(1) KELLEY OBIT. An acknowledged leader of Doctor Who fandom in the U.S., Jennifer Adams Kelley, died today. LA’s Gallifrey One con committee paid tribute on Facebook:
All of us at Gallifrey One today are mourning the loss of our dear friend, and our long-time Masquerade director, Jennifer Adams Kelley, who passed away early this morning at home after a short but fierce battle with cancer.
Jennifer was a titan of American Doctor Who fandom, both locally in the Chicago area and across the country: as former program director & stage manager of our sister events Visions and ChicagoTARDIS; her decades-long involvement in Chicago area Doctor Who fandom, including her participation in the local fan group The Federation since the 1980s (where they created many well-known fan videos such as “Doctor Who and Holy Grail” and “S-A-V-E-W-H-O”); co-author of ATB Publishing’s landmark tome “Red White and Who: The Story of Doctor Who in America”; staff member of the Outpost Gallifrey and Gallifrey Base fan forums (the latter of which she co-founded); and countless contributions to fan communities and publications across America. She was also very active in costuming fandom, participating in and running masquerades and convention events nationwide. She was unable to join us to run our Masquerade this year due to her illness, leading to a last-minute group effort she actively contributed to, to make certain the show would go on.
Our entire fan community has been enriched by Jennifer, and her loss is devastating to so many of us who have called her friend for so long. We will be dedicating next year’s Gallifrey One convention to her memory. Our thoughts and sympathies are with her husband Philip, her daughter Valerie, and their family today.
(2) AMAZONIAN CRITIQUES. Authors continue raising issues about Amazon’s business practices and those who abuse its revenue model.
- Courtney Milan. Thread starts here.
- Courtney Milan again. Thread starts here.
- Tessa Dare. Some interesting data from her, and from the additions and corrections in responding tweets. Thread starts here.
(3) BOMBS AWAY. The Verge, in “Rotten Tomatoes tackles review-bombing by eliminating pre-release comments”, tells about site changes being made in response to the negative campaign against Captain Marvel.
The film-rating aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes has announced it will no longer allow users to comment on or register early anticipation for movies, following a series of coordinated attempts to sabotage the ratings on a few select upcoming films.
The Rotten Tomatoes blog details those changes:
Starting this week, Rotten Tomatoes will launch the first of several phases of updates that will refresh and modernize our Audience Rating System. We’re doing it to more accurately and authentically represent the voice of fans, while protecting our data and public forums from bad actors.
As of February 25, we will no longer show the ‘Want to See’ percentage score for a movie during its pre-release period. Why you might ask? We’ve found that the ‘Want to See’ percentage score is often times confused with the ‘Audience Score’ percentage number. (The ‘Audience Score’ percentage, for those who haven’t been following, is the percentage of all users who have rated the movie or TV show positively – that is, given it a star rating of 3.5 or higher – and is only shown once the movie or TV show is released.)
… What else are we doing? We are disabling the comment function prior to a movie’s release date. Unfortunately, we have seen an uptick in non-constructive input, sometimes bordering on trolling, which we believe is a disservice to our general readership. We have decided that turning off this feature for now is the best course of action. Don’t worry though, fans will still get to have their say: Once a movie is released, audiences can leave a user rating and comments as they always have.
(4) SAYING NO. Emma Thompson quit a movie she wanted to do with a director she loves to work with – the LA Times has the reasons: “Emma Thompson’s letter to Skydance: Why I can’t work for John Lasseter”. Skydance had hired Lasseter just months after he left Pixar and parent company Disney in the face of multiple allegations of inappropriate behavior.
In mid-February, it was reported that the two-time Oscar winner had pulled out of Skydance’s highly touted animation feature “Luck,” citing her concerns about Lasseter’s hiring. According to her representatives, from the moment the hire was announced, Thompson began conversations about extricating herself from the project; she officially withdrew Jan. 20.
In a letter she sent to Skydance management three days later, she acknowledged the complications caused by a star withdrawing from a project, including the effect her decision would have on the director, the rest of the cast and the crew. But in the end, she wrote, the questions raised by the Lasseter hire made it impossible for her to remain in the film.
The full text of the letter is at the linked article. It ends:
I am well aware that centuries of entitlement to women’s bodies whether they like it or not is not going to change overnight. Or in a year. But I am also aware that if people who have spoken out — like me — do not take this sort of a stand then things are very unlikely to change at anything like the pace required to protect my daughter’s generation.
(5) MELON. Hong Kong’s Melon Sci-Fi event, to be held March 23, describes itself as —
An international gathering of leading science fiction writers, acclaimed scientists, media industry experts and fans to discuss what’s next in science fiction, entrepreneurship and the most compelling trends facing our future.
The program boasts a stellar list of talents from East and West, including Jo Walton, Bao Shu, Jeanette Ng, Aliette de Bodard, Rebecca Kuang, Tade Thompson, Regina Wang, Lisa (SL) Huang, and many others.
(6) NOT FAR AT ALL. C.E. Murphy, who lives in Ireland, gives a kindly warning in “A note about Irish distances” —
This is especially for people coming to Dublin 2019:
If an Irish person (or website, for that matter) tells you something is a 10 minute walk, they are almost certainly lying to you.
It’s a well-intentioned lie. They reckon anybody can walk for ten minutes, I think, so if they say it’s ten minutes, well, that sounds grand and not a bother and you can manage that. But if it is actually a ten minute walk, that is a matter of sheer coincidence and should not be used as a measuring stick for other times you’re told something is a ten minute walk.
Usually a ten minute walk is really about 20 minutes. Sometimes it’s 85.
Everything in Dublin is, according to rental ads, no more than a 15 minute walk from city centre or St Stephen’s Green. Everything in Ireland is no more than a comfortable 10 minute walk from a train station.
Honestly, we’d been here for years, trying to figure this and other similar phenomenon out, when it finally dawned on us that broadly speaking, the Irish people, who love a good story, would rather lie to you than disappoint you….
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
- Born February 26, 1918 — Theodore Sturgeon. Damn, I hadn’t realised that he’d only written six novels! More Than Human is brilliant and I assumed that he’d written a lot more long for fiction but it was short form where excelled with more than two hundred stories. I did read over the years a number of his reviews — he was quite good at it. (Died 1985.)
- Born February 26, 1945 — Marta Kristen, 74. Kristen is best known for her role as Judy Robinson, one of Professor John and Maureen Robinson’s daughters, in Lost in Space. And yes, I watched the entire series. Good stuff it was. She has a cameo in the Lost in Space film as Reporter Number One. None of her other genre credits are really that interesting, just the standard stuff you’d expect such as an appearance on The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Oh, and she’s still damn sexy.
- Born February 26, 1948 — Sharyn McCrumb, 71. ISFDB lists all of her Ballad novels as genre but that’s a wee bit deceptive as how genre strong they are depends upon the novel. Oh, Nora Bonesteel, she who sees Death, is in every novel but only some novels such as the Ghost Riders explicitly contain fantasy elements. If you like mysteries, highly recommended. Now the Jay Omega novels, Bimbos of the Death Sun and Zombies of the Gene Pool are genre, are great fun and well worth reading. They are in print which is interesting as I know she took them out of print for awhile.
- Born February 26, 1957 — John Jude Palencar, 62. Illustrator whose artwork graces over a hundred covers. In my personal collection, he’s on the covers of de lint’s The Onion Girl and Forests of the Heart, Priest’s Four & Twenty Blackbirds and le Guin’s Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea.
- Born February 26, 1963 — Chase Masterson, 56. Fans are fond of saying that spent five years portraying the Bajoran Dabo entertainer Leeta on Deep Space Nine which means she was in the background of Quark’s bar a lot. Her post-DS9 genre career is pretty much non-existent save one-off appearances on Sliders, the current incarnation of The Flash and Star Trek: Of Gods and Men, a very unofficial Tim Russ project. She has done some voice work for Big Finish Productions as of late.
- Born February 26, 1965 — Liz Williams, 54. For my money, her best writing by far is her Detective Inspector Chen series about the futuristic Chinese city Singapore Three, its favorite paranormal police officer Chen and his squabbles with Heaven and Hell. I’ve read most of them and recommend them highly. I’m curious to see what else y’all have read of her and suggest that I read.
- Born February 26, 1977 — James Wan, 42. He’s known originally for directing the Saw horror film franchise, but more recently for Aquaman. He’s been picked to develop the Swamp Thing series on the DC Universe streaming service. He also rebooted the MacGyver franchise.
(8) COMICS SECTION.
- Free Range thinks it will cost plenty to commute in outer space.
- AI loosely defined, in Brewster Rockit.
- Arriving aliens famously make this request. Over the Hedge offers a good example of when the right answer is “No.”
- Please, Monty, do not use the eggplant emoji to ask for baba ghanoush.
(9) TODAY’S THING TO WORRY ABOUT. BBC asks “Is Japan losing its umami?” (gallery and video; not viewable on small screens.)
Soy sauce is one of the most important ingredients in Japanese cooking, but chances are you’ve never tasted the real thing.
Yasuo Yamamoto has a secret – or more precisely, 68 of them. On a recent morning on the Japanese island of Shodoshima, the fifth-generation soy sauce brewer slid open the door to his family’s wooden storehouse to reveal 68 massive cedar barrels caked in a fungus-filled crust. As he climbed up a creaky staircase into his dark, cobwebbed loft, every inch of the planked walkway, beams and ceiling was covered in centuries’ worth of black bacteria, causing the thick brown goo inside the barrels to bubble. The entire building was alive.
“This is what gives our soy sauce its unique taste,” Yamamoto said, pointing to a 150-year-old wooden barrel. “Today, less than 1% of soy sauce in Japan is still made this way.”
Until 70 years ago, all Japanese soy sauce was made this way, and it tasted completely different to what the world knows today. But despite a government ordinance to modernise production after World War Two, a few traditional brewers continue to make soy sauce the old-fashioned way, and Yamamoto is the most important of them all. Not only has he made it his mission to show the world how real soy sauce is supposed to taste, but he’s leading a nationwide effort to preserve the secret ingredient in a 750-year-old recipe before it disappears.
(10) IF YOU CAN MAKE IT THERE. Joseph Hurtgen reviews “Famous Men Who Never Lived by K Chess” at Rapid Transmission.
Reminiscent of Philip K. Dick’s metafictional The Grasshopper Lies Heavy within The Man in the High Castle, Chess’s Vikram holds his copy of Pyronauts dear. It is the one item of cultural significance that grounds him to his former identity. What are pyronauts? They are those that set fire to things, that destroy the archive. So, then, it is ironic that the item Vikram holds dear is a story about those that destroy artifacts. The immigrants from a different New York City experience a complete cultural dislocation. The entire archive, the background to their lives, is gone as if incinerated in a fire. Though their New York City appears the same as the new one they find at the other side of the trans-dimensional gate, in the new city, they have no history, and with no history, no future.
(11) ARE YOU THAT AUDIENCE? Adri Joy says this flawed book is still a good choice for the right audience: “Microreview [Book]: Do You Dream of Terra-Two? by Temi Oh” at Nerds of a Feather.
By opening the action around the Terra-Two mission, and the tiny complement of students who get onto it from the academic pressure cooker of Dalton academy, Oh sets up an interesting moment to start the story. By this point, all of the characters have spent years in each others’ company to some extent, and while some clearly know each other better than others – there’s a notable divide between Jesse and the crew who were originally selected – we are still reading about relationships that have a great deal of baggage behind them, and the whole that’s handled quite well. At the same time, setting the action at the start of the crew’s 23-year journey makes the distance to the planet insurmountable. I suspect it’s no accident that the title frames Terra-two as a “dream”: a planet that will somehow provide all the answers to an overcrowded, dying earth, packed with natural beauty and already habitable for humans, somehow becoming more and more unreal with every detail we learn that conforms to the way things are on Earth. The fact that this mission seems so dreamlike, and the protagonists feel so underequipped, may be frustrating for readers seeking a more Seveneves-esque tale of human ingenuity in the face of interstellar adversity, but that’s sort of the point: there’s a subtle but increasingly clear message that we are supposed to question the design and realism of this mission, even while the teenagers themselves are fixated on their own destinies and, more practically, surviving long enough to arrive with them.
(12) BRANCHING OUT. This time around Vicky Who Reads connects young readers to works aimed at adults: “If You Liked… #13: Adult Science-Fiction & Fantasy by Women!”
…I picked this specific subset because oftentimes, these books are miscategorized as YA, for numerous reasons. A lot of it is definitely misogyny in both the YA and adult SFF communities, believing that women writing SFF are YA because in these people’s minds, YA is also “lesser” and “less intense” (Which is not true. YA is very valid, and includes a different writing style.)
So anyways, I wanted to both boost some adult fiction work (that have crossover appeal, but are still not YA) by women, and also to maybe provide suggestions for readers who want to transition from YA SFF to adult, but don’t know where to start!
The first comparison is:
If you liked The Wrath and The Dawn, you’ll love Uprooted!
Uprooted honestly feels very 1001 Nights to me–women needing to be handed over to an overlord of sorts as payment, and then something interesting happens!
(13) MOONWALKERS. There’s a day left to bid on a “Rare Apollo Reunion Poster Signed by 18 Apollo Astronauts, Including 8 Moonwalkers” at the Nate D. Sanders Auctions site.
Apollo astronauts signed poster, from their 6 July 1986 reunion in Washington, DC. Poster of three children gazing upward at the moon is commemorated by the autographs of 18 Apollo astronauts including 8 moonwalkers: Charles Conrad, Ron Evans, Stu Roosa, Dick Gordon, Charlie Duke, Michael Collins, Walt Cunningham, Jim Lovell, Buzz Aldrin, Don Eisele, Bill Anders, Alan Bean, Jim Irwin, Al Worden, Rusty Schweickart, Alan Shepard, Gene Cernan and Jack Schmitt.
(14) OGH WISHES HE LOOKED THIS GOOD. The Chibify site is fun, and I can hardly complain that the results aren’t too close to reality when they are as flattering as this.
(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Xylophone by Jennifer Levonian on Vimeo explains what happens when a pregnant woman steals a goat from a petting zoo.
[Thanks to JJ, rcade, John King Tarpinian, Chip Hitchcock, Cat Eldridge, Martin Morse Wooster, Mike Kennedy, Errolwi, Andrew Porter, and Carl Slaughter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Ken Richards.]
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Recently got around to Sturgeon’s Some of Your Blood. Fascinating novel … and disturbing.
He also wrote one of the Ellery Queen novels: Player on the Other Side.
(7) Does the figure of six include I, Libertine?
(Not to be confused with any possible autobiography of Richard Libertini, of course.)
Michael J. Walsh: I enjoyed The Player on the Other Side. Now I’m trying to remember if Sturgeon ghosted that one Saint story that was a cross between The Maltese Falcon and a dream that faded, insubstantial.
(120 — Well, there’s a big jump. Ah! Parenthesis problem! Should say (12).
(7) 1918, please, for Sturgeon, not 1928.
(2) AMAZONIAN CRITIQUES.
It’s interesting that Holley Trent, in her Tweet, openly admits to engaging in the scammy practice of re-bundling their works in different sequences and combinations and posting them under different titles in order to game Amazon’s “freshness” ratings.
7) I am very fond of Liz Williams’ Vance pastiche The Poison Master. She pays homage while keeping her work fresh and interesting. Recommended.
[fifth]
Sturgeon novels of which I am aware:
1. The Dreaming Jewels/The Synthetic Man
2. To Marry Medusa/The Cosmic Rape
3. Venus Plus X
4. Some of Your Blood
5. More Than Human
6. Godbody
* * *
7. The Player on the Other Side (as Ellery Queen)
8. I, Libertine (as Frederick R. Ewing)
* * *
Movie adaptations – but he always wrote them as real novels, and added his own touch so I consider them Sturgeon novels –
9. Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
10. The Rare Breed
11. The King and Four Queens
I spent part of the day reading “The Raven Tower”. It doesn’t go where you expect.
Clickity
@JJ
It’s possible that she is referring to legitimate practices like series boxsets rather than questionable things like bookstuffing.
(14) OGH or Hayao Miyazaki?
Click.
You climb it and end up underground instead?
Looks like I’ve read most of Sturgeon’s genre work – Venus Plus X is of note because it’s an example of an SF book in which the characters spend a fair amount of time talking about another SF book (Wylie’s The Disappearance).
14) I prefer this one. Needs to have flash enabled.
https://www.deviantart.com/gen8/art/Chibi-Maker-1-1-346025144
Well my file went so pix’ly, I went lickety-split, scrollin’ my old ’55
(3) Good. Once upon a time Rotten Tomatoes was my go-to source for reviews, but they seemed to have fallen behind the times. I will have to reintroduce myself.
1) I believe Jennifer was present at every single Doctor Who convention I ever attended, from 1993 on. I didn’t know her well, but I am close friends with her best friend of 40+ years, also a co-author on Red White and Who. The one word I would use to describe Jennifer is “generous” — with her time, her knowledge, and her friendship. She will be sorely missed.
Two scrolls diverged in a file, and I—
I took the one less pixeled by…
@James Moar
Actually, that’s exactly what characters do at a couple of points. (It is, of course, a little more complicated than that.)
It contains both snow and tavern and yet is science fiction?
John Winkelman says Good. Once upon a time Rotten Tomatoes was my go-to source for reviews, but they seemed to have fallen behind the times. I will have to reintroduce myself.
Those Puppies were gaming a system that frankly shouldn’t have existed. If you’ve not seen a film, you shouldn’t criticise it in any manner what-so-ever. So NBCUniversal which has the controlling interest in that service made the intelligent decision to only allow reviews after films had actually come out. Won’t stop Puppies from saying saying Stupid Thimgs then, but likely they won’t bother as no one will notice or care about them pissing on the floor then.
@Cat Eldredge: I wonder whether a blatant attempt to hype, or build buzz based on nothing, turned around and bit the corps expecting to gain from it?
@6:
That’s not just Irish. A friend concluded after a visit to Japan that asking directions was unreliable, possibly because “I don’t know” was locally considered a rude brushoff; instead one should ask “Who can tell me how to get there?” until someone says “I can” instead of “That person”.
@7: I’m not sure I’d credit Sturgeon with 6 novels — More Than Human is 3 linked novellas, and some of his other “novels” are very slim — but I’ve been rereading his shorter work through the North Atlantic Press series and yes, it was amazing (and too many other adjectives to pile up here).
@7 ctd: I recall McCrumb declaring some years ago that everything up to that time — folklore, Jay Omega, and the amusing nastiness of the Elizabeth MacPherson series, maybe even the stock-car books — was juvenilia; she had started doing historical novels with very tenuous connection to the original Ballad works. I haven’t finished anything of hers recently, because it was all so bleak; the works may be more meaningful to people who share her ~Souther background and who are trying to fight the South’s magnolia-scented equivalent of the dolchstoblegende.
Bimbos seemed a little mean-spirited to me — not quite the look-at-the-freaks approach that the mundane press used to take to all SF conventions — but Zombies seemed to have a solid base in history (cf Knight’s The Futurians).
@7 ctd ctd: I’ve read several of Liz Williams’s other works; my notes are terse, but Empire of Bones, The Ghost Sister, and Nine Layers of Sky all look interestingly unusual, and different enough that I’d suggest you read the jackets for what strikes you — ISTM that until the Inspector Chen novels she was doing what she wanted, just once, rather than trying for the sort of consistency Marketing loves. (cf Gaiman’s observation on John M. Ford).
@Cat Eldredge
Does that mean all the puff pieces that come out before a film should be banned as well or is it just people who say things you disagree with that should be muzzled?
I expect that there will be a modification or removal of the audience score within a few years as well. And not because of any political reason just because the studios are in a position to stamp out anything that might hurt their bottom line.
@magewolf : There is a difference between “I didnt like the trailer, and Im not watching this” and “Brie Larson is an SJW and has to be boykottet”. The latter was the main part of “comments” for Captain Marvel. I cannot imagine a universe where this is helpful to anyone, notto mention its trolling. They are the one trying to drown out and punish free speech.
But even if you put politics aside(which you probably shouldn’t): it’s incredible unhelpful for someone who just tries to inform himself of the buzz of a movie.
Rotten tomatoes just tries to make their site useful to anyone who doesnt want to scream at an actress for speaking out about diversity, but to learn about movies. Which is the reason they founded the site in the first place. So, I applaud them for trying to keep their functionality going in a way that helps the majority of users.
(3) You’d have to have been pretty stupid to confuse a film’s anticipation poll results with any kind of pre-release review, since the figure always had the words “want to see“ immediately above and below, although that didn’t prevent the mainstream media from deliberately misrepresenting audience feedback (based upon trailers and advance press) as “fake reviews” or even “review bombing”. Rotten Tomatoes has now lost whatever credibility or worth it once had, and its recent statements are disingenuous at best and frequently stray into absolute lies.
Steve Green says Rotten Tomatoes has now lost whatever credibility or worth it once had, and its recent statements are disingenuous at best and frequently stray into absolute lies.
I don’t see anything that’s a lie here. They just decided not to allow comments prior to a film coming out. Explain to me how that “its recent statements are disingenuous at best and frequently stray into absolute lies.” I get that you don’t like that they shut down what these Puppies were doing, but I don’t see anything that’s the behaviour you describe.
@Steve Greer: I read plenty of media reports on “early marvel scores” or controversies. So yes, that happens. And like Cat said: They didnt tell any lies, the only sugarcoated the behavior of a screaming mob of alt trolls that dont like women in charge as “non-constructive”.
@Peer
I see a lot people cheering this when what actually happened is The Mouse spoke and the people lost even more of their small ability to stand up to their corporate entertainment overlords. I expect the same people to cheer when the audience score turns into two buttons marked “This movie was the greatest thing I ever saw” and “This movie transcends all other forms of entertainment ever produced by the human race and is now my new god” . Hyperbolic fun aside, I imagine they would be marked ” I liked this movie” and “I loved this movie”.
@Steve Green
Yes. I noticed that when I starting looking around for what all the trouble was about. Every article about the looking forward to the movie poll called it the audience review score and most talked about trolls misusing the site to “review bombing” the movie before they had seen it. I only ever saw one that went back and corrected itself about people answering a poll with no reviewing involved.
@magewolf
Most of these rating sites (be it movies or something else) evolved from a fansite to “This is the ultimate possibility to rate X”
If the slippery slope would indeed go as you fear (which I doubt), there isnothing stopping new rating sites popping up. Or sites like metacritic stepping up and take their place. Its not like there no alternatives already. Or that we have these tools to blurt out opinions a plenty, whoch we didnt have just ten, twenty years ago (and I vividly remember that there were already coporate overlords back then)
Its also worth noting that not Disney caused this, but a bunch of right wing trolls, triyng to harass an actress. As always a bunch of idiots spoiling stuff for the majority…
I’m not seeing the comparison between a media outlet previewing an upcoming movie and a comment/rating on a movie review site. The latter is obviously intended for people who legitimately saw the movie. Disallowing comments until a movie comes out is a sensible policy for a site like Rotten.
@ rcade
I was responding to Cat Eldredge’s ” If you’ve not seen a film, you shouldn’t criticise it in any manner what-so-ever.” since if you should not say anything bad about a movie until you see it I would think that you should not say anything good about it either.
And I wonder if she would think the same thing if a studio was planning a big budget, star studded remake of The Birth of a Nation. Not comparing Captain Marvel in anyway to that just saying there can be good reasons to criticize a film before you see it. Something as simple as not liking the lead actor in earlier works seems like a good enough reason to criticize an upcoming movie in my mind even if you turn out to be wrong in the end.
Soy production as explained to a rabbit by some indeterminate critter.
@Cat Eldridge: The article above merely quotes the Rotten Tomatoes blog, which the RT management suddenly thought necessary to launch. The references to potential confusion are certainly disingenuous, since this “revamp” was blatantly prompted by pressure from Disney. As for untruths, I am referring to subsequent statements made by RT and its owners, Fandango. With all respect to File 770, other news outlets are available.
@Peer: Labelling a large and diverse group of voters (of which I was one) as “a screaming mob of alt trolls that dont like women in charge” is non-constructive, ill-informed and pretty damned troll-like in its own rights.
@Magewolf: Apparently, RT is still allowing people to indicate their interest in seeing films, but not the alternative, which makes no sense whatsoever. You make several excellent points here, by the way, but it’s increasingly obvious a number of the respondents prefer their own prejudices to the facts.
@nickpheas
I recall snow being mentioned. And taverns – or at least a guesthouse resembling one.
(6) it finally dawned on us that broadly speaking, the Irish people … would rather lie to you than disappoint you.
Chip Hitchcock: That’s not just Irish. A friend concluded after a visit to Japan that asking directions was unreliable, possibly because “I don’t know” was locally considered a rude brushoff; instead one should ask “Who can tell me how to get there?” until someone says “I can” instead of “That person”.
That’s good advice. When we took a trip to New Zealand some years ago (before interactive driving maps became a big thing), we had to ask directions a few times, mostly of staff at gas stations and convenience stores. And we found that people would spend 10 minutes talking about where what we were seeking might be, or things we could possibly do to find it, instead of just saying “I don’t know” so we could move on to looking for someone who did know. It was incredibly frustrating, because I knew that they meant well, but it was a huge waste of time.
Steve Green says Apparently, RT is still allowing people to indicate their interest in seeing films, but not the alternative, which makes no sense whatsoever. You make several excellent points here, by the way, but it’s increasingly obvious a number of the respondents prefer their own prejudices to the facts.
Not sure what you mean by this. I just took a look at Captain Marvel and this is what I see:
TOMATOMETER Reviews Counted: N/A
AUDIENCE SCORE User Ratings: N/A
The only reviews being blurbed are those invited industry folk who saw the film. Where is it allowing what I think are what you’re suggesting are positive only interests in seeing films?
@ Steve Green and Magewolf
It seems to me the poll you mourn was only good for trolling. You wouldn’t make a big fuss because the British didn’t name that ship Boaty McBoatface, right?
Magewolf says to me And I wonder if she would think the same thing if a studio was planning a big budget, star studded remake of The Birth of a Nation. Not comparing Captain Marvel in anyway to that just saying there can be good reasons to criticize a film before you see it. Something as simple as not liking the lead actor in earlier works seems like a good enough reason to criticize an upcoming movie in my mind even if you turn out to be wrong in the end.
First spell my last name right please.
Second we’re not talking about an earlier work, we’re talking about a squirming basket of very rabid Puppies that decided they were seriously pissed off about her wanting the press corps not to consist, as it usually does, of just older white males. So they decided to use Rotten Tomatoes to piss on her. And that got widespread bad publicity for that site which resulted in NBCUniversal which is the majority owner of Fandango Media to stop the practice of allowing comments on films that hadn’t actually been seen by said commenters.
Now if a forthcoming book novel from Terri Windling titled The Moon Wife got a horrible review, or worse yet several nasty comments about it came out months before it having nothing to about the novel itself were actuallly published here on File 770, there’d be a hue and cry. Same principle at play. here. Dumping on her for noting that the press corps at films has been generally mostly white males of a certain age is demonstrating just how stupid they are. Just Puppies being Puppies.
@Cat Eldridge
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/captain_marvel
The button with the blue cross labeled want to see showing 19,664 users.
And there were never any reviews involved in the first place just a poll.
@Rob Thornton
Actually I did think not naming the ship Boaty McBoatface was a mistake for several reasons. The poll in the first place was a bad idea (never put anything important to an open poll if you do not have to) then compounded by ignoring it. But I am a rule lawyer at heart so that sort of thing bothers me.
@Cat Eldridge
If a new forthcoming book by John Ringo was mentioned in a scroll and 75% of the comments about it were dismissive or snide would that be trolling? Even though they were based on his prior work? Or by people who had never read one of his books because of his stance on the Puppies or other things?
Magewolf says If a new forthcoming book by John Ringo was mentioned in a scroll and 75% of the comments about it were dismissive or snide would that be trolling? Even though they were based on his prior work? Or by people who had never read one of his books because of his stance on the Puppies or other things?
Once again, the Puppies slam on Captain Marvel had nothing to do with any prior work by the performer. You do know that. Repeating here doesn’t make it true. They’re attacking her because they don’t like her stand on her stand, and yes I feel she’s right, that the reviewing pool for Marvel films needs to much more diverse that it is now.
They decided based on that stand to piss on her personally in an public forum that wasn’t theirs. Bad decision. The owners of that public forum got serious push negative push back from the press and public from that campaign hence their decision to close down the right to make comments if you’ve not seen a given film. Not a complex story really.
@nickpheas: I know two things about The Raven Tower right now. It’s written by Ann Leckie and it’s said to be a fantasy novel. A wild stab in the dark has me predicting that actually the opening scene is aboard a spacecraft of some sort just to really fuck with people. (I’ll get around to it eventually, but I’ve got some Korean and Japanese fiction to read first, as well as a bunch of non-fiction on birds, but The Raven Tower can probably slot somewhere in between those)
@Magewolf: note that RT didn’t filter comments/ratings for content (per your quote of Cat); they shut down all comments/ratings on the grounds that none of them could be based on enough knowledge to speak. “not liking the lead actor in earlier works” is unlikely to be enough knowledge; a movie is usually more than one actor.
I’m in doubt about the value of a count of people not interested in seeing a movie. The vast majority of people in the world don’t want to see even the most popular of movies. Even when narrowed down to “people with access to the Internet,” there’s a vast number of people who don’t want to see any particular movie. This suggests that what’s really being measured is “the number of people who passionately _don’t_ want to see this movie” – and that doesn’t seem like a very interesting number. There were a vast number of people who didn’t want to see “The Passion of the Christ” – and some of them _passionately_ didn’t want to see it. I would consider an effort by them to inflate the “don’t wanna” number on a movie website to be jerkish behavior. The number of people who want to see a movie is far more interesting: if a lot of people want to see a movie, it might tell me that it’s likely to be a movie I’d like, or that it’s a movie that will be popular enough that I might want to see it, just so I can participate in conversations about it.
This may be beating a dead horse, but I’d like to see some explanation of how being able to click on a thing online to make a little number show up under “not interested” is in any way, even a small way, related to “standing up to corporate entertainment overlords.” And the explanation can’t simply consist of “Well, a corporation decided to discontinue X, therefore X must have been a revolutionary anti-corporate gesture.”
My alternate explanation for what it means if Disney was in fact responsible for RT making this change (which a lot of people seem to be taking as an article of faith; I haven’t seen any evidence that it’s so, other than “The Mouse runs everything, so of course they made this happen”) goes like this:
1. Regardless of what people were trying to do with the poll on Captain Marvel, and regardless of what the poll numbers were, there was obviously noise and controversy about the whole thing.
2. Disney doesn’t like to be in any way associated with noise and controversy.
3. The end.
And if this was just a decision by RT themselves, it’s basically the same thing. “There’s some kind of uproar, and it seems like keeping this feature will just be a giant pain in the ass, and it’s not really part of our main offering, so just drop it.”
Eli notes wisely And if this was just a decision by RT themselves, it’s basically the same thing. “There’s some kind of uproar, and it seems like keeping this feature will just be a giant pain in the ass, and it’s not really part of our main offering, so just drop it.”
Not an unreasonable conclusion. The Puppies pushed something to beyond the breaking point and the company realised likely that it likely would happen again in the future by other Puppies. So they dropped a feature that really made no sense.
@ Magewolf:
At least a/the UAV of “not-Boaty” was named Boaty McBoatface, so there’s at least some justice in the world.
Yes, I know that not-Boaty is actually names RRS Sir David Attenborough, but “not-Boaty” is much quicker.
@Andrew: “I’m in doubt about the value of a count of people not interested in seeing a movie…”
You and me both! I want to echo pretty much everything Andrew said up there. I don’t care about what people hate, except when said hatred incites my sympathy.
Years back, Amazon stopped allow “readers” to comment on unreleased books and DVDs. The troll factor was pretty high on political books.
@Andrew
I believe the theory and possibility the practice is that they were MCU fans ,the films target audience, that were saying they were not going not just random people on the street.
Looking around after the fact ,I had not been paying it much mind until the Rotten Tomatoes stuff happened, I am surprised how many of the “rabble rousers” were saying that all down voting would have no effect on Captain Marvel’s box office that it was just a way to show their dissatisfaction. Now most of them are saying that some bean-counter at the House of Mouse must not have agreed with them.