What grinds my gears

In many cultures, especially in the west, it's inappropriate to dress in black when going to a wedding. Black is the color of mourning, most appropriate for funerals, and most inappropriate for weddings, which should be a joyous and festive occasion. Not so in Finland. For some strange reason in Finland 99% of men dress in black for all formal ceremonies, including funerals and weddings. It might be hard for a non-Finn to imagine it, but I swear that the typical Finnish wedding looks like a funeral, at least if you look at the male guests. It's not a hard rule, just a de-facto custom. And yes, it looks ridiculous for such a festive occasion. Most Finns will joke about it when pointed out, but seriously, I really can't understand the reason for this.

This is a minor thing that bugs me: When people point out some inconsistencies or other kind of unrealistic details or events in a work of fiction, sometimes someone will say something along the lines of "this is a movie about magical unicorns and wizards and magic, and you complain that the main character can fly?" Extremely rarely, if ever, is this argument valid. If we take that arbitrary example, it's not a question of the main character being able to fly. It's about the internal consistency of the universe set up by the work of fiction, and willing suspension of disbelief. A work of fiction, no matter how fantastical, is well-written when it describes and depicts a world with consistent and plausible rules, which the work follows. It doesn't really matter if some of these rules do not follow the real world, as long as they are well-established, consistent, plausible and not changed or broken at a whim. It's a sign of bad writing when such internal ...

"Rape culture" is the concept that some people claim to exist in modern society (usually they are talking about western cultures only) where, they say, rape is not taken seriously enough, if not even excused in many cases, victims are often blamed or too heavily scrutinized, perpetrators may sometimes be protected eg. because of their status, rape apology in general, and so on. Some of this is true to some degree. However, it's only talking about rapes where a woman is the victim and a man is the perpetrator. There is another form of "rape culture" that's astronomically more prevalent, and which most people ignore completely (which, in itself, is part of the rape culture, of course.) Sure, it's significantly rarer, but it does happen: Sexual harassment where the perpetrator is a woman and the victim is male. Yes, a man can be the target of sexual harassment by a woman. The man can find the woman unattractive, unpleasant, or otherwise have zero inte...

At the beginning of the so-called industrial revolution, a bit over a hundred years ago, there was little to no governmental control over workers' rights, and there were no labor unions, which is why the working conditions in most factories were outright nightmarish. Even 14-hour shifts in horrible conditions weren't unheard of. A big revolution happened that pushed for making a 8-hour work day the legal norm (ie. no employer could require any worker to do longer days than that.) The 8-hour work day norm was so effective that it has persisted to this day, about a hundred years. However, as I see it, there are some problems with it. The major problem is that it's the standard full-day work rate for all jobs, regardless of what they are. Jobs are different, and have different requirements. And I'm not talking about skill and experience, but about low-level physical requirements. Jobs can be, very roughly speaking, divided into two types: Routine physical work, ...

School bullies get away with it, and they know it. And that's one of the biggest problems about it. There's an infamous recent video where a reporter crew was going to interview a high school student who was a long-time victim of bullying. While he was approaching the crew, bullies chased him away. On camera. The bullies were quite clearly aware of the reporters and the camera because they taunted the boy about it (with things like "what are you going to film?" and such.) The clearly saw the crew filming them. And they didn't care. They still chased the boy away, shouting at him. This shows the problem perfectly: Bullies are so accustomed to getting away with their bullying that they don't even have to care. Not even if there's a reporter crew filming them with a camera that they can clearly see. The sad thing is that they are right. Nobody will ever do anything of any severity to them. They are "minors", which means that they are practic...

In many judiciary systems (including that of the United States), a prosecutor is a member of the justice system who is responsible for presenting the case in a criminal trial against an individual accused of breaking the law. In principle, the job of a prosecutor is to simply present the facts, the things that the accused is being accused for, as well as the evidence and the reasons why he or she is suspected for the crime. Also, most importantly, in principle the job of a prosecutor is to make sure that justice prevails, and that people get a fair trial, and that the judge and the jury (if there is one) get all the facts in an unbiased and clear manner. Unlike some people might think, a prosecutor's job is not to try to convict the accused; it is to simply present the case against him in the most factual and unbiased manner, so that the judge and/or jury can get all these facts in order to make a fully informed decision. (The reason why it might look like a prosecutor's job...

Rebooting (and re-rebooting) known film franchises seems to be a curious trend of the new millenium. The Hulk, Spiderman, Batman, Superman (twice), Robocop, Judge Dredd, TMNT... you name it. Don't get me wrong. There's nothing inherently wrong with rebooting a film franchise. If the previous series (or even first film) was just not working, then better start anew with fresh ideas than try to forcefully drag a dead horse any more. Most of the mentioned reboots are, in fact, quite ok. For example the Batman film series of the 80's and 90's was getting completely ridiculous and needed a serious and complete rehaul. The same can be said of most of the other film series as well. However, what does grind my gears with this is that every single time without fail, when they reboot the series, they just have to show the origin story again in the first new film. Every. Single. Time. Why? How many times do we have to see how Spiderman got his powers or where Superman came fr...

A trope sometimes seen in movies and TV series (especially in the 80's, somewhat less nowadays) is that aliens come from another star system here in order to harvest resources that they don't have. Often this is water, sometimes something else. There are lots of problems with that premise (one of them being that it assumes that the Earth is somehow special, that it's one of the extremely rare planets in the galaxy that contains those precious resources in abundance. This couldn't be farther from the truth. For example, and unlike most people seem to think, water is one of the most common compound elements in the universe, and can be easily found in things like comets, moons and planets. The same goes for most other elements. An alien race sufficiently advanced to travel interstellar distances could certainly harvest those resources from almost anywhere.) However, the one thing that most people never think of is the way in which the aliens are supposed to lift eg. mill...

For several years after Star Wars The Phantom Menace was released, I just couldn't see what was so horribly wrong about it, and why people hated it. The subsequent two movies were quite ok as well. Now, don't get me wrong. Back then I thought that the vast majority of people hated it simply because the vast majority of other people hated it, and it was just a hip and cool to hate it (a phenomenon I have complained about several times,) and I still think that's mostly the case. However , I have later come to realize that some of the criticism of the prequel trilogy is, indeed, valid. I have come to realize that my own appreciation of the trilogy has dropped significantly since those times. What changed my opinion the most was the great review series done by The Distressed Watcher (who I think made a terrific job at analyzing it, and sadly has gone mostly unnoticed by the vast majority of people, who only know the review by Red Letter Media which, while funny, I don...

There's a rather curious misconception, or intuition, that many people have related to gravity, and this is sometimes seen in movies and TV. This misconception is that if there's a very large object orbiting a planet (eg. Earth) and it's broken up to small pieces, all of the pieces will fall down. (A related concept is that if small pieces get loose from the large object, eg. garbage or such, they will likewise fall down to the planet.) I find this misconception rather curious. It's the exact reverse of Aristotelian gravity. You see, in antiquity there was among some philosophers the concept that heavier objects fall faster than lighter objects. In this case it's the exact reverse: The intuition seems to be that lighter objects fall faster (ie. are pulled more strongly by the planet's gravity) than heavier objects. If the orbiting heavy object gets broken to smaller pieces, or it lets small pieces loose, those pieces will now be pulled by the planet's gr...

Homeopathy is most certainly not the only snake oil salesmanship out there that's a pure sham, but it's probably the one that makes the most money worldwide. (There are other shams that may make more money than homeopathy, but they are usually not related to selling supposedly medicinal products.) Homeopathic products are 100% placebos, pure and simple, yet it's taken really seriously among many people, and many claims of successful clinical studies and efficacy abound. There are published papers and lots of positive experiments that claim that homeopathy fares much better than placebos in properly-conducted double-blind trials. But how can there be, given that homeopathic products are just placebos? It's not hard to get such results. There are some simple tricks that can be used for this. For example: When conducting an experimental trial, minimize the amount of test subjects. For example, rather than testing on 500 people, test on 20. Engage in confirmation bi...

One common sentiment that many people express goes something like this: " Your freedom of expression ends immediately when you hurt someone. " It's sometimes described with an analogy: " You are free to wave your arms around, but that freedom ends immediately when you hit someone with them. " This is a rather deceptive sentiment because it's so easy to agree with, when you don't think about it too much, yet it's quite hideous. There's a big difference between hurting someone physically and hurting someone's feelings. The former is an objective and universal thing. Hitting someone on the face will hurt every single person in existence, and it's not a question of opinion, education, culture or personal preference. It's quite an objective thing. Hurting someone's feelings, however, is completely subjective. It depends completely on one's personality, background and a ton of other things. What hurts someone may well not hurt...

I have commented in previous posts, how among "armchair movie critics" and internet reviewers it seems to be an unwritten rule that if the majority of other people detest a particular movie (or franchise) then everyone must detest it, lest their credibility be tarnished. There are many, many examples of this. For instance, you absolutely must detest the Star Wars prequel trilogy (especially the first film), the second and third Matrix movies and, as a more minor example, the Battleship movie. If you don't, then you are strange and without any credibility. Personally I would add the Twilight saga to this list. Especially the first movie. It's, once again, one of those movie franchises that everybody must hate, because everybody else also hates them. It's not even allowed to say "it was ok." Even that's too much. I'm not saying that the Twilight movies are the best masterpieces ever made (after all, only an extremely small minority of all mov...

It seems to have been a trend during the last decade or so that every time they make a movie that's a remake or adaptation of a story, they always modernize it to happen in the modern world, even if the original story is set to happen many decades ago. It doesn't really matter if the original story is set to happen in the 1980's or the 1920's, the trend seems to be to always adapt it to happen in the 2000's. Sometimes this has no big impact in the story, so no bad consequences follow this modernization. However, oftentimes they have to bend over backwards in order to make the adaptation work. A very typical example is that 20+ years ago almost nobody had a cellphone, while nowadays it's rare for somebody to not have one. Thus if the story relies on people being stranded or otherwise cut from civilization or the authorities, the adaptation needs to go to extra lengths to try to explain why the cellphones aren't working or why they don't have them. And...

When interacting with people in real life, some people have a slight misunderstanding about how to apologize to someone properly. (By the way, this post wasn't prompted by anything that has happened to me recently. I have simply been thinking about it. This kind of situation has happened to me in the past several times, though.) When someone wants to apologize to someone else, for example because they had an argument or the person making the apology acted in a very inconsiderate manner, a relatively common way that people do this is to first apologize and then ask something like " friends? " or " are we ok?" or something similar, and often accompanied with an expectation of shaking hands or whatever. They usually do this with good intentions. They want to apologize for the negative thing they were involved with and want for the relationship to return to normal. However, they have misunderstood a bit how this kind of apology should be done. You don't...

I have written about this in the past (especially in my old "blog" at my homepage), but I think it deserves repeating. There isn't a single movie that properly captures the essence of Batman in the comics (at least not any professionally-made big-budget one.) The only non-comic artwork that I have encountered that really captures this spirit is the Batman: Arkham Asylum and Batman: Arkham City video games. They are dark, gritty, violent and badass... yet they still somehow retain the kind of "innocence" of the comics' world. The characters feel like the characters of the comics, and the entire setting and atmosphere feels like the ones from the comics. In my opinion, not a single movie has ever succeeded in doing this. So, what do I think of Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy ? The first movie follows a rather clear three-act structure, not only in its contents, but also in its quality. The first act (which shows Bruce Wayne's background...