Michael May of AdventureBlog fame has recently been taking writing assignments from a shadowy online cabal known as the League of Extraordinary Bloggers, and when I saw the current one, I knew I just had to have a piece of that action:

What is something you absolutely hate or love or just don’t get, or maybe it’s something you have never even seen or read. What is your deepest, darkest geek confession?

Like Michael, I’ve elected to go for a straight flush and provide an answer for each proposed category. So, briefly but most likely provocatively:

• Something I Hate That Everyone Else Loves: The “reimagined” version of Battlestar Galactica. I’ll admit, I was probably biased against this one from the start because of my affection for the original Galactica, but I gave the new series an honest chance to win me over, I really did. I watched the pilot film and the first half-dozen or so regular production episodes, and… it just didn’t do anything for me. While there were some interesting storylines (the one where the Cylons were harassing the fleet every 30 minutes or whatever was good, as was the one about replenishing the Galactica‘s water supply, an issue the original never touched on), I didn’t like what I saw as unnecessary changes in the show’s basic premise (the Cylons created by humanity instead of an alien race, the Twelve Colonies all existing on a single world instead of 12 separate planets), I didn’t like the shaky-cam cinematography, I didn’t like people from the other side of the galaxy wearing perfectly ordinary 20th-century business suits and having perfectly normal North American/European names… and worst of all, I just didn’t like the characters. Not one of them. I recognize that modern audiences have different expectations of their fictional characters now than they did in the ’70s, but everybody on this show was conflicted, bitchy, morally compromised, untrustworthy, and totally unsympathetic. By the sixth episode, I found I didn’t give a damn if the Cylons did wipe them all out, and that’s not a series I care to keep watching. Sorry.
• Something I Love That Everyone Else Hates: As you might imagine from the above, the original Battlestar Galactica. Seems nobody can even mention this one anymore without sneering, or at least applying a qualifier like “guilty pleasure,” but I maintain it was not as bad as people think it was (at least not when you consider the context in which it was made, i.e., late 1970s broadcast television) and I personally far prefer its themes of friendship and family to the complete dysfunction I saw on the remake. I prefer my heroes with some innate nobility and joi di vivre — even in the face of total catastrophe — to unrelenting nihilism. And even though its dialog was notoriously clumsy with weird made-up jargon and its writers ignorant of actual astronomy (they seemed to think the terms “galaxy” and “star system” were interchangeable), the show conveyed a genuine sense of wonder about the universe that frankly no modern sci-fi movie or series seems able to capture anymore, not even the various latter-day Star Treks.
• Something I Don’t Get That Everyone Else Seems To:  The Christopher Nolan/Christian Bale Batman movies. They’re undeniably well made, but I don’t find them especially thrilling or inspiring or fascinating, or even all that much fun. I’ve only seen Batman Begins and The Dark Knight one time each, and never especially wanted to see them again, nor do I really remember much of what happened in either of them. These films seemed to slide right across the surface of my consciousness without leaving a mark. Part of this is probably due to the fact that I have a very hard time seeing Christian Bale as anything but a pretentious, self-absorbed dick, so I don’t really care what happens to his Bruce Wayne/Batman. And partly, I dislike the unrelentingly downbeat tone of these movies. Like Neo-Galactica, it’s ultimately about unsympathetic characters and nihilism for me… But then I’m already hearing talk about rebooting this series after the third chapter comes out this summer, so there’s always the next version. (Really? A reboot already? You can’t give it a rest for a decade, guys? Sheesh…)
• Something I’ve Never Seen That Everyone Else Has: Finally, this one isn’t really a “geek” thing, but it is a pretty major landmark that is constantly referenced, at least by people of a certain age, and I just have to nod my head like I know what they’re talking about because I’ve never seen… Rocky. That’s right, one of the watershed blockbusters of the ’70s and I’ve not seen it, or any of its sequels. Not do I really care. Not a big Stallone fan, you see…