I just thought of that again and remembered the old webcomic Filthy Lies, in which an atheist grabs a pencil while arguing with a creationist: "Being written down does not mean it's true! Look! 'The sky is really a giant blue chicken with a pink butt, and the sunset is him mooning us'!"
Battlefield Earth review on Mythcreants made me laugh with this line about the racism, which is now my headcanon:
Okay, Fifty Shades just got significantly more horrifying, according to the das-sporking analysis ("Gaston" here refers to Christian Grey): Spoiler: rape/murder references, length
Much as I like dumping on fifty shades, you can correlate anything if you're willing to reach like that. Especially if you're, ah, mentally agile enough to go from "[Yates] doesn’t seem to have had a physical type" to "Grey has a type. So did Yates," within two paragraphs.
I would have dismissed it as coincidence if not for the Pantrol part. It seems like such a specific combination.
Eh, the thing about unlikely things is that in something like this, we're only looking at the things that do match up, and not the things that don't. Because of how probability works, while any one particular coincidence is unlikely, it is in fact very likely that there will be /A/ unlikely coincidence. This just happened to be the one that fits.
Samsung is involved with telecommunications and manufacturing. So are Apple, iRobot, and Tesla, just off the top of my head. There's probably a zillion companies like that. Besides, the "has no type / has a type" discrepancy is fatal. As a general rule, if you find out you can't trust an analyst you should throw out the whole analysis immediately.
Yeah, I concede it probably is coincidence, but it's still extremely creepy if it is. Like, I would KNOW for a fact it was a coincidence if, say, the victim in a murder mystery shared both my first and last name, but it would still be disturbing.
*checks what the conversation is about* Oh, come the entire fuck on. I expect concern-trolly contortions to see everything through the worst possible lens from sporkings, but this is excessive even for them. You know why Christian is Like That? It's because he's the character who has authorial sympathy, and E.L. James is Like That. If you want to read up on some juicy fandom drama with an unhappy ending, check this out; that thing Christian does where he constantly shoves how much money he has in Ana's face while pressuring her to take expensive gifts? That's not just a romance trope, here: E.L. James has done that to a living, breathing person, to the point where that person felt sick about taking her money. And that was before she went from "lots of money" to "all the money in the world." Look at anything she's written with an Edward POV- Grey, or do what Folding Ideas did and dig up her fanfic from before Masters of the Universe- and it's painfully obvious both that a) he's a gigantic slimebag and b) the narrative is completely on his side in being a gigantic slimebag. When Grey came out, there were FS fans who were devastated because they'd believed what the narrative and the conventions of the genre had told them to believe about the kind of person Christian was- damaged bad boy with a heart of gold- but when they saw his thought processes through his eyes they stopped being able to see him as anything but a creepy, controlling asshole. Which he always was if you looked at the text without rose-colored glasses, but a lot of people just weren't setting out to question the base assumptions of their niche porn that way. She describes Angel Clare as "an impossible romantic hero," couldn't be assed to google anything whatsoever about wine, and thinks Twinings English Breakfast is a distinctive taste in tea that it's "lucky" a hotel would have, and you expect me to believe she did enough research into a random serial killer to base AU!Edward on him and fill the narrative with extremely vague connections between them, while obfuscating literally all of them but the number of victims? Every single thing I have heard about the behavior of E.L. James as a person indicates that she's an egotistical control freak who enjoys being able to leverage social and financial power over people to get them to do what she wants. And she wrote an egotistical control freak who leverages social and financial power over people to get them to do what he wants, and also he's unimaginably handsome and wealthy and has a tragic backstory that left him Damaged, and everything he does and says is presented as correct by the narrative. He has Cool Classy Hobbies and owns Cool Classy Stuff and demonstrates his immense magnanimity by using inconsequential slivers of his limitless wealth to white-savior the problems of people far away that have nothing to do with him and will never appear in the narrative. You don't need to Pepe-Silvia this into being serial killer RPF. He's just a completely ordinary Gary Stu.
Yeah, the overlap between telecommunications and manufacturing isn't that special, and a lot of the other "similarities" are just... not that similar. I really think what happened here is that they got bored and put on their tinfoil hats. I don't see a problem with them writing this, btw. But the editing process should have had it cut before publication. It's not good analysis, and honestly I consider it pretty offensive.
It's a blog post on a Dreamwidth community. I doubt there's exactly a robust editing process beyond double-checking the spelling.
One of the two main sporkers (Gehayi, the other being Ket Makura) is a professional editor, I'm pretty sure. The two of them also have a beta reader (I want to say Mervin but could be wrong); the beta reader has been mentioned to at least sometimes point out logic and research errors. The publication may be hosted on a blogging site, but that doesn't make it a "blog" in the colloquial use of the term. It's an amateur publication that incorporates philosophy, activism, and media criticism. (Also it was originally on LJ; the DW move is pretty recent, and half the links in it still pointed to the LJ copy last I knew.) It's a publication by people who claim to value well-edited, coherent, concise, morally responsible writing. The entire point of the publication is to express that value and judge others by how closely they comply to it. They're failing their own standards here. So yeah, I'm going to judge them for not taking twenty minutes, or however long, to calm down and come back and realize they were full of shit.
Dear protagonist; melodramatic declarations of spiritual connection with your fellow kidnapping victims work better if you bother to actually ever speak to them or learn their names.
In honor of ChelG posting excerpts from the Battlefield Earth spork... belated excerpts from the Mission: Earth spork.
