Big changes are a-coming, as I mentioned last week, and it's probably a good time for me to lay out what you should expect those changes to consist of.
The very last day that any new content will be posted to this blog will be Friday. The new site, Alternate Ending (follow us on Twitter! & on Facebook!), will be going live on the morning of Monday, 16 January, with huge swaths of new content, above and beyond the 11+ years of old content we're dragging over from this site. It will not be pretty, at first - the archives are going to be a bit rocky earlier than the start of 2016 until myself and my new collaborators, Carrie and Rob, have a chance to tweak all the extant reviews for the new site format (fun fact: as of this post, there have been 4378 posts on Antagony & Ecstasy since 1 August, 2005. I have to look at each and every single one of them). But I thank you for your patience as we get it to that point.
An important thing to note: it was of great importance to me to import all of the comments that my beloved readers have made over the years. However, the final version of this site's data was sent to our webmaster this morning. So any comments made on any post since 9:30 AM, CST will not survive to the final version of the site. If you have any thoughts that you want to preserve for all of history, I'd save them for Monday.
You'll otherwise not notice anything different about the next couple of days here. And come Monday, things will be glorious and shiny and all your old links and bookmarks should automatically re-direct to the new site. Any questions about the new site? Ask me in the comments!
11 January 2017
18 comments:
Just a few rules so that everybody can have fun: ad hominem attacks on the blogger are fair; ad hominem attacks on other commenters will be deleted. And I will absolutely not stand for anything that is, in my judgment, demeaning, insulting or hateful to any gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or religion. And though I won't insist on keeping politics out, let's think long and hard before we say anything particularly inflammatory.
Also, sorry about the whole "must be a registered user" thing, but I do deeply hate to get spam, and I refuse to take on the totalitarian mantle of moderating comments, and I am much too lazy to try to migrate over to a better comments system than the one that comes pre-loaded with Blogger.
Will I need to do anything with my RSS reader? (Feedly, in my case)
ReplyDelete@Andy Farrell I also use Feedly. I imagine I'll have to put in the new link when the site goes live.
ReplyDeleteThe old RSS feed will be useless after Friday. I'm pretty sure that with Feedly, you just need to add the site URL for it to start pulling new posts, but I'll check with our web guy and make sure that's true.
ReplyDeleteCongrats and I look forward to the new site. I only ask a few things:
ReplyDelete1) One of the reasons I love reading you Tim is because you're not afraid to go long when the reviews deserve to be long. Never change. If anything, if upping your education level means you could go into even deeper analysis when reviewing a film, then by all means, go longer. I'm greedy and want to get education by proxy.
2) I hope the new site will finally let you get some money off of writing this stuff. Obviously, even Ebert couldn't get anyone to actually pay for his reviews, but whatever monies you can get through advertising and whatnot, you (and crew) deserve it.
An important thing to note: it was of great importance to me to import all of the comments that my beloved readers have made over the years.
ReplyDeleteAdorable spam bots included?
Hayley- Thanks! The content should remain entirely unaffected, though I will no longer have my beautiful Left-Aligned Poster of Recommendation and Right-Aligned Poster of Dismissal. I think that will be the biggest difference as far as what the posts are and how they are to be read. Oh, and also it will be a five-star system rather than a /10 system.
ReplyDeleteMoviemotorbreath- The spambots are part of the life's blood of this community, after all.
I would like to express my dismay at the loss of the Left-Aligned Poster of Recommendation and Right-Aligned Poster of Dismissal.
ReplyDeleteSo as you transfer your scores, what's your philosophy for converting between ten-point and five-star systems? Also, what percentage of your new site is the worst thing ever?
ReplyDeleteNot that it really matters, since the actual review content is what counts, but will the five-star system be exactly analogous to the /10 system? Like, will a 4-star movie be the equivalent of an 8/10? Just curious, so I can gauge your original opinions when reading old reviews.
ReplyDeleteColin, Michael- We're going to have a breakdown of exactly what stars mean on the site, but the general rule of thumb is that I'll be slightly harsher: an 8/10 might be 4 stars, but it also might be 3.5 stars, for example, if it's not an 8 I was enormously jazzed by. There will be no more 6/10 rotten reviews - 2.5 stars is rotten, 3 stars is fresh, across the board.
ReplyDeleteIt's an eleven-notch yardstick, just like the 0/10-10/10 system, right? I suppose if the new system eschewed half-stars, it'd be different--but otherwise, they'd have to be exactly the same. (Except, you know, this one uses stars.)
ReplyDeleteAnd anyway, like I've always said; the numerical score does matter. At least a bit. Particularly, I find it makes a critic's biases a bit more overt.
"an 8/10 might be 4 stars, but it also might be 3.5 stars, for example, if it's not an 8 I was enormously jazzed by."
ReplyDeleteI just bit off my tongue, and now I'm drowning on my own blood, Tim.
Anyway, I always dug the general idea behind splitting the 6/10s--that a movie could be pretty much right on the edge between halfway-valuable and merely watchably-bad. Pity that's going away; although of course the recourse open to you is to simply downgrade the bad 6/10s to 5/10s.
The idea, in part, was to make a level playing field that ignores year of release: right now I'm inflating new releases a bit so that films only compete with other films that came out around the same time. But a 10/10 like The Lobster isn't remotely equal to a 10/10 like Vertigo. So in the new site, 5 stars for new ratings will be almost unheard of, and everything else will shift accordingly.
ReplyDeletePreserve all my comments for posterity? I've been coming here since I was 23 (posting under King Kubrick then) and I'm 31 now (Goddamnit we're all dying slowly of old age!); I haven't taken a look back at the old comments in a long time but I'm sure I'd be embarrassed as hell by some of them, especially when my world was crushed by how badly I was disappointed in the Dark Knight Rises. Live and learn I guess. God speed, Tim! I'll see you over at the new site.
ReplyDeleteCongratulations Tim! Check your email when you can. Best, Zev
ReplyDeleteI wish I could delete some of my comments too. I wish I could remember for which movies... If only the google profile would show a list of all comments written, 'cause I'm obviously not going through all your reviews checking out if I wrote something... Thankfully al least this one will vanish for itself...
ReplyDeleteHow will you be porting your retrospectives (and their extras like your rankings) over? Every so often I do like poking about the James Bond and Disney retrospectives.
ReplyDeleteI'm bummed that the Left Aligned/Right Aligned posters will be gone, and I'm half-tempted to say "now how will I know when it's a scathing takedown?", but you're one of critics whose positive reviews I like to read as much as the negative ones.
ReplyDeleteSuch a lovely website which makes me fresh from my daily routine work. Thanks for sharing how to create beautiful things in life.
goldenslot
สูตรบาคาร่า
gclub casino