Hey, Overthinkers. I know I’m a little late with the Open Thread this week. (To tell the truth, not everyone here at the OTI-dome is convinced we need Open Threads now that we have the forums, but I’m not sure they need to go the way of the vinyl album just yet. What do you think? It’s your Open Thread, after all…
Of course, the big pop culture news this week is the return of Cougar Town!!!
Classy!
OK, kidding. Sort of. I’ve watched it, and—though I don’t want to sound like Abed here—it’s a pretty consistently funny satyrical dysfunctional family sitcom. Search your memory: Can you think of as decent a show that had as terrible a name? Leave it in the comments, because I’d like to hear it.
At the box office, this week’s new releases continue the 2012 trend of containing at least one movie I have heard nothing about. I guess I’m not really in the demo for The Secret World of Arrietty, so it’s not as shocking as when I knew nothing about The Grey, but still, maybe I’m getting old, because I used to feel better informed. Rounding out the weekend we have Ghost Rider 2 and action/spy/romantic comedy This Means War.
Are you watching any of the mid-season replacements? Can you explain to me what the hell an “Arrietty” is, and why I’d want to understand one’s secret world? Sound of on this, or any other, topic, for this is your… Open Thread.
I’m not sure if you’re being facetious, but Arrietty is The Borrowers? Like, British children’s book from 1950?
The Grey has had a trailer in every movie I’ve seen recently (not many) so I can tell you it’s a high concept movie about Liam Neeson vs. wolves. I think it’s an action/suspense movie. To steal a joke, I wish it were a buddy cop movie where Liam Neeson’s the bad cop and his partner the wolf is the good cop.
“it’s a pretty consistently funny satyrical dysfunctional family sitcom”
It has satyrs? Is it like the proposed remake of The Munsters?
Satyrs and cougars: True Blood, yuppie edition. Weird sex guaranteed every episode.
Wierd sex as in wierd gender or wierd nice nice?
I miss Perich’s open threads. They had a certain je ne sais quoi that I feel we’ve somehow lost.
Wrather was the original, though.
It’s like how Roger Moore wasn’t the first to play James Bond, but he gave us the tropes and characteristics that we expect from the platonic-ideal-of-Bond now. Pierre Menard may have written both the original Casino Royale and the first Open Thread, but I’ll (completely unnecessarily) defend Roger Moore when it comes to the classics.
I don’t care what you say, Gab, I think John Perich is a talented writer.
I too think John Perich is a very talented writer, as well as a smart individual, a decent and honorable man, a veteran in the ways of love, and an outlaw in Peru. And he has taken the open threads to a dizzying height of prose composition whose aesthetic and linguistic accomplishments I can only dream of someday matching.
It’s just that we share responsibilities at the site, and sometimes it’s necessary or good to shake things up.
Gab, you are very kind to remember my old, original days of the open thread. And Pasteur, I hope one day to impress you with a certain je ne sais quoi all my own.
I guess I knew about the new Miyazaki film a while ago… but because I love all of his movies. So I kind of harp on any mention of him in the movie blog(s) I frequent.
Oh, and keep the Open Threads. Please…?
I’m for the keeping of Open Threads. Forums are a dark maze as far as I’m concerned, although now that OTI has them, I suppose I’ll have to give them another chance.
I just hope that the trend continues in which the person writing the open thread brings up whether or not they are still needed and then several comments are devoted to saying that the open thread should be kept alive.
All bloggers are fundamentally insecure, and need constant approval to keep writing. That’s why we have a blog.
(That was a joke, in case you didn’t know. There are many benefits to writing online, but the Internet is a relentless ego-destroying machine, so constant approval isn’t one of them.)
Went to see Secret Life of Arrietty today. I love Miyazaki films and even though he didn’t direct it, it had the same feeling (and beautiful animation) as Kiki’s Delivery Service and Totoro. Like in a lot of his movies, the world of the story seems whimsically caught between East and West and between the past and the present. A character wrote notes in English, but read books in Japanese. One character had a cell phone and another used a rotary phone to make a call. The setting seemed pretty Japanese (to me anyway), but the story, as Spankminister said above, is English. Not sure where I’m going with this, but it’s one of the things I really love about these Studio Ghibli (specifically, Miyazaki) films. I guess Totoro feels more Japanese, but Kiki’s Delivery Service seems equally caught between worlds. And then there’s Porco Rosso, which just throws a wrench in everything.
Oh yeah, the French? I mean, wow. Porco Rosso doesn’t get the attention it deserves. And yeah, I agree wholeheartedly, anything Miyazaki puts his hands on is great for making you not realize- or care– where it’s set.
I have half of it memorized, but Howl’s Moving Castle still makes me sniffle. I haven’t seen Spirited Away quite as many times, but that one also gets me really emotional.
Open threads might allow for more serendipitous discoveries for people who want that, but forums help categorize things better for users who mainly want to talk about comics or film or something specific. The only other advantage of open threads I can think of are that it acts as a reminder to people who might not visit the forums. I’d suggest replacing the open threads with occasional announcements highlighting one or two new conversations on the forum. “Miyazaki on the forum” might attract my attention, or some people’s attention, better than “Yet another open thread.”
OOOh, if people really prefer the serendipity of open threads, there’s probably some way to create a link that takes users to a random discussion on the forum. Now there’s no advantage I can think of. Open threads, we hardly knew ye. kthxby
I like the open threads because, if we’re thinking about Overthinking It as a community, it lets me know what’s going on in the community. Forums are pretty specialized and don’t give me a view of the whole conversation as easily. You may say I could just look at the titles of the forums, but the other confusing thing about forums is that they stay up long after people have stopped using them, or people may get way off topic. An open thread, as a weekly thing, gives me a better picture of what’s happening now. Although, I guess a forum for “discussion of recent pop culture” or something, with a thread for each week, would serve roughly the same purpose.
It seems to me that both open threads and forums serve a specific purpose and a specific niche. Both serve to keep the community active, so they’te both good things.
I don’t know wordpress at all but Wrather definitely knows what he’s doing with web design… seems like he could find a nice way of melding the two.
For example:
I know that the comment threads get closed down after (3 ?) weeks I’m assuming that’s at least partially automated.
Could do something as simple as creating a forum post when the open thread get’s closed and linking to it “To continue this discussion…”
On the more complex side there are a whole wide range of options… maybe even mirroring thread posts into the forum in some way and then at the 3 week point clicking the open thread link takes you directly to the forum thread.
There are some great ideas in there—I like directing readers to the OTI forum when comments are closed.
(that was meant as a reply to Deidzoeb. apparently I have a hard time figuring out any of this.)
On the “Shows with a Terrible Name” front, I think “Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place” takes the cake—though I don’t know if it was a good show, since I never watched it.
The idea is to calculate a ratio of show’s goodness to title’s badness, with the theoretically perfect, badly named show scoring infinity (1/0) and the theoretically terrible, well named show scoring 0 (0/1). There are likely problems with that formula; mathematicians and economists, have at it!
In that rubric, would there be a quantifiable difference between a theoretically terrible, well named show and a theoretically terrible, median-well named show? (0/1 = 0/.5?)
at X+1/Y+1 (where X is content quality and Y is title quality), we sadly lose the 1/0 effect. A perfect, perfectly named show becomes a 1, as does a terrible, terribly named show? The best, worst-named show comes in at a much less exciting “2”.
This is a can of worms!
Wrather’s formula is fine as long as you don’t actually assign scores of zero. Which actually makes sense, because you can always have a worse title. “Two Guys, a Girl, and a Pizza Place” is a bad title, but it’s got nothing on “Two Guys, a Girl, and a Twitter Feed.”
Actually having recently rewatched “Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place” your title would work for the reunion movie or reboot. Throughout the series the two guys are having trouble deciding what they want to do with their lives and try a half dozen careers. By the end of the series one chooses premed and the other chooses to be a fireman.
Nowadays they’d choose social media.
This just in! John Perich asks why he reads comment threads on pop culture blogs other than this one — can our combined minds come up with a satisfactory answer to this conundrum?