Rubenerd

Rachel Obordo compiled a fun list of people’s frustrations about TV shows, and the first one was:

Empty coffee cups. You can tell from the way people hold them that there’s no liquid in them, never mind hot coffee – surely they could at least fill them with water?

Many, many times this! It’d also get me that they’d bring the cup to their mouth to drink without looking at it. Maybe some people are able to pull off this manufear without making a mess, but I sure can’t. It looks unnatural and weird.

And subtitles:

Please complain about bad subtitles as often as you can. I translate STs for a living. Sometimes my work is really good. Sometimes less so, when I am asked to translate 1200 STs overnight, for a Chinese/Korean/Spanish etc video and with the help of an English ST file that is often even less intelligible than the Chinese/Korean/Spanish etc audio. BaZu007

Funnily enough, the best subtitles I’ve ever seen were from anime fansub communities, who were doing it for free. Modern anime distribution is still pretty good, but none go into that same level of detail, complete with live footnotes and avoiding covering up something important on-screen. Some would even translate signs.

My other peeve was the fact that phones always ring at a convenient moment when people aren’t talking. Millennials like me hate phone calls precicely because they’re such a disruptive incursion.