Criticker Account

So, in addition to giving up the type of writing I used to do, I’ve been trying to find new places online to hang out. When I used to role-play, I hung out a lot on BMR, an adult website specifically for that kind of writing. The site is slow for anyone not role-playing and the topics that people generally make and talk about…all have to do with role-playing. Since that is no longer something I do, it feels kind of silly to stay there, especially when I’m quickly moving into the age bracket where I am no longer a part of the demographic for the site(18-28). I’ll become the old lady who hangs around but nobody knows why, just shaking her finger at youngsters for being immature and obnoxious, lol.

Other than Youtube and the free speech site I go on for political discussions, my path in the carpet is fairly worn between these three places. As far as writing discussions go, I tried the Water Cooler and I think that was where I got my first bad review this summer(somebody trying to knock me down a peg). They’re very liberal and not very tolerant of other viewpoints and it infects even the discussions about writing, where if you don’t write 100% healthy relationships, have an even representation of minority characters, or 100% positive representation, then you get ostracized for being racist/homophobic/misogynist etc. It was the largest/most active writing community I found, so, to avoid SJW attention, I think I’ll keep to myself about reading and writing. There’s criticism, that can be good to have, and then there’s backwards thinking and people trying to shove you into their personal bias box. I did not get into writing to write happy/safe things or to write what everyone else is writing. I also prefer to get genuine criticism, not people looking to bully and silence me for having the wrong opinions.

Now that I’ve got a blog and an FB base, I do not need to hang around BMR even for the bloggy type stuff, so, I need to find something else to replace it with. The only other thing I talk about there is movies and TV shows, since that is what I’m obsessed with when I’m not reading and writing. So, I went looking for active and large movie discussion forums. I’ll probably find pretentious people in these places as well but that is unavoidable; at least with movies and TV people can be pretentious and know-it-all about stuff we all enjoy and not stuff I’ve personally created.

I signed up to Criticker since I liked the look of their 100-0 rating system. I just spent all day yesterday and several hours today going through my Netflix ratings and re-rating them on Criticker. I’ve been on Netflix since the fall of 2008 and it’s been so long that movies listed past 2011/2012 sometimes show up as “MOVIE” without any details other than the rating. I think maybe because licensing and title changes that were never linked or fixed on my list, so, now, I’ve got about 100-200 titles that I rated at one point but I have no idea what they are. Fun.

Just like Netflix, when you rate movies on Criticker, you fill in a sort of profile that the site then uses to predict how you’ll rate other movies and they make recommendations based upon that. I rated 1,021 film and TV show titles and it is still confused on how to read me. I think my tastes are very particular and might make it hard to trust its predictions until I’ve rated enough movies. I like Pauly Shore Will Farrell movies but I hate Adam Sandler and Rob Schneider movies. I like the Fifth Element and the show Firefly but I hate the Star Wars and Star Trek franchises.

I’m not sure how Criticker’s algorithm is set up but I just asked for recommendations and it gave me a bunch of movies from the 40’s, 50’s, and 60’s. I guess I have to go in and let it know I hate that old, fakey acting era. I’m going to explore the forums and read for a while and see how that goes, maybe even check out IMDB’s discussion forums, see if I can’t find someplace more geared towards my current interests to hang out in. It’s time to move on and shed these relics of the past.