I'll pile onto that. I love improv. It gave me a new set of mental skills that are difficult to train for elsewhere. It teaches you how to walk in a room and make the best of any situation and overcome that feeling of meeting strangers. I find any difficult work situation I can now approach from a "what can we do with this?" mentality, where I used to always dread rolling up my sleeves to do more work. Highly recommended to anyone, but especially anyone in a leadership role.
Tearing into a popular piece of media is just really, really cathartic, and much more so if a group of people agrees with you. And if we're gonna be honest its punching up most of the time, so it seems fairly harmless. Someone brought up Nickelback, its not like they've been shoved aside from relevancy, they were super popular the entire time people tore up their music critically. If someone puts them on at karaoke (or if someone puts on Starship for that matter) I'm sure most of the place is going to sing along.
One of my coworkers stated this a few years ago: "i'm on an interesting musical journey right now: trying to identify musicians/groups/bands/artists, etc. that i've over looked because they were "mainstream" popular"
And I always thought that was kind of a hilarious thing to go through. Most people I know who are music snobs are generally anti-pop music and it seems like they miss out on the fun stuff that everyone gets into.
I couldn't get into Nickelback personally because they came in on a wave of similar music that I was generally over by the time they got big.
> I couldn't get into Nickelback personally because they came in on a wave of similar music that I was generally over by the time they got big.
I feel like that's often part of it. Something that represents peak (whatever) in terms of a sound. The sort of highly-polished result that almost sounds like it was AI-generated by a model trained on exactly what was popular over the past few years.
Of course, you don't need AI to do it - just slightly more human and manual analysis of trends, sales, marketing, and production techniques.
I unironically love the band Winger. They’re probably most famous now for becoming instantly uncool once Mike Judge drew Stewart in a Winger tshirt on Beavis and Butthead in the 90s.
The thing is though, they’re amazing musicians. Kip Winger is premiering another one of his classical works with the Nashville Symphony in the next few weeks. Reb Beach is one of the most skilled and melodic guitar players to come out of the 80s. They wrote and continue to write some great songs too if you like that kind of music.
Music snobbery is just silly, and robs you of the joy of discovering some great new music while simultaneously robbing others of it too. Everybody loses.
On a parallel track, I've been continually amazed at how even as someone interested in broad musical categories, how many bands I've never heard of who were 'mainstream' popular in some way - maybe not top 40 radio but at least on some radio somewhere, or were #1 at some point in some not completely niche genre. there's just so much music out there, even so much good music.
Its been awhile since I've seen it but Spinal Tap was making fun of a lot of bands like that, its part of their fictional band's backstory. They start out much like the Stones with some simple catchy early 60's tunes, turn into a hippie band, then quickly transform into metal in order to follow the money.
Most of the comments here are going to predictably call out that "We Built This City" is not the worst song of all time and offer up an example that's ostensibly worse.
But I think a very important caveat missing from the article and all of the comments here is that Blender/VH1 never said it was the worse song of all time. They said it was the most "awesomely bad" song of all time. To which I 100% agree with. Its not worst songs, its good catchy songs that are also objectively bad. And I think "awesomely bad" is just a great way to title it. We can all agree "We Built This City" is a catchy ear worm you can rock out to in the car, it lifts my spirits whenever it gets played. It stands on the pantheon of terrible but awesome hits like "Ice Ice Baby", "She Bangs", and the Ghostbusters theme song.
Nobody is saying you shouldn't listen to "We Built This City". Its a guilty pleasure. Crank that mother up on your car ride home alone and rock the fuck out.
It's a brilliant song for this reason: Read the lyrics to the song. It's a song about what they now call gentrifcation. The video and song are in the post-corporatized/gentified world where once true rock reigned. It's supposed to sound phony as hell.
Jordan Peele does a fantastic impersonation of Ray Parker Jr. (“the Ghostbusters guy”) promoting his lesser known movie theme songs he’s submitted through the years. Talk about bad songs! Jumanji, Passion of the Christ, Apt Pupil. lol. https://youtu.be/GxjNOv5QPzM?si=zSduoOlbIULoKOMC
Big Excalidraw fan and I had no idea you could do that...this might be the version controllable solution I've been looking for. Also have given up trying to get mermaid and other solutions to work well.
Never seen anyone get so worked up about the idea of growth mindset. This seems like some wildly misplaced animosity toward the concept. Especially in regard to trying to shift away from calling kids "intelligent". Author here neglected the whole point of that, which is that we typically used to say "you're so gifted, you're so intelligent". The theory is that many kids would take failures poorly after hearing that a lot and decide "I wasn't gifted enough to solve this problem" and would give up. I'm not here to say whether that's panned out or not, it seems very new in the child psychology space, but I think the idea makes sense. Give kids the encouragement to keep striving instead of believing they were just built a certain way.
> This seems like some wildly misplaced animosity toward the concept. Especially in regard to trying to shift away from calling kids "intelligent". […] I'm not here to say whether that's panned out or not, it seems very new in the child psychology space, but I think the idea makes sense.
That's the entire point of the elaboration that TFA goes into on the research in this area: while the idea feels like it "makes sense", it actually doesn't, and the research appears to confirm that it is just junk science.
The larger point is that it's just C-suite grift, and they're just shoveling bull to appear as if they're knowledgeable leaders.
The article is criticising the “you can be anything you want” mindset and highlighting the lack of reproducibility in research around student academic results.
But the reason a multinational like Microsoft might promote a growth mindset are different. Employees who are open minded are able to work with others and collaborate more effectively. Employees who actively seek new data and try to invalidate their preconceptions can be more successful in large sprawling organisations.
The animosity isn't toward all these feel-good intentions you mention. The animosity is toward the minor detail where it's a *lie*. People on this forum generally don't like lies.
"The theory is that..."
Yeah, we know. But the theory is false. Facts don't care about your feelings, and the replicability crisis doesn't care whether you "think the idea makes sense".
Sure there are, plenty of low income countries with fledging industries, but the governments get more and more risky to deal with the further down in income you go.
Well it’s not aimed at IT people and programmers (though the policies still apply to them), it’s aimed at everyone else who doesn’t understand what a phishing email looks like.
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