I would think the folks who need the characters explained to them wouldn’t know enough about them or the show they’re on to say which one they prefer.
Nothing wrong with popping in explaining who the people are either but, in general, if the reader is interested enough in the thread anyway, they can go ahead and read along and learn, or google the characters and catch up.
BTW: Michael, Randy, Duquan or Namond?
I hate that too. I even made a pit thread about it, I think.
My number one Café Society peeve is how deeply invested so many Dopers are in hating everything even slightly popular in tv, movies, and music. I don’t know if that is a function of being young and trying to be painfully hip, but it gets on my last nerve some days. You can enjoy entertainment that’s actually entertaining - I swear it’s possible!
I was toying with starting my own pit thread about this, but it fits here.
Why do so many people believe there is some dark agenda on American Idol - some contestants supposedly are loved by the judges or producers and are given the best lighting, camera angles, make-up etc. and get lavish praise from the judges.
Meanwhile, other contestants who are deemed inferior for some reason are given the bad orchestral sets, awful lighting and the judges pan their wonderful songs.
It makes no sense to me why anyone would think the producers do anything other than love the most popular singer exactly because they are the most popular singer. Thing is, they don’t know ahead of time which one of these clucks is most likely sell a billion albums so they set them up and let America pick.
It boils down to folks not agreeing with the judges. You love a singer that the judges pan? Fair enough. It doesn’t mean that Simon secretly knows that you are right and that singer is the best, but for unspoken reasons he can not admit it.
Do you really need to come into a thread just to shit all over somebody who likes beans in their chili? Honest to fuck, does it really matter at all? Nobody is asking you to eat it, and we’re all impressed by your knowledge of “real” Mexican/Tex-Mex foods. Honest. And while I hate nearly all things ketchup, if you want to eat it on your ice cream, who’s to say you’re a disgusting pig? Most threads in CS don’t go that direction, but every so often. . .
That’s because I forgot about the game room. But before the game room, hoo boy, were there a lot of sports threads in Cafe Society.
Yeah I know that early on somebody decided that cuisine was an art form, so it belonged in Cafe Society, but originally it was for discussing books, music, movies and so on. And most food threads aren’t about any creative aspect of cuisine, but just stuff like which brand of peanut butter has the most calories and things like that.
Give it a rest on telling us how much you loathe Olive Garden and Applebees and Panera. We don’t care that you were forced to eat there there against your will for some work function or some friend’s birthday party. We know that otherwise you wouldn’t be caught dead eating that bland tasteless crap that is mass produced, flash frozen and microwaved in the back.
I haven’t seen this much recently, but it was a big one for me.
Say somebody starts a thread like “Which bands have a color in their name?”
Then people post a bunch of responses:
“The White Stripes.”
“Black Sabbath.”
“Do the Moody Blues count?”
“I dunno, but Blue Oyster Cult definitely does.”
And so on and so forth.
And then some schmuck jumps in and posts a list of 6,000 bands with colors in their names that he obviously found on a google search or something.
A few replies tosome comments above:
(1) On information about what’s in the spoiler tags, that is currently part of the Cafe Society rules:
Perhaps this should be emphasized more clearly? (When there’s lots of information/rules/clarifications, it’s hard to know how/what to emphasize.)
(2) Used to be that games (sports, etc) were considered “entertainment” and thus were kept in Cafe Society. Now that we have a Game Room forum, all that is moved there. Food… well, we had some lengthy mod discussions a while back and decided that CS was the best place for it. Mostly.
I HATE it when someone comes in and says, “What’s the point of even talking about this? No one will ever agree on a certain answer, so what’s the point?” The most recent example was seen in that thread about musicians who are universally respected among their peers:
Seriously, give me a fucking break. You know why people are discussing things like that? Because this is a message board and there’s nothing else to do here but discuss. Christ.
I can’t believe nobody has mentioned (yes, I hate that) using fan abbreviations in non-fan threads or threads about something else. Then I have to ask or sort out what TRFDMD means. Please, spell it out, at least the first time.
I’m going to take this meta and move it from The BBQ Pit to Cafe Society.
Gfactor
Pit Moderator
Yes. Yes. A thousand times yes. People who hate Titanic seem to think that everyone hates Titanic, that its estimation has gone down because all they usually see are snarks from other people who hate it. It’s only because the people who loved and still love the movie tend to roll their eyes and keep quiet, while the ones who hate it are vocal and self-assured in their hatred. They’re like the Teabaggers of movies. I would guess that Titanic is still loved, admired, and respected by the vast majority of people who saw it. To this day it’s still at 83% at Rotten Tomatoes and a 7.3 at IMDB and 74 at Metacritic. It’s held up very well. If it were as horrifically bad as some would have us believe, those scores would be a lot lower. I have no problem with people who don’t like the movie. But I wish they’d quit pretending that it’s universally hated, that it’s by definition bad, that only teenage girls liked it and propelled it to its huge box office, and that the people who voted on the Oscars didn’t know what they they were doing. On a personal note, I saw it again in the theater a few weeks ago at a retrospective, and it absolutely held up in every way.
This is especially irksome and threadshitty when someone dies. There’s a special hell for people who come into a grief thread and say “Who?” when there’s a link in the OP to a death announcement/obit with a biography.
Red Lobster, White Trash, and Blue Lagoon by Joe Queenan. A whole book about how he lowered himself to investigating the middle class’ idea of entertainment. Found out it was NOT all “bad” (some was), but most was just “mediocre”. Compared with Joe’s hi-falutin’ idea of entertainment.
Sweeping generalizations about large groups of people are always a downer for me.
Popular= lowest common denominator in most cases.
Mmm, Red Lobster. I could go for a cheese biscuit right about now. 
Red Lobster cheese biccuits don’t want me to listen to them sing fucked up kareoke on my t.v. 
As a movie buff who goes to see new releases almost every week (Fridays, opening day - mostly because I usually have that day off) I love reading what others have to say about a movie after they have seen it, and often start a thread or post my comments in other threads as well.
Why does some jerk have to come along and say:
“I haven’t seen (insert name of film discussed) but absolutely hate (insert name of lead actor/actress).”
And if that weren’t bad enough, some other jerk will pipe in:
“Yeah, and the trailer for this film was really (insert boring/not the same as the book/stupid…)”.
If you saw it and hated it, fine. But if you haven’t seen the film, and have no intention of going to see it, nor like anybody associated with the film, why the hell are you posting in a thread about the merits of the film?
Sports and Food never fit in Cafe Society. CS is basically the messageboard equivalent of Entertainment Weekly, which has sections for movies, tv shows, music and books. There are no sections for sports or food.
I have long maintained that food threads should go in MPSIMS. Nothing is more mundane than eating. At the time I made the food argument, though, I was engaged in a years-long campaign to convince the powers that be that a sports forum was justified, which meant the food argument largely had to fall by the wayside.
As I recall the same justification was used to refuse both ideas: Cafe Society is the only topical forum; all others are based on type of conversation. I’ve never felt that was a good way to split forums, but the mods sure did seem proud of it. I think they also saw the fracturing / disenfranchisement of sports threads as a noble goal in and of itself.
Now that the “topical forum” concept has proven its utility with the addition of the Game Room – meaning Cafe Society is no longer a single unique exception – any chance you guys can revisit putting food threads in MPSIMS where (I would think) they so clearly belong? The very existence of the Game Room torpedoes the main argument against doing it, so the board climate has changed enough that the outcome might too.