What movie did we watch for Thanksgiving? "Boogie Nights." Appropriate? No. But we just felt like watching it. What a great film!
Checking in on the blog, I face up to the problem of the degradation of the comments caused by an influx of several categories of new readers. I realize I've got to be more vigilant and less tolerant, because the decline in quality is affecting our regular readers. Newcomers are welcome to participate, but I've got to uphold some standards or the comments will lose their value for everyone.
In particular, I'm not going to accept repetitious arguments, abusive language, and overblown accusations -- which seem to have become the style in the last few days. This is my place. I like debate and am ready to read criticism, but what has been going on lately has crossed the line, and I'm adopting a new, more activist form of supervision.
I will delete comments that offend my standards, and I will turn off comments on posts where the conversation is played out to the point where it is attracting too many deletable posts. You're welcome to practice your free speech on your own blogs. I intend to keep a civil dialogue on mine.
November 24, 2005
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22 comments:
Weird. It's like I'm on a slow blog to China.
At one point, I was just trying to trim back the end of a thread. Some not-so-bad individual posts might have gotten lumped together with the ones that were really bad, so don't take it personally. Some of the problem was repetition, not impoliteness. People continually demanding that I provide responses and then criticizing me for not taking orders -- I'm not going to live like that.
Yeah, talk about "Boogie Nights" -- so many great scenes in that movie. It's hard to take the whole thing in in one sitting.
Oh, there are so many terrific things to say about that movie. I saw it when it first came out in the theatre and a couple of times since on DVD. The screenplay was excellent; the direction and filming caught the time frame so well; and the performances! Well! In places it was hard to watch, but then, that was the point.
At the time, I was hopeful that its reception would encourage more movies of that type--meaning, adult-themed movies aimed at adults and produced in an adult way. I've mostly been disappointed, though.
As you've said before, I believe, most of the film output we get today and for lo, these many years, is really disappointing.
Re: Your new policy
I'm sorry that it's going to make more work for you, but I'm sure it will be worth it. Yours is a "destination blog" for a lot of us, and for compelling reasons. So, snaps for you and I hope we all cooperate.
Iam: It might actually be less work, actually. I always get all the posts as email, so I don't need to go looking for them. Leaving them up, especially when people are repeatedly nagging me to do something (like apologize for some bogus offense like quoting something that proves embarrassing) can be troubling.
As long as SquismTM comments are still allowed, I'm good.
(and lengthy parenthetical asides, that may or may not be on topic, cause that really is my commenting life's blood. Which reminds me, Boogie Nights was a damn good film, probably Paul Anderson's best film (not to be confused with Paul Anderson who doesn't have a best film))
and I disagree with wildaboutharrie, they had to show what made Dirk Diggler famous at some point, though instead of teasing about it for the whole film they could have been up front and gotten the reveal out of the way early.
And nothing says Thanksgiving more than a sprawling Altmanesque look at the life and times of the denizens of Porn Valley at the end of the filmed porn era.
(plus you have that great scene with Night Ranger playing in the background, woohoo!)
Just asked my husband if he's ever thought of me, or see me as, a "fawning sycophant" who says things because she wants to make people "feel all safe and adored" for God knows what purpose.
"Guffaw"!!!
Then he gave me that little "As if. I wish." look that he gives me quite often ... and kept laughing.
I know he's thinking, "From your mouth to God's ear!"
Hah! Pray away, pardner!
Seen, damnit, seen. Has anybody else noticed that going to a laptop from a desktop has dramatically degraded their typing skills? And caused more typos?
Pflslhfdlkjafgl;kjs.
Dogtown: The Pajamas people themselves are saying the same thing about themselves today. I guess they are being mean-spirited too. Get with it. The site is pathetic and they all know it. But it's damned touching of you to feel sorry for those guys.
...It's hard to take the whole thing in in one sitting...
Wait - Are you talking about the movie itself or about Dirk Diggler?
Ann:
Good new policy.
XWL
I guess I will have to see Boogie Nights, since P.T. Anderson is my favorite director based on Magnoliaalone. But I am willing to wager that Magnolia is the deeper, more profound film, all about judgment and being set free from oppressors. The frogs, well, you have to remember when it last rained frogs, and what happened soon after that.
Indeed that frogfall immediately shot me back into ancient Egypt, as Pharaoh, with Moses standing before me saying, "Let my children go". I felt that moment. Magnolia itself is all about children being set free from oppressors, and judgment on those oppressors. Also, it has a message about how every little thing we say or do impacts other events and people, and those things that often look accidental or coincidental have a deep causal connection.
Like, whoda thunk that one comment about pus would ultimately lead to a new policy on Althouse and dogtown changing his reading habits? What do pus and dogtown's reading list have in common on their own? Nothing.
Our lives ripple and shake, sometimes to unknown ultimate effect.
Prof. A.
I'm very glad to hear about the new policy. I have noticed a change for the worse in the past few weeks. (And I'm not the only one. I've seen comments on other blog's mentioning the melee...)
At the same time, and this is just me spitballing, but knowing your readership has changed may indicate a little more self-censorship in terms of presentation. I'm not suggesting any alteration to underlying messages or a change in tone, because they are what make you who you are, but rather making sure you aren't unintentionally feeding the larger swarm of trolls with slightly wayward language.
Leon,
She didn't. Her original joke wasn't exactly funny, but it was well short of that particular bodily conflation. She was quoting a comment to make a point. Whether said point was either made or taken is an open question (actually, not its not, but still...)
Finn: regarding Magnolia, I found it more profound while watching than I did in retrospect, sometimes what seems deep at first glance is just hardcore navel gazing (but that film had lots of amazing performances, stunning monologues and dialogue, and a fantastic score (the songs formed the nucleus from which the film was arranged)). I'm sure we can agree to disagree though, with film preferences there is no right or wrong.
And a thought crossed my mind recently about this blog.
It's the Velvet Underground of blogs. Not the biggest, not always the best, but well written, inventive, artistic and incisive. Plus the other distinguishing feature about the Velvet Underground was that it was said of them that while they were together they didn't sell more than 10,000 records, but every record they sold lead to a band being form.
I think Prof. Althouse's style of discourse has influenced a lot of her audience and I notice many of the frequent commenters are also bloggers using blogger.com with minima and blogging the same mix of personal, political, observational, etc.. Many of these people probably had blogs before they came here but I suspect that this blog and the community of commenters has shaped how they approach blogging and how they choose to write on their own blogs. At least that is the case for me.
(and any leftover lurkers, try and keep the brown-nose comments to yourself, not really very constructive)
Well, Pooh, she at one point demanded that I explain why I felt she'd mischaracterized and misquoted me, quite demandingly. I did, with links and details, she didn't respond.
I dunno. But after a while, I as a layman have to start to wonder if her characterizations of the legal arguments are as trustworthy as some of her other arguments have been.
For folks who wonder what's the "baldfaced misrepresentation" Leon's referring to, check the update in this. The Balloon Juice guy believes I lied by writing about the Thanksgiving parade based on a press report. I wasn't watching the parade on TV!
XWL: Thanks. And I love the Velvet Underground.
Comment sections can be overtaken by extremists pretty quickly, as occurred here. Verbose pedants and intellectual nihilists aim their best efforts at bullying those who disagree with them. Moderates quickly disengage, knowing that such interactions start with seeming civility, but soon decay into namecalling and seeing who can be the most over-the-top.
It's somewhat fascinating to watch fellow humans out-do each other in 6th-grade-level mean and gross-out verbal sparring, but like the Jerry Springer show, initial interest in the sordid turns quickly to horror.
The funniest posts (though unintentionally so) are the demands that Althouse reply with the answer that agrees with their view. Attempts at providing "proof" that an opinion is wrong would be even funnier, if it weren't posted a kajillion times, like some toddler tugging at Mom's hem demanding Mom-mom-mom-mom-mom-mom until you screeeam. And finally, the least intelligent take your post, insert a noun that describes you or your beliefs, and tries to "turn it around," but ends up being just a hackneyed "I know you are, but what am I" snore.
Anyway.
I'll have to admit that I am jealous of people who enjoyed Boogie Nights, just like I am jealous of people who like baseball. They seem to really have gotten something out of that film that I don't ken. It made me feel empty and sad, mostly, and I don't think I could watch it again. Since real life too often replicates that, I veer towards other genres.
Slocum: "South Park" is a brilliant satire, made by comic geniuses, who choose their targets well. Other folks just talking like the "South Park" kids? Not quite the same!
Pogo: Well put.
But Leon, I didn't "accuse the people liveblogging the event of mocking someone's injury." I noted they were live-blogging when an accident occurred, recorded the series of jokes, and said "Yikes." Then Jeff (of Protein Wisdom) accused me of calling him a "MONSTER" and so on. That was a bizarre overreaction, which I'm now perceiving, along with your repeated comments, as a smear campaign intended to intimidate me and, by example, anyone else who dares to mock the Pajama entity.
A better response to my post would have been for them to append to the live-blog a statement that live-blogging is good, but there are risks, and afterwards when they saw the news reports, they felt bad about the jokes, and that they are in fact sympathetic to the woman and the girl who were injured.
The path Jeff chose, attacking me, hounding me on my blog and his, showed preoccupation with his own mosquito bite of injury. Every time he whined about how offended he was that I dared to criticize them, it drew attention, by contrast, to the failure to show any concern for the injured woman and girl.
Yay to the new comments policy from me, too. I'm tired of all the people writing in to tell how much they don't like this blog. Okay then. Stop reading it, and get the heck out of the pool.
I like the comments section here, and while I'm interested in new people chiming in, I'm tired of the repetition and trollish comments. Makes it hard to wade through.
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