The Letting Off Steam Thread - Page 138

1 poker housemen quit at work its just me and 2 other guys. I am working 6 fucking 8 hour shifts a week and I am so exhausted. I'm always tired, always yawning, sleeping until 4pm and have no time to go and cure my loneliness because my fucking days off have to be spent doing shit like cleaning my house, laundry and grocery shopping. I wanna fucking quit...

lord knows its the only reason anyone pays attention to ninazerg
+ Show Spoiler +

FUNK THAT! THE GOD DAMN ONE EYED SAGAT IS A SAGE!

I also hate getting into arguments with one of my best friends over things he self-imposes unto my arguments. He always loves to think he points out a logical fallacy of mine just because that is "what normal people imply", guess fucking what we don't discuss like normal people and we were having a debate and you can't even have the decency of giving my arguments good faith. Also the accusing us of having selective memory whilst you stand high upon the hill with no flaws in your memory baffles me. God damn it you're not an idiot.

And then my other friend who normally debates with us has the horrible tendency to make generalizations and doesn't even fact check himself to see if the data supports his conclusions. He will fight with until we show him the data which normally takes ONE GOOGLE SEARCH and the top result. Worst of all he wants to surrender quickly in games.

Another friend who I don't speak to much anymore used to think himself clever over me and the group we were in because he knew how to bully someone in a conversation and it would infuriate me for days until I learned how to speak and debate at least decently. I guess I should thank him for learning what not to do.

Lastly someone I dated for approximately 2.5 years is amused by texting me every 6 weeks or so always with no substance talk, asking for help, or talking about her new perfect mate. It doesn't bother me knowing she is with someone else but it all irritates the hell out of me because there is no point in talking when you're not doing anything other than small talk, or that she is using me because she thinks I will go out of my way to help, or she gets some smug satisfaction that she is dating someone else.

"Don't worry about assignments or tests overlapping. The computer science professors coordinate things so you don't have to worry about having everything crammed within a short period"

If they weren't going to do what they said, they should have at least been up front about it. I seriously don't know how I am going to finish all my assignments and prepare for all my midterms. I have gone as far as to get a program on my laptop that blocks all of my favourite sites for set periods of time (I am about to enable it again after this post. It blocks any and all connection to a site and anything related to it. It also does not enable them until after the timer expires, no way to disable it either. It actually works amazingly well. I have yet to find a workaround. I believes it involves blocking ports from accessing domains. It works at a hardware level because even VMs are blocked from accessing sites. It isn't just some browser plugin or anything) so that I can get work done, and moving my desk to the empty spare bedroom so there are no distractions but it still doesn't help with the giant workload.

I have 5 assignments (4 programming, 3 of which are quite big, and 1 high level theoretical comp sci) and 3 midterms all within a 7 day period. This Wednesday I have a large data structures assignment (around 3/4 done but still). Friday I have an assignment and a midterm. Monday I have 2 large assignments (one in Assembly so it takes forever to do) and a midterm. Next Wednesday I have another assignment. Then I finally have a midterm on that Friday. It wouldn't be so bad if we actually had time to work on things. I was given 3 of the assignments on Friday. Two of the professors promised two weeks to work on each assignment at the start of the term and have already broken that promise. Instead of revising the due date they just gave us less time (a week less in one case. He said his assignments are designed to take about 20 hours to do). And they do this knowing that the extreme majority of midterms occur right now. Only one of the professors tried to avoid this from happening by moving his midterm to after the break and adjusting when our assignment was due. The others said they would at the start of the year but have not, even after being asked.

Plus 3 profs are giving assignments specifically for over the February break (as in handed out right before, due first or second day back. Department policy is no late hand-ins in most cases so people going on trips for break are basically SOL) even though they aren't supposed to, since, you know, it is supposed to be a break and all. Apparently not. I mean, I've had a massive 3 hours of free time over the last couple weeks, might as well extend that to 4 or 5 weeks of no free time.

I'm at the point of blowing off attending classes so that I can work on assignments. It should never get to this point. I know other people are doing the same so it isn't just me either. I'm not procrastinating or anything either. I start assignments the day I get them.

I guess I need to channel my inner Polt and stop sleeping...

Godamn mobile/tablet gaming. The amount of times people go on about the latest Angry Birds vs StarWars via Lego, but yet won't hear out that Starcraft is anything other than pure nerdage. Frankly that doesn't annoy me half as much as the way the 'casual' market is being catered to with games that I literally played 15 years ago and playing them with a sense of childlike wonder. I PLAYED THOSE GAMES FIFTEEN YEARS AGO. It is probably more profitable to churn out mediocre crap to people with low attention spans, but imo it is to the detriment of my gaming experience, as IMO gaming hasn't pushed on since it became for want of a better term socially accepted.

In the same way music is ruined by people who don't really like music. If i have to hear another chick go on about how talented the DJ is in some club, who somehow can't comprehend that he is a fucking hack I'm going to scream. Guy in my local, has girls flocking around him who think he's hot shit. He has two jobs, sort a playlist (he's used the same one last 4 weeks, identical track order), and basic EQing. The playlist one is debatable, the mixing one is beyond a joke. The speakers in that place actually have asked me to kill them such is the silly strain put on the bass ones especially.

Same EQ band used for a modern DnB song and a fucking Black Sabbath song and PEOPLE DONT NOTICE THE SPEAKERS ARE PEAKING ALL OVER THE FUCKING PLACE. Gargh.

who doesn't ? i mean that is supposed to be a long wait to pee right ?

Our class needed a design for a shirt for Valentines' Day, since we are the ones organising the event at school this year. So, since we had decided on the exact design (as in, literally the picture of a shirt shown to everyone and voted on), I basically upsized it and made it much better quality. Then, some girl says "Am I the only one who thinks this could have a prettier font?" This viewpoint was reinforced by about 20 people, which quickly snowballed into me realising my class has some real fucking retards...

YOUR USUAL ANGRY RANT ABOUT WOMEN.

Beautiful man. I lack your sheer amount of listen time, but the attitude you express I agree with 100%. I hate this 'taste is subjective' crap, it's not about taste, it's about appreciation/how much you value music.

As I said earlier, in a club where the bass speaker is actually about to EXPLODE from clipping and nobody seems to even notice, much less care. Retards :p

Someone explain to me how it's either "balanced," or "fun," that a Terran can literally spam marines ALL FUCKING GAME LONG against a Zerg, so long as they have decent micro and good splits. The Zerg needs 3-4 base gas just to hold back wave after wave of a no gas, 50 mineral, tier one unit with the best fucking dps per cost in the game.

HOW THE FUCK DOES THAT MAKE SENSE?

People will think I'm out of my mind - if so, why do I see pros constantly resorting to 95% marine compositions in the face of sling/bane/muta/infestor - right up until ultras, in which case they *gasp* add in another tier one unit.

Fucking stupid. I feel bad for Terran players. It must get boring pounding that A button and never having to field much more than MMM. I suppose you would if you had options - but why change what already kicks ass, right?

casuals:

-Fuck everyone who got tix for hundreds of dollars and barely see anything thats goin on there while they could watch it HQ from a stream

-Fuck Seahawks, they don't deserve shit. 49ers should ve been there and won the whole thing so yea fuck you all.

more important stuff:

-FUCK EVERYTHING ABOUT YOU MANNING WHAT A FUCKING TERRIBAD GAME. I BET I CAN DO BETTER THROWS THAN THAT YOU RUINED MY NIGHT.

-FUCK THAT LITTLE KID THAT CANT SING OR DANCE AND IS ONLY THERE CUZ OF BRAINDEAD 13 Y/O GIRLS WHO HAVE NO CLUE ABOUT MUSIC LOVE HIM, FUCK YOU BRUNO MARS.

-FUCK CAPITALISM AND POPULAR CULTURE THAT MADE RHCP WHAT THEY WERE THAT NIGHT, FUCKING BUNCH O SELLOUTS.

-FUCK ADVERTISEMENTS.

Would it kill my management company to hire people to actually shovel the snow off the damn sidewalk?

I only agree with your sentiment, but not the extreme to which you take it. I have my overall range of music that I listen to, and I pass a lot of time listening to it. Rather than listening to as much as I can like you do, I prefer to drill deep into one album at a time, get as much out of it as I can, then move on. I just picked up Anthrax's Among the Living a few months ago, and have been listening to that for the most part, and I'm wondering where the fuck that album was my whole life. Listened to it maybe 60-70 times start-finish so far, I love it more now than I could have imagined after just 2 or 3 listens. My problem comes with pop culture, where else. People who claim they really like music, but they just consume the same shitty pop music that infects my ears but only too frequently. People who are happy to consume artless trash, that has no depth to it whatsoever, when music has so much more to offer than their minds will ever realize, that's what bothers me. My problem with pop music has never been the fact that it's mainstream, that would make me a faggoty hipster wouldn't it. It's the fact that it is without a shadow of doubt the worst possible representation of music, as a whole. It takes up the same space on your ipod as any other music, and it does the same thing insofar as it makes noise, but you're wasting space, filling up your memory with 1-dimensional expressions of feel-good drivel, rather than 3-dimensional expressions of complex subjects and emotions. This connects with your point of trends, pop music needs to trend, because each song gets old fast, there has to be a next new thing or people realize how shitty it all is. Helps the commercial machine that music has become, but destroys everything else. Meanwhile, Among the Living is still as insanely good as the day it came out nearly 30 years ago. That's the difference, the distinction I make, and why pop music is officially shit, and a source of nonstop disgust for me. I wish people would open their fucking eyes to the beautiful realm of music that's out there. It's so much more worth your time than any of those pop songs I could list, but I would vomit just trying to type out their titles.

I don't agree with the idea of breadth over depth, that sounds to me more like someone who listens to music just so they can share that achievement, or whatever, with others. Maybe you really do enjoy every type of music there is, if so that's great, but most people don't so I reserve the right to be a cynic about that. I've kept an open mind about the music I listen to, but I've honed in very seriously into complex guitar-oriented music, listening to lots of instrumental guitarists, and diving into thrash metal particularly, something that came before my time but that I find just flows with me in a way I didn't expect. I stick to my genre not because of elitism or a closed mind, but because I've found my favorite music of all, and prefer to spend my energy getting as much out of it as I can. I feel any time I spend broadening my horizons comes with the opportunity cost of getting to know my core music better. But that's just me.

Not so much steamletting for me, rather effusing on something I've been thinking about for a good long time. I think it fits.

Yeah another good post on the music thing. I'm not a particularly broad guy with my tastes, relative to most people I guess I would, but I'm not fussed on a lot of genres and styles. I kind of discovered progressive metal of various kinds and it's always been my go-to. I find the sound of a good distorted guitar has a timbre that I don't feel has equals to me in anything in the world of classical music instrumentation. I hate solo/quartet violin pieces because I hate the sound of a violin, enjoy good piano music because I like piano.

You can find what you like, still look elsewhere and have a justification for why you picked what you did. Kind of like relationships in that sense I guess.

I only get annoyed where I get the 'oh you like music too, I love music' from people who barely listen to it outside of whatever the hack DJ on the radio or in the club plays. Taste is very much subjective and not comparable, imo a true 'passion' for the art form in question is a differentiator, albeit one that you can't really quantify beyond doing so arbitrarily.

PS Anthrax are the shit.

I agree with Sunshine on a lot of points. Depth is more important since you actually take time to build connections with the music, and yeah you're missing out on a lot of great stuff, but the stuff that you do listen to, you actually develop a strong connection to.

You can listen to all the genres you want, and more power to you. I'll listen to nearly anything that isn't the corporate kind of rap about money and bitches, or core music. I usually won't go out of my way to seek it out when I'm looking for new music, but if my friend comes over and says "check out X Y and Z", then yeah, sure, I'll listen to it and hopefully enjoy it a lot. Maybe I'll even save a copy for myself if the song really resonated with me. I'm not a Beatles fan but I have 2-3 of their songs on my computer for that reason.

Personally I've listened to Stratovarius's Elements, Pt. 1 over 200 times now, and I know every song on that album like the back of my hand. I still continue to listen to it regularly, because every listen I still find some sort of connection that I've never seen before, and it reminds me of all the memories and experiences along the way that I've linked to the album in the past. It's good in a compositional sense as well. Most of the music on my computer and phone is either Romantic-era classical, 80's rock, or European power metal, and this is where I draw 90% of my influences from. But the deep connections I form with these styles really allow me to write songs and melodies inspired by them, and it's a really great foundation for having lots of streamlined ideas that sound just as complex and interesting as the material they're inspired by.

zyce I think many of your statements are incredibly hypocritical. I don't understand why it's any better (or worse) to play a woodwind instrument than something like guitar or drums. To each his own; all of them can be studied in-depth, performed in-depth, and composed on in-depth. All of them require time, patience and hard work to master.

I didn't lock myself into any genres based on what my friends listened to, but because, like Sunshine, I personally liked the music. Hell, I added a few people on Facebook recently just because I finally found some people with the same tastes as I have, and it's always nice to have someone to talk to, but that's music leading to new friends and not the other way around. I understand your point though, and I think that's the driving point behind the circlejerk that is pop music (I listen to it all the time because my friends like it because they listen to it all the time because their friends (including me) like it). My work plays Top 40 radio stations daily, and I've been listening to what is pretty much the same thing with slightly new faces and hooks shift after shift. Sometimes I actually wonder if I can probably listen to enough of it that I can make a nice pile of money writing formulaic Top 40 songs. Max Martin does lead a good life after all.

But just because I'm not actively seeking to expand my collection of music that I listen to on a regular basis isn't a bad thing. I get to go in-depth with the stuff I already have.

I hate how how the word "faggot," or "fag," or even "-fag" used as a suffix (i.e. newfag or whatever those 4chan kids say these days), is still used quite frequently in online forums. I often wonder if these people use the term in real life as well, or more likely, only use it online to try to demonstrate how straight and masculine they are.

No, using the term "fag" does not make you straight, nor does it make you funny. In fact, it simply demonstrates your lack of maturity, and maybe in 10 years after you've finished growing up, you'll come to understand why using pejorative terms casually if anything reflects poorly on you.

This all coming from a heterosexual male, but I shouldn't even need to mention that.

Update!

I managed to somehow organize myself enough to survive this all. I only have one question of one assignment left and a midterm on Monday for a class that I could probably get a 80% on without studying because I know the material quite well already. My midterm today was pretty stupid but it is only worth a tiny amount so I don't really care. I probably did fine

I know exactly what both of you mean. I avoid talking to most people about music anymore because it is an exercise in futility. I'll ask people what kind of music they like and the response is either "everything", which is usually just a very narrow range of music and not actually anything (I stop trying to continue the conversation at that point because it is obvious where it will go), or they will give a group or genre, I'll ask what else, and then I'll get a blank stare. I can immediately tell when I am talking to someone else who is quite passionate about music because their response will be something unpredictable.

I have a feeling both of you share similarities with me when it comes to how we view and listen to music. I listen to music probably 8-10 hours a day (2 hours each morning, while I work on homework for 6-8 hours, and then for an hour before I fall asleep. My favourite time is right before falling asleep. I listen to it just sitting on my bed or laying in bed, lights out so I can completely concentrate on it. I have to force myself to stop or I would easily stay up all night listening), and will listen to anything depending on my mood. Tonight I was quite happy because I finished a bunch of stressful stuff so my choice was my finely tuned upbeat, synth-focused 80s pop playlist, yesterday was Weather Report and Return To Forever, because instrumental music like Jazz Fusion, Classical, Jazz, etc. is, erm, instrumental in helping me focus when studying or working on something important.

What I frequently will do is take a band, look at what influenced them or what else each musician in the band has accomplished, listen to that, then go back to the band and see how it changes my perspective on them. This both broadens my horizons and allows me to appreciate a group I already like even more. For example, with Weather Report, shortly after finding how much I liked them I went and listened to some of Wayne Shorter's material from the 60s and ended up loving that all a bunch, likewise with Jaco and Joe. I've been listening to some Zawinul Syndicate lately as a result as well.

However, I will argue that passion for music transcends what instrument you play (though I know what you mean. There are a billion and one people who will state "I play guitar" when they have put maybe a few hours into it and barely know anything. I had a buddy who was like that with drums. He claimed to be insanely good but it was obvious he never practiced with a metronome because he could barely keep a beat. He would do all these elaborate fills but then fall apart on the basics). I've played many instruments over the years, guitar for 9, Saxophone for 10 (I would guess I am near the 10000 hour mark on this. I quit a few years ago. It just doesn't do anything for me anymore. I used to love playing sax), piano (and later synth) for 9, and bass for 7. In the end, the one that has stuck with me the most has been the bass. Despite it having a reputation of being kinda boring (but again, who cares what people think), I find it to be the most interesting for me, and I find it really easy to be quite passionate about it. I love studying how jazz bassists construct their lines and finding the logic in it. I've been studying improvisation and composition quite seriously for the past little while. I used to have only a cursory grasp of how improvised walking basslines in jazz worked, but now that I know significantly more, I can appreciate them quite a bit both when playing them and when listening to others. I still regret not majoring in music. I wouldn't be shocked if I go back to school and doing a music degree at some point. Though I do partly blame my high school band teacher on steering me away from music at the time. That's what happens when you take the joy out of things and focus solely on competition. Now that I am free of that restraint I am having far more fun. Being the bassist for the jazz band used to be a chore, now it's my main hobby.

I guess what all this comes down to, particularly with regards to others, is that it is a real shame that more people don't commit more time to listening to, learning, and appreciating music. It can enrich your life so much if you put in the effort.