So the gist of this is "so what if it's narrative is sophomoric, it's characters stock archetypes, and the direction bizarre, I agree with the social and political messages and that's all that matters"?

So you're saying Rotten Tomatoes is incorrect, and that Kirk Cameron's "Saving Christmas" is actually good?

I also find it an odd review, because it seems to be lambasting other movies for doing things the Wachowski's are quite guilty of in other movies, especially The Matrix Trilogy (the "power of love" and all that).

I also don't think they characterize the Marvel movies fairly, unless they're confusing the ones from Marvel/Disney with the ones from Fox and Sony (which blow goats). Mar/Dis movies are fun, but they make sure to have enough seriousness in their stories that they don't become complete parodies or just silly FX-fests for no good reason. They cite Nolan as being part of the problem with things being too gritty, but I'd say that if the last two Dark Knight movies were about grittiness, they failed, almost becoming campy. Not to mention Bale's "Bat Voice" which drives me up a goddam wall.*

I dunno. They liked this movie, and good for them, but their analysis doesn't seem to hold up well.

* Were I obscenely wealthy, I'd so pay Kevin Conroy to re-record all of Christian Bale's dialog... hell, ALL Batman dialog for EVERY Batman movie, even the Adam West ones, just because he brings such gravitas to the role. If I had any money left after that, I'd kidnap Mark Hamill to do the same for the Joker.

Get a kickstarter for the redubbing. You might have something there.
I didn't like the movie because the cinematography is crap, the story didn't engage me, I never identified with any character and although the CG was fine it isn't anything I haven't seen. I don't go to a movie for CG so it was a movie I'm never going to see again. However I went because my wife really wanted to see it. I had very low exceptions for it and it was the movie I thought it was going to be.

If you're going to post your pals' movie review it should at least be funny or ironic.

Note to steele- I guess upmodding every post is a nice way to encourage posting, but doesn't it also kind of make the site a little like the Special Olympics?

Which would you prefer, the special olympics or an empty stadium?

This month and last we've gone full 24 hour periods without a single post. Feel free to downmod, that's what they're there for. But a 'lonely, futile campaign for postworthiness' is going to continue to be futile unless you are providing a steady stream of postworthy examples.

Personally I wouldn't mind a front page filled with a mixture of +10s and -10s because at least it would show that people are trying. Hell of a lot better than a max # of posts per day in the single digits... If we're lucky.

Thing is, there isn't really a choice between the special olympics or an empty stadium- you can easily end up with both. Just sayin' quality is as important-maybe more important- as quantity. I, for one, would keep checking back and contributing to even a sparse trickle of interesting, content-rich posts. A steady stream of navel-gazing mundanity however will result in just a polite, self-involved community of same-old same-old.
But then again, I'm just a freeloading griper pining for a long-lost forum of diversity and irreverence. :(

edit- just to be clear, my petulant observation should in no way detract from the amazing job you've done trying to revive and (at least technically) invigorate the old SE. Obviously this site is its own, organic being- and if that being happens to evolve into something resembling a masturbatory literary forum, c'est la vie.

For a site like this content quite literally is king. Without content there is no conversation, no community. What you are describing is basically the slow death that SE community has been experiencing for years. Because while you would be happy with the occasional trickle of interesting (a subjective concept, btw) content-rich posts, when people show up to a site that hasn't been updated on a regular basis it makes them think that no one else is showing up. Which instead of them making a post to help, often leads them to showing up less and less until they don't show up at all. Which leads to even less posting and less conversations.

Once upon a time, this community posted about everything. It was basically an amalgam of google news, porn caches, and the latest (cutting-motherfucking-edge!) of the viral trends. And it was amazing. You could refresh the front page and have a new post every few minutes. Which led to conversations, new users, upmods, downmods, arguments, trolls, dramatic self imposed exiles, sockpuppets, hacking, banning. It was fucking glorious!

We are never going to get anywhere near that point ever again with the mindset of being afraid to post and settling for a sparse trickle of posts. It's not fucking possible, all that lies down that road is the eventual death of the community.

And thank you for the kind words, I do appreciate it, but when it all comes down to it the biggest hurdle I'm facing isn't a technical aspect, it's the mindsets that's gotten us here.

On the brightside, it's almost fun time.

I guess my issue is this question over content with broad interest or appeal, and content that's relevant to a very small, specialized community. In my posts I try to aim for the former (OK, I assumed more folks were into naked hippies. Who knew?).
But if we end up with more with the latter- well what you'll end up with is a very small, specialized community. I've always considered the mod system as quality control- but if everything gets an upmod just for posting and everyone else is too polite to downmod there goes your quality. So goddamnit I will counter your token upmods where appropriate because somebody's gotta do it.

And you're free to do so ;)

If we encourage people to post whatever for a while to build ourselves up again we can have a wide variety of posts to choose from where we can all upmod and downmod them at our leisure. Who's to say that we can't have a large community built from people with various small specialized interests? That's basically how it used to be. Not everyone is going to like everything, but that shouldn't stop us from trying to have a wide variety of posts to explore and converse over.

Fuck broad appeal. You know what has broad appeal? Celebrity gossip, sports, and poorly researched pop science articles. If I wanted to see that shit I'd make friends with a boring person on Facebook. If anything, I come to SE to get AWAY from content with broad appeal.

I don't want to hear what you think most people will find interesting, I want to hear what YOU (and anyone else who posts) think is interesting. That won't lead to a specialized community because we all have different specialties.

Sorry, I think you misunderstand exactly what I mean by 'broad appeal'.
By 'broad appeal', I mean porn.

I'm not sure what you mean by porn. Can you post some examples?

I have tried. Last effort was met with tepid response and derisive comments about the 'smell'.
Obviously this is a sensitive crowd.

That wasn't porn. That was a photo essay about hippies. I mean something intended to arouse a prurient interest. This is a desensitized crowd.

Lol, I just looked at your profile :D

Hi, mechanical contrivance!

Well it passed my fap test. But of course I'm a little partial to hirsute ladies.

There's plenty of hairy porn out there. If you want, curate a collection of the best stuff and post it.

Hey thanks for the advice!

sanepride: 46 entries posted, 4 NSFW/porn/nekkid content (yes, I'm including the naked hippy post goddamnit).

My point is the naked hippie thing isn't porn. Actual porn would be better received, especially a well curated collection.

Thanks again for your valuable input.

"It was fucking glorious!" I imagined you as Willam Dafoe in Boondock Saints while reading this.

In my mind a certain creeping element of herd mentality on a variety of issues kept many posts quickly down-modded and some users feeling alienated, some of which left SE. This perhaps is no-one's fault in particular, but the result of a harder to pin down effect seen in online communities. I visit Reddit a lot, and I see this happen all the time, where there is a noticeable unspoken agreement of how the majority feels about certain issues and topics. I can see why many who consistently got -10s here on SE got tired of it. Personally I'd much rather still have them around causing trouble then to have a bland front page. I'm sad to say, I only visit SE about once or twice a week now.

So how to move forward? The site needs a big change. A completely new codebase. I've offered my designs and help on this a couple times. A multicolumn view that has columns for images and videos would make the front page much more engaging. Of course they are categorized and one of the categories is porn. The 2257 thing... I just don't see how millions of tumblr blogs and other sites can do without it but we have to stifle our site because of it.

Esssir. Porn. the Porn will bring back the people, and with it, the bankers, the shop keeps and gosh dang it we'll rebuild this town!

I don't expect you to take all that on and the logistics of actually doing this is maybe too much to take on for a loose knit rag tag group of drifters such as ourselves. I can offer to design and code a responsive front end design, but I'd need to work with someone to really make it shine, and a great backend person, or a pre made CMS would be essential.

I saw it too. I do have a couple ideas on how to counteract the herd mentality. We'll see what happens.

A new codebase is coming. The reason I started with upgrading the old version first was because I didn't quite know where we stood as a site and the people of this site are often very adverse to change. So rather than start things off fresh I let people become accustomed to some of the features I've added in an environment they're familiar with. I've got maybe one or two more features before I lock this codebase down as version 1 and start the beta for v2.

The 2257 issue isn't up for debate. It's the law and I'm not putting my ass or anybody else's on the line for it. Not to mention the cost increase that would come from putting the site with a hosting company that would be okay with porn on our servers. We skate a thin line now and I'm fine with people posting links to porn. Anything beyond that isn't happening.

Besides, I don't know if you've noticed but we've had porn posts and they didn't get nearly the response the posters were hoping for.

When the time comes I may end up taking you up on design, as it's not really my forte, but as I've been adding features to the old codebase I have been doing so with plans for the future in mind. Been looking forward to quite a bit actually ;)

Ha, exactly. You the man, keep up the good work.

Thank you. Will do.

Well, I found it to be funny, insightful, well written, and unique. Although I love and use sites like rotten tomatoes often they, like the oscars, promote the mean average of taste. I find it refreshing for someone to proclaim their love for something as goofy and schlocky as Jupiter ascending. I also like their other reviews and wanted to share.

Fair enough, nothing against you or your friends, good for them for putting their views out there. I'm just fighting a very lonely, probably futile campaign for postworthiness, and hey- somebody's gotta take those downmods out for a little fresh air every now and then. Otherwise, why even have them?

Shit movie. The W brother/sister need to be told "no" to dumb ideas, and I assume after this bomb, that will happen. They just seem to not care if there are likable elements in their movies. Yes--I liked Cloud Atlas, but Jeezuz this movie. No heart, laugh-out-loud horrible dialogue, no characters you root for, no intriguing plot, so much lore added in that you can never stop to explore the world. These points are the things that make something like Guardians a much better movie, even though by most accounts, Jupiter is more visually striking film.