a compare/contrast of both sides.

 

At least most of my professor's have been decent that way. My best grade in Comp II was for a paper that I wrote completely refuting what the teacher thought. He told me that it didn't change his mind, but it was a great paper.

 

That doesn't always work though. I wrote a paper a few weeks ago in English 339 which sort of denounced the topic. I got a C, but my prof told me it was "beautifully written." So I did well, but went too off-topic to get a better grade. Eh, such are the risks of the starving artist, right Half?

 

Well, this particular paper was supposed to be an argumentative piece so I figured I'd chance it. Gotta be careful though, there are plenty of jerks out there who will give you an F just cause they disagree with you.

 

Ugh... English.

The teacher has declared that we shall write "novellas". Remember Elementary School, when we were just writing "Stories"?

Normally, I would have plenty of ideas for such a project. However, forcing creativity is the best way to completely destroy it. As a result, I can't think of a single thing to write about.

The teacher isn't helping much either. So far, we gone through too many "Idea generating processes" for me to count. The only problem is that these generate process ideas- not an ounce of originality to quality in anything that I've come up with.

The other kids aren't doing much better. One is borrowing liberally from a fantasy novel that he read. Another is ripping off a movie. The rest have resorted to cliché-ridden plots that sound like they came out of a made-for-TV-movie.

So I don't know what to write about. Maybe I'll write about a writer who can't think of anything to write about, so he goes back in time and kills history's greatest writers so that he can plagiarize their work. It ends up taking too long, so he goes back and smashes the first printing press into splinters, causing the Dark Ages. It isn't reinvented until the 1500's.

Pathetic idea, I know, but until I get my time machine, it's the best I can do.

 

The Coen Brothers movie Barton Fink is about a screenwriter with writer's block. They wrote it when they got writer's block while writing Miller's Crossing. You're in good company with a story idea like that Dev.

And I agree that forced creativity sucks the creativity right out of you. It also doesn't help that there are no original ideas anymore.

 

No, there aren't any original ideas anymore. Only reiterations of what exists, and that's not necessarily a bad thing.

 

Edit: Disregard whatever I said here. It's getting late and I'm tired.

 

I'd like to know what you said.

 

It was a response to Daughter of the Force. It wasn't mean or anything, it just didn't really make any sense.

 

Up.

 

Today, a small rant about the lack of logic oft displayed here at Miami University.

I've come to realize that the people who run Miami University are, in the words of George Carlin "like every other group: a few winners, a whole lot of losers."

The shear stupidity of a couple of things just blows my mind. First off, starting this week we have real-time registration for our second semester classes. Before, you would request classes online and find out over winter break which ones you got.

Now you can register for classes and find out virtually instantaneously if you got the class or not. Neat idea, poor execution. Registration started yesterday at 3:00 PM. I'll give you one guess as to what happened soon after. That's right, the server crashed.

By "upgrading" it so you can immediately register for a class, they created too much demand. With the previous method, there was no rush. You requested a class and that was that. If you found out later that you didn't get it, you looked for something else. But now everyone wants to log on at once so they don't get shut out of a class. Way to go, Miami.

The other item concerns event parking on campus. There is a large parking lot off-campus. If you have so many credit hours, you can get an on-campus parking permit. If you don't have enough hours, you get a permit to park in this lot. At any given time, there are probably at least 200 cars in this lot.

Anyway, I'm leaving the lot on Friday when I see a sign asking students to remove their cars from the lot the Saturdays when we have home football games, for "event parking." Well where the hell are we supposed to park then? Okay, I take my car out of this lot and head off to find a place on-campus. Surprise! There are no open parking spaces on-campus, because people are parking there for the football game. There is absolutely no logic in this. If we leave our cars in the lot, other people need parking spaces. If we let them park in the lot, then WE need parking spaces. It's a lose-lose situation. Basically, the university police are saying "We don't care about you. Get your car out of the lot so people who pay to get in to the game have a place for their car."

Don't these people realize our being here as students provides the demand for their jobs? Idiots.

 

I see that stupidity within the ivory towers of higher education hasn't dimmed since I graduated.

 

Nor will it ever, in my opinion.

 

Hm. I must register for classes tonight and - whaaa? - I have a PM!

 

Today's hatred stems from my drive back to school yesterday:

Idiots who suddenly brake in the middle of a busy highway. They tend to fall into 3 main categories:
1) People who brake when there is a cop stopped along the highway.
2) People who brake when there is a cop stopped along the other side of the highway.
3) People who brake to view an accident on either side of the highway.

Let's address these folks...

1) Okay, I can't really fault these guys. It is the law (at least in Ohio anyway) to slow down when you see an officer has stopped a car on your side of the highway. But that doesn't mean you have to slow down to 30 MPH. Just brake slightly and give the officer plenty of room.

2) These people really piss me off. Are you afraid the cop will suddenly leave whoever he has stopped, jump in his car, and drive across oncoming traffic to stop you from going 3 miles over the posted limit? What are you, an idiot?

3) These people are even dumber. Now granted, if there's been an accident on your side of the highway, there may be a lane closed or something while they clean it up. But it's when they slow down for an accident on the other side of the road that they show their stupidity. Yea buddy, I see the crashed car over there too. But I'm not going to suddenly drop 20 MPH to get a good look at it, because chances are the guy behind me is glancing at the crash as well, and isn't expecting the car in front of him to suddenly brake. Then we've got wrecks on both sides of the highway, and we've made the situation even worse.

Just use common sense on the roads, people. And for the love of God, the passing lane is meant for passing. Don't get over there and go slower than the rest of us.

And is it too much to ask to use a turn signal when you change lanes? Are you listening, you elderly citizens? You may not have many years left, but I do. I don't need to lose them because you couldn't warn me you were coming into my lane.

There's one undeniable cause for road rage. It's called road stupidity.