TMP7: Questions

Welcome to my refreshed Monday Peeve! Unburden yourself of an annoyance and you’ll feel better afterward. Or not. Complain in my comments or crab in your own post. Doesn’t have to be on a Monday. You do you.

Omg, what is it with all the freaking questions online lately?!? Someone must have read that asking questions is the best way to get to know someone and/or show interest, so they decided hey I’ll ask a billion people what their fave band is. Naturally, this creates buzz/churn or whatever you call it to keep the original poster in the feed. Not talking about WordPress (today), but the other social media. Though I admit I quit doing the blog award posts because of the endlessly annoying questions.

I stay on those sites for the connections who don’t blog, but it’s becoming impossible to wade through all the garbage posts. The worst thing is… I have friends who constantly reply to this crap from random radio stations and other public pages, so as soon as I block one, three more pop up like demented jack-in-the-boxes. I don’t want to mute my friends, since the whole damn idea of belonging to these sites is to stay in touch with them.

But ugh.

~*~

Image altered from the original on Pixabay.

©️2021 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon. Thank you.

TMP6: “Glitches”

Welcome to my refreshed Monday Peeve! Unburden yourself of an annoyance and you’ll feel better afterward. Or not. Complain in my comments or crab in your own post. Doesn’t have to be on a Monday. You do you.

Today my peeve is “glitches” that aren’t. What do I mean? I’m talking about annoying design bugs that make things inconvenient for the user but keep us on a site longer, so we (presumably) will view more ads. On Facebook, it’s the auto-refresh. You follow a link from a post to read an referenced article, and when you return… poof! Your feed has refreshed itself and you can’t find the original post. It’s maddening. Here on WP, there are several “features” that make our experience less user-friendly, as my fellow bloggers have documented repeatedly. One is the idiotic pop-up menu of likes on a post. I dgaf who else has liked a post when I want to like it! But this insidious feature has a purpose imo, and that is to create inadvertent clicks to other sites. So many times lately I have ended up on another site when I go to leave a like, all due to that stupid pop-up menu. I believe that is intentional, as it gives more sites more views (and the ads too), and basically keeps us here a few more seconds as we navigate back to where we were. It has zero benefit to any user.

GRRRRRR!

~*~

Image is mine, altered from the original on Pixabay.

©️2021 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon. Thank you.

TMP5: Wayback Machine

Welcome to my refreshed Monday Peeve! Unburden yourself of an annoyance and you’ll feel better afterward. Or not. Complain in my comments or crab in your own post. Doesn’t have to be on a Monday. You do you.

Some of you may not have heard of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, but I’ve known about it for a long time. My peeve is that it exists at all and I’m not the only one ~ they got sued by LinkedIn for data-scraping, but LinkedIn lost. That is unfortunate, imo. How it works is that the WM periodically takes “screenshots” of the internet and posts links back to the original content, so they aren’t “stealing” it, but if you delete something, there’s a chance they’ve already grabbed it. I hate that. Obviously, I have a big stake in this because I like to erase my footprints and start over when the mood takes me, but a lot of my stuff is up there, from 2004 on.

I don’t mind so much that Google has garbage I posted in Groups (and when people quoted my posts). I accept that, even though I don’t love it. Those threads remain in context, at least, and you can see what was going on, if you want to. But blog posts just float out there like balloons, unmoored from their context. It bothers me a lot that there is no easy way to get the IA to take them down. They will ~ but it’s a giant pain in the butt.

The only bright side is that when I went on my frenzy of deleting posts and media recently, I inadvertently trashed my header image and couldn’t find it on my computer. So… I went to the Wayback Machine and fished the image out of their scrapings.

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Image is mine, altered from the original on Pixabay.

©️2021 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon. Thank you.

TMP4: Inconsistency

Welcome to my refreshed Monday Peeve! Unburden yourself of an annoyance and you’ll feel better afterward. Or not. Complain in my comments or crab in your own post. Doesn’t have to be on a Monday. You do you.

Inconsistency always bugs me, especially my own, but my excuse is that I’m human. What really gets me is when technology doesn’t behave the same way all the time. How is that even possible for a system built on “if x, then y” with no room for interpretation? I keep looking for something I may have done differently, but so maddeningly often there is no explanation.

Take WordPress, forex. Most times when I go to another blog, all is “normal” and I am able to leave a like and/or a comment. Other times, I have to log into my account again before I’m allowed to like/comment. But occasionally, the screen goes blank when I try to re-login and I can’t participate on the post. Whyyy? I do the same things every time!

Here’s another example. I’ve been clicking the “copy post” button to create new posts since my refresh. It’s convenient because some text stays the same. But yesterday I did that for the next SLS and guess what? The copied post didn’t autosave in a new draft and instead “updated” the existing post. Argh! Luckily, there’s a way to grab previous edits, so I was able to return the post to its original form. But whyyy? Why did “copy post” behave differently this time? I just don’t get it.

It’s so frustrating to depend on something that calvinballs at random. I expect that from people, but not from machines. Yeah, yeah, they were designed by people. But still!

~*~

Image altered from the original at Pixabay.

©️2021 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon. Thank you.

TMP3: Junk Calls

Welcome to my refreshed Monday Peeve! Unburden yourself of an annoyance and you’ll feel better afterward. Or not. Complain in my comments or crab in your own post. Doesn’t have to be on a Monday. You do you.

Yeah, yeah, old news, I know, but even so I would like to peeve about junk calls today. There are the flat-out scams, of course, which are horrible (Trent posted about his recent experience). Then there are the endless surveys, which waste time even to hang up on them. Go away! Around election time (and when isn’t it anymore?), you get the volunteers bugging you about candidates and issues. Go away! At work, I answer endless calls from people needing to “update their information” on us, ugh. Mostly garbage. And yes, my cell phone provider does a pretty good job of marking the worst calls as spam or telemarketing, but some slip through. It’s just so irritating to spend any time on this and block their numbers. Sometimes you’re expecting a call, but you don’t have the person’s number in your contacts, so you can’t screen and must pick up. It feels so much more invasive than the junk mail in my mailbox, especially when a real person is jabbering on the line at me so fast I can barely get in a “no thanks” before I disconnect. They must go to some rapid-fire speech training class. And what is the point? I guess it’s worth it if one in ten thousand buys some dumb thing. The rest of us just get annoyed with the company/candidate/whatever.

GRRRRRR! Okay, that’s all. Your turn.

~*~

Image is mine, altered from the original on Pixabay.

©️2021 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon. Thank you.

TMP1: April A-Z

Welcome to The Monday Peeve’s refresh!

I have been writing April A-Z posts relating to James Bond during my break (I’m up to L) and it’s been a blast! I’ve been learning a lot and also want to watch the movies all over again now. What’s my peeve then? Same as it’s been before regarding this project ~ the sign-up sheet. I know I signed up early on to do the Bond posts. I had a low number. But poof! My name and everything else is missing from the master list. And when I tried to re-enter my data, the sheet was all messed up and insisted I had another name and wouldn’t let me proceed. Argh! This has happened at least once before, in exactly the same way. Last year I played but didn’t even try to enter my name on the list. (I’ve deleted those posts because I decided I didn’t like them.)

So I guess I’m not “officially” playing this year either, but I still intend to publish the A-Z posts. After April is over, I’ll make a new blog page with the links to each one, in order, so people can read them easy peasy later on. I’m trying not to be fussed about the master list. I hope anyone who is interested in reading about 007 can find my posts regardless.

See you tomorrow, bright and early!

~*~

Image is mine, altered from the original on Pixabay.

©️2021 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon. Thank you.