I remember on the NYCC website they actually had a page where they asked people to please bathe before coming.
Wow REALLY? That's just... I bet they got complaints from the hotel staff! And people complain about the gamer/neckbeard stereotype as though it's a fiction. I've met a lot of lovely interesting CLEAN women at conventions but the list of men I will avoid getting stuck talking to or sitting near is pretty long. There's some more seriously unpleasant things than smell but I won't go into it here.
Confessions, eh? Ok, mine involve ebooks. I have a Nook. I buy ebooks from B&N, but also buy them from Kindle and other places. As soon as I've bought anything non-B&N, I download it, strip the DRM and convert it to ePub (format for the Nook). I then stick it in a folder with titles I've downloaded from B&N, before copying it to my Nook. I'm not sharing the files. But I've also been around long enough to have seen instances where "big brother" has gone in and yanked files that were purchased legally. Damn right I'll back those files up. If I get some other ereader in the future, I'll do the same thing with that.
Fast food. All too often I'm getting home from work, am really tired, and thus I get some fast food. It's not as bad is I once was with it, but still not something I'm proud of. Napkins. Always. When I'm out eating and there's napkins, I grab a few more then I'm gonna use so I always have something handy if i need to blow my nose or just need a piece of paper. I mostly go to our local theater. They're good people and I'm a regular so I usually buy something, if not the full popcorn/drinks/candy thing every time. As for other theaters when I go to them, yeah I usually buy some stuff. Kinda curious, any reason why he forbids you to? Just the pricing or secret toxins? Oh Gods, all the fucking CoD kids that where at the game convention my brother's school had a booth at...You literally passed by the FPS corners and the stench... The stench defies description.
Whenever I hear something like this, I immediately think of Mr. Bookman from the library book episode of Seinfeld. Don't be surprised if one day a library detective knocks on your door! That really is obnoxious. Why? Because you don't know who you're spiting (might even be a friend or possible love interest). And just how long does the good feeling last? I imagine not too long. What happened? Did someone do this to you once and you're obsessed with getting revenge? I only bring this up because I've been on the other end of that a few times. I pull up to a spot where I saw someone get into their car. As soon as they see me waiting with my signal on, it's like they shift into slow motion. Then with the engine and lights on, they go to the back of the car, pop the trunk and rummage around in it for a bit, pretending to "adjust" their bags. The telltale sign was the smirk flashed as they closed the trunk and slowly sauntered back into the car. Not a friendly smile. A smug grin that telegraphed "heh, I'm making you wait and it feels so good." And they don't even know me. Just blatant anonymous hostility. Sickening.
Kinda related to the above, but parking lot vultures annoy me, especially around the holidays. You know the ones, as soon as you exit the store they slowly trail behind you in their car so they can snag your spot as soon as you leave. It's not really a problem in this city, but in STL or ATL, my wife and I used to walk down one row of cars, and then cut over a couple of rows to where we were actually parked, just to annoy the vultures!
I usually get our movie tickets at Costco. One side of the pass is entrance for two, the other is the concession pass for 2 drinks and a bag of popcorn. If we go on a Friday or Saturday, I'll use the entrance tickets and we bring in our snacks. If we go on a 'cheap Tuesday night', we'll buy our tickets at the box office then use the concession pass to get our drinks and popcorn.
When I went to an anime convention for the first time, I was a little surprised to read all the literature saying bathe, sleep, eat something other than pocky and drink some water! It's like, wow. This is that much of a problem, huh? I'm not really all that familiar with ereaders, but are they all that proprietary? If you have a Nook you can't ever read anything bought from Amazon without all that DRM stripping and hoop jumping (and vice versa I'd assume)? Screw that! Wow. I guess it's a little petty to feel smug and satisfied that everyone wants your spot and won't be getting it (I've disappointed many a car vulture myself, though not on purpose), but this level of ire over it? Nobody deserves a parking spot anymore than the next guy! And everyone's had to wait just as long to get it. Just move on to the next spot if someone's being a douche about the spot they won't be giving up!
If you're in a car and you're following people around the parking lot like a damn vulture, that's more irritating than if you're in the car and lingering in the spot. Once you're there, the spot's yours and you don't have to give it up. What if it's a worker on their lunch break and they just want to listen to their iPod in the car? That being said: People who park in handicapped spaces and are not themselves handicapped should be beaten like a rented mule.
Nooks use the open ePub format, so usually no DRM there. It's Amazon's Kindle that uses a proprietary format, and one of the very few e-readers that doesn't support ePub. It's one of the main reasons I got my wife a Nook instead of a Kindle.
Amen! One piece of trivia that infuriated me when I read the bio of Steve Jobs was that he regularly parked in handicapped spots (long before he got sick). Grrr.
I never realized how often it happened until my mother got her disabled tag about 3 years ago. She has paralysis in one leg and for a while required a walker (though now she usually gets by with just her leg brace and sometimes a cane if she's tired). Every single time we go somewhere it seems there is someone without a tag in the disabled spot.
Oh good, I can cross off 'teach someone an Americanism today' off my list of things to do. What do you chaps call it on the other side of the pond. I'm assuming in proper English, it's something dignified, like...throat yogurt.
^That would be really weird -considering yoghurt is made with bacteria usually found in the opposite end of the digestive system...