Seriously, is this just some elaborate practical joke? Are Davis Aurini and Jordan Owen deliberately trying to convince the world that they’re such bumbling nincompoops that they shouldn’t be trusted with $15 much less $15000 a month to make a documentary? Or are they really this incompetent?
I’m leaning towards the latter interpretation.
Watch the video and you’ll see what I mean. It’s their latest official update video for their backers on Patreon, to let the people who collectively sent them $9000 last month and another $7000 this month know what’s the SarkeesianEffect duo have managed to accomplish with their money so far.
And it’s filmed on a cheap webcam with bad lighting. Apparently these guys can’t be bothered to spend ten minutes to set up the equipment that their donors have so generously provided for them in order to make a video that looks even vaguely professional.
Even more hilariously, they filmed the whole thing using a directional microphone that 1) makes Jordan Owen sound like he’s fallen down a well and 2) RENDERS IT IMPOSSIBLE TO HEAR WHAT DAVIS AURINI IS SAYING ALTOGETHER.
You don’t have to watch the whole thing to see what I mean — skip ahead to about 1:15 in the video and wait until Aurini starts talking. He manages to get in a couple of words before moving out of the microphone’s range, and from then on nothing he says is audible (unless you want to blast your speakers out every time Owen talks).
In other words, not only can these two not be trusted to make a professional quality documentary, they can’t even manage to make a crappy webcam video properly.
Had their bete noire Anita Sarkeesian put out a similarly shitty video in order to tell her supporters what she was doing with their money, she would have been run out of town on a rail. Possibly literally.
In the comments on YouTube, Owen tells his disappointed backers that he can’t upload another video to replace this obviously fucked up one because that would trigger something on Patreon and cause all their backers to get charged again.
Uh, dude, you can’t upload an improved video with a different title, or on Aurini’s channel?
Huh. Maybe you should have, you know, watched your own video once to make sure everything was ok with it before putting it up in the first place?
I swear, these guys must have thought that Tim Burton’s movie about Ed Wood was a how-to, not a comedy.
girlscientist – that would make a really good affirmation for anyone feeling down. “I’m not Owen or Aurini.”
Weissness – dunno what’s up with that; do you want to drop a line to David?
The video was deleted, so now the link goes to the next one on the playlist.
Looks like the guys who built their entire careers on throwing tantrums have thrown another tantrum.
Please tell me somebody permanently captured that video before it was deleted. It’s an important historical document that must not be lost. Hysterical… historical… it’s one of those.
It’s still up on their Patreon page, under Creations.
Finnish language has a word “myötähäpeä”, which basically means “feeling ashamed over actions of someone who is clearly uncapable of feeling ashamed”.
Yes, seriously.
Brazilian slang “vergonha alheia” (literally “shame by proxy”) covers the same situation.
All I know is that I made a couple of comments explaining and answering his “questions” about Anita, and then the video was gone, and there’s still one up on the Patreon site.
The video is still up here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63zOFf5WuDc
They have some tripe about posting a new video which, for some reason, required them to disable and delete all the comments on the current video. We’ll have to see if the next update will be as hilariously bad as the last one.
Finnish seems like kind of an amazing language. Maybe I’ll learn it next.
Weird.
“This video is unlisted. Be considerate and think twice before sharing.”
O-kayyyyy:
http://youtu.be/63zOFf5WuDc
Oh for crying out loud, their Patreon account says ‘per monthly update’. Fixing their current one – or more than one a month – wouldn’t be the monthly update, now would it?
I think the term “sympathy shame” would cover the meaning nicely.
@katz:
Just so that you know what you’re going to face if you plan to do this…
http://i.imgur.com/zWOMoaA.png
http://i.imgur.com/KgtBP0D.png
http://i.imgur.com/mUZ3HtP.jpg
Still haven’t managed to make myself watch the whole thing. Got a new giggle out of it though—watching the closed captioning struggle with Aurini’s inaudibility.
Yep, Finnish sounds kind of amazing.
skiriki, I love those cartoons, especially the third one!
XD
Russian, however, has a word for “to mutter while making menacing hand gestures” (Приговаривать).
And Hungarian has a word meaning “due to your repeatedly not being possible to be desecrated” (megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért) which I’m pretty sure was created by some troll to see how much you can stretch the rules of the language without breaking it. (It begins with “szent” meaning “saint” and everything else is basically just a metricshitton of suffixes.) I also heard that we apparently have a novel without verbs. Literary trolls. We haz them!
B-b-but don’t forget, Sarkeesian totes scammed everyone who backed her Kickstarter! I mean, it’s not like she actually made professional quality, actually watchable videos, right guys? Guys?
@Malitia: Finnish and Hungarian are related. 😉 Explains a lot, doesn’t it.
@katz: We got similar words, like “koheltaa”, which means “flailing around and doing everything wrong/actively worsening the situation”. Very ergonomic and explains why we got a reputation of being people of few words. 😉
@kittehserf : *bows*
Now if I can just figure out how to pronounce the helpful Finnish word. It really would be useful, the way this whole gamergate thing is going.
@skiriki: Well, not that closely related, though, (Like English and Russian, on the same family tree but on very different branches) But sharing the tree is more than both have in common with basically any other language in Europe.
German famously gave us “Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän,” or “Danube steamship company captain.”
I remember there was also a ridiculously long Communist-era German word for “farm,” which had to win some sort of prize for longest word referring to a really simple thing, but I can’t remember what it was 🙁 Does anyone know it?