What grinds my gears

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...