I'm supposed to like They Might Be Giants and Talking Heads, but I just can't. Even after a Terry Gross marathon of Fresh Air.

Alice in Chains for me. I developed my taste for music in the 90s and love the grunge and punk from that era, but just not AIC. I can't explain way exactly, just drives me batty.

No guilty pleaasures or displeasures. like what you like and accept it.

( I like Nickelback, they were pretty solid at what they were. There i said it.

I should like house of leaves, but I couldn't get into it. Same for early Bruce Sterling. )

The great outdoors. Hiking, skiing, camping in the wilderness. I always aspired to be a person who genuinely enjoys this shit but at 50 I decided that yeah, this ain't going to happen. All indicators point to me being the kind of person who likes this stuff - locale, income level, fitness level, age etc.

I spent decades trying to learn to ignore mosquito bites or frigid cold or vicious rain to no avail. It's just not me. I wasn't cut from that cloth and never will be. The sad part is though that my dear son and to some degree my wife ARE cut from that very cloth. And that means that most of the family activities that they thrive on have always been an endurance test for myself.

I'm just so glad I'm past the phase where I'd worry about these things. It's very exhausting.

I just can't bring myself to care about fantasy role playing games, entertainment based on comic book superheroes, or board games. I have friends who are very serious about some of these topics, and I struggle greatly to pay attention when these things are being discussed. I have some very nerdy interests, but these are not among them.

On one hand, I want to be supportive and happy for them that they are involved in something nerdy and creative, but on the other it's like hearing about somebody's vivid dreams. Neat for them, not great for me.

I feel like this is something we shed bit by bit as we age. When people talk about becoming a more authentic version of themselves as they get older, I think this is part of it.

Winter is my guilty displeasure. I live in Alberta, where winters are relatively long/cold, and I'm near places where I can ski, so I should probably make the most of winter. But, I'm happy with indoor hobbies, and the occasional toboggan/skate/snowball fight with my kid.

Most anime is either a guilty pleasure or a guilty displeasure for me. The stuff I like, I feel embarrassed of the part of me that likes it, and I feel embarrassed about what I'm willing to overlook to enjoy it. Then the stuff I don't like, I feel closed-minded about it, like what's wrong with me that I'm too stuffy to enjoy it or too dumb to get it. But I don't have friends or acquaintances who are into it, so it never comes up with other people, and I generally don't think about it.

I find myself in this weird cross-section of software devs who do enjoy coding, but also love experimenting with new AI stuff and I don't quite care yet if it's more or less efficient.

It feels more efficient and feels like I'm outputting much better products with it. Indeed I feel like I am able to tackle harder, more encompassing problems than I otherwise could.

It may take my job, but tbh I'm having fun on the ride there.

So while I do enjoy coding, it's not the end-all, be-all for me.

No argument from me about opera. The music is often fabulous but the “acting” is histrionic, the plots are generally overwrought, and the singing is like watching the 400th lap of the Indy 500. First two laps were kind of cool but now we’re in the fourth act and why can’t this tenor stop yelling?

But I don’t have any guilt about my displeasure. I’m a snob about some things, a reverse snob about other things, and some things I just like or dislike for whatever reason.

Some people wrap a lot of their social identity up in passing an invisible bar in the level or type of interests they hold.

In theory I'm ok with drugs being legalized, but I will admit that I have a strong distaste for people who routinely use drugs and drug culture.

I'm not talking about people who drink during the holidays or smoked weed in high school, those people don't bother me. I'm talking about the people who need to lecture about how great weed is and feel the need to smoke it every day and make it a vital part of their identity. I find people like that insufferable. I think the people wearing cannabis-leaf t shirts are generally annoying, and I hate how everyone who smokes a joint and watches a Carl Sagan video seems to decide that they're a philosopher.

I'm a pretty boring American liberal, I think drugs should be legal, but I guess that's more in an abstract sense, sort of a NIMBY thing. I'm ok with people doing drugs, as long as I don't have to deal with those people and they do it far away from me.

I acknowledge the hypocrisy in this. Can't help how I feel.

Probably the most obvious for this community is being very enthusiastic about technology but loathing anything with "smart" in the name. (I still use a flip phone and 15+ year old appliances)

Similarly I grew up always enjoying video games but it feels like a burned out husk in the modern era. Most of the big dollar "video game" market is now just MTX gambling and even a LAN party probably routes everything through Steam or Epic's servers