The Old Country's Biggest Blunders

The only response to the Dunham kerfluffle (seriously, people, just don’t give her attention) is, strangely, Nathan Rabin’s. Seriously sometimes mockery is often deconstruction enough.

Nice one: guess he'd had his full dose of Faygo when he wrote that.

I'm seeing double! Two 'Save The Watercooler' links!!

Hah! They changed the Alison Pill headline. Of course, no acknowledgment of said change in the article.

I was prepared to give it a fair shake even though I don't think it fits the website. But now the front page supper club articles say "Sponsored by Hormel" and have an autoplaying (if muted) banner video, so fuck that.

ETA: kind of the most ridiculous thing is that it's now first in the alphabetical banner menu:
Food : Film : TV Club : Music : Comedy : Books : Games

One of those things doesn't fit.

One might argue they're taking a page from us / Ye Olde TI / AVCAD(?). But unless they're going to be interviewing world-class chefs and reviewing restaurants (as opposed to Top Ten Fast Food) I don't see it.

I can see a place for it: we talk about food every Wednesday at length. And a section for good, healthy recipes on a tight budget would both be interesting and could actually help people, for example.

But comment-blocked clickbait ads? Get tae fuck.

(428 comments on the We Like Food And Here's Why You Should, Too article; 477 at Reasonable Discussions. At least bitching about it is getting them clicks...)

Huh. That's something, at least.

The videos are, even the fortune cookie one which seems to *not* be sponsored.

I guess in principle I'm kind of excited about it, but yeah, all the sponsored content tabs on every article and then making it fairly fast food centric gives me pause.

So the new Food Guy, Kevin Pang, is a refugee from the Chicago Tribune. I've followed his writing online for years (and I follow him on twitter). He really loves to talk food. (I almost feel like he talked the AVC into trying this section out?) I like to talk food. Food is culture, after all - we talk about Guy Fieri, there's Taste Test, why not a food section?

That said, Hormel sponsorship is definitely tacky.

One of the mothership commenters mentioned that he (?) couldn't see the Reasonable Discussions link on the front page for the longest time. I couldn't either. It's back up now, but I'm starting to wonder if we're being sent messages.

Did you know there are three different ways to cook bacon? WERE YOU EVEN AWARE??

So it’s Star Trek’s fiftieth anniversary today and apparently all they’re doing is a GJI and a tossed-off newswire about stamps. Checking the AVC this morning felt like I looking at the daytime TV of websites. It’s gotten to the point where there’s basically no recognition, which is a shame because even recently it seemed like they were having a bit of a mini-renaissance of sorts (and, like Pedantic Editor Type , I like Pang’s stuff and his presence was enough to make me cautiously optimistic about Supper Club, but the fast foodiness is putting me off).



One thing that’s kind of odd is that, if you’re a site that’s aiming to get a wide audience through social media (i.e. basically every site except those with paid subscriptions of some form) there’s basically no reward for having a loyal readership anymore and the best approach is to spray as much out as possible. So that model has no need for comments—which are meant to build loyalty (not just among commenters but the much-larger community of lurkers), and given the volume of both GJI and newswire these days none of them can really accrue decent comments, either (I remember talking with Nathan Ford’s Evil Twin about this a couple of years ago). So while I’m pretty sure there’s no “message” they’re trying to send by forgetting Reasonable Discussions or Pop-Culture Weekend or letting them slide off the page, it does show that they’re a low priority.

There was that gleefully threatening tone from the author of that newswire about NPR getting rid of its comments, though—we already saw an attempt to minimize comments during Star Wars week, we’re already seeing more articles without comments, and I’m pretty sure the day where comments disappear from the AVC entirely is coming soon.

Yeah, seriously, it's the 50th anniversary of one of the most significant sci-fi franchises in all of entertainment history, and the best they've done thus far is a half-assed newswire about stamps and a GJ,I. But, thankfully, they're letting us know which Blizzard is the best.