The unpopular opinions thread (Hawaiian pizza is great)

Loving the Britpop chat. I have to agree that most of what was popular in the 90s was crap, but you can say the same about any era.

But since this is about unpopular opinions, I should point out that Nirvana were absolutely rubbish. They had one semi-decent song (Teen Spirit) but the rest was just awful. Nevermind is one of very few albums I bought but had no hesitation in throwing into the charity pile after a few months of failing to see any redeeming features.

(The others I threw out being anything by that dreadful Middle of the Road outfit called the Manic Street Preachers. Life’s too short to listen to someone being that tedious on a record.)

The one positive being that Dave Grohl, being so clearly the main talent in the band, started Foo Fighters, who are actually all right.

Fight me.

I think Nirvana might be one of those bands where their significance is harder to see over time due to them influencing so many other bands, and it gets harder to see what was so special about them retrospectively. And that’s fine, you can’t force yourself to like something

Foo Fighters are way more poppy and accessible but most successful rock bands would put Nevermind up there with the most important albums of all time

Foo Fighters are pretty shite. Steve albini was pretty much spot on when he said Nirvana were just REM with a fuzz box, the Unplugged album is their best legacy imo

And Albini was a total cunt who got off on belittling people to make himself feel like a big man.

Grohl has made the same album about ten times. I went to the Hyde Park concert years ago and left halfway through FF. Literally every other band on before them (as headliners) had annihilated them

My wife, who's radio station of choice is Magic FM and can't tell the difference between Guns n' Roses and AC/DC, likes Foo Fighters and bought a few of their albums.

I'd agree.

People who say Nirvana were shit always have hilarious taste in music too, like they'll be listing what they like and it'll seem sane and then holy shit suddenly it's full of Coldplay and Snow Patrol, or Simply Red and U2 (not that I actually hate U2, but come on), or the modern equivalents thereof. Or god help us Mumford and Sons or Pearl Jam or Chumbawumba or something. In one terrifying case it was Creed.

I am prepared to believe someone could have reasonable musical taste and think Nirvana were shit (as opposed to them merely not enjoying them personally), but I have yet to come across a case where they weren't actually some kind of sick musical deviant in a bad way.

I have an opinion which I suspect will be truly unpopular though which is:

People who are colour-blind should not be allowed to make decisions about art in videogames, except as relates to making colour-blind modes work. Right now, there are significant number of games out there where it feels like someone quite senior in the artistic decision-making was definitely colour-blind, and it leads to fugly colour choices. And games which don't use colour-blind modes but design from the outset to be colour-blind-friendly are fugly-as-fuck, as exemplified by The Outer Worlds. A truly hideous game with many heinous colour-palette choices.

(I'm pretty biased, note, because whatever the opposite of colour-blind and for that matter face-blind is, I'm that.)

Making the entire game fugly for the sake of 4.5% of the population is some fucking silly shit.

And what's more, there's absolutely no chance it'd have been done if it was women who were colour-blind, not men. None.

I strongly support the existence of colour-blind modes, they're pretty easy to implement and don't detract from the game, but there's literally no other disability games are willing to help so aggressively - not even vastly more common stuff like poor eyesight or dyslexia. And why not? Especially given eyesight stuff is often potentially easy to help with via UI/text scaling that actually works (extremely rare - most UI/text scaling is a total disaster, and often clearly untested - it's still literally noteworthy when it isn't). I can't see any good reason. There's a very smug article up on EG about it right now, but I've never seen one from them about eyesight and the only one about dyslexia is because a developer chose to actually be helpful about it in one specific game.

You may commence booing now.

Maaaaaaagic….. (do doo do) one oh five point fouuuuuuur… 🎶

This thread is so shit

And cycling.

That always goes well.

I can believe that. NFTs can get to fuck though.

Everything that crypto is good for is more efficiently achieved through maintaining a central database, with the exception of funding illegal activity.

How blockchain works is an interesting application of shared key encryption, and you can see how it would sort of make sense as a record of some kind of activity between a smallish group of people who need some kind of shared way of establishing trust. But really, even a lot of that could be achieved by writing emails to each other and using PGP to sign and encrypt them.

Blockchain sort of automates that process and makes it easily to scale, but once you *do* scale it, it becomes increasingly pointless and inefficient.

Quite. People already have made a lot of money on NFTs, but that's because an awful lot of other people are, in the longer-term, going to lose a huge amount of money. In part simply because it's so easy to churn out NFTs, and they're generally not inherently aesthetically pleasing. Rather, for the most part they're hideous tat which will be emblematic of an era, but not something people will want to be associated with in ten or twenty years.

You have people blowing fortunes right now to get into NFTs, with the expectation that they will be able to re-sell them for several times the price a year or six down the line.

These are the people who are likely to get fucked by them. If you've spent $180k on NFTs, because you think you can re-sell in three or five years for $500k, you're probably stuffed and mounted. The guy(s) who sold them to you for $180k, they're laughing all the way to the bank, but it's a game of hot potato and sooner or later, someone ends up with no-one to pass it to. Probably sooner.