Ink Tea Stone Leaf

(For a cheerier list, follow this link)

To be posted when I’ve gotten tired of adding to the list:

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When people, in the context of creative arts, use the term “rip-off” for anything other than one artist plundering a different artist’s work for ideas and presenting every original creative element as their own work. An artist cannot rip themselves off; this should be called “repeating oneself.” Likewise, an artist is not guilty of “ripping off” simply for using established genre conventions or character types; this is called “writing.”

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When people say a singer is “out of tune” merely because their voice has a timbre they find disagreeable.

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When people comment on local news stories for the sole purpose of letting their communities know how much they hate every single aspect of living in said communities, and also how much they absolutely loathe homeless people.

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“Perservere.”

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The use of the phrase “breaking [one’s] silence” for making a comment in a timely fashion, or for saying literally anything at all.

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Social media entities that troll for engagement by making trivially incorrect statements about nostalgia-triggering media properties.

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Anti-intellectualism.

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People who lose their minds complaining about the casting of Hollywood roles for not conforming to their extremely narrow ideas about verisimilitude and fidelity to the source material.

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Bad-faith interpretations of kindness.

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People on Instagram who take a break from posting adorable photos and videos of their pet birds in order to post ludicrous AI slop.

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Books that credit their author’s real name, followed by “writing as” their pseudonym, alter ego, or whatever.

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Just the whole mindset that creates the impression that the purpose of universities is to field teams which serve as recruitment pools for professional sports leagues, subsidized by dorks who overpay for academic degrees.

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Hustle culture.

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The post-literate society.

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Looking up the answer to a logic puzzle in the back of the book to see if I got it right, only to accidentally spoil the solution of the next puzzle and be unable to forget it no matter how many days go by.

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Poems that make you feel like you’re walking on eggshells in the poet’s presence.

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Ads for mobile games that attempt to lure seniors by terrifying them with dubious claims about memory loss.

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Considering the right answer, then considering the wrong answer, and finally choosing the wrong answer.

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The fact that the San Diego Padres sometimes lose baseball games.

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The scent of tobacco smoke.

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Monarchism.

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The naughty misbehaviors of my green cheeked conure.

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Getting sun burnt.

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Having too much time to do nothing, and too little time to do anything.

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Commercials that make a mockery of education.

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The two thin cracks that formed across the glass covering the face of my watch when I dropped it, which made it a little bit difficult to read the date on the dial in the upper right corner until I finally got it replaced.

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The obsessive anointing of dubious “GOATs.”

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Ideological monolingualism.

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“They didn’t have to go this hard.”

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Having difficulty focusing on things on account of all the ADHD in my brain.

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Excessive glare.

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Eugenics, ecofascism, and arguments in favor of the extinction of humanity or against reproductive freedom.

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Having to think of one of these every time I think of something nice to add to the other list, even when I’m in a good mood and I’m not really annoyed with much, just to keep the lists even.

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The ambiguous boundary between my neighbors’ yard and my own, such that I’m never quite sure if it’s my responsibility to deal with the invasive Himalayan blackberry brambles that would otherwise grow to block access to their AC unit.

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Invasive Himalayan blackberries.

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The vagaries of prepositions.

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Really, really bad ethical analogies: so bad that it’s not clear whether the person proposing them is only too absorbed in the intensity of their feelings to see the situation clearly, or is actually completely ignorant of what it means for two things to be equivalent or analogous.

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Finding that I’ve grown tedious in my discourse.

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When I am expected to be patient with people whose plan is to wait out my patience, and time is not on my side.

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Telling people I’m writing a novel, and being asked if it’s fiction or non-fiction, as if I haven’t already told them it’s a novel.

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When a person presses the button for the mid-block crosswalk lights on a wide and busy street, bringing traffic to a halt as the cars wait for that person to cross, but that person instead remains motionless at the curb, eyeing the cars while puffing on a vape pen, and only stops vaping and begins to cross the street a second before the crosswalk lights turn off.

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Logarithms, which I understand perfectly well when paired with annotations delineating the notation of number, base, and exponent, but which collapse into meaninglessness the instant those annotations are taken away because I can never remember where each thing goes.

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Very poorly transcribed subtitles.

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“Explain it like I’m five.”

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Getting distracted by writing one thing when I’m supposed to be writing another.

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Shame as a “treatment” for mental illness.

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The paranoid cultural obsession with masculinity.

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The inexorable slide into a future we never asked for, and away from the future we pleaded for.

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That visibly, shamelessly corrupt politicians are seen as people that sober, responsible citizens can hold their noses and support, but inspiring candidates who support universal healthcare must be opposed at all costs.

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When I get in one of my moods and I start complaining about how the world put me there.

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Running out of allergy medication.

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Getting most of the way through the campaign mode of a classic real time strategy game and its expansion pack (literally, like three missions to go) and finding I have finally reached the point where advancing requires a level of actual skill at RTS games that I simply do not possess.

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Censoring words by replacing a vowel with an asterisk. I don’t care what the reason is, I don’t care how fickle the algorithm is, it’s infantile.

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Doing anything at all for the sake of gaming an algorithm.

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Clickbait titles that refer to a person making any sort of comment as “admitting” something.

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Words like “franchise” and “content” in regard to storytelling.

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Car trouble.

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Bullies and liars.

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Baby names as stunts, as if the baby in question won’t be 80 years old someday.

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The way that “ethnic cleansing,” a bleakly dystopian euphemism for destroying a people’s homes, killing them and driving them into refugee camps from which they may never escape, has become the standard term for those acts.

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When companies refer to their products as “solutions.”

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When people say something is “cooked” to mean that it is doomed to fail and can’t be saved—not because the expression is bad, and in fact I think the expression is good, but because it’s almost always too soon to say and they often end up being wrong, yet they keep saying it because the phrase is en vogue and people like say to say phrases that are en vogue because recognition makes the dopamine receptors light up.

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When people profess to believe in something that almost definitely is not real because their subjective experience aligns with a colorful metaphor for what is actually a fairly mundane phenomenon.

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When the quotient of racists to non-racists in your town is too high for your favorite restaurant to remain open.

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That goonish expression of astonishment they use in advertisements to reinforce the idea that the AI slop-producing application they’re trying to sell you on is some kind of magic that you’re too dumb to understand.

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This strange notion that if you refer to somebody’s hateful or ill-informed opinion as an opinion, you are necessarily implying that it is actually a valid or intelligent or decent opinion to have.

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Attempts to portray trivia about things that happened decades ago as news, no matter how widely known they already were.

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My own legacy of foolishness.

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When people act like elaboration on stereotypes is the equivalent of insight or original thought.

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When a perfectly good sock gets a hole in the toe.

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When people describe works that are emotionally impactful as “traumatizing” and question why they were exposed to such works as children, while laughing and joking about it because they were not in fact traumatized.

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Political cartoons posted online by people who can’t draw, to the extent that not only are they using AI to generate the images, but that they have also put absolutely no effort into making sure the figures in the cartoon have anything like appropriate body language or facial expressions for whatever they happen to be doing, because the only thing these people understand about political cartooning is that things have conspicuous labels on them.

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Watching a broadcast of a baseball game when all of the drunken oafs yelling at the batter are clearly audible.

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The way all my youthful prejudices kept me from experiencing the fullness of life for so many years.

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Knowing as much as I know about “the Rapture,” an ahistorical concept, because certain of my childhood friends made me paranoid of the consequences of not believing exactly what they did.

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Unthinking chemophobia.

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The way minor frustration makes me absolutely inarticulate.

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The way that Evangelical Christians actively attempt to mislead people about how extreme their theology is by identifying themselves only as Christian, specifying no denomination.

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Songs that put all their effort into delivering big choruses, while their verses are utterly devoid of melodic or lyrical interest.

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When people make earnest, thoughtful, and passionate posts in support of vulnerable people, and then immediately apologize because a bunch of people told them that they did it wrong.

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Straining a muscle in my chest (I didn’t even know you could do that).

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The way that “duo” has three letters and “trio” has four letters, and there’s nothing that anybody can do about it.

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When misconceptions persist in the larger cultural ecosystem despite my having known about them for years and having told everybody I could reach about them an annoying number of times.

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Being too tired to read.

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Grown adults who don’t know how to behave in a movie theater.

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When my outdoor Halloween decorations blow away on a windy October day.

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People who go on and on about all the reasons that understanding history does not matter, while basing the entirety of their rancid, obnoxious worldview on a distorted or false understanding of what happened in the past.

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My overly-compulsive brain chemistry.

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The way that most people have decided the only important measure of good journalism is whether it tells the story the way you want to hear it.

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Being haunted by the zeitgeist.

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Falling behind on a project that I set my own deadline for.

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Stand-up comedians with only basic timing skills and few original ideas.

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The use of “carb” and “protein” to refer directly to whole foods that are rich in carbohydrates and proteins, especially by people who slept through the nutrition unit in health class and don’t actually believe in chemistry.

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Bad dreams about good people.

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When bell peppers go bad in the fridge. Other vegetables too, but damned if those bell peppers aren’t treacherous.

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Pointless shibboleths.

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Sweet pickles.

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Driving in heavy rain at night.

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When effectively opposing a nihilistic, fascist political movement requires taking steps that are less than optimal for the long term health of democracy.

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Daylight Saving Time, or the attempt to cope with the illogical use our institutions make of daylight hours when drawing their schedules by pretending it is a different time than it actually is, rather than adjusting their schedules to better suit the actual daylight.