i think you're right as far as general speech (saying lawl is face-palm worthy) but i feel like after a certain amount of use acronyms become universal enough within a group that capitalization is unnecessary. in my opinion the capitalization is to signal to others "this is an acronym and not a word", so once the acronym is ubiquitous the capitalization is extraneous.

New mothers: your child is not as cute as you think he or she is. Believe me.

In the first place, "cute" is pretty much the standard for kids, right? 95% of them are "cute" (this is never a word that I say in an "aww, how cute" way, that's why I keep putting it in quotes)...so essentially the kid just looks normal. They're not a standout; you just didn't get unlucky and get one of the ugly ones.

Women will coo and say, "Aww, he's so cute!"
A more honest compliment would be, "Congratulations, you didn't hit an outlier. Wouldn't that have sucked?"

Occasionally I find myself having to put up with new mothers as Facebook friends, and 100% of them are insufferable. Every ****ing status update is about their kids, not to mention the flood of pictures they post that aren't nearly as great as they think they are. I'm pretty sure that any and all young mothers on my friends list are now hidden from my feed...they give me no choice in the matter. Now, if I see one of them do something ****ing stupid like have a picture of their kid instead of themselves (not with, but instead of) as their profile picture, that's pretty much an auto-hide.

Last week, I got a friend request from an old high school friend. Her picture was a baby. I had to assume it was her baby. I then had to press "ignore" on the friend request even though she was pretty cool when I last knew her. I'm quite sure that I did well to spare myself the annoyance.

Thoughts on the Steroid era in MLB and asterisks next to the leaders in most of the well known records?

I'm sympathetic to all that baby rubbish, but ignoring someone's friend request just because they have a baby as their profile picture seems just really judgemental and harsh, especially if you got on well with her a few years ago and they probably just wanted to see how you were doing. If she does turn out to be annoying its just a simple click of the hide button.

ready and willing to field this one in the case of a pass by LKJ. jumping off points itt.

This is another one of those things that others get riled about when I don't. I mean, I do think that it's a shame that so many records got broken in this era that won't be re-broken by clean players for a long time, but it's difficult to quantify just how tough it was to break those records even with performance enhancers. After all, the pitchers were juicing too...as a Mariner fan, I was rather shocked when Ryan Franklin, a little runt who looked like Doogie Howser, got caught testing positive. It was at that point that I realized that no player I cheered for during the era was likely to be clean. Perhaps Ken Griffey Jr. was, because it seems that there would have been a witchhunt to bring him down if he was on roids too, but who really knows.

I just don't get all high and mighty toward the steroid thing. Institutionally, Bud Selig and MLB were all but encouraging this behavior. It was helping their product, and they didn't want to clean up the game. If I was a talented enough baseball player to make it to the majors during this time, and all that stood between me and my dreams (not to mention millions of dollars) was performance enhancers that everyone was taking...I'd take the health risks and take steroids too.

I hate cheating. Hate it. But I guess at some point the steroid thing stopped feeling like cheating to me, since the playing field was almost entirely juiced and thus equal.

I will say that I still take issue with Rafael Palmeiro for the way that he so vigorously denied steroid use under oath, to the point that he was admonishing everyone for the fact that he would even have to be asked about such a thing. I watched at the time, bought his story completely, and actually felt sorry for him. I don't much like feeling like a fool, so when I found out later that I got 100% duped...**** him.

If you want to get me to hate on players for cheating, I'll gladly hate on the likes of Sammy Sosa and Albert Belle for corking their bats. That's something most players were never doing, and I think that getting caught with a corked bat should be a much longer suspension than just a week or whatever they got.

Me being judgmental and harsh is the entire basis for this thread. Guilty as charged.

Anyway, it was pretty clear from me seeing a bunch of other people becoming friends with her in my feed, and the small number of friends she had when she first sent me the request, that she was simply populating her friend list. As such, I find it doubtful that she ever even realized that the friend request was denied, since I was clearly one out of a bunch of people who she friended at the same time. Slight x-factor to the fact that she was in love with me at one time and I wasn't into it, but seeing as she's now married with a kid, I doubt she cares about that anymore either.

are you leveling here or for real? if for real, wow. lighten up dude and learn to not hate happy things in life. babies are some of the most joyous things in many people's lives, and parents are very proud. also, other people do genuinely care quite a bit about them as they are a huge deal.

and the last paragraph is LOL. i surely hope that's a joke.

I'm never leveling, save for really standard and obvious sarcasm.

You know what I also don't like to see on Facebook? "Happy birthday Tom!!" Okay, aside from the obvious sin of multiple consecutive exclamation marks, that wall post is just a waste of time. If this person matters to you, formulate a clever or at least personalized sentence to support your happy birthday rather than being lazy and saying something so generic.

If I see people's birthdays show up on my home page, it's a quick decision as to whether or not I actually give enough of a damn spending the next minute thinking about something good to say to them. If I think of something clever or at least personalized, I post it. If I can't think of something, then they clearly don't matter enough to me to justify a happy birthday wall post.

People who taunt the fans of losing teams directly after their losses...total pieces of ****.

Trash talk all you want leading up to the game, but once your team has beaten the other guy's? Leave it alone. Take a victory as its own reward. Have some honor. Why is a win not enough, and you get a perverse pleasure in taunting as well? If you need to take pleasure in their pain, you can do it without ever saying a word; after all, a person who would get upset by your taunting (which is the whole point) is clearly pissed off about the loss, and you know this to a certainty. Enjoy that knowledge if you like, but rubbing salt in the wound just turns you into a bastard.

I suppose that the likely counter-argument is that if someone has been talking **** to you all week, they deserve to answer for it afterwards. I still say that you can enjoy their depressed silence as much as anything else. The result shut them up; silence sounds pretty sweet in that context. We wouldn't want to discourage trash talk, after all...the passions that get riled up by trash talk add to the overall experience, to the ups and downs of a game.

My BD is in April, just sayin.

technically this thread is "ask a bitterman" and not "itt a bitterman rants", so really you should only be speaking when spoken to.

"You are 20-something years old. It's time to get over birthdays." -Don Draper

Actually I still find birthdays enjoyable, so I don't really agree with that quote, but...anything for an opportunity to reference Mad Men.

As originally made, it was an LKJ containment thread. Far be it from me to throw enough respect Karak's way to really even acknowledge the thread title change that he executed.

Precisely. I have nieces. They are three of my favorite people in the world.

I would not be self-unaware enough about them to think that anyone else would given even close to as much of a damn as I do about them.

Being justifiably proud of something or someone isn't license to go around constantly bragging like an idiot and never shutting the hell up. Not with kids, not with anything else.

Demetri Martin itt

That was probably one of the best episodes of the entire series so far.

I'd never even heard of this guy. Googled him now, I see that he's a comic, but I don't get the reference.

Hell yes it was.



No real coincidence that one of the best episodes in series history did not involve even a second of screen time for Betty Draper or whatever her last name is now.

it's funny that this came up. we were watching earthquake warning guy and we've been saying "ATTEN. SHUN. citizens of california" and happened to come across that episode of important things. then i looked around for the original but couldn't find it. i'm really hungover so that mspaint took me like 20 minutes to make.

He likes to use a lot of drawings and stuff to help illustrate some of his jokes.

ha

Favorite Louis CK joke/story?

That's really damn tough, like picking a favorite Seinfeld episode.

Allow me to cop out by picking a few of my favorites.
****asspet****ers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95fNgx8aCS8
Gay marriage: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPvVnrV1tow
Turning 40 (no, I haven't done this yet): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzEhoyXpqzQ&

Equally difficult to pick a favorite from Mitch. Thing is, such a vast majority of the jokes/stories told by Louis CK or Mitch Hedberg are so damn funny that picking a favorite is almost pointless since they're all so close in quality.

That's as opposed to someone like Brian Regan who is only funny some of the time, and it's easy to pick a favorite like the "you too" bit. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2-5mDyCKac