A sufficiently desperate amalgamated waffle sorter

You know what confuses me?

Toys.

Now, I could make this post be about the My Little Pony stuff. I considered it, but I think we'd all be better-served if I just skip to what actually prompted the post:

Brave.

There is, at my local TRU, an endcap with a bunch of Merida dolls, along with some costume dresses and a few other pieces of tie-in merchandise. Each of these dolls has the character's picture, perhaps taken straight from the movie, right on the box.

And they don't match. Skin tone, eye shape, face shape, the natural state of the hair... even the expression is not one that I can recall seeing.

It is established fact that people will buy, play with, and enjoy toys not based on any particular intellectual property. I haven't researched, maybe people are more likely to buy things that are based on IPs they like. But if you're going to sell a toy based on an existing visual appearance, is it that hard to either make them match or not include a picture on the box itself?

Y'know what I hate?

Those Ads.

For the most part I use Firefox with the Ad-Block Plus add-on, which deals quite nicely with Those Ads. But sometimes, for one reason or another, I do things in Internet Explorer, which has no such add-on. That's when Those Ads come in.

Those Ads seem to be most common at fanfiction.net, although I've seen them a few other places. They consist of the page you want loading, and then being covered by a full-page advertisement. It's bad enough when the page in question is just for some store, but the worst are the video ads. I have a suspicion that those are mostly for asinine teen TV shows, but I have no noticeable desire to find out.

What makes the video ads the worst is this: even once you click the "Skip this ad" button - the only way to see the page you want, short of navigating back and re-progressing - the audio keeps going. So you've got this chatter you didn't choose, that is not relevant to your interests, and it's not even accompanied by images of people you can whack over the head with your mouse pointer.

This? Is not so much a great day, for me. Or, really, a great week. Human idiocy dominates the radio news reports; I've got a final tomorrow that I'm likely to fail in a class I'm fairly sure I'll fail regardless of the final's score; no one will give me canonmates for Felix; my display is fairly broken; and it's cold outside. And now the ad by my posting window is being irritating.

Honestly, people. If you're going to like an idea, you should continue to like it after you're told that it comes from one or more members of another political party. Politics in the US is broken. Time to start over from scratch. No elephants, no donkeys, and no participation beyond personal voting from anyone previously involved above the city level.

Why do I need this Business Thought class? I don't care how my bosses make their decisions, or why. And no, Douglas McGregor, I don't have any ambition or self-direction to speak of. Point me in a direction, tell me how far to go and what to do there, and I'm fine. People are messy. Give me numbers - be they grammar-numbers, numbers-called-by-names, or ordinary unadorned numbers - and keep the psychology to yourself.