Unpopular opinions go here

[SteveC]

Splinter in the Mind's Eye is rough. It was all we had back then, but it was rough.
I remember picking up a 1970s Doctor Who novel (dinosaurs running around in London) and there was an extended tongue in cheek rant, I think representing a panel at a science fiction convention, that gleefully tore into both Star Wars and Star Trek as inferior franchises and it was glorious.

I had those books! That was a discussion written by Harlan Ellison on Doctor Who versus Star Wars and Star Trek. I think I had that entire series ... I think they were from the Tom Baker and Sarah Jane Smith era. Aha, Sarah Jane.

 

[Gradine]

on a tangent but related one of my favorite stories is when a new york times writer cornered Herman Melville at a party and gave him the whole english teacher deconstruction of his book and asked him how he'd gotten the idea for the allegory of the Whale, and he looked at her and said "Huh funny, I thought I just wrote a book about a whale and a whaler" he on several occasion's popped people analyzing his works that way and apparantly he really thought they were nuts. I wonder how many authors feel the same way about smart people trying to tell them what they were doing.....

There was a probably apocryphal story about an author, I want to say Samuel Beckett, that I can't seem to find anymore because Google is now useless, but the story goes that he sits in on a lecture about one his books. After the class he tells the teacher that he thought his interpretation was interesting but incorrect. When the teacher asked who he was to tell him he was wrong, he said that we wrote the thing. The teacher's response basically boiled down to "And what makes you think that makes you an authority on it?"

find the recent article on the internet of actual shark experts reviewing shark week and how horrified they are at the bad science it puts out. It's like they read this discussion and then decided to check on disney.

The best thing about Shark Week was that b-movie (I think it was called Shark Night) where the twist was that some idiots set up the whole thing to try to get on Shark Week.

 

[MGibster]

I agree, but I think, ideally, you should be able to have good examples of the genre that are just the story themselves, not a meta-discussion on the commentary. We can find those in a lot of genres. Can we find them for westerns, though?

Tombstone
The Good the Bad and the Ugly
El Dorado
3:10 to Yuma (original and remake)
True Grit (original and remake)
The Quick and the Dead
Silverado
The Ox-Bow Incident
Jeremiah Johnson
Little Big Man
The Shootist
The Searchers
High Noon
Fort Apache (one of the first Hollywood productions to depict Native Americans is a sympathetic light)
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
Rio Grande

These are all good movies that aren't deconstructions of the western as a genre. Since the western as a genre started losing popularity in the 1960s, most of these are older movies with The Ox-Bow Incident being released in 1943. I could have included Stagecoach (1939), as it's included on many people's list of great western movies, but I can't remember a darn thing about it.

 

[Dausuul]

on a tangent but related one of my favorite stories is when a new york times writer cornered Herman Melville at a party and gave him the whole english teacher deconstruction of his book and asked him how he'd gotten the idea for the allegory of the Whale, and he looked at her and said "Huh funny, I thought I just wrote a book about a whale and a whaler" he on several occasion's popped people analyzing his works that way and apparantly he really thought they were nuts. I wonder how many authors feel the same way about smart people trying to tell them what they were doing.....

Tolkien had a good deal to say on that subject.

The funny thing is that the Lord of the Rings really does have a lot going on under the surface, deliberately put there and carefully thought out by the author (who was after all an academic himself). But none of it lends itself to hot takes on trendy issues.

 

[Gradine]

Update: It was called Shark Night. Or, alternatively, Shark Night 3D!

Actual dialogue from this movie: "What is cable television's longest running program? Hmm? Last year alone it was watched by over twenty million viewers. Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock, ehh! Shark Week loser."

It also turns out to have been made by the same director as Snakes on a Plane, so you know what you're in for with this one.

 

[Lanefan]

True, but it is a difference between how you say something and how you write it. The spoken variant will automatically clairify wether you use month or day first. Like "January first" or "1st of January". But in written anything but the ISO-standard is ambigious, unless you really spell everything out as for example "January 1st, 2001".

But with the short-format with just AA-BB-CC you have absouletely no idea if it is YY-MM-DD, DD-MM-YY or MM-DD-YY. so for stuff like food or medicine or other stuff that are perishable that can be dangerous...

Here in Sweden we used the ISO-standard, before we joined the EU. Sadly the EU incorrectly uses the format DD-MM-YY. I blame the Germans for that.

Never never NEVER! use numbers for the month, and all those issues go away. If you're stuck with a 2-character field, use JA-FE-MR-AL-MA-JN-JL-AU-SE-OC-NO-DE.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Tombstone
The Good the Bad and the Ugly
Little Big Man
The Searchers
High Noon

These are all 100% commenting on westerns as a genre.

The Searchers is most famous (other than for its shot of going from a dark house into the brightly lit outdoors) for explicitly discussing how westerns deal with Native Americans, for instance.

 

[Gradine]

Unpopular Opinion: Acting like local/cultural/colloquial traditions (e.g, dates, Fahrenheit vs. Celsius, regional spelling/pronunciation, etc.) are objectively superior is weird at best and elitist at worst.

 

[humble minion]

Never never NEVER! use numbers for the month, and all those issues go away. If you're stuck with a 2-character field, use JA-FE-MR-AL-MA-JN-JL-AU-SE-OC-NO-DE.

Speaking as a software developer who has to do date/timestamp work All The Time, this solution sucks because it prevents you doing a pure string comparison to sort dates in chronological order. You end up having to do all sorts of parsing and deserialisation to translate, which is a pain.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Unpopular Opinion: Acting like local/cultural/colloquial traditions (e.g, dates, Fahrenheit vs. Celsius, regional spelling/pronunciation, etc.) are objectively superior is weird at best and elitist at worst.

Yes, but ... the Imperial system? Really? Grown adults shouldn't have to look up how Imperial measurements convert to one another within the same system while cooking or whatever. It's objectively dumb.

I think Celsius is similarly more logical -- freezing and boiling are great, logical points on the line -- but the fewer degrees in the human-comfortable range of the scale means it's less precise for day to day usage, IMO. If water boiled at 500 degrees or so, there'd be no question that it's the right way to go.