Jay

Hey kids, Daddy is home! So shut the fuck up now.

chyron8472 said:

Jay said:

Handman said:

The Nintendo Switch is the fastest selling console in US history, outselling even the Wii. I find this very hard to believe, given people were in hysterics over the Wii, but it’s true.

Switch is legit. It’s the only console I own.

I’m not sure that says as much about Switch as it does about you.

Not sure what you’re implying.

Anyway, I meant the only modern console I own. Everything else is retro.

Handman said:

The Nintendo Switch is the fastest selling console in US history, outselling even the Wii. I find this very hard to believe, given people were in hysterics over the Wii, but it’s true.

Switch is legit. It’s the only console I own.

The feedback is welcome 😃

I had to start ignoring these GOG sales because — just like Steam — I’ve amassed a huge library of games I’ll probably never have time to play. And I’ve purchased too many games on sale only to see them on sale again for still less before I’ve even had a chance to play them.

Realistically, when am I going to find the time to play through Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale, and Neverwinter Nights (and their sequels)? Probably never, but that didn’t stop me from buying them anyway.

GOG is amazing though if you’re into classic PC gaming as well as new stuff.

Thanks for the heads-up. The encoding error, which happens the first time any of those static pages is loaded (you’re likely the first person to read any of those pages since the most recent updates a week or two ago), is fixed in my most recent build and will be released later this week.

The unstyled content will be there a while longer. oojason has written all-new content for those sections and it will be incorporated in one of the next few releases, at which point I’ll fix the layout issues.

ChainsawAsh said:

Season 8 is a surprising breath of fresh air though, so if you remember hating it at the time because of the Duchovny stuff, it’s worth a revisit. And the finale works very well as a series ending IMO.

Season 9 is just as bad as you remember, though.

I was surprised by how good 8 was. Agent Doggett was a much stronger character/lead than I expected. (I stopped watching regularly around season 5 or so — finished college and lost interest in TV for a while — and marathoned the entire series in preparation for season 10.)

I’ve enjoyed some of the “monster of the week” episodes in seasons 10 and 11, but the alien/conspiracy arc is a bust, and wiping the entire story from season 10 with the soap opera-like “it was all a dream” season 11 opener was just terrible.

TV’s Frink said:

Possessed said:

TV’s Frink said:

“Apologists” reminds me of the previously used term that I can’t even remember anymore that was supposedly either neutral or positive, when it clearly wasn’t being used that way. If you want the discussions to remain civil you should probably avoid loaded terms like that.

Beyond that, I wasn’t aware resolution was required in the middle installment of a trilogy. And beyond that, while I personally hope we do get resolution on some of these mysteries, it won’t ruin my enjoyment of the films if we don’t.

Actually I’m pretty sure it was apologist.

Was it? Lol. Regardless, Jay knows it’s a loaded term and IMO if he wants to be consistent he shouldn’t use it.

It was a joke, hence the cough cough.

Ryan-SWI said:

Jay said:

TLJ has none of that mystery because it picks up literally where the previous installment leaves off, and that’s J.J.'s fault because he just had to have his dramatic ending and couldn’t tell a complete story

Rian wasn’t forced into anything by JJ, especially not making TLJ to pick up right where TFA left off, mere seconds later.

…

Rian was definitely forced to do certain things based on the way things had played out in TFA, but a lack of a time jump isn’t one of them.

moviefreakedmind said:

I haven’t actually seen TLJ, but I can’t even imagine how jarring a time jump would be given the way TFA ends.

Pretty much this right here. The style of the scene set the expectation that the audience would be shown what happens next. As I mentioned in my earlier review, I actually enjoyed Luke’s saber toss because it was like Rian thumbing his nose at the overdone cliffhanger.

And don’t get me started on what TLJ ignored from TFA. All we heard from cough apologists cough after TFA was that all the mysteries were a big setup for some great reveals in the next installment. The truth is likely that J.J. had no idea what any of those reveals should be (again, he likes throwing a lot of balls in the air and letting other people catch them) and Rian had no desire to be saddled with filling in all those holes.

Killing the past seemed to be not just Kylo’s driving force, but Rian’s. Setting aside some of the junk storytelling in TFA provided a few of the best moments in TLJ.

https://github.com/jaysylvester/comitium/issues/158

Thread cleaned. Two entire irrelevant pages wiped. Please stay on topic, thanks.

Tyrphanax said:

It hurts TFA in my mind, too, because it calls attention to the parts I didn’t like most about that movie and I don’t feel like it was enough of an evolution from TFA to right those wrongs. It just feels like additional footage from TFA stretched over two hours with these massive character-defining moments in the trilogy sprinkled in that don’t have the impact they should because we’re not far enough away from TFA.

Part of the drama in ESB and ROTJ is that those films start off with some time having passed since the previous installment. There are new and different things we have yet to discover about what happened while we were away.

And frankly I think that’s why TFA works for a lot of people. We get a story that kicks off decades after the last one. What’s happened since then? Who are these people today? How have they changed since we last met? That’s exciting.

TLJ has none of that mystery because it picks up literally where the previous installment leaves off, and that’s J.J.'s fault because he just had to have his dramatic ending and couldn’t tell a complete story, which is his MO. He’s great at starting stories, but not so great at finishing them.

And yet somehow we still don’t know these new characters or their world very well. Over 4.5 hours of storytelling and how we got from ROTJ to TFA/TLJ is largely a mystery.

After letting it settle a bit more, for me the biggest failure was not kicking off the new trilogy with our favorite characters on one last adventure, even if it were a brief one. I’m not saying give the old characters 90% of the screen time and let the new ones hang around as window dressing; the new characters need to stand on their own. But having access to Luke, Leia, Han, Chewie, Threepio, and R2 and not putting them on screen together one last time was a massive miss.

I applaud Rian’s risks and what he was able to do with what he was given, though. He could’ve handed in a boring retread and instead he went for it.

Hey guys! Hope your Sunday is going well.

LordZerome1080, whether you intended it or not, your post came off as insulting towards those religions (mostly due to the word “fictional”, which you should have known would set people off).

All other posters, you’ve made your point.

Everyone please shut up now, or I start issuing temp bans.

Let’s try to keep it civil and not insult each other. Argue the point, not the person.

Thanks.

DominicCobb said:

Jay said:

DominicCobb said:

adywan said:

You only have to look around places like facebook to see how the RT audience scores have been manipulated. Campaigns were started before the film even come out to give it negative reviews. Not just star wars pages either. 99% of the time, RT was the place they aimed for. After the film came out it got even worse. The amount of posts i had to delete on my page where people had posted links to these type of campaigns was astounding. They even added getting people to upvote the prequels on RT to make TLJ score look even worse. Just check out the ROTS reviews and see just how many new ones have suddenly appeared since TLJ.

There’s a real dark side to the Star Wars fandom and it came out in force after TLJ. The amount of the so called reviews and the negative comments/ attacks on social media that point their hatred for it towards the fact that there is more diversity, more women taking the lead roles, Disney is pandering to the SJW’s etc is disgusting.

Woah ady, slow down with your rash argument.

At least his argument, while anecdotal, deals in reality.

True, you could learn something from him.

Bots and socks! It’s a conspiracy!

DominicCobb said:

adywan said:

You only have to look around places like facebook to see how the RT audience scores have been manipulated. Campaigns were started before the film even come out to give it negative reviews. Not just star wars pages either. 99% of the time, RT was the place they aimed for. After the film came out it got even worse. The amount of posts i had to delete on my page where people had posted links to these type of campaigns was astounding. They even added getting people to upvote the prequels on RT to make TLJ score look even worse. Just check out the ROTS reviews and see just how many new ones have suddenly appeared since TLJ.

There’s a real dark side to the Star Wars fandom and it came out in force after TLJ. The amount of the so called reviews and the negative comments/ attacks on social media that point their hatred for it towards the fact that there is more diversity, more women taking the lead roles, Disney is pandering to the SJW’s etc is disgusting.

Woah ady, slow down with your rash argument.

At least his argument, while anecdotal, deals in reality.

Matt.F said:

Gothamknight said:

(2) The “it’s just a kids’ fantasy” argument presupposes that we should accept lower storytelling standards for kids’ stories. Which makes zero sense.

(3) Why should Star Wars be viewed as necessarily /or/ only for kids, or considered only from a kid’s point of view? This presupposes that science-fantasy is only a child’s genre, and/or that Star Wars as a franchise can’t or shouldn’t mature in its storytelling. Yet for some reason the TLJ apologists have no problem with its obvious adult themes. The themes themselves are entirely valid; its the execution that was sorely lacking, and in fact unjustifiable.

TLJ Apologists eh?! This “presupposes” (your fave word) that the majority opinion is that it’s a bad film. Given the fantastic review scores and amazing box office results from repeat viewings, this makes zero sense and is in fact unjustifiable. Lol.

Please read the 10 or so posts regarding the word “apologist” and how it’s only a negative term if you don’t understand the meaning of the word.

DrDre said:

This is why I’m so glad sites like these exist, where people are free to passionately express their opinions. I think we’ve seen some great arguments from all sides.

It’s been a lively discussion and I wouldn’t have it any other way 👍

DominicCobb said:

All my argument has ever been is

A) Audience scores are always fallible, in general
B) There are many factors that point to RT audience scores in particular being biased towards negative
and C) That the RT audience score for the movie is only 3% points below even.

Put those altogether, and it is down right absurd to imagine that the RT audience score is proof that the majority of the audience disliked the movie.

The fact that I like the movie has nothing to do with it. If you had simply said that a significant portion of the audience didn’t like the movie, I wouldn’t have said anything, because that is obvious. What isn’t as obvious is the veracity of the RT audience score, so you treating it as gospel legitimately gave me a laugh.

I’ve made this more than abundantly clear in each of my posts, but I guess somehow it is still confusing to you, so I apologize. Hope it’s clear now.

I didn’t say it was gospel. I used it as an example.

I’m not confused by your rash argument, but thanks for clarifying anyway.

Frank your Majesty said:

Jay said:

My point was that using other questionable scoring methods to call RT into question doesn’t make logical sense.

But it makes perfect sense. If you measure the same thing with different methods and none of the results agree, it’s perfectly logical to assume that any or all of the methods are flawed.

No, it doesn’t make sense. He said RT is flawed and he pointed to other sources he considers more definitive to support his argument. I’m the one who posited that they’re all likely flawed in some way.

And we’re not measuring the same thing. While there’s almost certainly some crossover in the samples, CinemaScore’s audience isn’t IMDB’s and isn’t RT’s.

DominicCobb said:

Jay said:

DominicCobb said:

I never said the bot thing was an anti-SJW conspiracy, nor did I say that it even happened, just that it plausibly could have. Using bots is not “hacking,” and wouldn’t even be that hard to do. When I say bots I mostly mean people making a ton of socks accounts, which isn’t something that anyone in their right mind should think is a possibility far divorced from reality. The potential of someone making a script that’d do the work for them logically follows, though again I’m not saying it definitely happened (honestly the bot thing was pretty clearly beside my point).

Then why bring it up at all other than to obscure the lack of logic in the argument? “Hacking” doesn’t just mean breaking into a computer or network or writing malicious code; social engineering is a form of hacking. Using bots to overwhelm a system and subvert its intended purpose qualifies as hacking even though it works within the confines of the system. And bots aren’t people with sock accounts; bots work independently, which is what makes them bots. Words mean things.

I bring it up because it’s one of many factors that should be considered. Also, each time I brought it up I was saying “even if you don’t believe in the bots,” which is to say it’s obvious that you don’t believe people who say bots were made, so I’m acknowledging that and moving on to the other points.

What I meant by my definition is that I lump them together. Non-sock bots are still a part of that factor, as I stated if you paid attention to what I posted.

I think you’re intentionally blurring meanings because your argument that RT is an invalid source for audience opinion was based on your opinion (you admitted yourself you couldn’t bother to research it) and doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. At worst, it’s no more faulty than any other audience metric.

It seems to me like you’re just latching on to the bot thing (which I barely talked about) because you have no good counterargument to my actual point. Cool man, well done.

I pointed out where I think your logic is flawed beyond the bot subject and won’t repeat myself. You scoffed at RT based solely on your impressions of it, only presented alternative data when pressed, used your own definitions for words (that’s not how definitions work), and you’re grasping at straws to salvage your argument.

RT is just as valid as the other scores you mentioned based on what we know to be true about them. Unless you can provide real evidence or data to the contrary, I’m not sure why you’re still debating other than the fact that you like the movie and want to believe most other people agree with you, which is perfectly natural, but not reasonable.

I don’t care how other people feel about TLJ and their opinion doesn’t affect my own. I just work with the data I have and don’t invent theories why it may or may not agree with my own opinions.

DominicCobb said:

I never said the bot thing was an anti-SJW conspiracy, nor did I say that it even happened, just that it plausibly could have. Using bots is not “hacking,” and wouldn’t even be that hard to do. When I say bots I mostly mean people making a ton of socks accounts, which isn’t something that anyone in their right mind should think is a possibility far divorced from reality. The potential of someone making a script that’d do the work for them logically follows, though again I’m not saying it definitely happened (honestly the bot thing was pretty clearly beside my point).

Then why bring it up at all other than to obscure the lack of logic in the argument? “Hacking” doesn’t just mean breaking into a computer or network or writing malicious code; social engineering is a form of hacking. Using bots to overwhelm a system and subvert its intended purpose qualifies as hacking even though it works within the confines of the system. And bots aren’t people with sock accounts; bots work independently, which is what makes them bots. Words mean things.

I think you’re intentionally blurring meanings because your argument that RT is an invalid source for audience opinion was based on your opinion (you admitted yourself you couldn’t bother to research it) and doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. At worst, it’s no more faulty than any other audience metric.

DominicCobb said:

Jay said:

DominicCobb said:

Jay said:

DominicCobb said:

Jay said:

DominicCobb said:

Ha, citing the RT audience score unironically, that’s funny.

I’m guessing you have “valid” data that supports your take on things.

Do you? In general I wouldn’t trust an audience score on a site like that. Which is to say nothing about the reports of concentrated bot reviews. Even if you think there’s no way that could have been the case (because it’s so unbelievable) there was still a campaign to lower its score. Plus the simple fact that hardcore fans that got mad are way more likely to rate the movie on RT than the casual fans who vastly outnumber them. When you consider the high cinema score, it’s starts to paint a different picture.

Even if you’re skeptical of these things, it’s not hard to see how the RT score might be slightly biased in one direction. That considered, it’s weird to use it as proof that a majority of fans disliked the film when that score is basically right in the middle, even with that negative volunteer bias.

So yeah, I think it’s pretty silly to take any stock in the RT audience score, and you doing so did legitimately give me a laugh.

So no then. Got it.

If you chose not to listen to very easily understood concepts, sure.

Failing that, I think the CinemaScore and IMDb rating will suffice.

I understood what you said just fine. It’s just that what you said didn’t answer my question. I asked you for data you considered valid and you provided none. But you provided data this time, so I’ll address it.

This guy’s got some data
http://birthmoviesdeath.com/2017/12/20/the-curious-case-of-the-last-jedi-and-its-rotten-tomatoes-audience-score

which isn’t necessarily an endorsement of everything said therein but I don’t feel like doing the research myself. At the very least he provides reason for one to be at least somewhat skeptical of the RT score.

IMBD’s less than stellar TLJ rating of 7.4 is hardly a smash hit (do you pat your kids on the back when they get a C?), the MetaCritic score is mostly positive at 85, and audience reviews are split down the middle. Sounds suspiciously like…RT.

7.4 isn’t a great score, though you’d think if “the majority of people didn’t like it” it’d be quite a bit less than that. Which isn’t to say IMDb is more reliable, just that it’s different than the RT score, which means maybe it’s weird to say one of them is objectively right?

CinemaScore polls viewers on opening night, which provides multiple avenues for skewing the results in either direction (limited sample size, not enough time to analyze what they just saw, etc.).

Same point, weird to discredit one and not the other. I don’t doubt there’s skews there, but why pretend that RT is more trustworthy? At the very least, the CinemaScore skews more to general audiences rather than the kind of hardcore fans who would waste their time writing a review online. And Star Wars has a far greater percentage of casual fans.

Plus, TLJ had the same audience score as TFA and RO. You’d think if the majority hated it it would’ve been even slightly lower, no?

I don’t see anything about these methods that makes them a more reliable or scientific predictor of a film’s quality than RT, especially since what I’m seeing on IMDB backs up what RT says (critics like or love it, audiences seem split but veer into the negative).

I don’t see how IMDb backs that up, a 7.4 is mixed at worst. As I’ve said it’s just ridiculous to put any stock into these audiences scores.

IMDB has star ratings and user reviews. 7.4 is the star rating. They don’t provide an average for user review scores that I can see, but read a few pages and the general direction should be pretty clear.

I’m not getting into a line-by-line quote battle because I find them exhausting, but I never said RT was more reliable than the others. My point was that using other questionable scoring methods to call RT into question doesn’t make logical sense. And bringing up the bot thing as if some anti-SJW script kiddie hacked the RT voting system by flooding it with negative reviews has no basis in reality.

TV’s Frink said:

What circles would one travel in where “apologist” is considered a positive? Probably circles I couldn’t understand, right?

I think the point is that it’s not supposed to be positive or negative. At some point, someone misused it, that connotation worked its way into the popular culture, and now being an apologist in internet circles means you defend things that you know deep down don’t have a good defense.

The word “literally” is another great example of something that people misused to the point that it lost its meaning.

Collipso said:

DominicCobb said:

Jay said:

DominicCobb said:

Ha, citing the RT audience score unironically, that’s funny.

I’m guessing you have “valid” data that supports your take on things.

Do you? In general I wouldn’t trust an audience score on a site like that. Which is to say nothing about the reports of concentrated bot reviews. Even if you think there’s no way that could have been the case (because it’s so unbelievable) there was still a campaign to lower its score. Plus the simple fact that hardcore fans that got mad are way more likely to rate the movie on RT than the casual fans who vastly outnumber them. When you consider the high cinema score, it’s starts to paint a different picture.

Even if you’re skeptical of these things, it’s not hard to see how the RT score might be slightly biased in one direction. That considered, it’s weird to use it as proof that a majority of fans disliked the film when that score is basically right in the middle, even with that negative volunteer bias.

So yeah, I think it’s pretty silly to take any stock in the RT audience score, and you doing so did legitimately give me a laugh.

http://www.complex.com/pop-culture/2017/12/rotten-tomatoes-the-last-jedi-low-audience-score & https://www.cbr.com/last-jedi-rotten-tomatoes-score-defense/

Found these 2 doing a quick Google search. They were among the top results.

To say that the low audience score for TLJ in RT was hacked by some sort of alt-right group or that it isn’t legit is the same as saying that Disney has payed most critics to give their movies high scores, which isn’t something I believe in, therefore I call both ideas BS.

No need to go full denial mode about most people not liking a movie you like. It just so happens people have different opinions.

And interestingly enough I think that RT is so easily accesible to the casual movie goer that it ends up being one of the most reliable sources for audiences’ scores imo.

PS: I’ve been reading what I wrote over and over before posting and I don’t know how to phrase it better but it just isn’t making any sense to me and I don’t know how to improve it. If anything’s incohesive or incoherent, I’m sorry.

I’m going to build a post upvote feature just so I can like this post.

Gothamknight said:

Jay said:
I don’t agree with people who think TLJ is a good Star Wars story/movie, but that doesn’t mean they’re making excuses for something they know deep down isn’t good, which I think is what many would call an “apologist” today.

There are contexts in which “apologist”/“apologetics” doesn’t carry that sense. It just presupposes that a given thing has been attacked, and so someone else is defending it. It makes no presumption as to whether the attack OR the defense is, in itself, right or wrong.

I’m accustomed to using the term positively in my own circles, and so I wasn’t making a veiled insult to anyone who likes TLJ.

Which is pretty much what I said.

DominicCobb said:

Jay said:

DominicCobb said:

Jay said:

DominicCobb said:

Ha, citing the RT audience score unironically, that’s funny.

I’m guessing you have “valid” data that supports your take on things.

Do you? In general I wouldn’t trust an audience score on a site like that. Which is to say nothing about the reports of concentrated bot reviews. Even if you think there’s no way that could have been the case (because it’s so unbelievable) there was still a campaign to lower its score. Plus the simple fact that hardcore fans that got mad are way more likely to rate the movie on RT than the casual fans who vastly outnumber them. When you consider the high cinema score, it’s starts to paint a different picture.

Even if you’re skeptical of these things, it’s not hard to see how the RT score might be slightly biased in one direction. That considered, it’s weird to use it as proof that a majority of fans disliked the film when that score is basically right in the middle, even with that negative volunteer bias.

So yeah, I think it’s pretty silly to take any stock in the RT audience score, and you doing so did legitimately give me a laugh.

So no then. Got it.

If you chose not to listen to very easily understood concepts, sure.

Failing that, I think the CinemaScore and IMDb rating will suffice.

I understood what you said just fine. It’s just that what you said didn’t answer my question. I asked you for data you considered valid and you provided none. But you provided data this time, so I’ll address it.

IMBD’s less than stellar TLJ rating of 7.4 is hardly a smash hit (do you pat your kids on the back when they get a C?), the MetaCritic score is mostly positive at 85, and audience reviews are split down the middle. Sounds suspiciously like…RT.

CinemaScore polls viewers on opening night, which provides multiple avenues for skewing the results in either direction (limited sample size, not enough time to analyze what they just saw, etc.).

I don’t see anything about these methods that makes them a more reliable or scientific predictor of a film’s quality than RT, especially since what I’m seeing on IMDB backs up what RT says (critics like or love it, audiences seem split but veer into the negative).

DominicCobb said:

Jay said:

DominicCobb said:

Ha, citing the RT audience score unironically, that’s funny.

I’m guessing you have “valid” data that supports your take on things.

Do you? In general I wouldn’t trust an audience score on a site like that. Which is to say nothing about the reports of concentrated bot reviews. Even if you think there’s no way that could have been the case (because it’s so unbelievable) there was still a campaign to lower its score. Plus the simple fact that hardcore fans that got mad are way more likely to rate the movie on RT than the casual fans who vastly outnumber them. When you consider the high cinema score, it’s starts to paint a different picture.

Even if you’re skeptical of these things, it’s not hard to see how the RT score might be slightly biased in one direction. That considered, it’s weird to use it as proof that a majority of fans disliked the film when that score is basically right in the middle, even with that negative volunteer bias.

So yeah, I think it’s pretty silly to take any stock in the RT audience score, and you doing so did legitimately give me a laugh.

So no then. Got it.