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You are here: Home / Popular Culture / Gamer Dork / Late Night Open Thread: Crowdsourcing

Late Night Open Thread: Crowdsourcing

by Anne Laurie|  March 5, 20151:40 am| 29 Comments

This post is in: Gamer Dork, Open Threads, Popular Culture, Clown Shoes

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The winning eBay bid for Rob Ford's pajama pants was $660 #TOpoli pic.twitter.com/hGr5K9NYz2

— Don Peat (@reporterdonpeat) March 4, 2015

Just in case the Blogmaster needs ideas, I guess. The National Post explains:

Rob Ford is at least $23,000 richer after auctioning off “memorabilia” from his tumultuous time as Toronto mayor, but experts say budding Ford collectors may have just made a bad investment.

“Everyone wants a piece of it while it’s hot, and in three, four years, people are going to be saying ‘Rob Who?’ —that’s my feeling,” said Mike Rice, a British Columbia-based specialist in Canadian political collectibles…

Late last month, Mr. Ford listed about a dozen items of “Rob Ford memorabilia” on the online auction site, eBay.ca.

Bidding for the first round ended Wednesday. By far the most expensive item — it went for $16,100 — was a gaudy National Football League tie the then-Toronto mayor wore at a press conference where he officially admitted he had smoked crack cocaine…

Mr. Ford has said 10% of the proceeds will be donated to cancer research…

And in crowdsourced documentary news, per the Badass Digest:

Cinephiles everywhere have been following the production of The Sarkeesian Effect, a work of serious investigative journalism that we first mentioned back in August. Spearheaded by skull fancier Davis Aurini and bathrobe couture pioneer Jordan Owen, it seeks to expose the corruption and collusion of Social Justice Warriors like Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn, including but not limited to their reckless squandering of crowdfunded money.

There are no such worries to be had with The Sarkeesian Effect, a project that has received approximately $8,000 a month for seven months. That’s the message communicated by producer Owen this morning in a characteristically professional video blog, even as he relayed troubling behind-the-scenes issues with the production…

… Anyone who could put together such a well-intentioned and professional production is clearly worthy of investor trust. Some backers have donated hundreds of dollars per month to these truth-seeking purveyors of cinematic art – you don’t do that unless they have a proven cinematic track record.

Fans shouldn’t fret about this development. The Sarkeesian Effect will be completed. All that’s left to do is “the editing, the animations, and possibly a bit of fact-checking” – which any filmmaker knows are minor and even unimportant elements of the documentary process. Time and time again Owen and Aurini have demonstrated themselves to be upstanding citizens with truth on their side. They’ve even included actual women in their film, proving conclusively that they are definitely not misogynists…

There are videos. Be grateful I’m not embedding them here.

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Reader Interactions

29Comments

  1. 1.

    Tissue Thin Pseudonym

    March 5, 2015 at 2:50 am

    It’s awfully quiet around here at 2am.

    No one in Balloon Juice, either.

  2. 2.

    Steeplejack

    March 5, 2015 at 2:53 am

    This crowdsourcing part is so inside-baseball that I don’t know who I’m supposed to be mad at. Maybe it’s just late and I’m tired.

    Yeah, and I would definitely be “shorting” Rob Ford memorabilia. Ba-doom-boom. Tip your waitress.

  3. 3.

    Steeplejack

    March 5, 2015 at 2:55 am

    @Tissue Thin Pseudonym:

    Congratulations on the new job, by the way. I’ve been following your progress as I belatedly catch up on the threads. Looking forward to your contributions to the night shift as you sit there whiling away the hours in the China Syndrome control room.

  4. 4.

    Arclite

    March 5, 2015 at 2:59 am

    More Gamer Dork: The plethora of VR offerings has me excited. Oculus Rift has been the main one in the news for a while, but at GDC this week we’ve seen Morpheus from Sony and the HTC-Valve Steam VR offering. Competition is a good thing, so I’m hopeful that one of these will come out well this year so I can fly around space or in helicopters in full VR. Pew pew!

  5. 5.

    maeve

    March 5, 2015 at 3:03 am

    “Social Justice Warriors” – often abbreviated SJW – apparently its become a pejorative.

    Sounds cool to me.

    ” reckless squandering of crowdfunded money.” – heck, they could have spent it on potato salad!

  6. 6.

    Tissue Thin Pseudonym

    March 5, 2015 at 3:08 am

    @Steeplejack: China syndrome is so 70s. We’re worried about terrorists now. All I can say is that those better be some cold-proofed terrorists right now if they want to hit a facility in Grand Rapids, MN.

    The biggest problem I’ve got right now is that the guy training me in is watching Friends episodes.

  7. 7.

    John Cole +0

    March 5, 2015 at 3:10 am

    Might as well sell my pj’s. I can’t sleep.

  8. 8.

    Amir Khalid

    March 5, 2015 at 3:14 am

    US$600 seems a fair price. (Or was it CAN$600?) I mean, that’s a lot of pajama pants.

  9. 9.

    NotMax

    March 5, 2015 at 3:14 am

    Got video documentary?

    Quest for the Holy Foreskin scheduled for March 26 on NatGeo channel.

  10. 10.

    Anne Laurie

    March 5, 2015 at 3:20 am

    @John Cole +0: You could take more pet pics — those are always popular!

  11. 11.

    John Cole +0

    March 5, 2015 at 3:23 am

    @Anne Laurie: Those jerks are all asleep, and if I wake them, I have no chance of getting any rest.

  12. 12.

    John Cole +0

    March 5, 2015 at 3:24 am

    @Arclite: I just want my damned Navdy to ship.

  13. 13.

    Mnemosyne (tablet)

    March 5, 2015 at 3:33 am

    I work with someone who’s been producing a documentary on the side, and the editing has literally taken years, because it’s freakin’ expensive to get time with a professional editor. In the documentary world, “it’s being edited” usually means it’s a good 5 years from being released.

  14. 14.

    Anne Laurie

    March 5, 2015 at 3:34 am

    @John Cole +0: Srsly, though: There are two reasons I try to stick with fun, lightweight, heartwarming happy-snark posts in the early morning, just before I go off to bed. One is that the other people who are just getting out of bed appreciate having something to look at that doesn’t make them want to give up & go back there.

    The other is that getting into a righteous, wordy, multi-illustrated tirade right before crashing makes it hard to turn off my racing and-another-thing brain and get some revitalizing sleep.

  15. 15.

    TheMightyTrowel

    March 5, 2015 at 3:35 am

    Lots of Australian love for a crowd funding campaign for new bee hive style which makes honey collection easy and which has gone through the roof. They wanted 70k to set up a small business building their honey collection frames, they’re 10 days in and closing in on 5mil. Crazy apiculturists. Cool invention though – even Wired got excited.

  16. 16.

    Steeplejack

    March 5, 2015 at 4:15 am

    @Tissue Thin Pseudonym:

    Serenity now.

  17. 17.

    Steeplejack

    March 5, 2015 at 4:28 am

    @Mnemosyne (tablet):

    I would love for you to expand on this at some point, because one of my big beefs about independent film (including documentaries) is that the technology has improved so much in the last 20-30 years—you could practically make a movie with a smartphone, FFS—and yet there has been little or nothing comparable to the explosion of self-produced music in the same time frame (unless it’s YouTube?). The cliché is that any idiot with an iMac now has more editing/producing power at hand than the Beatles did for Abbey Road, and I think something similar obtains in the film world. But I always seem to be reading about things like what you’re talking about here: “We’re stuck in post-production.” “We can’t get a development deal for x.” WTF? What happened to just getting out there and doing it with the tools at hand? Dogme ’15, if you will.

  18. 18.

    Bobby B.

    March 5, 2015 at 4:34 am

    Sarkeesian Effect sounds like a Robert Ludlum potboiler.

  19. 19.

    Botsplainer

    March 5, 2015 at 5:19 am

    Got what looks to be about a foot of new snow.

    Sigh.

  20. 20.

    Schlemazel

    March 5, 2015 at 5:24 am

    There is no way I am clicking those youtube links so descriptions would have been interesting

    @Tissue Thin Pseudonym:
    Hey Tissue! Hope Ross & Rachel don’t get on your nerves too much.

    @TheMightyTrowel:
    The guy at oatmeal comics needed a few thousand to produce some stupid card game & got something close to $9 million US. He comics usd to be funny but since he had some success resurrecting the reputation of Tesla (the person) and a couple of campaigns like that the humor seems to have dried up & the ego has gotten huge so I sort of hate on people who raise that sort of money through crowd funding.

  21. 21.

    Schlemazel

    March 5, 2015 at 5:28 am

    @Steeplejack:
    I think that making a movie is several orders of magnitude harder than music. There are lots of people that can make decent sounding recordings but even professionals sometimes badly botch movies. Editing may be one of the biggest pitfalls.

  22. 22.

    Another Holocene Human

    March 5, 2015 at 6:48 am

    Way to bury the lede on the Dave Aurini drama. Which is hilarious, btw.

  23. 23.

    Another Holocene Human

    March 5, 2015 at 6:51 am

    @Schlemazel: I think History channel had a lot to do with popularizing Tesla.

    And the Oatmeal was always a shmuck but I’m sure 9milUSD didn’t help.

  24. 24.

    brantl

    March 5, 2015 at 7:24 am

    $660 isn’t a bad price, for a 4 person tent.

  25. 25.

    Bartkid

    March 5, 2015 at 8:29 am

    Rob who?

  26. 26.

    jon

    March 5, 2015 at 9:36 am

    GamerGate is a sham, their arguments are crap, their sexism and reactionary views are outdated, their tears are hilarious, and that link and the stuff it leads to is astoundingly funny. The Odd Couple of Investigators into Ethics in Gaming Journalism have broken up, and it’s like a dozen donuts of shadenfreude with all the icing and sprinkles you can imagine. These two Khan men just haven’t gotten Her. She’s still out there. Mocking them. Laughing at them. They may have ones of devoted followers, but they haven’t got Her. They might have a youtube channel and a skull collection and some bathrobes, but they haven’t. got. Her. KHAAAAAN!

  27. 27.

    muddy

    March 5, 2015 at 12:46 pm

    @jon: Reminds me of this song.
    ETA: oops, too bad I’m so late

  28. 28.

    Epicurus

    March 5, 2015 at 12:58 pm

    I predict that the movie will be just as successful and substantive as the magnum opus which is “Atlas Shrugged.”

  29. 29.

    Jebediah, RBG

    March 5, 2015 at 3:46 pm

    @Steeplejack:
    The cliché is that any idiot with an iMac now has more editing/producing power at hand than the Beatles did for Abbey Road

    Editing is much more than pushing buttons. I could probably teach anyone to use Media Composer but that doesn’t mean they would have a clue about cutting a picture together. And very small editing mistakes and mis-steps can ruin a picture. (OTOH a really good editor can sometimes make a substandard picture watchable. )

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