Things That Really !&$% You Off 3 and Knuckles

Yeah, I'm a little better. Still sleeping a bit more than I usually do, but forcing myself back onto schedule and back to the gym next week ought to fix it.

Golf.

Of all the sports, is there a sport that takes up more land, water, and general resources than golf? Seems to attract as many rich berks as cricket, even more environmentally costly, and atrociously dull to boot. The only good golf has Mario in, and even that was last good on the GameCube.

Ah, but without golf, we wouldn't have miniature golf, which is ace.

I also wouldn't have my current job so I can't hate it.

Balladeer wrote:

Golf.  

Of all the sports, is there a sport that takes up more land, water, and general resources than golf?  Seems to attract as many rich berks as cricket, even more environmentally costly, and atrociously dull to boot.  The only good golf has Mario in, and even that was last good on the GameCube.

True

Buskalilly wrote:

Ah, but without golf, we wouldn't have miniature golf, which is ace.

True - but it's the superior form of golf, and should really have eradicated its ancestor by now; mini golf should've been added to the Olympics instead.

Exactly what Jim says. With apologies to Smurf's employers, golf needs to change with the times and eliminate its original inferior form.

Golf’s fine! Right enough I was never any good at it and didn’t dedicate myself to it growing up either but it was a satisfying way to spend your time. At the very least going down the driving range with pals and smacking balls was good fun.

Plus I’m from a place that’s got three former Open courses and a handful of courses that are ranked in the world’s top one hundred. They bring a lot of tradition and a bit of prestige to this place, and do good for tourism and local employment. At least where I'm from it's this that outweighs any environmental costliness - I can’t have anything against golf.

Football Golf exists, that's the best form of Golf already but sadly its not replaced the PGA Tour.

Micro vs. macro scale writ large (and small), this.  My personal micro scale is a large swathe of the local park (the nearest swathe to me incidentally) being taken over by areas you're not allowed to walk on because you could get clonked by a golf ball.  And I live in a suburban town jam-packed with elderly Tories.  It doesn't need those jobs, and it doesn't need a golf course.  I had my views on the sport before that, of course, but micro scale definitely influences our views a lot (too much?) on the macro!

As an aside, while the job provision argument absolutely is important in Tory Britain, more important than it should be in fact, it also makes me shudder at how our society has some of its goals aimed exactly the wrong way.  (This isn't about golf, it's a general thought.)  It would rather make 500 unnecessary manual jobs, than have improving AI and robotics to the point where people don't need to do those jobs and pay those people a living wage regardless.  Maybe it's my chronic laziness coming to the front here, but that's always seemed mucked up.

Today’s local news headline was that someone was arrested after starting a fire that ripped through one of the nearby golf courses, and after hearing that I immediately thought 'fucking hell Balladeer'.

It's less than they deserve.

As somebody who grew up on fora, where things like "don't double-post"* and "don't drift off-topic" were both common and eminently sensible, sometimes Discord etiquette or lack thereof gets to me.  People butting into conversations with different conversations, hundred-line long conversations about unrelated (and usually uninteresting) topics in the wrong channels, the odd idiot dominating a channel with a screen's worth of words about themself...  Sticks in my craw occasionally.  Okay, often.  Okay most of the time

...and yet my hours' spent on Discord is


*Yes I recognise the irony.

I've not Discorded much because any that I would have joined have been in the UK since I moved to Japan

I've never felt any real desire to join a Discord and get involved in conversation like I would on a forum. I know they've got threading and other stuff in there, but it just feels like too much of a departure for me to get into it. Random dickheads wandering into the conversation would wind me up too, to be fair.

I barely manag to keep up here so I've got no chance on Discord.

JayMoyles wrote:

I've never felt any real desire to join a Discord and get involved in conversation like I would on a forum. I know they've got threading and other stuff in there, but it just feels like too much of a departure for me to get into it. Random dickheads wandering into the conversation would wind me up too, to be fair.

Yep these are all my problems... but on the other side of the scale, I'm on three active servers and if I wasn't wasting time there in the working day I'd be somewhere less pleasant, like Facebook or formerly-known-as-Twitter.  I regularly consider quitting Facebook, a lot of what I used to be on there for is political satire pages and they've been algorithmed out of existence (plus a bunch of other enshitification-related stuff), but this one keeps me coming back.