S'up

[cleolinda]

Hm. A couple of 15M-related things today:

1) I got a comment on the HBP parody itself that was deleted before I had a chance to answer it (remember, all comments--and edits to those comments--go to my email), and it was:

What was the last movie you really enjoyed watching in theaters?
the ugly truth :')

I'm not sure how tongue-in-cheek the question was intended to be, but for the record--I pretty much enjoy everything on some level or other--I love Van Helsing, for God's sake, and even The Happening was entertainingly awful. But then, my enjoyment is not restricted only to movies that are actually good (neither of those were). And I don't get out to see as many movies in the theater as I'd like, so I generally don't go unless I'm absolutely sure I want to see it (and sometimes I don't get to go even then). So this year, I've enjoyed every single movie I saw (and thought all of them were genuinely good): Coraline, Watchmen, Star Trek (twice), Up (twice), and now Half-Blood Prince. (Maybe I saw something else? If I did, I don't remember.)

The thing is, I'm not going to waste, on average, 5000 words (HBP clocked in at a very tight 3900, of which I am extremely proud) on something I did not feel any enjoyment for. Yeah, it's easier if the movie is bad, but it's also easier for me if it's a fantasy/sci-fi movie or something historical with swords, because they usually stumble over the same tropes every time. I did Lord of the Rings, for God's sake, and that's one of my top favorites (the three taken as a whole) ever. It's really not dependent on quality at all. So the idea that I sit down in a theater with the intention of grousing through everything I see is... mistaken, to say the least.

2) Here's what happens when you post the Breaking Dawn recaps in late August and a Fifteen Minutes in November, get a whole ton of new readers, but then drastically reduce your posting frequency due to depression:

The year by month

(It's not that people abandoned me or anything; it's that you can't get hits if you don't post things to get hits on.)


Here's what happens when you finally post another Fifteen Minutes eight months later:

The month of July

Yeah. So... there's that.


ETA: Just coming in over the wire, supposed pics of the Volturi in New Moon.

Comments

[cupcakery.livejournal.com]

It's like a herd of locusts.

Internet-having locusts.

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

Hey, people are more than welcome to come and... locust on everything? IDK.

[wumbawoman.livejournal.com]

1.4 million??

Man, that's got to be a little.... I don't know.... wow!

[greyduck.livejournal.com]

It's sad how much a small bump in my Google Analytics report for the webcomic (or the anime forum, for that matter) can cheer me up... which is almost apropos of nothing, but I know what looking at the traffic graphs can do for your outlook on life, I guess I'm sayin'.

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I try to look at the stats as little as possible, just for my own sanity. But when you know, logically, there's got to be a bump, sometimes I go peek.

[emmaorgana.livejournal.com]

Isn't part of the joy of loving something, making fun of it?

It is for me at least. :D

[nicolars.livejournal.com]

I usually won't bother to make fun of things I dislike -- why even waste time talking or thinking about things you hate?

[darth-snarky.livejournal.com]

I think people (esp. on the internet) tend to readily confuse snarking on something and hating on something. It goes both ways--someone not realizing you might write a parody of a movie you actually enjoyed, or people posting downright vitriolic comments and trying to pass them off as snark.

Of course, there's always the group that just has no sense of humor, or any sense at all. (I mean, I think you've mentioned before how much work m15m are to do, it's not hard to figure out from that, that if you truly loathed something, you wouldn't put the [unpaid] effort in.)

Also, unrelated question re: the graphs--what's the difference between the yellow and orange bits? Is the yellow the number of unique visitors, and the orange covers the total number of visits, or something else?

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

Right, unique visitors vs. actual page hits.

[apocalypsos.livejournal.com]

"Entertainingly awful" are some of my favorite movies. I mean, for crying out loud, my favorite genre is disaster movies. They don't make good disaster movies, for heaven's sake, so it's a choice between entertainingly bad or just bad.

I have high hopes for 2012 being cheesetasticly amazing. Hell, Knowing was a terrible movie but my GOD, did I have fun watching it.

[onlyonechoice.livejournal.com]

*laughs* I love disaster movies too - The Day After Tomorrow was lovely in its badness. How do you outrun COLD???

[queenanthai.livejournal.com]

Woman, you should see what you do to the Made Of Fail hits. SERIOUSLY. EVERY TIME. IT'S LIKE THEY ONLY LOVE US FOR YOU OR SOMETHING.

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

Aw! I'm just a novelty. Don't you pick up some regulars every time I do guest, though?

[prncssaurora.livejournal.com]

24 hours later, and I am still laughing at the GQMF.

Also I feel that Marcus is trying to drink my soul and it's making me uncomfortable, so thanks for that.

[plazmah.livejournal.com]

People must mix up your variety of snark with the snark of someone like Yahtzee at Zero Punctuation, who seems to genuinely hate 98% of everything he reviews. :P

[shanya01.livejournal.com]

That's kind of funny. A friend of mine really liked the Twilight series (I know, I know) and I pointed her at your recaps. She said she didn't want to read them because she'd probably just get upset.

Then she read the last book and as she was all WTF and upset anyway, she decided to read your links. She's still quoting your best lines to me in pretty much every email.

The thing was, it was clear to her that you understood that part of her who couldn't stop reading and that you didn't blindly hate it. I'm not saying you are a fan - but you clearly respected that there was something compelling about it all even while it was making you scream in annoyance.

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

Aw, bless. And yeah, anyone who goes around all "ALICE IS AWESOME" 24/7 is probably not the most shining example of a hater.

[percysowner.livejournal.com]

I adored Coraline and although I also adore your 15 minute reviews, I'm just as glad you left that one alone, although I am sure I would have loved it, I want to keep Coraline in my own little world, where it is simply one of the most delightful movies I have seen.

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

Well, I wasn't planning on doing that one anyway--it was so genuinely clever that I don't think there would have been much for me to do.

[kauricat.livejournal.com]

I'm wondering if someone had a window open to your page and was trying to respond to something else from another window (this really does sound like a Meme question). The Ugly Truth is a Gerard Butler movie in theaters right now, so I think they were referencing that instead of asking you for the ugly truth about which movie you liked.

And then, realizing what a mistake they'd made, they deleted it without comment.

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I thought "the ugly truth" was an interesting coincidence on that part, but at the same time I've had so many people ask, "Do you actually LIKE movies?" that I thought I'd run with it.

[duosiceprincess.livejournal.com]

Oh little vampire Dakota Fanning is like a doll of herself! Rather spot-on for Jane, I suppose. God Michael Sheen, I WANT TO LOVE YOU, WHY DO YOU KEEP MAKING ME HATE YOU BABY!?! I hope puberty catches up with that last kid's face, he's had those round cheeks in everything I've seen him in.

[nicolars.livejournal.com]

I am still trying to get over poor Jamie Campbell Bowers. He was so adorable in Sweeney Todd, but they have made him look like some hideously fug Lucius Malfoy wannabe. I hope he goes back to looking like his normal self as Grindelwald.

[trillianastra.livejournal.com]

About the Volturi pics... well, they got Christopher Heyerdahl as Marcus. This both *squee* and NOT GOOD, because CH has this effect on me where he gives me warm fuzzy feelings and turns my brain to mush just by *talking*.

Which means I may have to actually go spend money on New Moon. Dammit.

[foresthouse.livejournal.com]

Your visual aids cracked me up. What;s the red vs. yellow, though?

Well, I'm your loyal reader no matter what. :) (Except when I have the flu, in which case I am your loyal skimmer or put-aside-for-later reader I guess. Heh. Still ucky. SAD.)

P.S. You know, I believe you are the only LJer to be actually featured by name in one of my icons. Don't you feel special? Hee.

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

Unique visitors vs. actual page hits from those visitors.

(Hee, yes.)

[--kali--.livejournal.com]

I saw the Happening for the first time last weekend. Oh My.

[angeleyesjg24.livejournal.com]

See, I always go into your reviews with the assumption that, for the most part, you enjoy the movies you're parodying. I feel that the definitely come from a place of love, but willingness to point out flaws. It genuinely surprises me when people think that you didn't like what you are parodying. I've always gotten the sense that you genuinely enjoy those movies.

In other words HBP in 15m was BRILLIANT. Easily my favorite.

[piccgirl.livejournal.com]

Wow-lovin' the visual aids. (not sarcastic)

I'm one of those people who stumbled across you somewhere in the internetz (maybe ravelry? I don't remember) and then stayed. I've just been lurking for... a long time now. I finally actually got my own lj account.

re:Volturi. They look like creepy wax figures. Emphasis on wax. And creepy. :P

[chibimitch.livejournal.com]

The 1st 3 are supposed to look waxy (or like onion skin, depending on what part of the book you're reading...). So it's actually spot on.
I think they look creepy, too, and not in a vampire way at all.

[lady-moriel.livejournal.com]

Um...is there something about the word "parody" that people don't get? That means, you know, snarking on it, which you can totally do whether you like it or not. You can't even write something like this and make it funny if you're not making fun of it...and for whatever it's worth, I've read similar parodies that have absolutely nothing remotely positive to say about the movie in question (those do make me wonder why the person spent so much time/effort on something they didn't like), which you pretty much always do, except with stuff like The Happening which doesn't deserve it.

Plus it works on kind of the same principle as Zero Punctuation (http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation)--nobody, Yahtzee included, likes it when he has mostly good things to say about a game, because that's no fun for anyone. :p

[azuresquirrel.livejournal.com]

Oh yes. It amuses me when people see parodies and act like making jokes about something means thay hate it and want it to die. :)

I've read similar parodies that have absolutely nothing remotely positive to say about the movie in question

I've read such things as well, and I find them far less funny than Cleo's stuff. Cleo's like "Hay guys, let's make jokes about the movie we like that are fun but also admittedly not perfect and ridiculous!" Whereas many people who try to do something similar end up giving off the feeling of "I hated this movie because they left out A/B/C/LOBSTER from the source material so I'm going to try to make fun of it so more people will hate it too!" Which. . . strikes me as an odd and less fun way to do things. *shrug*

[dragonsblog.livejournal.com]

I was all, "Hey, cool, HBP in 15m, neat" *open page*. "Wait a minute, I haven't seen the movie yet! Durrrr." *closes page*

[rina2o6.livejournal.com]

Perhaps that commenter is stating that the last movie they enjoyed in theaters is The Ugly Truth and would like to know yours? Eh who knows

[constancedh.livejournal.com]

That sounds pretty logical... I mean we can't know for sure but that makes the most sense to me.

[violatekate.livejournal.com]

The Volturi pictures were delted. I think they were posted here, too:
http://www.twifans.com/profiles/blogs/a-preview-volturi

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I saved them--probably don't need to repost them, though, unless I want Summit on my ass.

[lesaubergines.livejournal.com]

I enjoyed all the movies I saw this year too, high five!

[syustat71605.livejournal.com]

Just curious, but do you get a hit if we view your journal through our friends page, or just if we actually log on to your actual journal? Because I only ever view it on my F-list.

Also, New Moon Comic Con scenes (http://community.livejournal.com/twilight_addict/831038.html), in case you haven't seen them yet.

[syustat71605.livejournal.com]

yes, over use of the word 'actual'... what are you gonna do?

[jubilantia.livejournal.com]

Dang, the bandwidth limit on the Volturi pictures has been exceeded.

I'll never forget reading someone's scene by scene, almost second by second, diatribe on Eragon. In this case, I got a distinct hateful miasma leaking from this person's experience of the movie. Mind, I couldn't stop reading it- trainwreck, couldn't look away, etc. But, I couldn't help thinking of your picture reaction to the movie, and how accurately you lampooned it from just the elves' viewpoint, and how much happier it made me than the other person's hateful slog. Comparing the two, I just don't see how anyone could think that you hate the things you write about. Maybe it's just because I read your whole journal- context. Context must be the answer, and yet I still feel no hate.

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

Yeah... there's a reason I never wrote more about Eragon than that, let's put it that way.