For me if I had to pick a good contender it would be the UK version of The Office.
I know many tend to debate how Ricky Gervais really fell off and how he repugnantly acts like a whiny centrist edgelord but me personally IMO I actually don’t think he was ever funny not even a little.
His big break through television was just so painful to sit through it’s so charismatically boring the characters are completely generic at best (notably Tim) or straight up insufferably unlikable at worst (especially the protagonist David FUCKING Brent) and most importantly the humour is just embarrassing.
Always seemed like The Thick Of It but without the nuisance tongue in cheek and charming satire.
I am trying to watch “The Wire” (on ep. 10) because it is one the highest rated show on imdb, but it doesn’t click in me. It is high quality product. Acting, music, camera work are all good. But is just boring for me, and I force myself to do it.
Same was with The Sopranos btw.
P. S. Ricky Gervais is funniest comedian for me. I watched his Life’s Too Short, After Life and I like it a lot. For me it’s very funny and bravely. Never watched British The office, may be shouldn’t, thanks.
Agree, I actually think he is a fantastic actor and that’s missed in the role, don’t confuse the role with the actor and the tone of UK black comedy. Yes he roasts but it’s in a highlight kind of way and tends to be pointed at mocking privilege and arrogance. I’d suggest trying his other stuff like afterlife.
The wire’s magic is that every character seems real, more like the show is a documentary rather than a TV show. And it carries all the way through, the quality never ends. You have to accept that you are watching a slow burn documentary, else you won’t get it.
Only When I got to season 3 did I understand why people rave about it. Each season is like an onion layer.
If the actual premise of the show isn’t interesting, then it may not matter how quality it is.
Hmm. I don’t know how I would feel if a person told me they found the premise of The Wire uninteresting… it’s a deep look at poverty, political corruption, black American life in inner city Baltimore, commentary on police and our justice system etc etc etc… there’s a lot to chew on, unless you came from the same background as the characters idk how a person could find the premise boring intellectually, and even then I’d still be surprised. The pacing however… yeah season one is slow
While I personally liked the show, it is heavy. Not everyone likes watching shows about serious topics.
I think it takes a different approach mentally to enjoy it. Especially compared to anything modern. I’m working through it slowly myself and just finished season 3. I watch it with friends tho which maybe makes it easier to watch.
All that said, if it’s not clicking after 10 hours, could be best to put it down. You can always try again later.
You’re the first person I’ve ever seen that made it that far into The Wire and didn’t like it. Are you American? If not, I think that maybe makes more sense. For Americans, it’s just such a great representation of so many things that every city experiences. And the fact that you see the same story from so many different perspectives is just SO compelling. I think it should be watched/taught in high schools because of how many perspectives it gives on the plights of society in American cities.
This is going to be a semi-spicy take, but World of Warcraft.
I had a lot of friends who were into it during Cataclysm but I had a hard time getting into it despite it being THE game everyone was obsessing over. It got to the point where I was struggling to get them to play anything else and it pretty much split our gaming group.
Even after all these years, some of them still play it and its still a big piece of their gaming sessions.
It has some hooks that I can see people liking, but it is pretty understood that the game isn’t for everyone.
I can a dumbed down version of it being played a lot in retirement homes.
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/retirees-playing-wow/1072667/21
Anyone else retired and gaming?
long thread
There was a hardcore group at a local FL retirement home a couple years back. Youngest was 83. Guild cleared everything with ease.
Anything anime. Lots love it, I hate it.
What’s wrong with bugs bunny?
Not liking anime is so isolating as a nerd because people find out I’m into nerdy stuff and all they want to do is recommend anime to me and talk about anime and I have to explain that I don’t like anime and won’t be watching that show they love (insert show here).
Ya’ll be talking about anime like it’s a genre but it’s a medium
Yeah, but come on. Sure, you could depict anything with it, but in practice, it’s correlated with content.
Chinese ink painting is a medium too, but people talking about it probably are not going to it for cyberpunk stuff.
I mean, Ghost in the Shell, Cowboy Bebop, Great Teacher Onizuka, Frieren, DragonBall, and whatever are absolutely different genres and have practically nothing in common.
Yeah, but normies don’t know that. It’s all just cartoons with a weird annoying fanbase to them.
Not liking “anime” is just saying “I watched a few hours of popular anime, didn’t like it, assumed it’s all like that and now I’ll never be able to correct my opinion.”
Personally, it’s the art form I don’t like. I couldn’t say why, but there’s something about the style of drawing people that I just can’t get past.
I accept that I’m in the minority, and I’m not criticizing it or talking down on it in any way. I understand there’s an incredible amount of love and talent that goes into it, it’s just not for me. Think of it as someone who says they don’t like the Mona Lisa, they aren’t saying it isn’t a famous painting or shouldn’t be well known, they’re just saying they prefer other styles of art.
Even with the wide variability of art styles, something about that anime gene creeps you out? That’s fair, but a little sad that keeps you out of it.
I was speaking mostly from personal experience. I used to think all anime was adolescent violent wish fulfillment and tits, so I didn’t explore too much, and found plenty of incidenthl confirmation bias.
How do you feel about other forms of animation?
I’m picky. Some are ok, some just weird me out. I think it really just depends how close they get to portraying the human figure, when they start intentionally skewing proportions and making features anatomically impossible it’s just creepy for some reason. If it’s not a human character or if it’s still sort of realistic to normal proportions it usually is fine.
It’s usually ugly as fuck and blatantly misogynistic, it infantilizes and objectifies women and often has very strong pedophillic themes? 90% of it is an incredibly problematic form of media and when a person tells me they’re into it I wonder do they just willfully ignore these problems or are they not actually smart enough to notice in the first place, or are they into that gross shit?
Never understood the “I don’t like anime” mindset, of course everyone has the right to like and/or dislike anything they choose to, but as you said it’s a medium. “I don’t like anime” makes as much sense as “I don’t like live action movies.” It doesn’t.
I guess “I don’t like the way anime look,” or, “I don’t like the Japanese approach to storytelling” makes more sense.
It makes sense to me because they’re describing in a simple way the thing that they don’t like. If you ask why, they’d probably tell you the reason. “I don’t like the way anime looks” or “I don’t like the Japanese approach to storytelling” or whatever…
Yeah but some people just can’t stand the medium. Me included.
Everything? Perfect Blue? Paprika? Angel’s Egg? Tamala 2010: A Punk Cat in Space? Anne of Green Gables? Moomin? Belladonna of Sadness?
I’d be genuinely surprised if the answer was yes, as all of those wildly depart from the tropes people have in mind when anime is brought up.
Yes
Claymation. It is unnerving and creepy. Gives me the same vibes as nails on a chalkboard or HR Pufnstuf.
I find it amusing that most of the commentors in here cant tell you why they dont like something they just simply chose to not like it and are carrying that forward. There are a few who recoil at cringe comedy but the majority of responses are unbacked opinions.
I can not and will not explain precisely why eating dog shit is nasty, but the flies seem to love it.
Its nasty tho
I think that it’s reasonable to like or dislike something without them needing to analyze further for that opinion to be valid. I think it’s fine for someone to say that they don’t like the taste of, say, strawberry ice cream without being obligated to break it down further. I mean, people form opinions without trying to psychologically analyze themselves.
And I don’t think that people generally “choose to not like something” either. People don’t say to themselves anything like “I think I’ll dislike the flavor of strawberry ice cream.”
Opinions regarding preferences don’t need to be backed by anything. I don’t like the color puce but couldn’t say “why”
I have friends who are into jam bands and I’m glad they go to live music shows. However, I’m the type of person that likes movies that are a tight 90 minutes long, and one of my favorite songs of all time is less than 2 minutes long. My time is worth money, treat it like it is. I don’t need to listen to a 15 minute guitar solo.
I’m lead tou nderstand that drugs are often involved in developing appreciation for jam bands.
Are you currently on drugs? No disrespect if you are, but it took me awhile to unpack that sentence.
“I’m going to need you to write a concise sentence before I let you go.”–Cop about to perform the Strunk & White sobriety test
Sadly, no, stone cold sober.
the Strunk & White sobriety test
got me good
is there an AP style variant?
I’d imagine a devilishly complicated citation of a book by a married couple two-generations into hyphenated last names about their ancestors published by their parents’ eponymous publishing house.
I’m curious if you’re from the UK, OP, because I think this colours your perception of the The Office very much. For the record I loathe both, but The Office UK is a typical British comedy of taking the absolute piss of the characters, who are irredeemable fools one and all. You re not supposed to find them funny, or like them. You’re supposed to laugh at them. That’s the usual expectation, with British comedy.
Americans seem to have great difficulty with that concept, and can’t seem to handle a protagonist that is made fun of.
Again, not defending the show itself. Just saying you need to be aware of this approach when you watch British comedy in general. The common language should not make you forget the ocean of cultural differences in between.
Now it makes sense why so few British comedies work in the US. The US only knows how to laugh at the hero’s jokes.
Sports. I have little tolerance for it because every time a big event is on, people get incredibly obnoxious. They think they know better than the professional players, they keep making so much noise, it polarizes people into arbitrary bands and start talking shit like using that as an excuse to be a homophobic POS, sometimes they’ll even riot because their team lost/won (da fuk), and even kill people over their favorite fucking team, and so much more. If the game is on I’d rather steer clear because it really brings out the worst in people.
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
Big Bang Theory
The worst part is how it’s fans seem to think it’s a love letter to “nerd culture” (whatever the fuck that is) and endlessly bring it up if you dare mention any interest in comics, roleplaying games or anything in that vein. “Oh you’ll love this show, it’s all about that nerdy stuff.”
Overwatch the video game. TF2 felt better in every way - no I didn’t play the original team fortress. I never felt good playing the overwatch, never cared about all the backstory considering it had no standing on the game whatsoever - I’m sure they’ll add a campaign some day though. The mechanics felt so floaty and slidy, and I never felt like my hits registered at all. The community sucked even more because everyone was “one game off going pro” because they got a cool kill 10 rounds ago. Rocket league was less toxic and that’s saying something. Oh and sooo repetitive. I hear the irony of comparing it to rocket league then saying that, don’t worry.
I’ll take the low blow and say Blizzard can get fucked as a company too, I’d be happy if they went bankrupt tomorrow. They’re like the worst of the worst in the video game industry.
Country music or rap. And I don’t call it rap music because it’s not music.
When I refer to country music that I cannot stand, I’m talking about the abomination they call country music that has been released since the early to mid-90s. I’m still not a big fan of old country music but the newer stuff is just awful and I don’t understand how it has an audience. It’s nothing but drunken pop music that only discusses five topics.
Any rap music that came out after the year 2000 is also horrible. Sure, there are a few minor exceptions here and there, but for the most part it’s all shit. I’d have much more appreciation for these artists if the background music was actually made by them with real instruments and real musicianship. All these people do is write down a bunch of words and speak them. And nowadays, they don’t follow the beat, they don’t stay in tune, they use auto-tune, it’s all no-talent crap. When I see people riding down the road bumping modern rap music, I just shake my head, especially 30-year-old or 40-year-old white women.
And I don’t call it rap music because it’s not music.
shit only racists say
And I don’t call it rap music because it’s not music.
Disliking something doesn’t inherently exclude it from a category. Rap is a genre of music, what else could it possibly be? So are country and metal, even if many dislike them.
Hip hop comes from the projects in the Bronx neighborhood of New York City, where it coalesced from several different art forms developed in defiance of rampant poverty and oppression.
All these people do is write down a bunch of words and speak them.
Those people couldn’t afford ‘real’ instruments and didn’t have the musical education to take advantage of them anyway. Turntables became instruments in their hands because there were no other options. Rap itself draws a pretty straight line from poetry- infuse some more emotion and performance, and you get rap.
As the movement grew in popularity, the hip hop and rap genres were effectively stolen around the turn of the century by producers to sell to white people instead of allowing it to thrive in the black communities that created them in the first place. The lyrics changed from being about surviving and thriving in spite of The Man to focusing on exploiting women and doing drugs, in ignorance of the short but rich history behind the genre.
(I’m lounging in bed writing this on my phone, so no direct sources sorry. We talked about this in one of my high school classes eons ago, I might be able to dig up those files later if there’s interest.)
In that sense, it’s not all that different from the newer corporatized country that you spoke about, or even rock and roll. If you’re going to mad about rap lyrics, be mad at the cultural theft and exploitation rather than discounting it wholesale just because you dislike the sound.
Username checks out.
😂 Indeed.
I don’t think I’d call rap not music.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music
Music is the arrangement of sound to create some combination of form, harmony, melody, rhythm, or otherwise expressive content.
I think that it meets that bar.
I don’t like it myself, either, but there are plenty of genres of music that I don’t like.
When I see people riding down the road bumping modern rap music, I just shake my head, especially 30-year-old or 40-year-old white women.
Like, because it originated from black artists? I mean…I’ve heard people make similar statements before, but jazz also originated with black artists, and I haven’t heard people object to white people listening to jazz.
Maybe they did and it was just before my time. I remember a World War II Danish Nazi poster complaining about the jitterbug, which also originated with black artists, but that seemed to take issue with the music rather than who was listening to it.
searches
Hmm. Though it sounds like there was some friction:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jitterbug
Swing dancing originated in the African-American communities of New York City in the early 20th century.[5] Many nightclubs had a whites-only or blacks-only policy due to racial segregation, however the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem had a no-discrimination policy which allowed whites and blacks to dance together[6] and it was there that the Lindy Hop dance flourished,[7] started by dancers such as George Snowden and Frank Manning. The term jitterbug was originally a ridicule used by black patrons to describe whites who started to dance the Lindy Hop, because they were dancing faster and jumpier than was intended, like “jittering bugs”,[8] although it quickly lost its negative connotation as the more-erratic version caught on.
EDIT: The WW2 poster referencing jitterbug that I was remembering:
https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/1774f384-00b9-4f24-8dcf-880f0cb0d58d.jpeg)
I think it’s important to parse country music. There’s Nashville country music and then there’s county music. Actual country music is great. Nashville country music is not.
Would you be so kind as to share a few of those artists?
See, I caught my ex listening to country yesterday, and I know she’s just doing it because her new gf is into country, and it sounded like your aforementioned Nashville schlock. I figure if she’s going to force herself to listen to country to impress her gf, least I can do is suggest some real country artists.
I am here for you! There is so much good country music, what they play on the radio is mostly shit. But like with every other sort of music, what’s good is good.
Jason Isbell
Hayes Carll
Tyler Childers
Joshua Ray Walker
Charlie Crockett
Sturgill Simpson
The gay cowboy with the deep voice - Orville Peck
And a few I heard on the Saving Country Music top 25 this year and liked:
Charlie Marie, Mack Geiger, Sam Platts
If they are ladies into ladies - Kacey Musgraves, Waxahatchee, the supergroup album The Highwomen, and all of the members, Charlie Marie has such a voice.
AFA radio guys, Alan Jackson, Allison Krause, Lyle Lovett are good.
ETA - since this whole conversation came from some racist rant - there is a straight line from country to R&B and you can hear it in Charley Crockett’s music, Leon Bridges, Carolina Chocolate Drops. Music is all related. You can always find a path from one style to any other style but almost all those paths were laid down by black people first, at least here in the US.
Johnny Cash for sure but a modern example is Sera Cahoone. Give her Couch Song a listen.
Another great is Lucero. Fucking amazing country rock! The album Nobody’s Darlings is one of my absolute favorites.
Neko Case is always amazing.
Ben Nichols, the lead singer of Lucero, has an album based on Blood Meridian call The Last Pale Light in the West that is absolutely phenomenal as well.
Hell yeah, its always in my playlists. Really captures each of the characters in Blood Meridian very well
Director Dennis Villeneuve. I don’t like emo and the guy is playing only that card.
Kinda surprised I didn’t see breaking bad already listed. I guess I’m one of the few who dislikes it. I don’t like tragedies in general. Life is already a tragedy.
I’m sure it was extremely well executed and totally worth making, but it’s not my flavor of ice cream.
It started out a lot funnier and slowly became darker over time. I think I remember Gilligan saying this was a conscious choice, to grow darker in tone over time.
Anyway, that’s what hooked a lot of people initially, and a lot of them stuck around for the drama that followed
Genuinely though the Talking Pillow scene is still my favorite. As someone who lost a dad to cancer the conversation was morbidly funny and real to me, with the pillow as a perfect set piece.
