Change of Plans

Okay, I was going to cut down the Glee review to a submittable length. And I even made all the slides for the new script (118, by the way. That's about six hours of work, right there). And now I've decided not to do Glee.

Part of it is my concern that a Glee review won't be considered relevant enough. Part of it is that I don't want to be disqualified just because I started with material that wasn't original to the contest. Mostly though, it's that Burn Notice is shaping up to be awesome.

Not the show. The show is... well, you'll have to watch the video. I'll link to the site after I submit, but I can't post it as a review until after the contest, so there may be a blank week in my schedule. I'll try to do another in time, but no guarantees.

Also, I have a Twitter now (which seems like a terrible idea now that I've already done it, but I'll forgive myself later when I'm not feeling quite so betrayed... by myself. Good Gods I'm screwed up), so if you care about the random humor that comes from watching bad TV at two in the morning, I'm OpinionCritic, but only because "Opinionated" was taken and "OpinionatedCritic" has too many letters. I got as far as "OpinionatedCrit" but that just sounds like I'm judgmental about my Nat 20s.

Torn

So The Escapist as a video competition. The prize: a contract.

That's kind of a big deal, and I was all psyched and everything, but then I was flipping through the rules and saw the maximum video length. Five minutes.

Ouch.

My videos run seven to eight minutes, and I go at a decent clip. So I talked around and settled on Glee for some serious pruning. I figure that it's old enough that there will be things that my more developed critical eye can see. And I cut it down by three hundred words. And then I ran a test-read, and even going at ludicrous speed, it was still too long. So I cut out another two hundred words.

I'm still going to have to go pretty quick, but if I cut it down any further I'm going to lose content instead of just gags. This scares me. I don't want to sacrifice the integrity of my product just to fit it into an arbitrary timeline, but at the same time I really want that contract.


I'm gratified to see that the judging for the contract will be done by the moderators instead of by popular opinion, because I believe that my videos have merit, but I really don't think that they're terribly entertaining.

So I guess we'll see, huh?

Oh, and I know that the entries have to be unique to the contest. I have to remake my Glee video from scratch, though, so it is completely new. It's sort of a... version 2.0.

Feeling a Little Off

It's so strange not to have anything to post tomorrow (today, technically, but I haven't been to bed yet so it's still Saturday, damnit). After two months of posting every week, I feel like I've failed or something, even though this week off was scheduled.

And then not doing anything tomorrow is also a tad bizarre, as not having the kind of job that requires my attendance on certain days means that I also have only the weekends I give myself. I usually work on Sundays.

-Sigh-

And the poll for the video to post tomorrow? By a resounding majority of one (1) vote, Heroes: The All Bad All the Time Edition won. So I'm just calling the whole thing off. I know that it was a silly little idea and everything, but I had hoped for a much better reaction.

So yeah. Stargate: Universe is next week. After that's Burn Notice.

Review Talk

I don't usually talk about the critiques themselves here. In fact, I try to avoid talking about the critiques at all, as I feel it makes me look like I don't have anything better to do than stalk YouTube and hit F5 every thirty seconds just in case there's Another View. 'Cause, you know, I would never do anything like that.

But three days ago I posted The Mentalist and I did my usual rounds of Facebook and The Escapist and then walked away from the computer for awhile. Okay, I went to sleep, but point is, I didn't stalk it. And then it got sixty four views in twelve hours. For scale, even Heroes: The All Bad All the Time Edition, my most watched video to date, took a week to hit sixty five.

I know it's not crazy-viral or anything, but for me, that's a lot of views, really fast. Well, yesterday The Mentalist passed 100 views and as of writing is sitting pretty at 107.

And it's freaking me out.

I mean, yes I know that for my videos to become popular, people actually have to watch them, and yes I've been getting steadily more views as I keep doing this, and yes the fall premiers are coming up so searches are up, but damn, ya'll.

So, yeah. Thanks, Everyone Who Watches My Videos.

Oh! And since I'm taking this week off to start a rolling schedule, I shall link a the video that's selected by The Audience. There's a poll here if you want to vote, or just comment with your choice from the list below and I'll add the results together. I really don't expect to get a whole shit-ton of results, but The Mentalist has surprised me this week, and ya'll might as well.

Criminal Minds
Glee
Castle
Eastwick
Numb3rs
Heroes: The Good Stuff Edition
Heroes: The All Bad All the Time Edition
The Mentalist

Make your choice!

From the Audience

"Quick question: Are you ever going to review Leverage, or Burn Notice? I liked both of them, and it would be interesting to see your take." --ALuckyChance


I was and they've both been upped on the list now that it's been requested. In fact, once I'm done with SG:U, I'll do Burn Notice.


"Good review. You hit all the key points and were very entertaining. As for the show, I always preferred Psych, myself." --Super Toast


Thank you, I try, and now Psych's on the list as well. See this whole "getting comments" thing really cuts down on the need to come up with the shows for myself. And I get to put off CSI: Wherever for a little longer.


"I liked it. Also i like your voice lol. Don't know how to describe it though lol." --Tankichi


Okay, this one's more of a personal gripe of mine. "LOL." I don't have the words to express to you how much I hate LOL. It's a good abbreviation, and I do use it myself, but I use it... when I laugh out loud. Such a concept, I know, but it's been overused to the point that people seem to use it the way they would use a nervous chuckle in conversation. That is to say, involuntarily. And that usage just doesn't work very well at all in a written medium.


Last year someone actually said "LOL" to me. I was incredibly confused. Why would someone do that? Lawl is awkward to say, awkward to listen to, and it doesn't have any connotations when spoken. Now I'm not one of those "Text-speak is killing the English language!" nutbags, but I do have a problem with the new words that don't translate the medium of interaction. That is to say, abbreviated phrases should stay in a written medium.


On an entirely different note, I'm editing my edited schedule. I thought about how doing a video every two weeks would be boring as all get out, even with the store to get up and running, so I decided to go back to a video a week, BUT! I'm still going to take this week out so that I can start watching shows one week, and making the video the next week, while I'm watching the next show. I know this sounds just as bad as a video every week, but it's actually not. You see, I spend a lot of time not doing whatever it is I should be doing, and on this schedule I'll have something productive to do while I'm not doing what I should be. It's foolproof!

More on The Mentalist

As predicted, there are some things in my notes that didn't make it into the video. Most of them are little things, like that occasionally the background noise (footsteps, traffic, ringing phones) drowns out the dialogue, or that the camera during fight scenes has no desire to show us what's going on, or the myriad continuity errors from multiple takes. So I won't go in to those.

A big one though, is that, like his inspiration, Patrick Jane is occasionally wrong. Sherlock Holmes was wrong all the time, he frequently edited his theory as he got more information to accommodate the new facts, and on one spectacular occasion (Wisteria Lodge, I think it was), he was out-and-out wrong. Jane is outright wrong more often than Sherlock was, but it's usually about minor things, and he brushes off his mistakes with such savvy that it's difficult to notice when he's wrong. Which is a great thing from the actor. The writers made him wrong, yes, but a minor tweak to the way Simon Baker plays it, and the scripted mistakes could be glaring.

The other major thing is the way the show treats the supernatural. Early on there's an episode with a psychic, and it's heavily implied that she's a faker, but no undeniable proof ever comes up, and her insights provided one of the best "Awwww" moments in the show. She wasn't even the bad-guy-of-the-week, just a minor character antagonist.

There's also an episode with a "Wiccan," whose depiction is just about as stereotypically neo-pagan as is possible. I hates her, because she's... well... fluffy. For some reason that's the only satisfactorily descriptive that I've got. She does cast a couple of spells and, if you interpret it that way, they come true, but it could also be chalked up pretty easily to coincidence. Thankfully.

From the Audience

Now that The Mentalist is ready to go I can slow down a touch and talk about something that's been bugging me since it came up. This is a comment that I got on my second Heroes critique:

"your review was pretty good and well tought out. But it was very subjective, which is fine considering your review title." -- wasalp


I could rag on the lack of a fifth-grade level editing skill, or the spelling, punctuation, grammar, word choice, and clause placement mistakes. It would be mean of me, and probably pointless, but I could. Instead though, there's a concept here that deserves some thought: the idea that subjective reviews are a problem.


Quite simply, no review is objective. Part of objectivity is the ability to quantify, or assign a number to, the object being reviewed. And while, yes, you can give any feature of anything a numerical score, you have to do so arbitrarily, so that number has no meaning to anyone but you. Bit of a waste then, huh? And that's assuming that your perception of the object being reviewed isn't filtered through your experiences, opinions, and prejudices. If it isn't, then we've got bigger problems than subjective reviews because you are a robot.


So, since no review can possible be objective, why is subjectivity a problem? It seems to me that since objective reviews don't exist, if we bitch about the subjective ones, what have we left? Nothing.


And if you think about it, every time someone expresses their opinion, that's a review. "Hey, you went to see Scott Pilgrim last week, right? Whatja think?" "Oh, it's awesome you should totally check it out!"


Review!


Not a great one to be sure, but a review nonetheless. And that's really what professional written reviews are about. Not just the opinions, but also the reasons behind them. What's good and why. What sucks on a saguaro and why. So when we read reviews, we're not looking for opinions, we're looking for someone else to justify our opinions.


Ponder that one.