Oh those pet peeves

[nosimpleway]

It was a teenager desperate for attention, obviously.

[sei]

Suggestion: either reuse the blog name / handle or use a different noun, like "the author."

Stuff like that can slide into pretentiousness pretty quickly. But it's a lot more concise than lengthy parenthetical text explaining why you're using a plural as a singular.

I usually see writing use things more like "Stross writes," "ArsTechnica reports," etc. and it doesn't strike me that way.

I'm sure it's a case-by-case basis kind of thing. It might get old if you kept writing "Ars wrote... Arse went on to say," but I'm not sure where the pretense comes in. Fill me in?

[Thad]

TV shows that can't keep recent history straight.

I just watched a Warehouse 13 where Claudia's sister wakes up from her 15-year coma. It's a nice, sweet, heartfelt episode. But the writers...well, I suspect the writers are older than they think they are.

There's a bit where Claire sees an Xbox controller. Claudia explains that it's for video games. Claire says, "Like Donkey Kong?" A game released in 1980.

Fifteen years ago, we already HAD game controllers that looked damn-near identical to the Xbox 360 controller, except they had wires.

And then they go to a coffee shop, and Claire makes that stupidest, laziest of all person-from-the-past TV jokes and complains about how expensive coffee is. (See also: Sleepy Hollow, Smallville, every fucking show for the past 20 years where someone from the past shows up in the present.)

Except Starbucks was already a thing in the 1990's. A pretty big fucking thing.

Leaving aside that these are things people should just know off the top of their heads, they're easily looked up on Wikipedia. Unless you've been in a coma for the past 15 years.

[Brantly B.]

I feel like coffee is a damn lot cheaper now than it was in 1999.

[Blossom]

I need to get caught back up on Sleepy Hollow, but what I remember of that was Crane getting upset at a 10% levy on the sale of baked goods. Which, revolutionary war, yeah, that's actually a fresh and authentic thing.

[Thad]

But he also made a comment about how many Starbucks there are, a joke which I believe also dates back to the Revolutionary War.

Anyway. It has occurred to me to add this to the list of things I'd like to do if I ever got to write a TV show (right after "guy goes into a police department, starts looking around quizzically every time a computer makes a stupid noise for no reason"): have somebody from The Past wake up and start referring back to the old days, and making increasingly wild and contradictory references ("I was trying to download the White Album from Napster since the Beatles had just made their famous appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, but the DSL connection on my Apple II was painfully slow because President Roosevelt hadn't passed the PATRIOT Act yet...").

[Brantly B.]

I feel like Futurama has done th-... wait, Futurama was pretty much based on this, wasn't it?

[Thad]

Yeah, Futurama did the "people 1000 years in the future have a hazy idea of the order events happened" bit pretty much constantly. The difference is that they have the excuse of being from 1000 years in the future. (People at ren faires -- which, coincidentally, was the setting of the other story in the Warehouse 13 episode in question -- don't know the difference between the Renaissance and the High Middle Ages; presumably people 1000 years from now aren't going to know the 21st century from the 19th off the top of their heads.)

In my version, it's people from the present not being able to keep shit that happened in their own fucking lifetimes straight.

You know, TV writers.

[Brantly B.]

I was referring mostly to Fry though, whose excuse I guess is that he is Fry.

[Thad]

Ah, but he had a pretty good grasp of late-1990's video games.

[Thad]

It really is hard for me to decide which is my least-favorite TV trope: guy with gun stands close enough that captive can disarm him, or automobile is completely soundless and its sudden appearance takes somebody by surprise.

I think both those things annoy me even more than magic computers with hideous UI's that make stupid beeping noises for no reason and perform searches by flashing a bunch of photos up on screen very fast.

[Mongrel]

So... what is this stupid new trend where people are saying that leaving voicemails is outmoded and "rude" and that they will summarily ignore any voicemails left for them, possibly for hours, possibly forever. Apparently the "correct" thing to do is to leave a text.

I mean, I've done the thing where I try to call someone, don't get an answer and quickly leave a text message instead of a voicemail often enough myself, but seriously? It's now rude to leave voicemails? WTF?

[Joxam]

I grant that I work with a lot of kids (I work at a movie theatre) but most of my employees don't even answer their phones if you call (ITS CREEPY!!), even if you're calling in an official I AM YOUR BOSS capacity. I actually have to text most of my associates about work things in order to get a hold of them.

[zaratustra]

I don't know about your phone, but mine uses a voicemail button-driven interface from somewhere around 1982. And I never know if I'm paying for this service or not.

[François]

I'm making arroz caldo with basmati rice and man does that stuff smell exactly like sweaty feet while it's cooking. I think it's the combination of rice and fish sauce, somehow.

Hella delicious when it's done tho.

[Blossom]

Well, that sounds and looks pretty interesting, but I have no idea where to get safflower or calamansi.

[François]

Oh, right, neither did I*! It's fine without. Season it with a bit of soy sauce and vinegar instead, just before serving, it'll be flavorful enough.

*: At first. I looked all over town for some safflower but it turns out they just call it "american saffron" here. Which is weird because apparently it's from Egypt and not actually saffron? Still can't locate calamansi though.

[Healy]

I can't fully articulate why, but it always bugs me when "what if gaining super-powers turned someone into an asshole instead of a superhero" is treated as some novel insight, or more realistic, or whatever. I guess even though I stopped caring about comics I'm still a huge fangirl at heart?

[Thad]

The whole grim-'n'-gritty trend is just so banal at this point. I mean, it was banal 20 years ago, so I guess now it's whatever banality becomes after 20 years.

It's not inherently bad; it's led to rather a lot of great stories over the years. But I really hate having only one flavor. Not only am I sick of everyone trying to turn Superman into Batman, I'm tired of everyone acting like there's only one valid interpretation of Batman.

I want superhero movies to stop being fucking ashamed about being superhero movies. This shit where people refuse to use the words "Batmobile" or "Cosmic Cube" or put any bright colors in a Superman movie needs to stop. Superheroes should allowed to be fun sometimes.

Chris Sims had a pretty good line the other day about DC's attempts to establish itself as Grown Up by constantly tearing dudes' arms off as the equivalent of a fourteen-year-old trying to buy cigarettes while his voice cracks. It's not a simile I'd thought of but it's the basic point I've been making for...well, since before I was a fourteen-year-old myself.

[Healy]

Haha, well I was mostly referring to it in the context of original works (i.e., not Big Two). I am generally in agreement with you re:Grim and Gritty, but for some reason it feels harder for me to justify this feeling with a lot of the original stuff, mainly because their narrative assumptions may be different? (Hence why it's just a pet peeve.) Maybe I am just more sensitive to this kind of thing, I dunno.