Rant Thread

This is going to be a heavy rant about a very serious topic, sorry in advance if you get uncomfortable while reading this.

Just happened like 15 45 minutes ago. I'm at my home eating toast. TV is on the nightly brainrot gameshow which is essentially people playing 1v1 Sporcle slideshow quizzes.
Last round of the evening comes. 20,000₪ on the line! Category: electrical products (remember this!)
So the two being the stand-off, blah blah "oven" blah blah "washing machine"

They have 45 seconds total. She is down to 4 seconds. He is at 13, and it's his turn.
Unluckily for him he gets a picture of a fake device no-one has ever seen and that doesn't exist, but he's smart enough to "skip" almost immediately. And so at T=8 seconds left he is presented with this:
1752609482631.png
T=7 sec left: "kettle"
T=6 sec left: "kettle!"
T=3 sec left: "it's not a kettle? skip"
T=1 sec left: *buzzer*, lighting turns red, on the screen:

electric kettle

What the hell is this shit. The CATEGORY is ELECTRICAL SHIT. He said kettle HOW CAN IT BE A NON-ELECTRIC KETTLE IF YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT ELECTRIC STUFF!!!!!!!! He was totally robbed, and I too was robbed of seeing another picture of a dishwasher or something and saying "dishwasher" to demonstrate to the empty air how knowledgeable and smart I am. Gonna press this button HTML button here now and share my rant with this forum Internet forum.
 
Yesterday a customer made rude comments towards my colleague at the cashier who is a trans man. He kept on verbal attacking my colleague until the point he freaked out and cried.
I was only a few meters from the incident and was there when the asshole was allready outside. Thankfully this happened at the end of the working day. We gave my colleague all support and he´s doing fine now. It makes me sad and mad at the same time that even in 2025 people can´t be who they want to be.
 
If English was a sane language, the ';' would have been called something like "period and comma", or, even better, "dot and comma".

Why even better? Because now that can be shortened to "dot com" = ".com", and then instead of writing forum.maidenfans.com you could write forum.maidenfans;.

If that somehow wasn't enough to convince you, you could also write things like
"int google.com" instead of "int google;" when coding, which would be mighty helpful, for obvious reasons.
 
Diesel 11 said:
Man, the semicolon is one of my favorite punctuation marks; it is nothing but useful, yet never given its proper dues.
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I like it too, but, if one of them has to go... It's biggest purpose is being a middle step between a comma and a colon, and you can get by just fine using those instead. It's useful, it's also pointless.

At least, it should be... There's another issue I have, if a colon is two periods on top of each other, then where is my punctuation mark that is two commas on top of each other? It's not fair that in this dot-comma family (, ; : .), there are four periods and only two commas. The semicolon should be two stacked commas. If people are too sentimental about the current semicolon, fine, I guess you like specialized commas enough to not have a problem with a new punctuation mark somewhere between a comma and a semicolon! It could also be even weaker than a comma depending on your perspective, I guess, but I don't really agree with that.

One more thing... Question marks/exclamation marks with commas at the bottom. Who in the world decided that I need an awkward period-length pause just because I used a question word 20 words ago, that makes no sense to me. The comma in the last sentence is exactly where I'd put my question mark comma hybrid. I purposefully use a lot of commas to intend a certain tone, and whenever I write a question in that tone, I need to choose between keeping my flow, and announcing the question? And using an unholy abomination like "?," ? Fuck that!
 
Shmoolikipod said:
It's useful; it's also pointless.
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:goodbye:

Shmoolikipod said:
One more thing... Question marks/exclamation marks with commas at the bottom. Who in the world decided that I need an awkward period-length pause just because I used a question word 20 words ago, that makes no sense to me. The comma in the last sentence is exactly where I'd put my question mark comma hybrid. I purposefully use a lot of commas to intend a certain tone, and whenever I write a question in that tone, I need to choose between keeping my flow, and announcing the question? And using an unholy abomination like "?," ? Fuck that!
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I really like this idea, I looked it up and someone proposed this already. I will say that when I'm writing I'll often do something like this:
Shmoolikipod said:
It could also be even weaker than a comma depending on your perspective, I guess? but I don't really agree with that.
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...the question mark indicating tone but the lowercase B representing that the sentence isn't over.

Also for what it's worth, I rarely use the semicolon online (I could've used it when I said "I really like this idea;") because I feel like it's a bit too formal. Its best use IMO is in actual writing where you're expecting a far less casual tone.
 
Diesel 11 said:
...the question mark indicating tone but the lowercase B representing that the sentence isn't over.
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I do that too, very rarely, but it feels like once the question mark is there, the damage is already done... :( And I would still need an additional solution for the Hebrew case because no capital letters.
Diesel 11 said:
Also for what it's worth, I rarely use the semicolon online (I could've used it when I said "I really like this idea;") because I feel like it's a bit too formal. Its best use IMO is in actual writing where you're expecting a far less casual tone.
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I know I share this sentiment and I'm sure we're not alone in this. I've seen people write that they don't like using capital letters because they are "intimidating". That's a synonym for "I want to keep it casual", as far as I'm concerned. I don't know anything about the history of the semicolon, but I wouldn't be surprised if it, too, is a victim of this thinking, and it just died earlier for being less vital...
 
Shmoolikipod said:
I know I share this sentiment and I'm sure we're not alone in this. I've seen people write that they don't like using capital letters because they are "intimidating". That's a synonym for "I want to keep it casual", as far as I'm concerned. I don't know anything about the history of the semicolon, but I wouldn't be surprised if it, too, is a victim of this thinking, and it just died earlier for being less vital...
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Yeah absolutely. I mean if you had to choose the 'least important' punctuation mark, the semicolon is pretty much the obvious choice. You can pretty easily leave it out of your writing because it only has two main uses: joining two sentences with related ideas into one, and clarifying a list that uses commas within the list items themselves.

But those are still very useful functions of the semicolon and I feel like people should take advantage of what we got! And then absolutely also create more punctuation marks. I'm completely sold on the question comma now lol.

Also I will say that the semicolon's role as a symbol for self-harm/suicide survivors is really cool. My partner got it as his second tattoo and it looks dope (now assimilated into a larger leg piece).
 
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