Random thing you loathe right now.

Had to use a fire extinguisher on my grill last week. Now I'm cleaning it, and it's a greasy mess. And I think the enamel is coming off the flavorizer bars?

BoogtehWoog wrote:

Windows 10 totally screwed up and I had to reformat my drive. Lost a lot of stuff. :(

Backups. Backups. Backups.

*Legion* wrote:

Backups. Backups. Backups.

It wouldn't let me long ago when I tried to do one. There was nothing I could do except watch as the ship sank over time. Its forced updates screwed me over heavily.

BoogtehWoog wrote:
*Legion* wrote:

Backups. Backups. Backups.

It wouldn't let me long ago when I tried to do one. There was nothing I could do except watch as the ship sank over time. Its forced updates screwed me over heavily.

You can turn them off. Its a group policy edit. If you have Pro that is...

I do not have Pro.

*Legion* wrote:
BoogtehWoog wrote:

Windows 10 totally screwed up and I had to reformat my drive. Lost a lot of stuff. :(

Backups. Backups. Backups.

But ya, this time everything is being backed up regularly. And I'm going to get a USB drive to back up on every week as well.

BoogtehWoog wrote:
*Legion* wrote:
BoogtehWoog wrote:

Windows 10 totally screwed up and I had to reformat my drive. Lost a lot of stuff. :(

Backups. Backups. Backups.

But ya, this time everything is being backed up regularly. And I'm going to get a USB drive to back up on every week as well.

I recommend Crashplan - does live backups so you don't even think about it. You can pick an external drive, another computer on your network, a remote computer, or pay to back up to their servers. My brother and I each built servers for fun and all the family's computers back up to both, which live in different states. (My dad's a bit of a belt-and-suspenders kind of guy.)

I also keep my most important documents in Dropbox or Google Drive. There's a ton of ways to handle backups these days. Hope you find one that works for you and that you don't need to use it anytime soon!

Thanks for the recommendation!

OS X has had dead-simple built-in automatic hourly backup since 2007. Hands-down the best feature introduced in 10.5. It's saved my skin, taken the hassle out of switching computers, and just been a convenience for retrieving deleted files, countless times. Does Windows still not include something comparable?

I hate that my wife's best friend is a cop and a vocal, card-carrying member of the blue wall. My wife doesn't really pay attention to current events (a different loathe), has no idea why her friend's FB liking of anti-BLM stuff drives me nuts, and doesn't want me to start a fight about it, so I can't say anything to the friend. I'm also pretty sure if I did say something, her friend wouldn't speak to me again, which would make everything unpleasant.

Finding black widows around our house. So far only in the garage and outdoors, but that's never something you want to see.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

Finding black widows around our house. So far only in the garage and outdoors, but that's never something you want to see.

I dunno, I think that wouldn't be so bad.

IMAGE(http://cdn.hitfix.com/photos/6020098/Black-Widow-not-on-merchandise_article_story_large.jpg)

It just occurred to me that my mother is a black widow.

You are both hilarious.

Chaz wrote:
ClockworkHouse wrote:

Finding black widows around our house. So far only in the garage and outdoors, but that's never something you want to see.

I dunno, I think that wouldn't be so bad.

IMAGE(http://cdn.hitfix.com/photos/6020098/Black-Widow-not-on-merchandise_article_story_large.jpg)

You'd think that, and yeah, the first one you find, you think you've hit the life jackpot. But when there's 5 or 6 of them standing around looking hopelessly bored, having no interest in you but refusing to leave, you realize that it's actually kind of a hell.

IMAGE(https://media.giphy.com/media/kSA7u0tUziLXq/giphy.gif)

I'm currently living by myself, renting a place, and I'm single

My mom visits for a few weeks from out of town, nags me to buy the place (the owner has offered to sell it to me at a discount), despite me not wanting to.

After several arguments and freakouts i finally give in and say I'll buy the place (she's helping me with the down payment)

I thought i bought myself some peace and quiet, but less than 5 minutes later she brings up that I should find a GF and get married, and the nagging begins all over again with a different subject.

I just can't win.

Podcast hosts that eat or burp on mike. (GWJ is, thankfully, never in this category.)

I can't be the only person this bothers, right?

MrMetonymy wrote:

Podcast hosts that eat or burp on mike. (GWJ is, thankfully, never in this category.)

I can't be the only person this bothers, right?

You're freaking kidding me, right? People actually DO that? How very unprofessional!

You Are Not So Smart had (has?) a segment where the host baked cookies from listener submitted recipes and ate it on air while talking.

sometimesdee wrote:
MrMetonymy wrote:

Podcast hosts that eat or burp on mike. (GWJ is, thankfully, never in this category.)

I can't be the only person this bothers, right?

You're freaking kidding me, right? People actually DO that? How very unprofessional!

Some other current videogame podcasts--that shall go unnamed--are frequent offenders. Every time it happens, I cringe. When Joystiq's podcast was a still a thing, I actually unsubscribed because they had a post-E3 segment where they sat around eating Doritos while talking about the day's events.

dibs wrote:

You Are Not So Smart had (has?) a segment where the host baked cookies from listener submitted recipes and ate it on air while talking.

That would make me want to claw my ears off, dibs.

I don't understand how anyone could think that okay. I mean, even if you do eat or drink, at least edit the sounds out...right? Or do I have ridiculously high standards?

Misophonia sufferers unite?

sometimesdee wrote:

I don't understand how anyone could think that okay. I mean, even if you do eat or drink, at least edit the sounds out...right? Or do I have ridiculously high standards?

Misophonia sufferers unite?

I've had to stop listening to some podcasts due to people taking regular swallows of water (or whatever they are drinking) while talking. It was so distracting because instead of listening to what they were saying, I was instead counting all of the times I was hearing them make swallowing sounds.

Axel wrote:

I just can't win.

Nope! You never will. Not with moms.

My loathe is when podcasters record while drunk. I dropped pretty much all my gaming podcasts after they all had "omg, we are live and so drunk at E3/PAX/XYZcon" episodes. I've listened to enough drunk people ramble and bullsh*t to last me for a long time.

I gave up on the Giant Bomb E3 podcasts because in the segments where everyone was buds, it was just a lot of guys with similar-sounding "white dude" voices yelling over each other and laughing at jokes I couldn't make out over the din.

There's a reason better than 50% of my podcasts are in the NPR-esque family.

Since the new 'trending' change in facebook, a whole bunch of my trending topics come from Breitbart - a site I wholly despise and disregard when it comes to any kind of factual information. It's like Fox News for the alt-right. I'm all for getting my information from a variety of sources and viewpoints, but I do draw the line there. Hence, the loathe!

The biggest problem with podcasts has, I think, largely passed by as the medium has matured. That was that many podcasters assumed that people would be entertained listening to them and their buddies sit around and talk free-form for multiple hours. Guess what? There's a narrative structure to journalism for a reason, and similarly, there's a reason why talk radio is rarely a group of people sitting around a microphone talking at the audience.

Good long-form podcasts are rare. They're either a single person telling one (or sequential) stories, or a group of people with a planned-out schedule that moves well from one sequence into the next. Frankly, even the Conference Call drags through the "Games we've been playing" segment when there's more than three people on, but it gets a pass because I've been listening long enough that I feel like I know the people talking.

Chaz wrote:

I gave up on the Giant Bomb E3 podcasts because in the segments where everyone was buds, it was just a lot of guys with similar-sounding "white dude" voices yelling over each other and laughing at jokes I couldn't make out over the din.

There's a reason better than 50% of my podcasts are in the NPR-esque family.

Yeah, I had the same take on that podcast.

I recently listened to a few episodes of The Nerdist, and was surprised how much enjoyed it. Of course, the first one I heard had Max Brooks as a guest, and he was flipping amazing to listen to.

Otherwise, I'm with you, NPR has the best podcasts. But I am looking for something more like talk radio than something cool.

Do you think there's an ideal length for an enthusiast podcast? I like the segmented hour-ish format of GWJ Conference Call, but I think it depends on the topic.