Last night was the grand premiere of The Sarkeesian Effect (Team Jordan Owen Edition), and the response from critics and audience members alike has been overwhelming!
That video of crickets has gotten more than 3,344,825 views on Youtube. That’s 371,647 times the number of people who apparently showed up at the Sarkeesian Effect premiere/#GamerGate Meetup at the Landmark Midtown Art Cinema in Atlanta last night.
Yep. According to the organizer of the #GamerGate meetup, only nine people showed. Including the director.
@mundanematt @jordanowen42 But yeah, including me, Jordan, and my bf, only 9 people showed up.
— Artist Lisa M (@ArtistLisaM) August 1, 2015
Meanwhile, on Reddit’s Kotaku In Action subreddit, one of the main #GamerGate hubs, the excitement was palpable.
Even Jordan Owen — the director of this incarnation of the Sarkeesian Effect — was uncharacteristically quiet; his reports from the premiere consisted mainly of photos of the screen, evidently his attempt to prove to the critics that, yes, the film exists.
https://twitter.com/jordanowen42/status/627336679112736769
https://twitter.com/jordanowen42/status/627343425369702400
https://twitter.com/jordanowen42/status/627350752097341440
Those last two pics seem to suggest that the insidious “Sarkeesian Effect” that gave the film its title is Ms. Sarkeesian’s uncanny ability to cause her critics to wear plaid shirts vaguely similar to her own signature look.
Online, the only people excited about the event that I could find were an assortment of popcorn-munching critics of #GamerGate. And they were mostly excited about the discovery of the official Sarkeesian Effect website.
Sorry, I meant to say the discovery of ANOTHER official Sarkeesian Effect website.
You may vaguely remember the official website, unveiled several months back, an amateurish unfinished job, with crappy graphics; the links on the front page to the film’s trailer, press coverage, Sarkeesian Effect wallpapers (!), and a list of theaters showing the film (!!) all led to this page:
And they still do.
Owen says that this unfinished mess of a website is still the official Sarkeesian Effect website. But now it’s been joined by a second unfinished mess of a website that also seems to be staking a claim as the official Sarkeesian Effect website. It’s not clear if this new site is the handiwork of Davis Aurini, or if Owen hired someone to put it together and just forgot about it.
Weirdly, this last option seems the most probable. Given that the site was promoting the premiere last night — a premiere of Owen’s version of the film, which Aurini had disavowed in advance — it seems unlikely that Aurini had anything to do with it.
While a teensy bit slicker than the original, the new site isn’t quite ready for public consumption. Here, for example, are the bios of some of the famous NAMES interviewed in the film.
Yes, that’s right: Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s …
Also, Karen Straughan — the blabby FeMRA videoblogger and “Honey Badger” — is actually three women sitting next to each other.
Alas, the now-feuding “filmmakers” behind the “film” don’t fare any better themselves. In addition to giving both of them the Lorem treatment, whoever made the site also managed to misspell Aurini’s last name.
Clearly, from now on, Davis Aurini will be known as Davis-a-rooni.
Even the site’s Quick FAQs section has an impressive Lorem ratio.
And, yes, it is true that FILM starring NAME, NAME and NAME, has been featured on MEDIA.
This site, as, er, wildly optimistic about the commercial prospects of The Sarkeesian Effect as the old site, also includes a link to theaters showing the film. But instead of leading to a “Coming Soon” page, the new site links instead to … a blank page on Google Docs.
I can only hope that the film itself — presumably headed ultimately for a YouTube release — lives up to this amazing website.
Sorry. I mean BOTH films live up to BOTH websites.
H/T — @tortoiseontour, who alerted me to the website and pointed out the misspelling of Aurini’s name.
Help me, I am suffering from Schadenfreude overload!
Quick, somebody put my cat onto my chest to calm my heart!
Lorem? I hardly knew ‘im!
But holy shit that website is awful. No wonder Owen’s distancing himself from it.
…oh wait. His is even worse. Carry on then.
I gave these clowns too much credit when I first imagined how this would end up. I wonder if any version of The Sarkeesian Effect will ever surface for public consumption.
1. Owen and Davis fight and make up.
2. Owen and Davis break up for good.
3. Davis and Sargon of Akkad fight.
And yet feminists are supposedly the ones driven by feelz, not realz. Sure, fellas.
The more you know:
Says you, Cicero. “Neither is there anyone who loves, pursues or desires pain itself because it is pain”?! How do you explain people voluntarily watching The Sarkeesian Effect then, huh?
Hah 🙂
It’s an odd get-out to say a site must have been designed and made by a bot, especially when that “bot” has significantly better web design skills than you! Most importantly, it didn’t produce a site like Jordan’s which weighs in at an absolutely browser-crushing 9.6MB for the front page.
Coming out of lurking status simply to say Oh My GODS, I can’t stop laughing.
imagining the Gator spin on this: “Hypocritical SJWs mock the work of female MRA Laura M Ipsum…”
The schadenfreude tastes sooo delicious.
http://www.daily-meowing.com/Tee%20Hee.jpg
They could even have bothered to generate their own. http://www.lipsum.com/ But no.
1. Credit to Owen, I really thought this would never come to completion. Even if its completion is falling off a cliff.
2. I really didn’t know about that Lorem Ipsum stuff. Wow. I’m just back from Rome and am intrigued by how so much of what they did still affects us today.
Davis-a-rooni, the San Francisco treat!
You know, honestly, I’m amazed they released anything on the actual date. I was pretty confident they’d make up excuses and kick it down the road. I hope this doesn’t mean the end of the drama 🙁
By the looks of their Twitters, it seems to be only just beginning 🙂
I agree with rugbyyogi and katz, in that it’s very surprising and mildly impressive that Owen actually came through and got the “movie” done. For a long time he said the “movie” was almost done, and that he would have it ready for GGinATL on July 31, and he fucking did it. It’s obviously a piece of crap, but he did keep his promise. I think Owen has shown he’s the guy who actually did any work, out of the two of these assholes. Aurini doesn’t even seem to have a plan. I am almost 100% certain Aurini will make up an excuse to never finish the “movie”, while obviously blaming it on Owen.
http://data3.whicdn.com/images/71155643/large.gif
You know, a lot of truly despicable and scary stuff has come out of Gamergate, but this trainwreck is the gift that just keeps on giving. It’s all just so breathtakingly incompetent. I’m going to be chuckling at lorem ipsum text for the rest of my life.
This is amazing, when do we get to see this train wreak?
Glorious. Lorem Ipsum glorious.
“Press coverage.”
Oh my giddy aunt. In fact, everybody should check with their assorted aunts to make sure none of them have fallen over.
This is an epic trainwreck. The kind you can’t actually see because it’s been overwhelmed by all the debris that came with the tsunami that swamped it. (It’s how all that money got washed away with nothing to show for it.)
The sarkeesianeffect.com domain was registered by a Deepak Patel in Blacktown, New South Wales, at an address which looks residential.
That Anita gif is glorious. I love it so much.
Wait – it’s not pronounced “A-rooney?” I’ve been saying it wrong until now, when it changed to make me right?
Lovely disaster….
I do wonder if Sarkeesian knows about this film? If so, what does she think about it?
Who thinks we could get more than nine people to show up if we made The Sarkeesian Effect Effect?