T w e n t y S i d e d
I say all the time that horror and comedy are the two most personal areas of life in terms of taste. They both prey on expectation to make their impact. That’s why hearing your drunk uncle tell the same joke for the 50th time is exhausting instead of humorous. It’s why knock knock jokes are mentally draining by the time you hit adulthood, too. Same goes for scares. The first time I watched Jeepers Creepers 2 I immediately developed a fear of scarecrows that I haven’t fully shaken, but I won’t have a panic attack watching the same scene again and again because the novelty is gone. The only scare left is the residual fear from the first time I saw it. And it’s also why the “mirror scare” in horror movies just doesn’t really work anymore unless you throw in a misdirect. We expect it now as a culture.
“Wish Upon” is a horror movie released in 2017 and it is atrocious. I say that affectionately because I LOVE bad horror movies. I think it’s a solid recommend for folks like me that like to see terrible writing mixed with a nonsense plot with a sprinkling of questionable acting choices. So when Red Letter Media covered it I was delighted to see my read of the movie was accurate in the eyes of some guys that I look up to and respect. I don’t typically care if I have the “right opinion” on things but it’s always a delightful sensation to me when my personal tastes line up with some people that I consider tastemakers. I also enjoy when I can confidently say that something is just bad because nowadays I avoid saying something is “bad” and substitute in the phrase “not for me” to avoid offending or debate.
Some may argue against my resolute statement that the movie is just plain bad, and that’s going to happen no matter what. There’s a world full of opinions and not all of them are going to be matching or even reasonable. And at the end of the day, we’re all fallible. Someone might see something in a piece of media that others don’t. I, for one, think that the splatter work of Jackson Pollock is pointless and silly. I like my art to have something more intelligible to say. Art critics might see my opinion as uninformed and stupid. That’s fine. That’s because the work just isn’t for me. I find the game Mixtape to be pretentious and boring. It won over tons of critics regardless and that’s fine, because those reviewers just saw something different in the game that I didn’t. It just isn’t for me.
I think it’s important to accept the superiority of the term “not for me.” For whatever reason, many people out there tie their tastes in media to who they are as a person. I think if you want to keep relationships healthier and life easier it’s just a better way to go. You can still hold strong opinions. I’ll still tell people I think Pollock is a hack, but I’m ready to hear how wrong I am from the few people out there who both care and hold a differing opinion. But I’m very ready to let them say their piece and follow it with a smirk and a, “Sorry, I just don’t get it but I’m happy to be wrong.”
Pollock was a hack, though. Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst are, too. Fight me.
Silver Sable Sucks
This version of Silver Sable is poorly designed, horribly written, and placed in the game for all the wrong reasons.
Chainmail Bikini
A horrible, railroading, stupid, contrived, and painfully ill-conceived roleplaying campaign. All in good fun.
Trusting the System
How do you know the rules of the game are what the game claims? More importantly, how do the DEVELOPERS know?
Gamers Aren’t Toxic
This is a horrible narrative that undermines the hobby through crass stereotypes. The hobby is vast, gamers come from all walks of life, and you shouldn't judge ANY group by its worst members.
Bowlercoaster
Two minutes of fun at the expense of a badly-run theme park.
There’s some topics that I’m similarly careful to differentiate between something that’s Actually Bad, and something that just isn’t for Me. Boardgames are the main one; and it’s primarily because I play a *lot* of them, so I have Opinions, with a capital O. I’ve found that commonly, because I have played so many, and so many are available, that I have to narrow down my options to the ‘best of the best’, specifically for my tastes. A good example is that I think Settlers of Catan is a Bad Game. I think that Terra Mystic is a Good Game, but Not For Me. And I think that Terraforming Mars is a Good Game, and also For Me. (It’s not my favorite game by any means, but I like really niche things like Through the Ages, I figure Terraforming Mars is more likely that someone brushing against boardgames has heard of it.) Wingspan is also a Good Game, and is on that level of … I’ll play it, if that’s the only option, but I won’t seek it out. But for other people, that’s their favorite game, and I respect that.
It becomes interesting to balance this against the concept of not yucking others’ yum. (Other than Settlers of Catan. If you like that game and think it’s good, we can’t be friends.) I’m perfectly fine with you liking a thing that I dislike, just don’t ask me to play it with you. :)
Stonemeyer Games is a strange one. A lot of them games need an expansion to really shine. For Wingspan that is the European Expansion. With nectar as a wild resource, revamped player boards and some bird powers to renew the dice and cards the game is much more balanced and less luck based. I won’t play Wingspan without EE anymore.
Oceanean Expansion, not Europe. EE has nothing of value.
What do you think’s objectively bad about Catan? I categorise it as “well, at least it’s not Monopoly”.
There are essentially no player choices that matter, as dice rolling is the main mechanic to acquire resources.
Dice/randomness to determine success/failure is generally a bad mechanic that should be avoided. (Instead, having randomness to determine the options available to you and deciding from them is desired.)
Trading resources is allowed, and a type of mechanic similar to Auctions, where it highlights a game design flaw: Can’t get resources? Don’t worry, just convince other people to give them to you! What do you mean you don’t have anything they want because the dice never come up for you? Whoops!
The game ends suddenly and without warning. While this isn’t necessarily a bad mechanic, the best games are ones where you can tell when the game is near its end. Either with a hard turn limit, or a creeping counter that everyone at the table can predict. Not with several points being built out of hand crossing a threshold and immediately ending the game. (Generally, having an extra round when a game-end trigger is reached is preferred.)
Like, the only bad mechanic the game is missing is player elimination. And I’m convinced they tried to put that in and couldn’t figure out how.
Nah, you’ll get no argument from me. Pollock was a hack – and I have a degree in art and have made my living as an artist. I think that’s honestly true of a LOT of “modern art”. It’s certainly possible to have something of merit that’s abstract or open to interpretation, but the departure from representational styles in “fine art” has opened the door to a lot of talentless garbage justified by fake bullshit.
There’s a possibly-apocryphal story about Picasso (often credited as the “father of modern art”), from the height of his popularity. The story goes that rich auteurs kept pestering him to do commissions, which he mostly refused. One especially stubborn guy – a New York upper-cruster – wouldn’t take no for an answer. He wanted an entire wall of his condo to be “a Picasso original”, and finally Pablo named an absolutely absurd price, which was accepted, and further demanded a couple conditions: he was to have total creative freedom – the patron was not allowed to ask for revisions of any sort – and Picasso had to be allowed to complete it in total secrecy.
Mr. Picasso constructed an elaborate scaffold in the room in question, concealing the wall that was to be his canvas quite thoroughly. He was given free access to the apartment, and came and went at all sorts of odd hours for months, bringing in and out various supplies, creating disruptive rackets at the most inconvenient times, and brushing off any attempts to gain insight into the subject matter or details of the project.
Finally, he announced it was done, and the patron excitedly organized a cocktail party to share “the big reveal.” At the appointed time, Mr. Picasso dramatically tore aside the concealing tarp to present his latest creation: a vast, featureless white wall, with a bright, blue square about a foot wide, in a lower corner. Tragically, what was intended to be a clever prank on the entitled elite backfired, because the patron and most of his guests revealed their total lack of artistic taste by simply hailing it as a masterwork, thus spawning an entire artistic movement of simple, monochrome geometry that clutters art museums to this day.
Obviously, a tale modeled after the old “The Emperor Has No Clothes” parable, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. The fable has endurance as a cultural touchstone for a reason, after all.
I’ve been watching and commenting on horror movies for years at my own blog, and one of the things that I am careful to do is distinguish between something I don’t like because it’s not my type of movie and something that I don’t like because it’s bad. A while ago, I subscribed to “Shudder” and decided to go through all of its movies in alphabetical order, not because I thought it would be possible but instead because it saved me the time and effort of trying to CURATE the movies to decide what to watch. I skipped most “beast” movies because I’m not a big fan of those sorts of movies (although I couldn’t resist watching “Big Ass Spider”) and then also came across giallo, which I was originally excited to watch but now have decided to tend to skip them as well, because while some of its elements sounded interesting to me the focus on being odd, sexual and disturbing instead of developing the plot and characters doesn’t appeal to me, and commenting on those sorts of movies is tricky because the very things that I don’t like about them ARE what makes giallo giallo and so are the things that fans of the genre want to see, and it’s not reasonable to criticize a work for doing what its audience wants them to do.
But this is where we can more or less objectively differentiate between something that is bad and something that is not for me, by appealing to what it is trying to do. A movie that is not for me achieves what it sets out to do, but I just happen to not like the sort of thing it set out to do. A movie that is bad doesn’t achieve what it sets out to do. And that holds whether or not I like it, and thus would filter into the “So bad it’s good” model, where something is bad because it horribly fumbles what it was aiming for, but achieves something else unintentionally, usually by, say, attempting to be a serious and dramatic work but ending up being unintentionally hilarious. We should not hold movies to a standard that they weren’t intending to try to achieve.
Note that I’ve kinda developed this from a discussion of art like painting as well, as in a philosophy course I argued that art intends to produce a certain sort of aesthetic experience in us — and potentially an intellectual one as well — and if it fails to achieve that intention then we can say that it’s bad art, even if we kinda like it. By appealing to what these things are striving for, we can judge quality on the basis of how well it achieves that, while still leaving it open for us to subjectively like it anyway in spite of its badness.
Taking up painting back in 2018 changed my perspective on some modern art a bit. Not that I necessarily like it all now, or want to have it adorn my walls, and I do think there’s a lot of poor stuff mixed in (as with any art), but figuring out how to lay out a painting – even a more representational one – taught me to really think about composition, and I can appreciate stylistic works with good composition more now.
This has become relevant again in a roundabout way since I took up woodworking this past December, and have started making things to sell; I’ve been working recently on making cutting boards out of strips of various-colored woods, and it can be a surprising amount of work figuring out a combination of colors and proportions that looks “good”, and not just “bundle of random wooden scraps glued together”.
There’s also a discussion about seeing something in person vs. seeing it via photo. David Morgan-Mar, of Irregular Webcomic! fame, once wrote (in a musing on the wider nature of art) about the experience of seeing Pollack’s Blue Poles in person (as a modern art skeptic). The full piece is worth a read, but it’s rather long so the gist of it is:
I haven’t seen Blue Poles myself, but having had the chance to visit the National Gallery of Victory in Melbourne and see its huge collections of paintings I’m willing to testify there’s definitely a certain je ne sais quoi to seeing works of art in person that just isn’t present in photos.
If you haven’t seen it yet, Stay Alive is the best hilariously bad horror movie I’ve ever seen. Highly recommend