Why so tribal?

I had a quaint little post in mind about how the new construction of the All Road and Hotfoot rims increased the friction between the rim and the spoke nipple, and how we'd concocted a new lubricant with Teflon powder that's crazy slippery and it makes finite adjustments super easy. It would have been a short post (I mean, there <- you have it, basically) about process and how as much as things stay the same, we always have to tweak our methods to stay optimized. But then social media late last week and over the weekend happened.

People doing Dirty Kanza were pissed at people who wanted to do Dirty Kanza with aero bars. People not doing Dirty Kanza were pissed at how much oxygen Dirty Kanza takes up. Everyone was pissed at how "corporate" gravel has become. Nibali had been pissed at Roglic, but I guess just became pissed at getting pantsed by a relatively unknown Ecuadorian. What had been CrossVegas and became CrossReno canceled itself for 2019, people on rim brakes were pissed at companies making disc brakes and the people who buy them. And the mountain bikers, having overcome their differences about all mountain and free ride and enduro and cross country and who gets to wear a full face helmet just smoked a lot of weed. Thank heavens for the mountain bikers. 

I'm sure that we feed into this whole miasma. I just did a brief coding of our recent-ish posts and the majority seem to be about process and attempts to arm you with your best knowledge about wheels, but there are several disc brake wheel specific posts. That gets driven by two things - disc brake wheels dominate our order book, and people have a lot more questions about disc brake wheels than they do rim brake wheels at this point. Our posts on 6 bolt versus centerlock and different axle types get so much traffic that if we charged you a dime to read them, we would have a shitload of dimes. At various points, we've had posts that were more specific to rim brake wheels that did huge traffic, and posts that were brake non-specific that drew crowds, but disc wheel topics are in demand right now and so we do them. There's also quite a bit more new product news about disc brake stuff now, and we need to stake out positions on that. So while we're not driving this cycle, our hands aren't necessarily clean I guess.

Personally, I'm full time embracing my inner Fred (itself a toxic word, except in embrace or so says me) on this whole deal. I've ridden my mountain bike with road/gravel (another toxic word!!) tires quite a lot, used the cross bike with both road and gravel tires, and yesterday I even rode a road bike, with road tires, with 100% on road content. Have not yet succumbed to the fanny pack trend. As much as I hate the whole "everyone needs to just calm down and ride their bikes, man!" sentiment, everyone needs to just calm down and ride their damn bikes. 

And thank heavens for the mountain bikers.