For example, I’m incredibly confused about how you’re supposedly to measure liquid laundry detergent with the cap. At least the kind that I have sits on it’s side, so if you measure it with the cap it just leaks everywhere and makes a mess.
Or at my parents house they have a bag of captain crunch berries that has a new design, where instead of zipping along the top of the bag like normal, it has a zipper in the front slightly beneath the top. That way when you poor it you can’t see what you’re doing cuz the bag is in the way. Like what the heck who’s idea was that?
Some toilets have a perfectly round bowl so they don’t stick out as far and take up less bathroom floor space - and they work fine, but only in bathrooms that anticipate the vast majority of its occupants to be equipped with a vagina. For those of us rocking a penis, those fucking toilets are horrible - sitting on that damn thing requires you to contort your junk around like some sausage-Houdini as you’re sitting, so that you can guide it through the remaining 2 square inches of open space not occupied by your legs or ass. Then when you’re actually seated, you still have to sit there and awkwardly hold the thing so it stays pointed straight down.
Fuck up any part of that, and the tip of your dick hits the seat or the inside of the bowl.
…and they must be like $3 cheaper than an oval toilet or something, cuz 99% of US apartments seem to be equipped with the round, vagina-only toilets.
Oval bowls are the way. No matter what’s in your pants, it gets the job done without the significantly increased biohazard risk.
I guess in fairness, the problem isn’t with their design, it’s with the people who purchase the toilets treating them as sex-neutral when no the fuck they aren’t!
I am a vagina owner from birth, I never imagined the toilet bowl shape would pose an issue to penis owners. From reading your comment I’m still unsure of which toilet bowls you’re talking about, I would appreciate if you (or anyone, really) could point to images of both so I, and potentially others, can compare. TIA
Space consideration is a bit more obvious with the seat though
How pronounced the difference is feels like it varies but the rounded ones are frequently just way too tiny.
Thanks for those! Clear as day.
I knew about different bowl / seat shapes, but I never thought about the issues for folks who have a penis.
Very enlightening. Thank you for bringing it up! It’s very interesting.
I just measured my usual toilet and while the hole is more squarish than the round one in the picture, the 16.5 length is about right. I don’t have any problem. I’ve got average sized junk, and have maybe a slender to medium build.
Maybe weight, whether one is a ‘shower’ vs a ‘grower’, or some particular anatomical proportion play into it, I don’t know. Maybe how far back one sits is key. Maybe people vary in their butthole to junk measurement. But I don’t think this is as universal a problem as OP thinks. But, hey I’m all in favor of a longer toilet standard for those for whom it is.
Round bowls with larger circumference is the clear winner. Elongated bowls also leave stains easier.
Tape a dildo to your vulva now sit down on a round bowl and see if it touches the rim. Now imagine you have to pee while taking a poop and you now have to shove the end down so it pees into the bowl. Do this without touching the rim.
It was the shape of the toilet what I couldn’t picture, not the usage
I hate those.
Sit where it is comfortable and you touch the front, fucken gross, or sit back far enough and stain the bowl.
When your dick hits the bowl and you wonder what STD you just picked up.
lol, facts.
STDs would be fairly difficult to get, most stuff requires blood or semen to transfer, or sustained skin on skin contact. STDs die pretty quickly once they leave the heat and wetness of the human body.
UTIs would be probably more likely, haha.
Just a little related PSA- you can get tested for STDs for cheap at wellness centers, university clinics, and planned parenthood clinics. The vast majority of STDs are curable, and even the more tenacious ones can be prevented via oral pills or shots like PrEP, whose pills give extremely high resistance to HIV, and whose vaccine has made people immune in trials (needed twice a year to maintain immunity).
At the end of the day, you want to catch STDs quickly, because they can do damage to your organs. Medicines can cure them. And if you are with a new partner, get tested, or wear condoms (or both!)
TIL!
I had to get a stupid round one because it was the only one with a 10" rough-in (distance from wall to toilet drain), standard is 12". House is from 1925.
I never really considered it was because the toilet might be rounder and less oval but I have definitely noticed those toilets because for some reason they’re ALL like that in every workplace and commercial building in this one suburb of my city. I have no idea why just that suburb decided they really enjoyed the idea of everyone having their penis touch the toilet bowl. I work freelance and because of agglomeration, most companies in my industry all set up shop in that particular suburb so I got to experience a wide gamut of different buildings who all made this same bizarre and infuriating choice.
In my parent home there’s a octagonal toilet badly shaped so is uncomfortable to sit parallel(the same way you sit in a oval one) because the seat is too long and is uncomfortable to sit crossing the seat because is too narrow, you need to sit diagonally but because is octagonal your dick hits the bowl. Extremely annoying design.
I can’t seem to pour out of my pyrex measuring glass without the water dribbling all down the front of the spout making a mess. You think they could have shaped the spout to prevent that better and it infuriates me every time.
Water has both adhesive and cohesive properties, and this bullshit is one of the results. I hate it so much. Basically the bit of wwater in contact with the surface of the spout likes to stick to that spot; and the above that likes to stick to the water stuck to the surface and so on, making it kinda roll along angled surfaces even when it seems like gravity should be yanking it right off.
And they absolutely could shape the spout in a way that stops this - they just choose not to.
Never heard of the oil coating trick @DontRedditMyLemmy mentioned, but it makes sense - oil is hydrophobic, so that could eliminate the adhesion part of the equation; and without that moving the stream initially, its cohesion won’t be an issue either.
Or do what they do in chemistry which is to take a rod (or in the kitchen anything like a dinner knife or handle) and place it against the spout and let the liquid then run down the rod.
I have to chime in here, as it’s a subject close to my heart. The old Pyrex measuring cups don’t do this. I went out of my way to buy some on eBay. I can’t imagine why they redesigned like this, but there’s a lot of things I can’t imagine.
It’s because they moved away from borosilicate.
Lightly coat the spout with olive oil
Why does it have to be olive oil?
Motor oil tastes funny.
Any mug that has a really hemispherical, smooth handle. You put a hot beverage in there, and the weight is enough to make your fingers slide down the handle, and then you burn yourself on the main body of the mug unless you really squeeze.
Any faucet that just barely sticks out over the sink, so you have to touch the back of the sink to wash your hands (british sinks are even worse, though).
I’ve had these dual wall glass mugs at home for a few years. So civilised.
https://www.house.com.au/products/baccarat-barista-cafe-double-wall-thermal-glass-mug-2-pack
The parabolic bottom causes fridge water to shoot up and out causing a mess.
I bought a set of mugs like that recently. It’s a shame because they are pretty nice looking, and comfortable to hold when empty. But when full of hot liquid, the handle just is totally inadequate.
They are from IKEA, so at least they didn’t cost too much, but I am a little surprised because their stuff is generally pretty well thought out from an ergonomics and usability perspective–it’s only really the sturdiness/durability I ever worry about.
The best mugs I have are still a pair of the stereotypical featureless cylinder type I got from a giveaway 10 or 15 years ago–they are utterly boring, but the handle fits 3 fingers for a perfectly stable grip!
If you only put distilled water in it it really doesn’t seem like an issue
Laptops with no intake dust filters.
Actually, no, any computer with fans that doesn’t have a dust filter is a terrible design.
My laptop doesn’t have dust filters, but the fan almost never runs anyway. Like the heatsink is way overbuilt for the CPU it’s attached to. It’s actually quite nice. I’ve never seen it hit 70 degrees. I’ve cleaned it maybe three times since 2016. It really only spins the fan up when I’m watching 60 fps YouTube videos or playing games. And even then, it kicks hard for a very short time and shuts off again.
And again, I bought this thing nine years ago. It’s just a little Acer. And it’s not even a nice one. I paid like 500 bucks for this thing.
Now, my wife’s MacBook that she games on…yeah, I need to figure out how to get the back off so it can get a proper dusting. Fuck you, Apple. Let me work on my stuff, dammit.
A twelve year old computer in 2013 would have been utterly useless. Doesn’t matter how good is was in 2001 it would die under even a modest 2013 workload. But a decent computer from 2013 is still useful today. Not for triple-A gaming, VR, or 8K video editing, but still a decent productivity and media machine. I just bought my first handheld gaming PC and I made sure it had eGPU support since that’s the likely bottleneck in the future (i7 and 32GB RAM, so that should be good for a long while) and I fully intend to get a decade out of it. There’s no real appetite to upgrade your machine regularly any more, and the manufacturers hate that.
Any time there’s a ready meal from the supermarket and for some reason the adhesive is way stronger than the plastic film. You end up with loads of bits of film just sort of stuck to the rim of it. Super annoying.
I’ve dropped brands for that shit
Got a local one that puffs up to like 3x height in the microwave though and that pulls off a lot of the adhesive.
The glue gets weaker when it’s heated. They use the same film for oven meals as well. It comes off fine when you finished heating, but it’s a pain in the arse when cold.
is it a good idea to microwave that plastic container, though?
I had some plastic clothes-pins that became severely degraded from uv sunlight.
UV light breaks the polymer bonds. You now have monomer dust.
Soak them in vinegar for 15 minutes
If they’re anything like the pegs I got, vinegar won’t help, they basically crumbled to dust!
Microplastics dust
Stainless steel ones are the way to go
I prefer wooden pegs with a stainless spring, but plastic has to be pretty much the worst choice.
I found the wooden one degrade after a while and break, yer 100% agree plastic is rubbish
Wait until you hear about PEX piping.
Alec from Technology Connections is known for his extensive rants about household appliances: https://www.youtube.com/@TechnologyConnections
As for me, I’m just trying to avoid things in general, and things I don’t enjoy in particular. Perhaps the only things that I find annoying at my home are:
- An awful flow-through gas water heater, which requires me to wait for like a minute before water gets up to temperature every time I need hot water (I’d go with an electric one myself, but unfortunately I’m a renter for now). It’s also a poor design because it’s going to fuck over humanity in a couple decades via climate change.
- Packaging on almost all processed food. I don’t need everything I buy to be in a plastic bag. It’s an incredibly poor design because it is almost always non-recyleable, either because it has a thin foil layer or it’s a mix of plastics or both, filling the landfills forever and contaminating everything with microplastics.
- Poor window frame design, combined with inevitable building settling, has resulted in a cracked window twice within the last year.
I have many more gripes about things, some of the most prominent:
- Most modern smartphones just suck. Gimme back the headphone jack, an SD card slot, and a back that I can open with my fingernails! (thankfully my current phone has all of those despite being only a couple years old and very cheap)
- Generally everything that has a battery which I can’t replace
- Bluetooth headphones without a headphone jack or at least audio-over-USB are an awful design, it would cost the manufacturer like a dollar do add that functionality that can come in really handy and yet they don’t
- Fuck clothes without pockets!
- Cheap plastic crap from wish.com or similar that’s designed to fail after one use, it just shouldn’t exist. I hope CPC bans this shit soon. (although I find it fun to pull out broken christmas lights from recycling, fix them and then get free christmas lights for every New Year’s)
- “Teflon” or similar frying pans. Just get a cast iron one. Lasts forever, doesn’t poison you, also allegedly enriches your food with iron
I’m going to go with that horrendous, non-absorbent, 1/8th ply toilet paper that gets stocked in public and office bathrooms.
I’m on Team Bidet now, so it doesn’t bother me as much as it once did… but the stuff should not exist.
I’m guessing that one day, the people who buy the stuff will figure out that it they’re not winning if it costs one-third the price of normal TP when everyone has to use ten times more of it, but who knows when that day will happen. Because it hasn’t happened yet.
Even with a bidet that paper sucks. Drying off you ass with it leaves so much paper crumble everywhere that you’ll need the bidet again…
Okay Team Bidet, how are they actually supposed work?
- Spray bum
- Pat dry with TP
The tricky part with phase 1 is managing water pressure. Too little is ineffective. Too much blasts shit everywhere.
Do a test squirt into the bowl so you know what you’ve got to work with. Start with low pressure to get most of it, adjust angle of necessary, then hit it with everything.
I get that’s the principle, but how long are you supposed to spray for? How much pressure? Is there a trick to it? In my own limited experience, it doesn’t actually do much more than dampen the poo.
You know you’re supposed to use the bidet after you’re done pooping, right?
Yeah, but how long do you have to dampen your crack in order to feel the equivalent clean of two dry wipes?
Just dont try to spray up your ass, its pretty hard but you dont wanna.
But now you only use three or four squares of TP to dry off instead of fingerpainting shit all up your asscrack until the point you’ve been conditioned to believe is clean enough.
One problem though, shitting at your workplace or anywhere else will be insufferable. My LPT is to take one of the better hand towels and wet it in a sink before hitting up a stall. Thank me later.
A water bottle with a sport cap is a sufficient travel bidet.
Toilets seem to be getting smaller and I’m having trouble sitting on it without my penis touching the front.
Hey everyone get a load of this guy with his massive hog
Rounded toilets are the worst for this. Elongated is the way to go.
Given your instance, I’m guessing you’re not from the US… but here there are two generally standard shapes for residential toilets–round and oblong. The round ones fit better in small bathrooms, but man when you are used to the oblong shape it feels like sitting on a child-size toilet or something.
Condoms should roll on either direction.
Ahh, like 4 day undies.
Normal
Backwards
Inside out normal
Inside out backwards
Fred, is that you?
And don’t forget! Yellow forward and brown backward (the rule of wearing underpants)
Spray on condom
I’m curious about how you propose this would be done…
I don’t know,I’m not a cocksmith.
Lawd I did an actual laughing out loud.
Protip: Buy the XXXXXL size, throw it over your junk, then shrink-wrap it with a heat gun.
Just don’t use ordinary shrink tubing, it doesn’t seal properly in the front and may tighten too hard for comfort
Overtime, our kitchen knives. Knives need to be thin, as thinner knives cut through ingredients more easily. Today’s knives are designed instead to be marketed. Something incredibly thick, and sturdy, to make it feel “premium”, when all its doing is tiring you out, since using a heavy knife gets exhausting, especially when its so thick it wedges in ingredients.
Vintage European knives are slim, and almost petite, because they knew how to make a good knife, in the same manner japanese knives are ground extremely thin, sometimes thinner than a postcard.
Yeah it’s a difference when it’s a cleaver, something meant to apply raw force, and hence needs a certain weight to be usable.
But a knife?!
Yeah good point I recently got a serrated utility knife and while it’s decently sharp, the profile is annoyingly wedge shaped so while cutting something soft like an orange is fine, anything hard like an apple will split before you can get a clean cut. Seems like it should have a more even, thinner side profile imo. Otherwise decent knife tho three stars.
Anyone got good knife recommendations I’m in the market right now??
General purpose for meats and veggie cutting.
I’m currently using a victorinox fibrox. It’s great but loses edge rather quickly requiring honing each meal and sometimes during cutting of ingredients.
Does victorinox offer sharpening services? Some knife manufacturers have programs where you can either send your knife in or take it in to a store and have it professionally sharpened.
If your blade is losing its edge quickly, it probably needs to have a new edge put on it with an actual sharpening, v rather than just the touch up it gets from a honing rod.
I actually do sharpen it with a kitchen sharpener and when it’s needed sharpening blocks. It’s an excellent knife large useful handle and thin slimmer blade it’s a major improvement from any stores chef knife. I considered shopping their other knives as well. But I wanted to branch out a bit too.
Zwillings Four star is great!
Zwillings Henkel? I was debating a Henkel, wusthof, or Japanese of some sort.
Thicker helps with balance in the hand. Cheap knives usually are too light in the handle or the blade is so thin it flexes. A sharp knife is what helps cut and you shouldn’t work with dull knives.
There’s a balance that needs to be maintained. A general purpose knife like a chef’s knife needs some thickness to it, otherwise it can’t effectively chop through tougher things. It’s also not a knife you are supposed to hold the full weight of when cutting most things. Thin knives are awful for things like cutting a cabbage in half or cutting chicken bones.
NOT FUCKING ACCEPTABLE WE ARE BETTER THAN THIS.
🚫
Thankfully, there are some designs that improve on this! Here’s what’s in my kitchen:
The brand is OXO, for anyone curious.
I have that and they still are still a pain (I said something else here and it got censored! LOL) to get in or out of a crowded tool jar. Then I always bump that end switch and they pop open in the jar.
Leave the one tong hanging out. Ie. Straddle the side. Assuming youre not one that cares about aesthetics.
I stick mine to the side of the fridge with old hard drive magnets when not in use.
Don’t they fit in a draw?
Sure, but my fridge is pretty much right beside the stove so it works out nicely for me.
Makes sense, i was more confused about the og pics but looks like heap of people have said the same thing i would of, I’ve never know a set of tongs that don’t have the locking tab at the back
Most of my tongs have a metal square that slides down the length to keep them closed, is that not normal?
My parents had one where it slid down, and my grandfather had one where it slid up. They looked otherwise identical.
Some thanksgivings we’d have both at the same table and it drove me up the fucking wall.
Those are gravity operated. Point the thongs grippers downward to open, point them to the ceiling to close.
Was a while before I found out. I like them better now.
Wine bottles. After thousands of years of drinking you would think humans would develop a bottle design that doesn’t dribble down the side after pouring.
You’re missing that the wine industry kind of loves traditions. That’s mainly why we still have the bottle design we do.
That’s why you should just drink it straight from the bottle.
That’s why you should just drink it straight from the
bottlebox.FTFY
If this is a regular issue for you I’d recommend a decanter or at least a large carafe. It solves your problem, helps the wine to ‘breathe’ and looks fancypants as balls.
We did.
Boxed wine.
However, bottle design is pretty refined, and they are quite reusuable.
Ok so my father makes his own wine, at home from kits/concentrate. He makes a lot of wine and drinks a lot of wine (and gives a lot of wine away as gifts)
One day he called me, and he was so excited. Like if he wasn’t a 61 year old man I would have guessed he was going to announce his pregnancy.
“You won’t believe it! The wine place is selling bags now!!! So I can put my wine in bags and put those in boxes!!! Omg why didn’t I think of this?! Think of all the time saved with corks and recorking!”
It was a happy day for him, certainly.
Humidifiers.
It’s just a pool of water with a little nebulizer and a fan to blow the mist out a chimney.
Trouble is, they’re all made by the fucking plague demon Nurgle with the sole purpose of aerosolizing mold and bacteria by having the tiniest nooks and crannies than cannot be reached to be physically cleaned.
And before I get the “you gotta clean it with vinegar every week” comment, two points:
- You don’t soak your hands in soap and rinse them off and call them clean. You gotta scrub them.
- Am I supposed to fill a 5 gallon bucket with vinegar to soak the whole water tank every week? Because the chimney goes right through that bitch.
Eh, we live in an arid climate and have a whole house humidifier which gets the air from the single digits to the 30s. We have another ultrasonic for the bedroom to keep the bloody noses down. It’s not that hard to find one that is easy to clean (has a large hand sized hole in the reservoir). Also, any spray like Scrubbing bubbles makes it super easy to clean to squeaky every 2 weeks. Who the hell would use vinegar, that would smell awful!
You better start showing Plague Daddy, Prince of Decay, God of Chaos Nurgle some goddamn respect
I’ve taken to using an old cake pan, a desk fan, and a towel. Fill up the pan with water, stick one end of the towel in the water, drape and clip the other end to the fan and let it sit running for a few days. Before the towel gets gross, toss it in the laundry when it’s dry and grab another towel
It works so well I’m completely confused as to how/why there isn’t a commercialized product like that, it completely solves the cleaning/highschool biology experiments problem
That’s pretty much a swamp cooler
Lol yup, got the idea from a Technology Connections video on how one of the common humidifier designs are literally just large swamp coolers
This is how the humidifier I used in the 90s worked. Tub with water, vertical sponge and a fan blowing over the sponge. I’m sure these are still out there but the little misters they call humidifiers now don’t work well.
Don’t use a mist humidifier. They suck. Use an evaporative one and add bacteriostat to the water.
Mine is a tub of water with a wick in it. It has a fan that blows air across the wick. That’s it.
i have a venta lw45. same principle, but instead of a wick, it has these rotating disks that the water sticks to (with a little soap in the water). Works incredibly well, still uses next to no energy (<8W) and the disks are super easy to clean. It’s a beast, goes through 9 liters of water in a bit over a day. All the parts are easily accessible for maintenance and there’s replacement parts if anything ever were to break (though i havent needed those yet).
the disks are especially nice when you have hard water, the calcium can be a pain to remove from a wick, but you can put the venta plastic disks (and lower housing, if you can fit it) in the dishwasher to get them good as new. And calcium does not stick to them weld, so a quick rinse under a strong showerhead is usually enough to clean the disks. Definitely one of the best appliance purchases i ever made.
You literally just use a sponge and some bleach spray and like a minute of your time. If you replenish it daily your normal water chlorine should keep most of the bad shit at bay.
I’ve always thought that most toilet paper holders are over engineered. You don’t need a little springy rod between 2 posts, you just need an L-shaped bar with the short end screwed to the wall and maybe a little knob on the end of the long side to keep the roll from sliding off. And it’s not that the spring style is especially difficult to use or prone to failure or anything, it just seems like a no-brainer to me to use a one-piece holder with no moving parts instead of one that has at least 4 parts (the base, 2 halves of the roller, and a spring) I’m seeing more of that style around these days, which I appreciate.
Stove vent hoods that don’t actually vent outside are fucking stupid. My over the range microwave basically just takes smoke from my stove and blows it back out over my head almost directly at the smoke detector.
I’ve frequently run into shelves, mounting brackets, etc. that seem to totally disregard stud spacing. We got one of those fancy Samsung frame TV’s a while back, to get it to sit so flush to the wall it has its own special mounting brackets, 2 little plates with sort of a modified keyhole slot that you slot 2 little knobs on the back of the TV into. It’s actually not a half bad way to mount a TV, probably one of the easier TV wall mounts I’ve ever personally used, the tv itself is actually pretty damn lightweight (because they moved all the heavy electronics into a separate box you need to hide somewhere) but still I wanted to make sure my fancy TV wouldn’t fall off the wall, so I wanted to mount it to the studs, but of course the spacing of the brackets doesn’t allow that option. I was able to bolt one side a stud but I had to get some toggle bolts for the other side. I’m pretty sure the whole TV is well within the rated weight capacity of one of those toggle bolts in drywall, let alone 2 in drywall and 2 in a stud, but still, it feels like a dumb design choice. (It’s possible that other sizes or newer models do allow for mounting entirely to studs, the size and model I got didn’t)
I helped a friend replace the wax ring on his toilet recently with one of the newer style rubber gaskets, which as it turns out made the toilet sit imperceptibly higher, which meant that the bolts holding it down were no longer quite long enough to screw the nut onto to tighten it down. With a quick trip to ace hardware and a minute perusing my options, I settled on some Danco zero cut bolts, and I definitely think that is a far superior design to the standard bolts that are probably holding down damn-near every toilet you’ve ever used.
On the subject of toilets, I can’t think of any particularly good reason for the tank to be a separate piece from the rest of the throne like on most toilets. The gasket and bolts there just add more places for something to start leaking. It’s probably an ease of manufacturing thing, but we have the technology to make one piece toilets now, the two piece style should be obsolete.
Stove vent hoods that don’t actually vent outside are fucking stupid. My over the range microwave basically just takes smoke from my stove and blows it back out over my head almost directly at the smoke detector.
Amen. The one non-negotiable item when we eventually renovate our kitchen is a vent fan so powerful you should be afraid to bring your small dog into the kitchen when it’s on.
We had one of those downdraft ones and it was similarly useless, worse than useless even though it technically vented outside because it got so disgusting, the vent grate right in the middle of the stove so things fell in, and heat doesn’t go down, it didn’t pull anything when it ran.
Stove vent hoods that don’t actually vent outside are fucking stupid
Some places you can’t (for whatever reason) install a proper ventilator. Then these with carbon filter will remove some things. But yes, they are far inferior to the full blow vents.
The two piece toilet does make installation a bit easier since it’s less weight. I wonder if there are any sort of workplace safety weight limit considerations that come into play. E.g., maybe the 2 piece can be done with 1 person, but a one piece could need 2.
A lot of toilet paper holders are secured to the wall with drywall hangers. An L-shaped one-piece one is basically asking to be torqued right out of the wall.
I’d tend to chalk that up to user error, if you’re putting enough force on your toilet paper holder to pull it off the wall you’re doing something besides just pulling toilet paper off of it or maybe you installed it with the world’s shittiest drywall anchors
Drywall anchors are basically useless.
It really kind of depends on the type of anchor and the intended use
The most common little plastic ones that you’re probably picturing are pretty bad in most cases, but some of the heavier duty ones are pretty damn strong if used properly
As strong as the drywall they’re pulling against, at least.
Every thing permanently installed in a house should IMO be designed to support one human of weight from above, especially in a room that will have a wet slipery floor.
I think the actual code re: that is those big metal handle rail bars that have to be attached to studs (ADA compliance maybe?).
yeah, but it is nice if the towel rack is screwed into studs so it can be used as one in a pinch.
