Shoot the Wall (A.K.A. The Rant Thread)

[Fantasy Lover]

I'm sorry Carol,

 

It won't happen again. Anyway, on to my rant.

Due to inflation and the expensive energy costs my rent was only increased by half, which means my rent will increase again! I only hope that it won't be higher than 38€ otherwise I'll lose my government benefits and I'm already struggling financially.

 

Oh AND I'm getting lousy advice from my mom and my grandfather. Mom said "don't worry about it, we'll cross that bridge when it happens" grandfather said "you need to budget better" get rekt both of you!

[Carol the Dabbler]

Good heavens, they're now putting trigger warnings on dictionary definitions!!!!!

So far, though, this apparently applies only to the definitions that automatically appear at the top of a Google search-results page.  Some [but not all] words that they judge to be "derogatory" or "offensive" or "vulgar" in any of their meanings, are now partly hidden for just those meanings.  They show just "Derogatory" or whatever, with a button to click if you decide you're brave enough to view the actual meaning.

Hmm, I may kinda understand why this is happening.  It's not a regular website, it comes up automatically with the search results, so you can't choose whether to see it or not, so they let you decide whether to view some parts of it.  The definition I'm looking for is usually right at the top, so it's possible that this has already been going on for some time and I just never noticed.

Still seems a bit odd, though.  But if I don't like it, there's always DuckDuckGo (which puts a few definitions at the top of its results page, but doesn't even tell you which ones to be shocked by, let alone hide any of them).

 

[besleybean]

Mad world.

[Fantasy Lover]

My effing elevator finally works again! In those 10 days I couldn't buy more than a bottle of milk and water each! And couldn't ask my friend to help me carry my trolley up the stairs because he had the the flu! But it works again! First thing I did was to buy 6 liter of water and milk.

[Carol the Dabbler]

As long as you're not buying a lot of groceries at a time, it might be easier to carry them home in bags, rather than deal with your own trolley.  I assume you can use one of the store's trolleys while you're shopping?

I know that what Americans call a shopping cart is called a trolley in British English, but I assume that yours is one of those smaller folding ones?

 

[Fantasy Lover]

I value my wrist thank you very much, but I mean of these https://www.amazon.com.be/-/nl/VOUNOT-Boodschappentrolley-waterdicht-opvouwbaar-trappenwagentje/dp/B08FLYCSB8/ref=asc_df_B08FLYCSB8/?tag=begogshpads0a-21&linkCode=df0&hvadid=633051686807&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=1215915078513503034&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=m&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=1001004&hvtargid=pla-1019603098683&psc=1&gclid=CjwKCAjwysipBhBXEiwApJOcuwudLYJvwuR1ci_LlSAsMDWSLy3RHDdl-YXr0us7B6YJxatQoxqZJxoCcecQAvD_BwE

[besleybean]

Yeah, tend to be used by older people here...but they are brilliant, for all kinds of storage, too!

[Fantasy Lover]

I love them! I've brought recently a fifth one. Because my others aren't decent enough anymore. 

[Carol the Dabbler]

Not exactly a rant, more of an annoyed sigh:

I grow nasturtiums in large pots on my front porch because hummingbirds love their extra-sweet nectar, and I love to sit and watch the hummers buzzing from flower to flower.  They're both from Central America, where the birds spend the winter, and where they developed a special relationship.  The flowers have a slender, pointy appendage called a spur (visible in the right-hand photo below; click it to enlarge), where their nectar collects beyond the reach of bees.  Only hummingbirds, with their long, thin beaks can access it.

 

 

 

But I've just learned that some breeders have developed spurless nasturtiums, apparently because the flowers sit at what they consider to be a more attractive angle.  The lack of a spur presumably renders the flowers more-or-less useless to hummingbirds.

This would not be a problem, except that seed companies rarely mention which varieties do have spurs.  They will sometimes say which ones are spurless, but not reliably.  And they tend to mark ALL nasturtiums as "hummingbird friendly."  So I am in the process of researching which varieties are which.  In the meanwhile, the safest bets appear to be heirloom varieties such as "Empress of India" or else the cheap packets marked simply "Nasturtium, Mixed Colors."

 

[J.P.]

Oh, I didn't even know that or paid attention to the spurs. Maybe it's because we don't have hummingbirds here.

[Carol the Dabbler]

Probably!  I have no idea whether the spurless varieties produce nectar and/or pollen for bees & butterflies, or if they're sterile -- or what.  Do yours set seed (if you don't pinch off the faded flowers immediately)?

 

[J.P.]

I think so, at least some of them. But they are not growing well in the soil here, so I hardly have some now.
Which is a shame, because I remember them like this:


And now the best I can get is this:

[Carol the Dabbler]

6 hours ago, J.P. said:

they are not growing well in the soil here

That's one reason I grow mine in large pots on the porch, using store-bought potting soil.  Another reason is that the concrete porch is a large thermal mass and well above ground level, so the plants are protected from the first few very-light frosts.

Nevertheless, mine have never looked quite like yours!

 

[Caya]

Maybe try to approach it from the hummingbird side of the equation and ask for tips at, dunno, https://www.reddit.com/r/hummingbirds/ or similar? Someone there might have recommendations for you.

[Carol the Dabbler]

Trouble is, everybody's got recommendations, but a lot of them seem to be based on simple assumptions.  Worth a try, though.  Maybe Quora too.  Thanks.

[J.P.]

As some of you might have read, I got myself another show to obsess about, The Walking Dead.
I was a bit hesitant about diving into another rabbit hole, especially when it comes to another fandom: I've got enough Sherlock fandom drama for the rest of my life. Above that, to catch up after 10+ years feels quite scary, it was bad enough after 5 years of Sherlock. My brain will all the information available out there - and it wants it all at once. 🤪

But…
The problem is that I have reflections. And they won't disappear, they want to be shared. At least mine want that very strongly. I just need an exchange of ideas and information, and I feel like it's a shame nobody will get the pleasure to know them.  

"Information metabolism" is as essential for me as the physical one.

So after a lot of deliberating, I finally decided to look after a forum.
And now comes the surprise: there are as good as none out there. Most are completely gone (dead links on old listings), or almost dead right now. I tried one, and after a few posts, I feel like talking to a void, which is very disappointing. The other one had two threads still running this year, so I doubt it's even worth the effort. Facebook is even worse, all you find there is some chain-posting of photos with "oh, he's so hot"-comments, or shallow rants. No real EXCHANGE of thought.

I have been in discussion forums since I got web access in 1997 or -98. Do you remember Yahoo! Groups? I was there. Since then I always had an online home (or two) for my current obsession. Even the IMDB movie discussions, despite all the trolls and verbal wars, were much better than what happens now.

Are forums dead? Is intelligent discussion dead?
It feels like the end of an era right now.

[Carol the Dabbler]

You literally have my sympathy (from a Greek expression meaning "same pain")!  I'd love to find some really good discussion-oriented places for older shows and movies.

Right now, I'm mostly using MovieChat ( https://moviechat.org/ ), which is the continuation of the IMDb chat pages you mentioned.  It's well moderated, and sometimes has interesting stuff.  For that fairly recent show, you'd probably have pretty good luck.  (And here's a thread where I posted tips whenever I encountered another of the site's peculiarities -- see the very last post for an explanation of how MovieChat came to be.)

 

[Caya]

I‘m sorry to hear that.  There seems to be a little life left in https://www.reddit.com/r/walkingdead/ , or some corner of tumblr maybe? 

[J.P.]

God save me from Tumblr.  Don't know Reddit yet, but I will take a look at all your links, thanks.

I also just realized that finding a Sherlock forum wasn't that easy either.

[besleybean]

This appears to be one of only two survivors.

[J.P.]

But at least they are good ones.
Some comments I see now make me wonder if people posting them are able to write a single sensible sentence.

[besleybean]

That is a tad irksome.

But worse still is the persistence of crazy fans...

only yesterday, I stumbled upon some Whovian nuts...

slagging Chris Chibnall.

[Carol the Dabbler]

15 hours ago, besleybean said:

only yesterday, I stumbled upon some Whovian nuts...

slagging Chris Chibnall.

I know very little about Dr. Who other than the Tom Baker and Peter Davison eras, so I had to look this up.  Judging by conversations such as this one (on Reddit), Chibnall (a recent showrunner) gets mixed reviews from the fans, something like Steven Moffat -- but that seems to be the standard to any public figure.  Hopefully you're not talking about anything truly hostile or slanderous, but that does, alas, seem to be occasionally par for the course.

 

[besleybean]

Just the usual self appointed experts, thinking they could write better...

what do they think fan fiction is for?!

[Carol the Dabbler]

On 2/24/2024 at 6:13 PM, J.P. said:

finding a Sherlock forum wasn't that easy either.

Odd -- all I did was go to Google and type in

Sherlock forum

Admittedly that didn't get me anywhere in February of 2012, but fortunately I tried again that April, when there actually was such a website.  I see that you didn't join till 2015, though, by which time the waters may have been muddied considerably!