The Room 101 thread - for things you hate or just having a bloody good moan

[Alan]

Mines way up too. The thing I dont get is, Scotland went on about being able to be powered 100% by renewable. We still have non-renewable but our renewable output is enough to sustain the country. If that's true why the shit would our electricity bills need to go up so much? Are you English stealing our clean power and selling us some dirty stuff? Damn you auld enemy!

[Raid]

How else do you expect us to keep you unruly barbarians north of the wall in check?

[Snowy]

Mobile phone shops, fuck them and their shyster fucking employees.

I have an old iPhone that my wife has asked me to get set up on a PAYG sim for my father in law. He will, in all likelihood, never use it but will have it for emergencies. I was in town today so popped into a couple of phone shops, all of whom wanted me (and him) to jump through fucking hoops.

"Oh yes, we can set it up for £10 per month." No, I just fucking told you what I want

"OK we can set it up for £10 per month, then you have to come in again within a month to stop the payments." No, that is a pain in my fucking arse. Customer is always right cuntybaws, set it up now how I want it

In the end I told both places I visited to get fucked. Got home, looked online and a firm called 1p Mobile does a nice easy cheap deal where I don't have to talk to any half-baked sales staff.

[eny]

[Raid]

So as mentioned in the Arty Antics thread, I'm currently following a drawing course called Drawabox. Lesson 4 of this course is about insects and arachnids with the focus being on breaking them down into simpler forms to aid you in drawing them from imagination rather than just copying existing images. Part of this involves pretty close observation of the subject.

Now I'm not particularly offended by insects, at least the ones that we get in the UK - I'm more likely to capture and release a wasp in my room than swat it. From a scientific point of view, they're extremely cool. But the stage I've just started involves scorpions. Scorpions elicit a really primal sense of dread when they're blown up to a scale that humans can really observe; most of the things are like an inch long so they're hardly going to bother you. But when you're looking at a 4k macro image of one? Terrifying. Unlike most insects they don't even have a recognisable head, just a pair of beady eyes stuck to the top of their carapace and then an almost formless mouth that more resembles a gooey sphincter. And a lot of them are jet black and glossy, like Darth Vader with six legs and giant pincers instead of a laser sword. They could have been designed by HR Geiger or Rob Bottin.

And while we're on the subject, Google Images and their Image Search function is so much less useful than it once was. I had to trawl through fifty scorpion images before I found one high-res enough to be useable. There was a time where you could specify the minimum dimensions of your search results, but now you just have to rely on their "large" category, which is borderline useless. Half the time you can't actually get the full resolution image anyway unless you dig into the website's code via the inspect function, and I get the feeling some sites actually lie about the dimensions of their image files somehow as there's no way of finding a file as large as the search reported. And then I have basically no luck whatsoever with their reverse image search now, which changed to include Google Lens functionality (which I have no interest in) a few weeks back - it just doesn't find any results now for 90% of the times I've used it.

[Medicine Man]

Unsplash although fairly limited depending on the subject can be a handy resource for high res free to use images...

https://unsplash.com/s/photos/scorpion

[Raid]

Unfortunately there are only about 15 results there that are available without buying them, and none of them are useable. That's the thing about Google; they've been doing this for so long that there just aren't many services that can offer the breadth of results, even if you have to sort the wheat from the chaff.

I actually went and checked out Bing Image search (which they call Image Trending for reasons I can't work out). They still offer a minimum pixel size option, and don't seem to prioritise stock images. I may actually have to start using it.

[Animalmother]

Duckduckgo image search let's you pick a size (small-large) and gives you the resolution size if that's any help. Probably not but worth a look maybe.

[ManBearSquid]

Testing positive for Covid when I have a video interview for a new job at 3pm today...

Arse.

[Rusty]

Bugger. Hope it's mild symptoms all the way and the interview goes swimmingly.

edit: I assumed it's a video interview... is it in person?

[Wrathbone]

Testing positive for Covid when I have a video interview for a new job at 3pm today...

Arse.

Hope you're not feeling too bad, and good luck! I'm sure if you explain that you have covid then they'll take that into account if you're not looking 100%, and if they don't then they're probably not someone you want to work for anyway.

[ManBearSquid]

Thanks, glad to say that I'm not too bad, though it's still pretty rough. Mostly like a bad cold/light flu for me just now, hoping that it is as far as it goes.

I think that the interview went well enough, and luckily for me it was a video one otherwise that would have been incredibly frustrating.

[eny]

That "thing" that people got tired of thinking about, being concerned for, monitoring, decided was "over"....yeah THAT thing, it isn't over...

[Hatredsheart]

That "thing" that people got tired of thinking about, being concerned for, monitoring, decided was "over"....yeah THAT thing, it isn't over...

Indeed, my daughter's just tested positive. Last one out of the whole family, I was beginning to think she might be immune

[eny]

My local doctors are overrun with people just turning up in person wanting an appointment, and then when the receptionist asks if they have covid, them not knowing because they haven't bothered testing...BA2 is growing quite quickly and will only get worse because the government doesn't want to do anything about it...