I think Randall Munroe is brilliant. One of the things he does that I've seen nowhere else is that he puts text in the graphic titles that pops up when you mouse over the comic, and you'll be missing a lot if you never see it. The subtext of this particular comic is: "We're also stuck with blurry, juddery, slow-panning 24fps movies forever because (thanks to 60fps home video) people associate high framerates with camcorders and cheap sitcoms, and thus think good framerates look 'fake'."
This brings to mind many situations in which I am annoyed by people who claim that they are the only ones perceptive and/or skilled enough to appreciate the nuances of various things. Such as morons who claim that some hunk of incredibly expensive audio equipment is "better" than another cheap unit when the actual measurements are either no better or sometimes actually not even as good. Or that a bitter, woody expensive wine is "better" than a cheap, sweet wine. Or that leather and wood in a car are better than fabric and plastic, even though plastic is much more durable and fabric is much more comfortable and both perform their functions better; wood and leather dry out and crack and require much more maintenance, and the aesthetics are debatable.
The truth is that such things are entirely subjective, and the reason there's so much variety in the world is because people are individuals and have different preferences, not because one thing is fundamentally and incontrovertibly "better" than another. One thing is not better than another simply because of price or any of the myriad of subjective values. It is simply different. The one and only criteria that makes one thing better than another is the quantifiable fact of whether it actually performs its primary function better. Frequently the cost is inversely proportional to the reliability, and that old saying "you get what you pay for" is usually not just wrong, it's exactly backward. I've seen far more luxury cars with serious dependability issues than econoboxes...
Getting back to the subject of the comic that inspired this post, one of the things that has always put me off of movies in the theatre was exactly that juddery, seizure-inducing effect of the slow frame rate, not to mention the grain that may be "artsy" according to some people but is simply distracting and annoying to me. I'll take smooth, grainless HD video over jerky, grainy film any day, thank you very much. (Not that HD video is perfect; there are compression artifacts and bogus, clunky and unreliable DRM to deal with.)
Bottom Line: Yours is not better than mine just because you say it is. And you are not better than me just because you wish it were so and make up artificial elitist criteria to support your claims.
The Real Dope: The overwhelming majority of life is purely subjective, and it is much more accurate and reasonable to say "I like this more than that because..." than to say "this is better than that because..."
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