What grinds my gears

There seems to be a really strange consensus that the movie Evil Dead 2 is better than the first The Evil Dead movie. Having seen both several times, I just can't comprehend the reasoning. The first movie is a very low-budgeted pure horror film. Regardless of its extremely low budget, it's really well made. The authors really utilized every limited resource they had to make the best film they possibly could, and it really shows. Many of the special effects might be simplistic and antiquated even by the standards of the time, but they are surprisingly well made and effective taking into account what they had to work with and how little money they had. In short, as a horror film it's really effective and well made. It's gory, it's gritty, it's gruesome, it's seriously made, and it doesn't shy showing you the goriness in full detail. The second movie is not a sequel. It has a relatively short segment at the beginning that's a kind of remake of t...

Version numbering of software products is far from being a standardized thing, but the most common convention is to have something along the lines of: <major version>.<minor version> For example the version number "2.1" means major version 2, minor version 1. (Generally the major version starts from 1 and the minor version from 0. A major version 0 is often used to denote an alpha or beta version that's not yet complete.) The major version number usually indicates some kind of significant milestone in the development of the program, and is usually accompanied by significant improvements or changes. Sometimes it could mean a full (or significant) rewrite of the code base (even if outwardly there's little visible change). Regardless of what exactly is it that has changed, it's usually a very significant major change (either internal or externally visible). Some projects keep the major version so significant that they hardly ever incremen...

In my old " blog " (of sorts) I have written extensively about conspiracy theories and believers in them, and the reasons why people believe in them. One aspect of this is, I think, that believing in conspiracy theories is a form of pseudointellectualism. Especially people who have memorized hundreds and hundreds of arguments and can flood a discussion with them in a form of rapid-fire and shotgun argumentation, probably get a sense of being quite smart and "educated": They have the feeling that they are experts on the subject in question and possess a lot of factual knowledge about it, and thus can teach it to others and use all these "facts" to argue their position and win any debates. In other words, they are pseudointellectuals. They feel that they have a lot of factual knowledge on the subject, and they might get a sense of intellectual superiority, even though in fact they are just deluded. They are often good at debating and arguing their positi...

"Show, don't tell" is one of the rules of thumb of proper storytelling in a visual media (such as movies, TV series and comics). It means that, in general, it's better to show something happening rather than just telling what happened. It can apply even to written stories, where it means that the events should be "shown" as a narrative, rather than being explained. This is not, of course, a hard rule. Sometimes it's better to just tell something as a quick summary rather than going to the lengths of actually showing the events in full. Too much "showing" can actually be more boring than just quickly telling what happened. What grinds my gears is when people use the "show, don't tell" argument to criticize works of art in situations where it really doesn't apply. There are excellent examples of things not being shown, just hinted at in dialogue. For example, consider the famous "hamburger scene" in the movie P...

At least 90% of internet forums out there have a strict rule against so-called necroposting. This is defined as responding to a thread that has not had any activity in a long time. (The amount of time varies from forum to forum, ranging from years to just a few months.) Necroposting is somehow considered a really bad breach of netiquette or something. If anybody necroposts, an angry swarm of people will immediately castigate the culprit with angry reminders that the original thread died several months ago! In fact, a few forums even go so far as to automatically lock threads that have not had any activity in a given amount of time. I have never understood (nor will ever understand) what exactly is so bad about "necroposting". None of the arguments given against it make any sense. So what if a thread has not been active in many months, or even years? Someone might still have something new to add to it. It could be a new perspective, a new idea or even an update of recent e...