101–110 of 213 posts
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There's web-based readers that work in Chrome. After Google Reader died, I moved to Feedly which seems to still work alright.
There's also TheOldReader which is the same UI as Google Reader and works great.
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> It's like with movies: you can watch whatever trends on Rotten Tomatoes, or you can watch a whole bunch of random stuff at a film festival. Guaranteed you will find something at the festival that will never trend on RT but that you'll enjoy thoroughly. Not my experience at all. Turns out critics are actually decent at judging stuff, and good movies really are better than bad ones.
but sometimes bad movies are more interesting than good ones (good, not great)
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but sometimes bad movies are more interesting than good ones (good, not great)
Meh. Occasionally you get a movie that failed in an interesting way, but most bad movies are just bad in the same handful of ways, and I lost interest in watching that fairly quickly. I know some people enjoy hate-watching as a social experience but I don't.
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Music, even more so than film and TV, is incredibly subjective in terms of what you find to be good. Pitchfork has trashed a bunch of albums that I love and they've adored lots of music I find to be unlistenable. I suspect this has a lot to do with identity politics and other things that I really don't want being front and center in criticism of the arts. Perhaps I'm just a troglodyte.
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If I worked for Pitchfork, I wouldn't give myself a 9.0 either. They're a brand, they sell tickets to a show they put on every year. They're not going to give a 1.6 to someone who can be at their show and sell tickets. They're not the same publication that I grew up with anyway. It's changed, and that happens. Any good idea starts with a movement, becomes a business, and ends up a racket. And I'm not calling Pitchfork a racket, but they're a business.
† I'm not dignifying 0.0-10
†† I had called this his 4th album but this was his first LP
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To me, a good review clearly explains why . If Cheer2171 gives Casablanca a 2/5... okay? But if it gets a 2/5 and an explanation that you thought the cinematography was hacky and the drama overwrought... that's cool. I might like the cinematography and over-dramatic dialog! 110% agreed that too many reviews/critiques these days are milquetoast. Have an opinion that the reviwer is passionate about! And argue it fully…
Speaking of video game reviews, that's why I've focused on Rock Paper Shotgun back in the day when they didn't do "reviews" but "Wot I think". Each article was an honest and earnest, detailed description of a human experience and their genuine thoughts. You wouldn't always agree with the reviews but it'd always be an interesting and informative read.
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I disagree, because I think the idiosyncratic aspect was way more of a feature than a bug of Pitchfork. The real purpose of Pitchfork was not to say which music was good or bad. It was to say which music is worth talking about, and it made itself the center of that conversation. Getting reviewed by Pitchfork was more important than getting a good review by Pitchfork. They were notorious for giving bad reviews to good…
In the mid 2000s I remember following a redditor who worked in the music business and he would predict pitchfork scores for anticipated albums with crazy accuracy.
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The Zagat acquisition was not driven by Marissa, but another exec at Google Travel. When he was turfed out, that signaled the end for Zagat as well.
Wikipedia says otherwise: "On September 8, 2011, the company was acquired by Google for more than $150 million, the 10th largest acquisition by Google as of that date, at the championing of Marissa Mayer, its Vice President of Local, Maps, and Location Services." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zagat
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Partially, but can't go back in time and prove otherwise. When Conde Nast started buying up specialty like Bicycling, Outdoors, and Wired they transformed them into generic "lifestyle" magazines (10-15 years ago). I remember flipping through Bicycling and seeing 3 car advertisements before getting to the first that had anything to do with cycling and all the columns and editorials contained product pitches for person…
Conde Nast has never bought specialty mags, and doesn't own Outdoors or Bicycling. It bought Wired mag (but not the online site) in like 1998. The closest Conde Nast has now to a specialist site is Ars Technica, which it bought almost 20 years ago
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It’s maybe worth mentioning that there have been many phases of Pitchfork over the years. That review would never be published today - the Pitchfork that wrote that review is already quite different from the scrappy 1997 Pitchfork (which probably had more in common with that 16 year old), and it’s miles removed from late-aughts/early 2010s Pitchfork (“peak Pitchfork”, perhaps, in terms of cultural clout), which was l…
This exactly; not a week goes by that the words "I am Ringo, elephant of Beatles Worship" (off an Of Montreal review by Matt LeMay) doesn't go through my head. But Pitchfork stopped being that long before Conde acquired them.