People often ask me this as an attempt to get to know my quirks slightly better. Hot takes, deeply-seeded beliefs and all. So I decided to write them down. These are strong opinions, strongly held and no, I will not engage in a good faith debate about them:
1/ The world should adapt to night owls
I can’t stand morning people. They go on and on about how wonderful it is to wake up before everyone is up and have a quiet couple of hours to themselves before the world wakes up. Please, no. Waking up is the worst. It rudely interrupts your mystical dreams and snaps you out of a peaceful slumber. Only to do what? Go out for a run as you get blasted by the harmful UV radiation of a harsh sunrise while the local crows rupture your eardrums with their ridiculous cacophony? No thanks.
Staying up late is far more preferable. You’re done with all the work for the day, you get to take a nice hot shower, and settle into the night. You can feel the galactic expanse above you, the world is dimly aglow in (non-damaging) moonlight, and you don’t have anything to interrupt you with whatever you choose to engage in for several hours until your body eventually decides to call it for the day.
I’m most creative at night. Most of my ideas come at night, often between the hours of midnight to 2:00 AM. I sketch, I draw, I write, I design, and I think best at this time. I absolutely despise the idea of waking up at 8:00 AM to attend some strategy meeting while I’m not mentally ready for it. My ideal work schedule is 12:00 - 4:00 PM followed by 7:00 - 9:00 PM. I can get a lot done in this kind of split working day and I’ve really enjoyed the few times I’ve actually been able to stick to this schedule. If workplaces could flex to allow for night owl schedules, I genuinely think we’d see more creative output and more inventive ideas.
We’re being forced to live on some arbitrary schedule that was made for harvesting crops more efficiently, and night owls hate it. We’ve sacrificed too much working for this schedule that does us no favors. Prioritizing night owls would work well for companies, commutes, people’s personal schedules, and so much more. Literally everyone would be better off if you let people choose their working hours.
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2/ Mass Effect is better than Star Wars
This might be the take that most people fight me on. I just think Star Wars is a poor-man’s sci-fi setting, with very generic and basic renditions of alien creatures and worlds that fail to inspire anything in my imagination. Maybe it’s because it was one of the first truly popular space sagas that caught the audience’s attention or because it’s just dated, but I just don’t get it. It’s just bland and boring and too cheesy for my liking.
You could say the same for Mass Effect in some aspects, but the world of Mass Effect is far more believable and realized that most give it credit for. I spent more time reading codex entries in the first Mass Effect game than I did actually playing the game. I got fully sucked in to the backstory of how humanity discovered mass drivers, set up the mass relays, formed the Alliance, made contact, and all everything that happened after. There is such deep history and lore that’s all plausible and believable. The inter-political conflict and squabbles are all just as interesting as the large-scale wars and space battles. That’s what makes it feel more real, in my opinion.
Sure, Star Wars has some of that too. Andor is actually one of my favorite TV shows and I really like how they portrayed a lot of the complex politics of the world. I also liked the way The Mandalorian creates a lone-wanderer epic where you get to dip your feet into all the different dioramas of the Star Wars universe. These are the exceptions though. By far and away, most of the Star Wars stories deal with an extremely generic good vs. evil story that ends in a predictable, boring, and often unsatisfying way where the morals of good triumph over that of evil. They just feel like generic feel-good action movies that don’t have anything of substance to say.
Meanwhile in Mass Effect, you have incredibly complex relationships and dynamics not just across the alien races and organizations, but also between you and your companions. The characters that accompany you on your journey serve as envoys to all the different races and are complex, flawed, and delightfully unique to converse with in a way that’s usually very difficult to nail. I wanted to get to know (and romance) everyone I could just to see how their character traits evolve and change. I wanted to get them to open up to me more about their personal tastes and preferences. I cared way more about the crew of the Normandy than I ever did about the one aboard the Millenium Falcon.
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3/ Luxray should have been an Electric/Dark dual type
When Generation IV released in 2006, I embarked on a “blind” playthrough on copy of Pokémon Pearl. This essentially means not looking anything up and just playing the game as if you didn’t have access to the internet (wild, I know). I was immediately taken with Shinx, the little electric cat pokémon and caught it. I evolved it all the way to Luxio and then Luxray, which looked like a ferocious feline ready to swipe and claw at everything with its electric fangs. Based on its appearance, I assumed it was an Electric + Dark dual type and continued my playthrough (yes, I know I could’ve just checked the Pokédex but I was really committed to this blind playthrough and I honestly couldn’t be bothered to check).
During a battle, I noticed that Luxray got hit by Psychic, a move that should have no effect on Dark type pokémon. Confused, I looked up Luxray’s summary in my team. It said Electric. Just electric. Imagine my confusion when I realized that I had made it all the way to the Elite Four with a pokémon that I thought was Electric/Dark but was just plain Electric. I swear I had looked up the summary for this pokémon multiple times and it must have said Electric. But it’s visual appearance and general vibes just cemented in my head that it must be Electirc/Dark.
Now, there’s a lot of fan debate about this one. There’s a vocal majority that thinks it should definitely be Electric/Dark (see, I’m not crazy), but the opposition faction makes claims that Luxray isn’t “evil” by nature and that its association has to do with light. Ok, first of all, the “evil” association is not consistently or reliably applied to pokémon. Look at Umbreon or Incineroar or Tyranitar. They don’t necessarily look evil (not anymore than any other pokémon in their class) but are by nature “Dark” in type. I would argue that Luxray has the same vibes. It learns Bite, Crunch, Night Slash, Thief, and Snarl. All Dark type moves. It has the naughty, sneaky, cat-like appearance. Secondly, so what if it’s associated with light? Electricity is associated with light. It can totally be pulled off. Look at the ghost association with Sableye or Spiritomb and the frail-looking nature of Weavile or Greninja. It doesn’t discredit their Dark type, but instead makes them more interesting and varied.
There actually isn’t an Electric/Dark pokémon at all. Unless you count Morpeko’s regional variant, which is a bit weird (it’s also just an odd pokémon in general that’s very forgettable). Luxray is unique, memorable, and is a staple member of any Sinnoh team. Also if it’s not obvious by now, I really like Luxray. And I’m not just making this argument because I named my midnight-black EV Luxray and would validate my choices in life really well.
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4/ Airports should have pourover coffee bars
They say coffee snobs find traveling difficult, and I’m finding that becoming truer for me as time goes on. Every decision of where to stay, the itinerary for the day to embark upon, and where to take a midday break revolves around one thing for me: coffee. Not just any coffee, but a slow bar with V60 or hand-drip coffee freshly brewed as a pourover. If you look hard enough, you can find them. I’ve even requested this at places that normally don’t have it on their menu and the baritas took it as a challenge upon themselves to do it.
But there’s one place where this is always extremely challenging: airports. Every single airport I’ve been to either treats coffee as an afterthought that a deli just so happens to offer or has one option of Starbucks with a massive line of people queuing up for sugary frappuccinos. I will stand by my long-held hot take that Starbucks isn’t real coffee, it’s just a shot of espresso topped with diabetes. The true test of good coffee is what the black coffee without anything added tastes like, and Starbucks completely fails at this. You shouldn’t have to add anything into your coffee to get it to taste good.
Anyway, airports are the one place where you’re very unlikely to find pourover coffee. The practical rationale for this is that people don’t have time for slow coffee. Airports are, at least in the imagination, a sanctum of efficiency where everyone is rushing or late or needs everything done quickly. No one has time to wait fifteen minutes for a pourover coffee. But this ignores the counterfactual: people also have a lot of time to kill at airports. Walk down any terminal and you’ll see droves of weary travelers using their backpacks as makeshift pillows or passed out horizontally across three seats. Flights get delayed all the time. People end up arriving hours earlier than their departure time just because they had to account for potentially longer travel times and security lines to get to the gate. These people have nothing but time. Why not provide a relaxing, slow coffee experience that allows them to take in the delicate and finely brewed aroma of a Panama Geisha or an Ethiopian Natural? I guarantee you it’ll invite you to slow down and relax your senses in the middle of an otherwise chaotic and frenzied itinerary.
My quest for airport pourovers has only been fruitful on two occassions: the Oslo airport had a Johan & Nyström coffee bar that served filter coffee, and it was incredible. The second time I had a layover here, I walked the entire length of the airport to a different terminal just so I could have this coffee again. The next time found pourover coffee was in the least expected place: the Raleigh-Durham International Airport had a coffee stand called Black & White Coffee Roasters that served specialty coffee fermented with fruits. This nearly blew my mind when I had it. Pourover coffee at an airport, in America? In North Carolina?! To this day, this is the only airport where I’ve been able to find a good pourover drip coffee and actually capitalizes on the idea that slow pours can work at an airport to serve the segment of travelers that are waiting or have time to savor it.
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5/ Microwaves only need one button and it’s “Add 30 secs”
I guarantee you that if you did a touch study experiment on how frequently the buttons on a regular household microwave are tapped, you will see almost no or negligible usage on the novelty Popcorn / Meat / Fish presets and occasional use of the number buttons. The majority of the time, people just pop in their food, hit “Add 30 seconds” and just keep tapping it to reach the desired minutes they need. I seriously think you could remove all the other buttons and be just fine.
In fact, I own a microwave like this. The LG NeoChef countertop microwave just has a “Start” button that also doubles as the “Add 30 seconds” button and a “Stop” button. That’s it. The other buttons are still available when you open the front door, and I’ve only ever used them when I needed to reset the time on the microwave. Aside from that, I’ve made do with literally always tapping the “Add 30 secs” button for every thing I’ve microwaved for the past seven years. Need something heated up for two minutes? Tap the button four times. Need it heated up for six minutes? Tap it twelve times. I guarantee you it’s faster than entering the actual digits yourself.
And nobody ever actually adjusts the power levels on a microwave. I actively avoid buying products that ask me to heat at 80% power for two minutes and then at 100% power for three minutes. Are you serious? The whole point of buying something that’s microwaveable is to avoid doing work. I just have it at full 100 power and everything will be heated at that power level forever. I will literally eat the burned food and singe my tongue to avoid changing power levels. When you resort to a microwave meal, you do not have any shits left to give.
This is actually a great example of overengineering a product and not carefully considering the actual user needs and behavior. If you sent the team working on the microwave to actually track and observe people’s usage habits, they would very quickly rework the entire design to reduce the buttons down to “Add 30 seconds” and remove nearly everything else (or keep it accessible but less visible). But alas, visibly seeing features on the control panel is what sells microwaves off the shelves for the majority of consumers. They’re lulled in by the fantasies of being able to microwave fish and poultry and popcorn and pizza and fork over the extra $400 for a specific model over another, not thinking for a moment how they’ve actually been using microwaves thus far in their lives and how they’ll use the new one.
I say take the anarchist approach. Kill everything and just keep “Add 30 seconds.” The world will not end, and you’ll still be able to heat up your food. And you’ll thank me later for saving you from all the decision fatigue of remembering where the numbers are and entering a specific sequence of button prompts and accidentally hitting “Defrost” when you meant to hit “3”. You’re welcome.
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That’s all. Don’t @ me.