I‘m going to do something I’ve never done before and that I likely won’t do ever again. That is, recommend that you watch a video by Thunderf00t. That one, up there.
Because, bless his terrible little heart, he has pulled together a hilarious and informative mini-documentary on what you might call the Unmaking of The Sarkeesian Effect, filled with clips that remind us all just what complete fuckups and hypocrites would-be filmmakers Jordan Owen and Davis Auini really are. Especially Aurini.
The section in which Thunderf00t rips apart Aurini’s claims to be a brilliant bloody editor (who knows all the keyboard shortcuts) is particularly delicious.
Just ignore the bits where he actually goes after Sarkeesian herself; they’re fairly brief, in any case.
If you feel bad about giving Thunderf00t views, you might be able to assuage some of that guilt by giving me money. (How’s that for a segue!) Just another reminder that the We Hunted the Mammoth Pledge Drive is (still) on! Please consider donating through the PayPal button below. Thanks!
Or you could donate money to Ms. Sarkeesian. It’s all good.
QFT. Anyone who thinks that editing a feature-length documentary is “easy” has clearly never tried it themselves.
While it’s true that fiction features can be radically altered at the editing stage, in general they come with some kind of blueprint, and they’re almost invariably scripted in advance. Documentaries hardly ever are – in fact, the “script”, if there is one, is generally written after the initial rough cut has established a viable shape.
As for “relatively few cuts”, suppose your source material consists of two or three dozen interviews, each running between one or two hours? Deciding when (and why) to make these “relatively few cuts” is a massively time-consuming process in itself, not least because you will always have to sacrifice good stuff for the sake of not delivering something unwatchably (or, more pertinently, unsellably) overlong. A friend of mine is currently struggling with a seven-hour rough cut of a film that he knows will have to be under two hours to be commercially viable.
I just would like to thank Davis Aurini and Jordan Owen for their total ineptitude. I had a meeting yesterday with someone in order to try and get funding for a commercial idea. I felt really stressed out because what if my idea doesn’t work? But then I came back to find this post, and I spent the whole evening watching videos of these two squabbling and puffing themselves up. And now I feel much better about myself and my idea, because even if it doesn’t work, at least it will still be better than “The Sarkeesian Effect.”
My golden rule is never to big up anything I’ve done in public until it’s finished – or at least so far advanced that it’s obvious whether it’s going to be any good or not.
Even in a crowdfunding situation, the formula is “this is what we’re planning to do, these are the people behind it, and this is their track record”, not “this is going to be the most awesomest thing EVER”.
I am not now, nor have I ever been a fan of TF… but this was pretty damn good.
And re: Sarkeesian smiling ‘like a white person’? WTF??? What does that MEAN???
@Tracy
It means “Sarkeesian bad – I angry”.
I know, right?! I think I was struck more by just how bizarre it was, than how racist it was.
It also shows the weird creepy levels he’s taken this obsession too. He’s sitting around analyzing her smiles for fuck’s sake.
You’re right – it is creepy. And utterly baffling. “There she goes, smiling like someone from a suburb of Copenhagen! Oooh, but look now – her smile is definitely more downtown Damascus. Gotcha, fake whitey!” 0_0 wut
That bit was amazingly creepy and pointless. What is even the point? That she “pretends to be white” even though she’s not in order to gain credibility? Even if there was anything to that, newsflash; that isn’t exactly a new thing. The problem is with a system that only gives credibility to people who “act white,” not with the people who “act white” in order to regain some credibility they would have lost by “not being white”.
@Bringab
Re: TF00t & the Mt, Lion
Only body language DOESNT scare away lions. They simply do not tend to mess with humans. And IF a very desperate lion is going after a child or any other animal, body posturing is not at all proven to make any difference (if anything, the evidence is the opposite). So the fact that TF00t used an INCORRECT anecdotal, misunderstading of an encounter with an animal to suggest women should use body language to fend off assault is stupid in many, many, many ways.
Thunderf00t can actually make good videos if he wants to and he wasn’t always like this where seems to be anti-feminist. His really bad videos railing against feminism are actually fairly recent development compared to the entire lifetime of his channel on Youtube. To those people saying that none of his videos are worth watching, actually his science videos and his video series “Why do people laugh at creationists?” are worth watching although his anti-feminism videos aren’t.
It’s unfortunate that recently he’s been making more of those anti-feminism videos where he just shows himself to be a complete ass than the science videos that he used to make.
@Jono
Re-watching them in retrospect, even his WDPLAC videos aren’t that great. I found them entertaining in the early days of “YouTube atheism”, but compared to more sophisticated rebuttals, even those from YouTubers who were active around the same time (Potholer54, for instance), they aren’t nearly so impressive. He was okay when taking on professional apologists like Kent Hovind and Ray Comfort in scripted videos, but he also took the bat to misguided and deluded amateurs like VenomFangX and NephilimFree, often turning those into embarrassing public squabbles. And his unscripted debates are fist-gnawingly cringe-inducing.