The Steampunk World

Being the continued explorations of a living steampunk.

The steampunk world is all around us, lying just out of sight, in a continuous thread of steampunk builders and culture that extends from the Victorian era to the present. You'll find no science fiction here: This is real life steampunk.

Friday, November 30, 2001

Here's the beginning of my Hate List (in no particular order):

-People at four-way stops across from you that don't signal that they're going to make a left turn, and so you go at the same time as them, and then you almost crash and they honk all pissed because they had the right of way (which they did) and you failed to read their minds.
-When you eat at a buffet, how coming back from the buffet table your napkin always blows off of your tray.
-Web sites that give you error messages because some stupid ad banner didn't load. As if I care.
-People with such a sense of entitlement that transcends logic, who (for example) don't just whine about their job all the time as though it were compulsory, but instead say things like, "This is an outrage! They didn't pay me for last week just because I didn't work!" or "Our landlord's an asshole- he was all pissed off just because I paid rent two weeks late!"
-The fact that the majority of people in the U.S. and other countries enjoy watching, not playing, sports (a concept I cannot grasp, and let's not even get into how they can take pride in "their" team's victory), and as a result those sports game take precedent over anything else on TV plus the fact that this doesn't seem to be ending anytime soon, since declining sports attendance figures is likely due to the expanding number of different sports that are available. And I can do nothing about this except accept it, which means that if I'm waiting for my show to come on I have to check in on The Game to see if it's over yet, and the sound of a professional sports game absolutely makes me cringe, so that I can't even bear to flip the channel and submit to three seconds of that sound, which means that the one show I watch on television, that happens unfortunately to be on Sunday, the Football Sabbath, I tend to just give up on the concept of watching TV altogether, so repulsive to me is the sight and sound of professional sports.
-Dog shit, everywhere, in the streets. Some guy in town got sued for posting "DO NOT LET YOUR DOG EXCRETE IN MY YARD" and then rigging his lawn with a number of nasty but nonfatal traps that let to discomfort and embarrassment on the part of both the dog and the owner who disregarded his warning. I don't see any problem with this, I'm thinking of posting signs that say "Please Help Keep Our Neighborhood Clean, Have Your Dog Euthanized" but I don't think it'll do any good since people with dogs tend to, you know, like them despite all of the things that make dogs unbearable, of which the shit is unfortunately not even the stinkiest.
-People who latch onto some way in which they are oppressed and then that victimhood becomes their entire identity. Also, people who do the same thing with some affected quality that they feel sets them apart.
-The way that people think that cars are like some sort of sheild that exempts you from any sort of concern for others.
-Parents who have developed a thick callous of ignoring their children but forget that noone else has, especially when you're trapped in proximity with a parent-child couple doing that "mommy mommy mommy mommy mommy mommy" "SHUT UP!" *smack* SCREEEEEEEEEEAAAMMMMM cycle.
-Parents who bring their young children into decidedly adult entertainment venues, such as nice restaurants, R-rated movies, and bars.
-Oh, okay, I guess kids in general.
-Not the fact that Xmas exists or the fact that it's so commercialized but the fact that it's so compulsory as well as ubiquitous, so that even if you can get past the surprise people exhibit when you say you don't celebrate and the unspoken retribution expected when they give you some thoughtless piece of crap (since anyone who put thought into their gift is probably doing it out of the joy of giving and not just because it's What Good People Do At Xmas), you still can't avoid all of the stupid songs (ever notice that it seems that no new Xmas jingles have been written in 50 years?) and the decorations at every single business. Smeared on top of this is a gooey layer of expected, nay, demanded good cheer, even though most people are miserable at Xmas due to the stresses of shopping and family and people sort of scurry about with these jack-o-lantern grins on their faces, emphasizing through clenched teeth how cheerful they are. For the non-Xmas-celebrator it's kind of like being on a tour bus that stops to eat at Waffle House, and you don't really like waffles but you don't really hate them so you think you'll just sit and have a cup of coffee but people just won't stand for you not having waffles, and everybody around you is ordering them and going on about how tasty they are even though they're obviously greasy old Waffle House waffles and not even the good kind but rather a mass-produced imitation of the good kind, with the yummy wheat batter substituted with some sort of nasty polymer, so they're all forcing down these imitation plastic waffles and going on about how great they are and they start to smear the waffles on you and hold your nose and cram them down your throat and then, THEN, they wonder why it is you don't like waffles and are so miserable when they're being eaten and boy you must be one bitter scrooge, that person sure needs a dose of waffles HERE HAVE SOME OPEN UP THAT'S IT GRAB HIM! This year there's the added bonus of being told that if you don't eat waffles you're not only a scrooge, you're downright Unamerican.

That's it for now, that last one is a big, six-months-of-the-year Hate, the kind that ruins your summer because you know it's lurking around the corner. So I'll make a separate page for all of these, you can bet I've got plenty but I know if I go on I'll never stop and I'm really not that bitter of a person, I treat most of these as something you just have to accept and try and think of ways that I can eliminate them from my life. What's that the drunks say? Give me the strength to accept what I cannot change so that I don't end up in a clock tower with a sniper rifle? Something like that.

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