Dear Textbooks

So, we all know you're ridiculously overpriced. There is no reason you should cost the hundreds and hundreds of dollars that you do. You abuse the fact that when students buy you, they have no choice but to pay the exorbitant prices that you charge. This is a huge problem, and the main reason I always avoid buying you if possible, but still not even the reason I'm writing to you today.

If I'm going to be stuck paying hundreds of dollars for you, how about you at least proof-read yourself a bit. It is just ridiculous that despite your crazy price, and the fact that you constantly revise yourself, you still end up with errors. For example, today we were going over a problem in class. The textbook we were using was a fourth edition, so by now there really shouldn't be any stupid errors in it, and I paid $130 for a used copy of it. At prices like that, you better be perfect.

So we're going over this problem, basically it boils down to deciding for some hypothetical company how many TV, magazine, and newspaper ads they should buy to get the most exposure for the least cost. They tell us that each TV ad gets exposure to 1,300 thousand people (and they give us the rest of the information we need, but that's not relevant to my point). We solve it, it has an answer, everything's fine. Then later they add more constraints to make it a more complicated problem. Now they want to make sure they get at least a certain amount of exposure to young children, and young children's parents. Each TV ad will supposedly be seen by 1.2 million young children, and .5 million young-children's parents.

Let's convert this all to plain numbers. As told to us in the first part, 1,300,000 people will see the TV ad. The second part says that 1,200,000 young children and 500,000 young children's parents will see the ad, combine those for a total of 1,700,000. So of the 1,300,000 people that will see the TV ad, 1,700,000 are young children and their parents. How is this possible?

This is not the first time I've seen problems in you stupid textbooks. It would be nice if something that I have to pay way too much for, would at least be correct. I've seen answers in the back to problems be wrong, I've seen problems that make no sense like the one today, I've seen typos and grammatical errors.

I don't think proof-reading is too much to ask.
-SF

Dear Wikipedia

Honestly, you are one of the best sites on the internet. Sure Google can get information on just about everything, but most of the time the way it does that is just by linking to you. Your an incredibly valuable resource, and provide vast knowledge to everyone. Hell, having access to you basically gives each individual person the combined knowledge of everyone.

Wikipedia, you are often called an "unreliable" resource by teachers, and students are told they cannot use you. Don't let that get you down, the students understand how useful you are and try to find ways to utilize you anyways. I bet teachers are just frustrated because you're so useful, that you have turned comprehensive research papers into simple, one-night projects.

So stick around, we'd all be lost without you.
-SF

Dear TV Tropes

TV Tropes, your site is wonderfully interesting. Somehow you often manage to take what was meant to be quickly looking at one thing, and turning it into hours of clicking on links to other articles and reading more things that lead you to other articles, and so on. Sometimes you can even be better at this than Wikipedia.

The best part is that you have way more than just stuff from television as your name might imply. You have a vast archive of things from video games, literature, tabletop games, and probably plenty of other things too. I'm not really sure if you have an actual purpose other than just entertaining reading, and honestly most of the stuff I read on your site is about things that I already have a basic understanding of what they are and why they are a common occurring, but somehow you still make it incredibly interesting.

Like today, when I was on my computer, thinking of who I wanted to write a letter to, I ended up getting linked to an article on your site. Then, suddenly, it was like half an hour later and I had read like a dozen or more pages and hadn't actually accomplished anything.

Thank you for being there, and being so interesting.
-SF

Dear Overbearing Parents

Parenting is a very important part of family life. If you have kids, taking good care of them and helping them develop into happy, responsible adults who are productive members of society is probably the most important thing you will ever do with your life.

So how come so many of you parents are so bad at it? You try way too hard, or maybe you're not trying at all, it's hard to tell sometimes. Discipline is important sure, but many of you go a little overboard with your controlling, punishing, and high expectations. And yes, getting used to having to work for things is good, but forcing your child to practically be your slave is not good either. You need to find a balance between being loving parents, and teaching them responsibility and work ethic.

You also need to understand that there's a trade-off between telling your kids they need to do their homework, and letting them do their own thing. Sure, kids don't want to do it and it should be enforced to some degree, but you also need to understand that constantly getting on your kids case about it, or about anything else they're supposed to be doing, just makes them want to do it even less.

None of this stuff is very complicated, just try a little harder to actually be good parents.
-SF

Dear People with Stupid Opinions

Everyone is entitled to their opinions. There's nothing wrong with having different opinions, and disagreeing on things. One of the important things about our country is free speech, it's okay for people to have their own opinions and voice them.

But there's a difference between having legitimate, different opinion, and being wrong. Let's start with an example that I think everyone will agree with me on, so you can see my point. The world is round, this is a fact. Some people, for some reason, still believe that the Earth is flat. Some would argue that it's their right to have their opinion about the shape of the Earth. In general, that's true, they have the right to have their own opinion on things, but this is not a case like that. The shape of the Earth is not an opinion, this is a hard fact that has been conclusively proven in a multitude of ways. Thinking the Earth is flat is not "your opinion" or anything, you're just plain wrong.

Of course, that particular example isn't a big deal. There are very few of you who actually believe that, and for the most part the rest of us are content just laughing at the silly idea and not caring. The problem is that people act similarly with plenty of other things. "Global warming isn't real", "evolution isn't true", "the holocaust didn't happen", these are just a few common examples. Now, I know some of these, particularly evolution, are a little bit sensitive topics for some people, but the fact of the matter is that all these things are real. I'm not talking about the degree to which each of them is real. It's not about how strong global warming is, it's not about if life was created by God or evolved all by chance, it's just about the concepts existing at least on some level. You cannot be of the "opinion" that scientific fact is wrong, that's not an opinion, that's just being wrong.

Stop being stupid, and accept the difference between fact and opinion.
-SF

Dear Abridged Series'

You are awesome. Honestly, you are often better than watching real TV. The only problem is you tend to update very slowly and sporadically, but that's fair since it's generally just a couple people doing all the work, and it's not exactly a real, paid job.

You were basically invented by LittleKuriboh, who now has the username CardGamesFTW thanks to some completely illigetimate legal claims against his account getting it banned (multiple times). When he first created Yu-Gi-Oh: The Abridged Series, he probably thought it would be some small, fun little thing. But it quickly become insanely popular, and I'm not hesitant to say that I love that series. It's hilarious, and always entertaining to watch.

Since then, tons of other abridged series' have popped up, the other most notable in my opinion being TeamFourStar's Dragonball Z Abridged, which is frankly pretty amazing. Part of why I love it may be due to the fact that I loved DBZ when I was younger, but even if you didn't it's hard to watch this series without laughing. These two abridged series' are honestly two of my favorite shows to watch, including everything on actual television.

It's unfortunate that often they are faced with legal issues, because they are clearly just doing parody, which is completely legal. Sadly Youtube's policies with copyright issues are mostly along the lines of "if someone complains enough, we'll just take it down to prevent any actual legal problems". In theory, this is a decent policy that minimizes costs for them, but a certain subset of their content get's damaged by this. For some reason the actual owners of the content being abridged always seem to hate abridging, and so they complain even when they have no actual case whatsoever. This is backwards, because it's just giving them free publicity. Watching DBZ Abridged just makes me want to go and re-watch the actual DBZ.

Keep on making those abridged series', and try not to be discouraged by false legal allegations, you're hilarious and awesome.

-SF

Dear Teachers

Sometimes I can't believe the things you say and teach. It is your job to to teach your students important skills that they will need in life, but often you have no idea what you're talking about. I've seen incompetence in this vain in a variety of ways, from not understanding the topic, to being horrible at explaining it, to just simply not caring.

I know you're underpaid, and I know your job isn't exactly easy. The students might not always seem to appreciate what you're doing for them, but you're incredibly important for them. Your students need you to help them become a productive member of society. People sometimes complain about how kids today don't try hard enough or something and end up doing nothing with their lives. This may be true to some extent, but half the problem is how bad some teachers are.

The worst part is, that the students know exactly who the horrible teachers are, but there's nothing they can do about it. There are no teacher evaluations, at least not until college (and I don't think they really mean much of anything here either, unless the particular teacher in question actually carefully reads them and decides to try and improve based on them, but of course if you're one of those teachers than you're probably not the problem and this letter isn't for you). Many times I've been sitting in class, thinking "man, I could explain this better than you." Often I would have friends, or even people I barely knew, asking me for help because I was viewed as one of the "smart kids" and they were learning nothing from the teacher.

Seriously teachers, care about your work and understand your subject, we need you.
-SF

Dear Weekends

I am so glad you exist. Without you, getting through the week would be so much harder. Being able to look forward to some relaxing time off at the end of each week makes everything else tolerable. If everyone had non-stop days of school and work, I think the whole population would go crazy. We need time to unwind and be lazy with no responsibilities.

Thank you for always being there.
-SF

Dear Snow

Sometimes you can be so much fun. You're pretty, soft, great for building, rolling around in, throwing, climbing and even eating. But sometimes you can be really frustrating.

Like today, you were falling from the sky and already a nice layer on the ground all morning. Not enough to cancel classes, but just enough to make walking to them rather unpleasant. When I go outside in you because I choose too, it's fun. But when I'm forced to go outside to walk to class... well all you do is make it horrible. For one thing, it's cold, and that's never fun. Even with a big winter jacket on, parts of me are still quite uncomfortable. You're also wet, landing on me, getting my bag and school things wet, my head and/or hood wet, and my clothing wet. On top of that, what's already on the ground is wet, getting all over my shoes and pants, getting absorbed, freezing my feet and making me rather uncomfortable.

You also sometimes block off routes, or make them incredibly dangerous. You prevent me from doing anything during the walk, I can't pull out my phone to check something, or some school stuff to make sure I did the homework, or a snack to eat, or anything because you'll just get it wet.

If you're going to come down on a day when I have class, the least you could do is fall hard enough to cancel classes.
-SF

Dear RSS Feeds

Thank you so much for existing. It's hard for me to imagine surviving on the internet without you. Just a few years ago, I didn't use you. I had heard of you, but didn't really know what you were or what the point was. What really got me to use you was webcomics. A few friends of mine showed me some, and before long I was reading a decent handful. Checking them all every day was tedious and pointless, I eventually organized my bookmarks by the days of the week they actually updated, but even that wasn't exactly a perfect system.

Then I discovered you. You nicely notify me when things are updated, keep track of what I have and haven't read, it's wonderful. Now instead of keeping track of tons of bookmarks and websites, I can go to one single place, and from their easily know where I should go for new content and when. It's so nice to have a place I can go that basically brings all the parts of the internet I want right to me, instead of having to go searching for them on my own. And since I use Google Reader, it's all part of my Google accounts so I don't need any new accounts or anything.

Currently I have 71 subscriptions, including all sorts of things like webcomics, blogs, Youtube channels, Tumblrs, videos, and even television shows. It's so nice to be able to keep everything nice and organized there, with folders and everything, instead of just aimless wandering the internet. I can't imagine trying to keep up with all 71 of those things on my own, it would be hectic.

I've gotten so used to using you, that now I get frustrated when things don't have an RSS feed. One webcomic I read, Dominic Deegan (not the best art, but good though often complex and confusing story), doesn't have an RSS feed, so I have to manually go check the site regularly and it gets rather annoying. Of course, I love you so much that I have one, with a tool on the right side of my posts that conveniently helps add the feed to a few common readers, as well as a link into the actual feed itself at the bottom.

Thank you, keep doing what you're doing, and never go away.
-SF

Dear SOPA/PIPA

I know I already wrote a letter to you guys, but in honor of today's internet black-out, I thought you deserved some more attention. There are so many reasons why you won't work, and why you shouldn't pass. Trying to do things on the internet today is a small sample of the problems you will create. You won't stop piracy at all, so there's no point in creating so many problems. You will massively inconvenience the average person's everyday usage of the internet, you will stifle creativity and innovation, prevent small people and organizations from getting going (one of the many awesome benefits of the internet). And honestly, when it comes right down to it, you break a bunch of rules from the constitution. You destroy people's right to due process, you stop free speech, and more. Hopefully enough people will take action and neither of you will succeed.

You better not pass, or the internet will quite literally be ruined.
-SF

Dear Marvel Vs. Capcom 3

You can't just create a bunch of downloadable content, and then add it to the game and re-release it as a whole new game. If all you're doing is adding some new characters, then that's DLC, not a new game. It should go up for sale for a few bucks per character or something. It's not fair to instead make people re-buy the entire game just to get a few new characters.

Sure, you slightly redid the UI, but you're not fooling anyone. It's the same game, you're just taking advantage of the fact that you know hardcore fans of fighting games, or marvel super heroes, or capcom games, or a variety of other things, are going to just buy it anyways and give you tons of extra money for no reason. It's not fair to your fans, and actually makes me think less of your companies.

If all you've created is some DLC, then release it as DLC.
-SF

Dear Fellow College Students

It's not very hard to avoid setting off the fire alarm when you cook. Just be a little careful, if you spill something on the burner, turn it off and clean it up. Keep an eye on things while you cook them.  It's annoying to have to go outside for twenty minutes every time the alarm goes off, so please try to avoid doing it. It's especially bad when it's below zero out, and it's 8:30am on a Sunday.

Please either learn to cook properly, or don't cook at all.
-SF

Dear College Advisers

It is your job to HELP your students, and make sure they take the classes they need to take, and that they get to graduate. Ignoring your students requests for help for months is completely unacceptable. They shouldn't have to spend hours going through other people to find someone else who can help them with something that is your job to do.

Let's say there's a hypothetical student, who totally isn't me, who is in their senior year. Let's say this student gives you the simple task of confirming that they will be all set to graduate at the end of the year, assuming they pass all the classes they are scheduled to take that year. Let's say they ask you think in the middle of first semester of the year, giving you plenty of time to get an answer. It is not okay for you to keep blowing them off, ignoring their e-mails, and telling them "I'll e-mail you" and then not doing so. Maybe this student needs to know before the end of the first week of second semester, so that if they need to change their schedule they can do so while they're still allowed to add classes.

This student shouldn't have to spend tons of time, going through a few different departments, trying to find someone else who can help them. Especially when it's such a simple task, that once they find someone who can help them, even though that person isn't in their office so the student is stuck just e-mailing them, the student gets a completely satisfactory response within a couple hours, completely solving all their problems. This is your job, your responsibility, and it was a simple task, just do it.

So if you're going to be an adviser, then actually be an adviser.
-SF

Dear Quicktime

You're terrible. I hate using you, for so many reasons. I don't know why my teacher has decided to use your stupid .mov format for his video lectures, but I hate it. First of all, you're pointless. There are plenty of other video formats that I don't need to go download a special program for, there are many ways to make the video just work in the browser itself without needing any sort of additional anything.

Second of all, you're a bad program. You're missing... well, everything. You have NO features, all you do is play the video, so I don't understand why anyone would want to use you. When I click on a video in my online course, I get a new tab that's just the video, in a very empty white background, with almost no controls. There's a volume slider, cool I suppose but useless, my computer can control it's own volume. A play/pause button, of course. A bar representing video progress, which can be click on to skip to different parts in a video. Two buttons that appear to be a "next" and "previous" button of some kind that have no use in this context. And a little drop down menu, with only one option I can even click on being "about quicktime plug-in" (the couple other things are greyed out or pro only) . Speaking of that menu, if I click on it, or right click anywhere on the screen which brings up the same menu, it will NEVER go away until I click on something within it, which is quite annoying. But all of this is in one, ugly, grey bar. Now, I'm not asking for much, but how about a full-screen button? Or perhaps displaying some measure of time (current, total, and/or remainging)? Do you have any idea how annoying it is to not know where the hell in the video I am? I don't think that's asking for too much, literally every other player ever has a display of time, and most have the ability to go full-screen.

Lastly, when I reluctantly installed you, I specifically UN-CHECKED the box to automatically update quicktime and other apple products, because I don't want another program running in the background all the time just to check for updates to one stupid program that I only use for this one purpose and then will never use again. Yet you STILL installed apple auto-update on my computer, which I had go manually find and remove. It is NOT ok to install things that I specifically said I do not want on my computer.

Improve yourself so you have an actual purpose and are useful, or just go the hell away.
-SF

Dear Our Microwave

I've always thought of you as a low end, low quality, but working device. Nothing special, but you get the job done when we need something microwaved. Well today you astounded me, when I unexpectedly discovered an incredibly useful, yet simple, feature.

My roommate was preparing dinner, and using the timer on the microwave. I was unaware of this, and went to use the microwave. Without really thinking, I simply put in my mug of milk (heating it up for some delicious hot chocolate), typed in some numbers and pressed start. My roommate quickly noticed and was mildly annoyed at the way I had no apparently inconvenienced him by ruining his timer.

But lo and behold, when the microwave beeped, it said "end" only for a brief moment. Instead of staying at "end-o'clock" (a joking way we have of pointing out someone annoyingly left it saying end so it's not displaying the time), it quickly changed back to resume the timer, being at precisely the time remaining it would have been at had no interruption happened.

Thank you for having this very simple multi-tasking ability.
-SF

Dear Teachers

Giving homework on the first day of class is not okay. We're just settling in to a new semester, trying to get used to having work to do again instead of constant free time, we want a couple days to adjust. Not only that, but textbooks are expensive, so many of us don't buy them ahead of time. We want to be completely sure about what books the teacher is actually going to use, and if we're personally going to actually use them. Yes, some of us don't get all the textbooks you tell us to, because some of us would never read them anyways.

Once this process of learning which ones we truly need is complete, many of us like to look around a bit. Some people do extensive research, some quickly check just Amazon and the school's own bookstore. Sure a few people just buy it from the school's bookstore without a second thought, but some of us want to save a little money since they're so overpriced. If we end up wanting them from somewhere besides the school store, we likely need time for it to be shipped to us. This means doing homework problems from the book on the first day of classes is a huge issue. It can mean forcing us to spend tons of extra money to buy them right from the school, just to do one silly little homework assignment.

So seriously, wait until at least the second class to assign some homework.
-SF

Dear Sonic Team

How hard is it to make a good Sonic game? I'll tell you, not very hard. You did it for years, why do they all suck now? Sonic Adventure 2 Battle was good, but since then... not so much. Sonic Heroes? Piece of crap. Personally I liked The Secret Rings, though no one else does. The daytime levels in Sonic Unleashed were good, but the nighttime ones as a wolf thing were just terrible.

I just got Sonic and the Black Knight for Christmas. Now, I had heard that like the others it was bad, but after skimming the directions, I was actually excited to try it. The story was kind of stupid, but the gameplay sounded  like a good mix of sonic with some RPG elements, and I thought maybe it was another good Sonic game, but boy was I wrong.

There are three playstyles Sonic can use, one focused on combat, one on speed, and one that's balanced. But for the first like two-thirds of the game, you can only use the balanced one. You can also use other characters, but you don't get them until even later than the different styles for Sonic. So technically these things are there, but only at the end (and since you level up each style separately, there's no real point in doing the other styles when your balanced style is already way higher in level). The other characters are pretty bad, except Knuckle's who is brokenly amazing at anything that's not combat because he can glide, thank god too because getting through some "platforming" sections are near impossible with anyone else because the controls are so bad.

That's the worst part, the controls. I mean, come on, really? Did anyone play test this game at all? You're not actually free to move as you please, you're stuck going forwards, and you can sort of move to the sides a bit. Sometimes you need to move to the side, to avoid something, or collect something, or whatever, but it's like the game fights against you, trying not to let you actually move over at all and trying to keep you centered. Plus, the path is zigzagging around so much that it's hard to tell where you can actually move to. And the "homing attack", it's been great in other games but... well... you have a sword in this one. If you don't swing your sword, then you just bounce off. So you have to jump, press the button again to do the homing attack, and in the millisecond before you hit, swing the wiimote so Sonic swings his sword as he hits the enemies. Of course, half the time the homing attack goes after a different enemy, or ignores the enemy, or goes after an enemy when you didn't see any, and basically is a pain in the butt. I could go on about the controls, but I won't.

Luckily, you had the decency to not torture us for too long, making the shortest game I've played in ages. Took me only about two and a half hours to beat it, though it turned out that wasn't really the end, the story had a twist, and then there were a bunch more levels... adding about another hour bringing the game to an astounded three and a half hours of gameplay.

This is just sad, I used to long Sonic games, what happened to the good ones?
-SF