*shakes head* I think the joke crossed the international punchline with that one, Meg.
"This is the thirty-second show of Brilliant Gameologists..."
"This is the thirty second show of Brilliant Gameologists..."
Just put a pause, the dead air, then come back. I thought that it was clever. Of course, that's not all that meaningful, and the opportunity for the joke has passed, though I suppose you could do it on the forty-second episode which would probably only be funny to ... well, nobody now that I've so thoroughly dissected the frog.
(Final dissection. The joke would be an audio pun between the numeric '42nd' and the literal 'forty seconds long'.)
Now, on to the rest of the comment: Are you suggesting that because I don't enjoy what you did, I should just keep my opinion to myself because there's Lots Of Positive Feedback? C'mon. I don't know what other people think of it and I don't think that I should really be phased on that. I think that the podcast, in general, was repeating the same joke over and over with the same generic turns of phrase. As far as your specific praise goes, how useful was it? 'More of this' doesn't suggest anything new, either, it's in fact, the exact opposite of suggesting something new. It's not even constructive, it's just confirmation. It's encouraging, sure, it's sure as hell nice, and I might be a bit less of a bitter shell if I got more pats on the back and fewer kicks in the ass, but I didn't have that luxury and now I'm inflicting myself on the world around me.
I reject your premise that I should not have posted at all. I made an attempt to listen, posted my feedback, got something about the timing out there. Then I listened to the whole thing as an exercise in doing so for the sake of the podcast (because I want to contribute to the show in however minor a way I can, and I want to get back to the point where I looked forward to new shows), and shot from the lip. I then noted that I shouldn't have said it in that way, then went on to say I stand by my criticisms, which are: You repeat the same joke too many times and not in enough interesting ways, the comic timing was off, and this entire piece feels so personality-driven that it failed to connect to me, leaving me the impression that I'd only get the jokes if I'd been around at Gen-con.
Furthermore, constructive criticism is not constructive because it builds for you, it's constructive because it indicates to you - when taken as a whole - what you did well and what you did not. If you have a billion people saying it's great and one person saying it's shit, you can probably take that metric and consider how far that one person's opinion reaches. Of course, that's the exact same metric you could use for World of Darkness, which you might note, Josh hates with a passion despite its commercial success reaching thousands and thousands of gamers. You are the Brilliant Gameologists, I am a forum dickhead with an opinion. It is not up to me to write for you, and if it was, I doubt it would satisfy any of you. I have suggested new things for the show in the past and I wait eagerly to see if you ever decide to touch on them, and instead see the show mostly focusing on things I don't feel to be that enjoyable to listen to or that useful to share with my friends or gaming group. Such is life. Constructive criticism can come in two basic flavours, the technical (where you have listened to things I say and I thank you for them, as does my download limit) and the content-driven (where we seem to differ pretty wildly). I can't tell you how to make a thirty-minute asshole joke funnier without killing the joke. That's about your choice of executing the content. And quite frankly, since you guys spent thirty minutes saying 'Here are podcasts we like and Josh is an unrepentent jerk,' I don't think you can really take issue with me wasting a scant paragraph of board space being just about as wasteful with the couching of my opinion.
The irony is, I have to present my opinion to you well, otherwise you won't respect it. The same is not true in reverse, because your podcast reaches thousands of people and I'm only talking to one. And even then I don't think I should have phrased it that way.
Finally, the real reason I think this whole piece flew foul for me is best explained thus: The day my grandmother dies, I'm not going to my dad to make a joke about moms dying. This is roughly how I feel about making a thirty-minute joke about Josh being a jerk. Especially when you then wave it under the banner of 'Oh, it's all okay, srs bzns.'
So hey, here, hit me, make me put my money where my mouth is. Make me burn some of this creativity I've got resting under my fingernails. What do you, Zeke, or Josh want from me?
