What grinds my gears!

[Frodo]

I'm a coeliac, which means I can't have wheat or gluten.
And it REALLY grinds my gears that gluten-free food is 3 or 4 times the price, for a SMALLER portion of the gluten equivalent. 

It's not like I woke up, and thought 'Hey, I think I'll be coeliac today, and pay extortionate prices for things that normally cost a fraction of the price.' 


EDIT:  Even something simple, like a loaf of bread...
Standard 800g loaf - £1
Gluten-free 535g loaf - £2.50
Smaller loaf, more than double the price! 

[Mandle]

Haha yeah that was the subject I began this thread with. I totally agree with that!!!

Thought it sounded familiar...

[lorenzo]

I'm a coeliac, which means I can't have wheat or gluten.
And it REALLY grinds my gears that gluten-free food is 3 or 4 times the price, for a SMALLER portion of the gluten equivalent. 

Here the Region (Tuscany and others, but not all) gives to coeliac people monthly vouchers to get gluten-free food.

You can use them to get bread, pasta, etc. for free in drug-stores and in designated shops. My uncle (who is coeliac) saves a lot of money this way, because â€" as you say â€" gluten-free food is quite expensive.

[Mouth for war]

What really grinds my gears is those times you're hungry and you are given food you don't really like. You still eat a good size serving because you don't know when you're gonna eat the next time. And just because the food wasn't good you can bet your game making a$$ you're hungry again within the hour. If it was good food, the same size would have made you full for hours!!! And that folks is what grinds my gears

[LameNick]

I'm so pissed off that I resorted to writing in this thread.
To everybody stopping by, listen.. listen!! I tell you that cryptocurrency miners are grinding my gears! In fact I feel pure, genuine, concentrated hatred towards them!
I'm in need of a new good quality monitor but I can just go wank myself for the foreseeable future as I won't be able to get hold of a GPU, at least not without selling my kidneys.
Thanks for listening and please don't mine.

[Mandle]

Thanks for listening and please don't mine.

Are you talking about mining new coins or hacking and stealing existing ones?

[LameNick]

I mean mining new coins. I'm not a cryptocurrency expert but if I understand the principle of the mechanism well, coin mining refers to using the computing power at your disposal to help maintain the blockchain and execute transactions, which is then rewarded by adding more credit of that currency to your account.
Those calculations require GPUs and with the coin mining insanity going on lately there are no GPUs available, not beyond the shitiest ones that are also absolutely horribly prized.

[Frodo]

What grinds my gears is when people on the bus ring the bell to get off LONG before they're anywhere near their stop. 

[Danvzare]

What grinds my gears is when people on the bus ring the bell to get off LONG before they're anywhere near their stop. 

Why is that bad?
I thought it was a good idea to let the driver know well in advance that someone wants to get off at the next stop.
I don't do that though, I prefer to wait until the stop is actually in view (so I don't accidentally get the bus to stop at a stop that I don't want to get off at), but I do want to understand why that grinds your gears.

[Stupot]

I'm not a bus driver but if I were I think I'd appreciate as much notice as possible. As soon as I have completely passed the stop before the one I want, I press the button. That way there's zero chance of any ambiguity.

[Mandle]

As soon as I have completely passed the stop before the one I want, I press the button.

Me too, but for me it's more than I enjoy pushing the button and hearing the "ding!"...

Mmmmmmm... feedback...

[Mandle]

A minor grind:

I watched Alien Covenant the other day and really enjoyed it. I was conflicted about watching it or not after what a complete disaster Prometheus was but decided that if my love for the Alien movies could survive Alien: Ressurection then it was pretty buttetproof.

Anyway, the movie was good IMO: It had an interesting story with some nice mystery elements to keep me interested. The characters were interesting enough, if a little hard to keep track of. David especially was amazing (he was the only thing I liked in Prometheus).

But two little things ground my gears just a bit:

* The neutrino storm at the start: The computer alerts Warren that a neutrino burst has been detected nearby and that it will hit the ship momentarily. It grinds my gears when sci-fi movies use stuff like this but can't get it right. Neutrinos travel at the speed of light. No information can travel faster than the speed of light. So how can the computer detect the burst before it hits the ship? It can't. For the same reason that we can't put a probe near the sun to warn us when a major solar emmission threatens our planet: The warning radioed to us by the probe and the radiation from the emmission would reach us at the same time. Actually the warning would reach us a few microseconds after the radiation if you take into account the time it takes for the probe's computers to process the detection and send the warning. Either way, the warning is useless.

* The CGI blood. There were a few really shocking scenes of violence which could have been damn effective if not for the fake-looking CGI blood. How hard would it have been to blow a few packs of fake blood IRL instead of using over-blobby, over-shiny CGI blood effects? Cheaper too!

Good film nonetheless. Best Alien film since 2 IMO...

[Mouth for war]

Ohh i agree. Movies ruined by crappy special effects is a real disappointment. Jaws is still the best shark movie around and people have had 40 years trying to beat it! I know people say how fake it looks etc but to me it still looks damn good when you think about how old it is

[josiah1221]

Speaking of special effects, it definitely grinds my gears when younger generations talk down classic films because it isn't CGI. They have no idea the amount of work that went into such classics. 100's of man hours using physical props, robotics, miniature models, stunt work, etc. Where as now a days most of everything you see is CGI. Actors in front of blue/green screens. It's at the point that these young ones think CGI looks real and REAL looks fake, SMH!

[Mouth for war]

A lot of moviemakers today seem to think that if they cram as many special effects they can in a movie it will automatically be a good movie. Storytelling and character development? "Nah just look at these cool effects":-P

[dactylopus]

Jaws is still the best shark movie around and people have had 40 years trying to beat it!

Jaws is a classic, and a truly great film.  But 47 Meters Down is the best shark movie for my money.

[Mouth for war]

Ah never saw that. Gonna look it up. Thanks :-)

[Danvzare]

Alright time to unload all of the things that really REALLY grinds my gears.
I've actually brought up a few of these things on other threads, but I think it's about time I just vented.
So I want everyone to just imagine that everything below is in block capitals.

I really hate it when people call a game 8-bit just because it has pixel art. The game clearly isn't using 256 colours, nor is it imitating an 8-bit console of any kind (not even of the fictional kind), yet they insist on calling it 8-bit!
What's worse, these games usually look closer to a 16-bit console game.

It grinds my gears how much people hate mismatched pixels. Ok, I get it, you all hate mismatched pixels. But can you accept for just one second that there are some people out there that think they look nice! And that some people use mismatched pixels out of artistic freedom and not out of an incompetent inability to use pixels "properly".
Mismatched pixels aren't even a new thing, a very good example are all of the games that used the Midway MCR-III. The sprites were all twice as detailed as the backgrounds. I admit, mismatched pixels were extremely rare until about ten years ago though.

It grinds my gears that everyone actually seems to believe that kids these days would only recognise a floppy disk as a save icon. I have never encountered any kid who thought that. If they recognise a save icon, then they recognise a floppy disk. And I'm willing to bet there are just as many old people who don't know what a floppy disk is, as there are kids who don't recognise one.
That's not to say that kids know all outdated tech. Show any kid an 8-Track and you'll always be met with confusion. But floppy disks are as embedded in culture as vinyl records (at least for now).

Which brings me onto my next thing. It grinds my gears when people say we live in a time when everyone has the shortest attention spans ever. Really? REALLY!?!
Then how do you explain Minecraft's continual relevance. If that was true, people would have moved on from that game in 2012. It's 2018 and people are still playing it like mad!
And nowadays people get so invested in a show, they marathon through it all in a single sitting!
If anything, we had a shorter attention span in the past. Remember flitting between arcade games back when they were popular?

Finally, the most recent thing that's been grinding my gears.
People have been constantly saying that Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice is lighting in a bottle. That until someone else manages to replicate its success on what many consider to be a shoe-string budget, that it's nothing more than a one time occurrence.
Except I can list 100s of games which have basically done the same thing. But of course no one will listen to that list, since they'll find irrelevant and petty reasons as to why those games don't count. Despite the fact that the only thing that does count is whether a successful game came out of such a small budget!

Ah... that feels so much better.
I've been holding that all in for waaaaaaaay too long.

[CaptainD]

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand.... breathe!

[BadLuckBurt]

Finished Tumbleweed Park last night and I don't care for the ending one bit. It's hollow, insulting and very, very cheap. Ron Gilbert is probably laughing his ass off but wth was he thinking. If he puts out another adventure game, I'll pass and stick to his 'classic' stuff.

Comparing this game to Technobabylon which I finished a few months ago, I'll be sure to recommend TB to anyone who wants to try a modern adventure game.

On a technical level, TP feels under-executed and / or underutilized. I love the backgrounds, top-notch work there from Mark Ferrari (I actually learnt about the game from watching his GDC video) but then there's the 'lighting' that sometimes shows up over characters but most of the time it just doesn't. Missed chance there in my opinion, same with non-working mirrors (in this age, really?). I really don't see why they would have visual effects in one scene but then in the next, it's as flat the character shading. Overall it just feels very inconsistent, they could've done a lot more interactivity, the CPU power is more than there these days and GPUs are probably left wondering what they should do after finishing rendering a frame in 1ms.

The story wasn't that engaging but it was interesting enough for me to want to see where it would take me, entered the factory with high expectations to only be greeted by one of the biggest disappointments I've had in a game. They have the gall to poke fun at the notorious Sierra deaths talking about how their method 'takes more effort but in the end it pays off', I had more fun following proper procedure in Police Quest and pumping the Death Angel full of lead than I had with this crap ending. If I ever play through TP again, Dolores is gonna push the button on that device for sure.

Spoiler

guess Sierra was right about BOOM! after all

[close]

I have always enjoyed both Sierra and LucasArts games and shit-talking your long-gone competition after all this time just feels freaking childish to me. They both did it back in the days but that was a back-and-forth thing, Epic did the same thing with Duke Nukem but it was always friendly jabs (doomed space marine, not being afraid of no quake), this felt a lot more malicious. Sierra games these days would probably just auto-save and give you the death animations, allowing you to rewind immediately.

I hardly ever make posts like these but TP definitely rubbed me the wrong way and I'd be more than happy to point out on the Ransome doll where it touched me