i couldn't come up with much of a title as you can see

Internet Wars

Amateur Hip Hop Enthusiast vs. White Hip Hop Professional (?) Critic: SHOTS FIRED

So awhile ago mainstream indie queen bee “Pitchfork” (like you haven’t heard of them) published a review of Big Baby Gandhi’s NO1 2 LOOK UP 2 (all caps necessary, please) (still my favorite album of 2012). And by review I mean pretentious wank tangentially related to the music on the album. Ian Cohen, you don’t really get hip hop man, you are reviewing it like a man without a tongue would review ice cream. You hold it to these weird metrics that just baffle me. The only thing you say about the production is that it sounds like it was mastered on a laptop. You discuss alleged hypocrisies in what you posit to be some sort of thesis he’s presenting on consumerist morality?? I thought you Pitchforkers were all about pseudoironic dualities??? Consider me a retroactive hater too, Ian Cohen, I looked back and in all your reviews I read I rarely see anything actually discussing music as like a thing you listen to and enjoy.

I KNOW THAT FEEL, man, quite often I feel like a review ought to be more a discussion of an interesting question raised by the art than the art itself. But that’s wrong! It just produces stuff at best useless to a reader. To illustrate, I have made a modest attempt to review your writing and gone off on a silly tangent that we are currently reading. INTENTIONAL. Nope.

But yeah lately I have felt like qualitative discussions of work should be really visceral and to the point. If you’re discussing the meaning of the work or whatever I think you’ve already gone past the point of review. Like, there’s an assessment on whether or not the work is enjoyable, and a discussion on whether the work is worthy of study, and you can’t conflate the two.

I dunno I’m not really sure of my opinion on this yet. But what I do know is that reviewing a hip hop album and being like completely dismissive of both the rapping and production and spending most of the time discussing what you think the messages of the album are is dumb. And it’s even worse when you are completely inaccurate in your thinking.

To this effect my friend Richard posted a good review of the review which addresses this stuff in a much more succinct manner. You can read it here and you should: http://letsgolesco.blogspot.ca/2012/04/pitchfork-review-review-1-big-baby.html

But yeah I generally don’t have a problem with Pitchfork, I think haters often need to realize that if they get linked to the site once a week and get angry that’s still like 24 album reviews and a bunch of song reviews and news articles and stuff that Pitchfork did fine and that’s a dang good average.

Whether or not this devolves into the full-on INTERNET WAR that I have been imagining remains to be seen and by that I mean that it won’t but I dunno I like this sort of controversy. Plus I wanted to make this more of a section.

SomethingAwful vs. Everyone; reddit vs. itself

Lately there has been something looming over the internet, threatening to change it to something half-bastardized and permanently disfigured. I’m sort of terrified. Even if their stated demands don’t take away anything I care about, they could easily and perhaps even carelessly ruin things dear to me if left unchecked.

I’m not talking about CISPA. That was probably obvious from the title. I’m afraid of CISPA in the same way that I’m afraid of meteors. Internet wars I’m worried about in the way that I’m worried about like, I dunno, there really isn’t any real-world equivalent I guess. It’s hilarious and troubling at the same time.

But yeah let’s get to it, what the heck is going on? I think a lot of people don’t follow this because it doesn’t matter to really anyone actually but I think most people ought to appreciate how funny it all is.

SomethingAwful’s PC Brigade

I don’t know exactly when this started but I think it was about a year and a half ago? Maybe two years almost now. As far as I can tell this was sort of a progression from SA’s hilarious “weekend web” sorta stuff. After delving deep to find really creepy forums and such, they started realizing that more and more you could find equally creepy on huge mainstream sites like reddit, etc. You have to remember that SA is still on the old method of forum moderation i.e. it has a lot of moderation. So I think a few people had the mindset that reddit admins etc endorsed stuff that was being posted to their site, ‘cause otherwise they’d remove it. I personally think that’s a really illegitimate viewpoint, that the admins are really only endorsing the freedom to post anything, but whatever, there’s definitely an argument to be had there at least. The next step was I think people with this mindset started getting a little ticky about the admins of said sites getting huge internet guap off of this stuff. And other people probably were worried about weird thing X getting mainstream acceptance via acceptance on reddit. Other people probably just wanted the stuff gone as much as possible. I think the vast majority of people involved were just interested in having fun screwing with the internet at large, because uh, it’s absolutely hilarious.

So from this mindset was launched many campaigns against various parts of the internet. The ones I followed the most were on reddit, tvtropes and 4chan. So let’s look at them!

SA vs. TvTropes: Like Flipping Over a Big Rock and Seeing Bugs

So the premise of tvtropes is people look for tropes in tv/movies/video games/anime/etc, note them with sort of lighthearted humour. This creates a sort of web where you can like, look at everything ever to contain a certain character archetype, or a certain joke, stuff like that. Pretty useful! Their big liberal freeinternet thing was to remove any standards for notability, a huge contrast to wikipedia etc. This lead to people putting up articles for fanfiction, webcomics, stuff like that. Where it gets weird is that a lot of fanfiction etc is REALLY REALLY WEIRD. Oh and not to mention the “Troper Tales” section, which, as notability is not an issue, had examples of tropes and such from user’s real lives. A lot of this stuff got really really weird too, like, fascinatingly so. Look up CrazyGoggs on Youtube if you haven’t.

Anyways SA basically wanted to know what the hell is wrong with these guys, which is a totally valid question that I would be really interested in hearing the answer to. But then they started threatening to harass Google into removing ads, at which point TvTropes started just deleting stuff en masse to cover themselves. That’s not cool! I don’t get why they thought forcing people to remove content would actually stop the behavior leading to the content. The only thing that could do that is some like, therapy sort of psychoanalysis and instruction. But that’s hard and this is easier and this is usually more fun. And I’d agree that it’s hilarious and such except in cases where they delete stuff! Like, all this fascinatingly weird stuff is gone forever. And where do you draw the line when you start deleting stuff? So far TvTropes has proven very unreliable in their line drawing. The knee-jerk reaction got rid of stuff like Lolita, now they need to scramble backwards.

When does the humour of horrible mismanagement and systematic panic outweigh fears of censorship and loss? Not here. Close, but not here. If TvTropes ceases to be all-encompassing, it ceases to be.

SA vs. /r9k/: SO MUCH ANGER

So here’s a case where content is being generated, not destroyed. Hooray! What has been destroyed is any semblance of r9k being a board where things aren’t awful all the time. It’s a bit better now, yeah, but a few months ago I can remember times when there literally wasn’t a single post on the first page that wasn’t trolling or being trolled or generally mad. From what I can tell, some dedicated people from SA decided to try to straighten r9k out about the whole misogyny/racism thing. Hey that’s what I suggested they do on TvTropes! And I still think this was the better way to go about doing it, but I guess that’s about the only way, ‘cause what else are you gonna do? DDOS? >implying this is over like a couple dozen people. Try to get ads taken away? Lol like you can offend away Jlist. Anyways the problem with this approach is like, did you ever think it would even remotely work even in the slightest? That’s a serious question to anyone involved. What was your absolute best case idealized optimistic scenario here? I can’t even imagine what it was that they hoped would happen.

What did happen is that every thread on the first page would get derailed within like five posts, or your money back. Usually there’d be like a twofold tangent attack, a double split to totally recenter the discussion. Then people would flood on, tripping over themselves to tell the internet just how angry they were. This would go on for some hundreds of posts, until people just raged themselves into exhaustion.

It’s interesting, ‘cause 4chan used to have a reputation as “untrollable”. This was because on the smaller moving boards people just didn’t care and ignored them, and on the faster boards it was just too chaotic for the concept to make any sense. Nowadays 4chan is very, very trollable. It’s almost too easy. Nearly every thread can get completely derailed through the efforts of one or two people.

Pretty sad!

I was gonna write about SRS and stuff but I lost a lot of interest in this and I want to get this post up so I can watch more anime but basically I hope the idea of banbots catches on and reddit devolves into WWI, but if it ever gets so much of a problem for admins that they take away scripting altogether, I’ll be annoyed. And god help us if they take away user-made subreddits. God help us in a world without /r/comeonandslam.

Animes

Natsuiro Kiseki

I was pretty hyped up for this one. Tennis, green Saten, great colour schemes, dramatics. I’m there. First 20 minutes 40 seconds I was really happy with it. The plot was pretty trite but it served it well. Characters were all really likeable. Animation was a solid A. Soundtrack decent too. Flashbacks and stuff, good, very fleshed out, quite nice. I sort of wanted like, one episode set before this one, so you could get a sense of their dynamics before the one girl had to move and such. The element of this wishing rock thing was good, I thought, really a nice exemplar of various putting away childish things and nostalgia and such that slice of lifes aim for. And y’know right when they’re hitting the climax of the fight, the sorta spacey girl says something spacey, and it makes them stop and reflect on how petty they’re being and they head home.

JUST KIDDING, there’s magic and the stone glows and they start flying.

Huh?

I’ll probably keep watching this despite all this sorta BS but WHATEVER, why did they think they had to do this sorta madness?

Hyouka

Watched this, very impressed. Is Kyoani the richest studio? They certainly seem like the one willing to spend the most money, at least. The soundtrack here is literally elder god tier. Why don’t more animes use classical? Why don’t more animes have animation this beautiful? The recreation of the ghost story, Chitanda’s entrapping hair, MC at the bulletin board – already we have three solid contenders for best animated shot of the season. They’re really just showing off at this point! Not to mention that everything else is beautiful too. I wonder how much this cost to make. I wonder if it’s actually more money than I will make in my lifetime total. It’s all like, movie-tier. Amazing. It seems like Kyoani is now aiming to make like, the SoL masterpiece, y’know? There’s this sense that they’re always combining previous elements, optimizing, etc. This is a legitimate effort. The plot is... fine. The premise is kinda fun, running around solving little domestic mysteries, I don’t think any given mystery will be too compelling and they’ll probably abandon the whole idea in an episode or two. The characters are fine, too, pretty fun, looking forward to seeing the second girl. Dunno if they’re aiming for legit relationship type stuff or what, I don’t really care much either way. Honestly I don’t even care much about the characters at this point. What I want from Kyoani is TRUE SoL. No characters. No plot. NO WAIT, there is a plot, but it’s only implied.

Okay okay:

So a typical episode would be like, just 22 minutes of like 30s-1min scenes of people just like, talking, walking about, doing their business. Sitting in class. Going to the store. Sitting in the park. Sometimes little comedic things. Sometimes little sad things. Gorgeous soundtrack and animation. Sometimes recurring characters but never like explicitly. Each episode would show about a day or so. I want this to exist man I think this would be perfect. All aesthetic. But uh I can see why studios might not be for it.

But Hyouka, yeah, can’t wait to see more of this. It’s funny to see people say stuff like “the mysteries are boring”, like that’s even the point. “I don’t like the music the keions play” etc. TOO BAD.

Rinne no Lagrange

Watched the rest of this, pretty happy with it overall. The ending was pretty anticlimactic and weird, I expected a big robot fight and didn’t get it, oh well. Parts of the plot didn’t really make any sense. I think the show might have been better if they changed one faction into obviously-bad angel/neuroi types and left KISS as like, the team rocket sorta semibad/semigood types. As it was right now we had emotional ambiguity and dramatics among the characters and the greater politics and it was kinda too much at times. I think it would’ve been okay if they were all actually properly complex and fleshed out, but the disparity of a complicated plot with really simple and really comedic plot elements is kinda jarring. Oh and when they have the odd noncomedic plot element that’ll throw you for a loop too. Like hey were those all manned robots at the end? Were Lan and Muginami just murdering people left and right? I was confused about many things.

That doesn’t matter though because the show was hilarious through and through and all the characters were fantastic and the animation was beautiful. It was essentially the antievangelion in terms of thematic development and character archetypes and such, that was cool. It was also often the antievangelion in that sometimes something would happen that was the exact opposite of how it happened on Eva, like the whole situation with Madoka being grounded. Madoka herself was also nearly miracle of universe tier as a character. Don’t really want to bother writing a whole lot about it ‘cause it does feel very unfinished at the moment and I know S2 and OVA etc are incoming.

Okay that’s all for now

I listened to The Money Store and I was very impressed, will likely talk about that more next post.