The Old Country's Biggest Blunders

Looking a little more closely at this, it appears to be a sponsored ad buy, which would suggest Duracell has particular traffic targets the ads team has promised they'll hit. Judging from how well most of these articles are doing, they don't need the help, but switching from comments popping up to the infinite scroll favored by so many sites nowadays helps with that.

Or put another way: I'm guessing they'll only haul out this particular design for sponsored buys. They're less dependent on comments than they used to be but probably don't want to alienate their core readers too much.

So is the infinite scroll, in general, a way of inflating ad revenues? Maybe by claiming, if somebody scrolls down too far, that it's a new page view?

(Question open to all web-savvy TIers, not trying to interrogate you.)

As long as they aren't on all articles or the majority of them, I'll be alright. I wouldn't even bother to comment on anything using that system. 

This lends further credence to my paranoia that they'll convert the whole site to that format eventually. 

Wouldn't be the first time a Leftovers review was an OC blunder.

I have *zero* inside knowledge here, but in the interest of allaying fear (especially yours, what with us being internet buds and all), wouldn't the Inventory and the Run the Series referred to here be the Star Wars ones, and thus part of the theme week for which Duracell did the ad buy for? So pretty sure this remains all under the umbrella of the one specific theme week, which as Todd outlined, is one area where doing something like that would make sense. I don't really see a scenario where you'd get the same value or organizational logic out of doing that with WOT or TV Club or whatever else when it's one self-contained article. But, again ... zero inside knowledge. Just saying I'm pretty sure what Pairesta noted still falls under the one themed thing Onion Product has said is specifically used for this purpose.

So I'm sure we've all noticed this, but Teti just posted that there's a live chat with him today at 2pm CST. Now of course my inner pessimist is freaking out that he's going to use the occasion to announce another format change, or that Onion, Inc was bought by TMZ or some such. But, hey, he's offering to be more regularly accessible to us so that'd be as good a time as any to clear up this comment box issue.

I intend to suggest that Coming Distractions be re-integrated into the Newswire instead of a separate feature hidden far down the front page.

Imma talk fashion with em!

Teti upvoted my comment about being sad the music department's so lacking and he specifically called it out as a department he wants to pay more attention to, so there's that.  Maybe - maybe - I can still believe in a place...called Hope.

I see Alston is now putting up reviews for The Leftovers immediately after it airs, which means he does in fact have mid-season screeners, which mean the delays on the first half of the season's reviews just confuses me further. 

Formerly I wasn't been reading them because they were so late; now I may continue to avoid them so that I don't get sucked into beema's trolling.

Is it too soon to mention today's Hear This/Hatesong* on Sinatra. I'm not even a fan of the guy, but it still seems pretty misguided. This and last weeks Beatles article just emphasize how lame the music writing has gotten.

*Add me to the chorus of those who don't like Hatesong. I could care less what some Grade-Z "comic" thinks about some piece of '90s shit.

This is exactly how am beginning to feel sometimes. I still enjoy the A.V. Club but the smug cynicism of the comments gets really grating. The thing is, I'm unemployed and have no social life, so I'm left browsing the internet all day so I'm probably taking this more seriously than I should.

Now, Michael Buble's an example where I think that a voice "is too good and smarmy, so it lacks character and is bad." But I think that in comparison to people like Sinatra. You can make that complaint if a singer doesn't really know how to "act" the words he's singing. Like, I think Buble is phenomenal at the art of sounding good, but he's not very good at getting the meaning of the words across. My mom collects all of his albums and there are definitely songs with heartbreaking lyrics where it still sounds as if he's winking at you and dashingly throwing his top hat offstage. Something about his sound says, "I'm not being sincere."

Now having said that...you need to articulate that criticism coherently. And you especially need to be careful with your argument, if the target is one of the 5-10 most famous singers ever. And you certainly cannot equate having a good voice with being inauthentic, because some of the most heartfelt singers ever have had really great singing voices (e.g. Nina).