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The guys from RLM commented about this on Twitter.
https://twitter.com/redlettermedia/status/365201480602497024
Ahahahaha I almost did a spit take when I read that.
Ramps?
Harry Knowles has been in a wheelchair lately due to a recent spinal surgery.
He's been in a wheelchair since the early 90s. If I'm not mistaken, and If I am I will continue to be because it's so much better, he got crushed by a trolley full of his own memorabilia.
lately?
Wheelchair ramps
I use to read AICN back in my early, early days of internet roaming. I spent a lot of time there until discovering better places. The "reviews" are awful and the "news" is reported everywhere now. the guys at red letter media are soooooooooooo much better its crazy.
Harry Knowles began a Kickstarter a few weeks back that has been mired in controversies from Harry Knowles changing the parameters of the Kickstarter, to finding loopholes in the Kickstarter reward system that allows him to simply give away stuff he owns, to finally getting his celebrity friends to back his campaign so he gets the money pledged by normal individuals. Finally, at the zero hour, Deadline.com has picked up the story. Over on the Aint it Cool News message boards (http://www.aintitcool.com/node/63935), many of Harry's longtime readers have turned against him because they claim he is scamming the people pledging money to his Kickstarter.
Typo. Instead of "many of Harry's longtime readers of turned against him", it should be "pretty much all of his remaining readers have turned against him"
I'm surprised to find out that not only is AICN still running, but Knowles hasn't died of heart attack yet. Does he still putt-putt around in a wheelchair?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9tyGzeYrgY
Wait, he uses a wheelchair just because he's fat?
Video taken down.
Yup.
I thought he was in a wheelchair from an accident that mangled his spine and his being a fat sack of shit was unrelated?
Turned against him? Every time I go to that site, the comment pages are just filled with people ragging on that guy for being fat, a ginger, in a wheelchair, illiterate, "giggling". I'm pretty sure that entire site's traffic is just comprised of people who want to post shit about him.
Typo. Instead of "pretty much all of his remaining readers have turned against him" it should be "pretty much all of his remaining readers still think he a fat ginger ape shill for his buddies and now have more things to bitch about"
This whole thing has been shady from the beginning.
I'm not a defender of Harry's, but aren't most Kickstarter campaigns shady? I mean, it's rare that they get super specific and some have taken the money and ran.
Each project I've backed (including Double Fine) have gone way past their projected release date. Some (including Double Fine) didn't have a budget laid out, and they found out it wasn't enough.
I'm just making the point that its not just Harry's that is "shady".
Edit: fixed autocorrect error.
Wait a minute... you're telling me that a guy who runs a website that was accused of and looked like it played favorites for whoever treated its owner to the best extras... is scamming people on kickstarter, a site with a history of people scamming others?
Get out of town. You're pulling my leg.
He's a crook
How exactly? I'm honestly curious. I can't figure out why people hate him with such a furious passion.
It's one thing to dislike or not agree with someone, but the hatred that people seem to spew about him seems childish to me.
I can't speak for everyone but I can't stand him because of what his reviews have become. I used to look forward to them and now they're just rambling and pretentious. That combined with some of the shady things he's done equals me not being able to stand him anymore. For the longest time I still went to the site to read reviews from other writers that wrote for the site but it seems like most of them have moved on as well. It's sad really.
I see what you're saying, and you seem very reasonable and thoughtful.
But there are so many people that say just say outlandish things about him, his wife, and his father. That's what I don't get. Why do people hate him so much that they do their best to embarrass or harass him. I just don't get that.
It's one thing to say you don't like his writing or site. It's another to comment over and over again about his weight, disability, or family.
The worst part is how he's repurposed tickets for a charity film event as perks for the Kickstarter donation levels to raise money for a completely unrelated project. That Aint Cool!
I thought the worst part is where he's asking for $100,000 dollars without actually providing a business plan or being at all transparent about how he's using the money.
I was kinda "meh" about this controversy, but now I'm totally on board with the hate. All he needs is a camera set up and maybe a friend to talk to. WTF is this $100,000 grand for.
He's using the Anita Sarkeesian plan.
No it's not. His is a business venture and hers is completely academic AND it's goal was completely realistic for what was required.
you get a 15min phone call with him
wow
I'd rather talk to my priest and I hate him
Harry Knowles is the quintessential example of what's wrong with Kickstarter. Fuck him, that stupid cunt.
Knowles is a despicable man, with an outdated website.
He's rude, obnoxious, smells like shit, and is a nasty hoarder. Worse than some of the folks on that show. Hopefully he gives enough of his stuff away to clean up that dump.
This man had more than enough money to fund whatever projects he has lined up, but he has lost a lot of it gambling, and ofcourse his site is not what it once was, so its not like the cash is still pouring in. If the man has celebrity buddies with money, I dont see why he would get on kickstarter to begin with.
I'm actually kind of amazed. I haven't visited in at least a year, and it's still the same puke brown piece of shit design it was in 1998. I don't think I've ever seen a site go that long without any sort of slight modification to how it looks (particularly since it looks like absolute garbage).
Good god it looks the same it did when I had fucking dial up. 56k dial up.
Comment deleted by user
Total visual overhaul? Of what, exactly? Font, layout, and color look the same to me. Perhaps the layout has changed a bit, but I recall the "top stories" on the left, "latest" in the middle, and "coaxial" on the right from a while ago.
Maybe I'm just remembering things wrong (which wouldn't shock me), but I don't see much significant change.
I don't go to the site anymore really, but I remember them changing it at least twice during my time there. It has always kept a pretty consitent look, but they've tweaked things quite a few things all over, and they've done some fairly heft backend updates to deal with their traffic. The most recent update was their comment section, which got a complete revamp when they moved from a pretty basic model to a DISQUS plugin...I think they are running Drupal CMS now, they were using something else before, but not sure what.
As an aside, every time there was a minor change, the user base would flip the fuck out.
Hey now, you've been able to edit your comments for at least the past year! /s
Can you provide some links and elaborate on your stories. I've only recently come into the whole 'web geek culture'. I've preached the gospel of a few newer geek sites, but friends always seem to refer to AICN as the holy grail, and equally so with Harry Knowles. What's up with him?
Back in about 1995 Harry Knowles started AICN. It was pretty much the site for gossip and rumors about movies. There were tales of top studio execs checking it every morning just to see the latest gossip about them and their competitors. Put it this way: he was the first guy to report that Ewan McGreggor was cast as Obi-Wan in the prequels. This predated Google by a few years so if you wanted to know the latest news in movies you went there.
Criticism stemmed from the fact that he couldn't actually write a sentence worth a damn and he would fairly regularly beg for "pwesents" (yes he really spelled it that way).
Having said that, it was one of the first, if not the first, fan-based geek sites and was a trailblazer in that regard. However, imho, Harry's inability to listen to his critics in order to learn how to change was his downfall.
If I recall correctly the first criticism happened with the Godzilla remake. Harry got invited to the set and gave the film a good review, after a lot of backlash because the film was shit he changed his review to a bad one.
The funny thing is the person who got me onto Reddit was a critic there, Massawyrm, who did an AMA and was actually a very decent critic.
Yeah, the one thing that Harry had to offer was he was the only game in town at the time for people who just wanted to write about movies but couldn't get a job at a paper. Drew McWeeny (Moriarty) was probably his best but he's gone on to bigger and better things.
Side note: did anyone ever figure out who Hercules is? Almost every other code name has been figured out but to the best of my knowledge his real name has never been revealed.
Link to AMA? Can't seem to find it on mobile.
This is exactly why we need Kickstoppers
I love the idea of Kickstarter. I really do. However, it just seems to be very easy to manipulate or do shady things with.
As opposed to any other means of fundraising?
Kickstarter is a tad bit different than most other fundraising methods I've seen. Of course, there are probably dozens I've never heard of. As for Kickstarter, an example I can think of is how the OUYA creators would help fund a game if it would be exclusive to their system for some time (6 months I think). Anyway, I remember hearing something along the lines of a group of guys just basically funded a game themselves and then pocketed all the extra money. Just odd things like that seem to pop up.
When I hear that someone "kept the extra money" or "their kickstarter is too high", what I really hear is "they got paid" and "they expected to get paid more than somebody thinks they should".
No. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about just normal over-funding. I'm talking about people who put up Kickstarter pages, knowing that their product is a sham, and take advantage of offers like these.
Not surprised, this is the same guy that fired a writer over FB for writing too many negative reviews
If this was the critic "the Kidd", I think theres more behind the story than just the negative reviews. I remember him really coming across as a douchebag in his reviews.
Not that AICN isn't known for being a douchey site(The comments section alone can be pretty bad.) but Kidds schtick for being negative wasn't really welcome and his reviews writing style was pretty pretentious and lacked enthusiasm. I just re-read his "Django Unchained" review and it really felt like a chore to finish reading a paragraph.
Not to defend Harry too much because, there isn't much to defend.
He just made about 30k in 2 days which would be fine...if support for his project hadn't died about a week ago.
It was at about....70k a week ago and didnt make more than about 2k up until a day ago.
Now all of a sudden its up to over 90k and has Guillermo and Peter Jackson support vids on it. -_-
If these guys had vids at the beginning of the kick starter project, that would have been fine. But within the last 24 hours of a failing kickstarter project? Thats really fucked up.
Well, Harry is kind of a douche... but this is what people do on kickstarter. Its a well known fact that the last 24-48 hours can be a HUGE push for a campaign, so this is often what is done.
Yes, I don't understand why the last push is a problem, but Harry is a douche
Holy shit, this led to me googling Knowles and I saw what he looks like for the first time. He's not at all what I had pictured, despite people constantly calling him a fat bastard. He looks disgusting.
Well it looks like he met the deadline.
Somehow they raised $20k in the past 15 hours.
the beginning of 2014 is going to be known for the end of kickstarter when hundreds of kickstarters get to their deadline and not able to deliver, we've already seen a few cases already and they have caused huge outrage, but with allot of the kickstarters deadline coming to an end soon will see huge outrage and a very like decrease in kickstart funds.
Functional illiteracy + cronyism + undiscriminating enthusiasm for "geek culture" = film criticism!
Fuck, it looks like he made it. $108,174 and counting for a $100,000 goal.
WFT?! I've being following this thing and reading all the comments on AintItCool for pure fun and it looked like a complete (and deserved) failure until one or two days ago!
Is this normal for Kickstarters? Did Harry finally sell a couple of his collectables and "donated" the money with another name?
Anyway, I hope the fans who donated don't get riped off.
It seems pretty typical, yeah (Just going by the ones I've followed). Many of them make a big push for backers as the end draws near, and some large donors tend to wait until it's almost over (sometimes because the people involved start making more direct pleas and so forth). None of this is very unusual.
The ones like Veronica Mars, or whatever, where they get all the funding very quickly are very atypical in that sense.
AICN used to get all kinds of big scoops on movie news. Now, you can read scoops here on reddit and other sites DAYS before AICN even makes a post about it. News it is not. Instead, they need to figure out what kind of site they are. Are they a reviews site (a biased one, as Harry's pockets are lined by many filmmakers)? Are they a film discussion site? Or is it time for the site to just die all together.
Read Harry's Blade II review. It's crazy weird.
The only good thing that's come from this KickStarter campaign are two (and hopefully they'll merge) sites made by REAL fans of the medium that came from AICN. I've been a reader since the late 90s when I was in elementary school. The site has literally remained the same since then. These two sites are streets ahead of AICN's design and they were made in a matter of days. That shows you what passion and dedication can accomplish, and it didn't take them $100k to make something great and community driven.
Psh. Whatevs. Don't like it? Don't contribute. Interesting it describes Harry of "boasting" of $1,500 per episode. Um... that aint that much.
ITT a lot of people real mad about how other people they don't know use money that in no way affects the people who are mad about it.
In other words: everyone is reacting exactly as Reddit does to every kickstarter no matter who makes it or for what reasons.
If people want to give their stupid money to other stupid people, to do stupid things, that's fine by me. To each their own.