pstringini's movie Reviews on Newgrounds

[Dork Legends S01E01]

First off, as a collaborator on this projecdt now that I see it, I hate the two little guys. I liked the movie better without it. But maybe it will do some good and make the unreasonable people who keep blamming our content look at themselves.

This review is preemptive. I'm tired of all the bullshit about youtube. The youtube issue is really quite simple. NG will not allow us to upload video files. If this special place is only about the love of art then why put such a constraint on the artist? I don't personally mind NGs forcing us to take this route, but I am sick of our projects getting artificially low reviews for trying to find a way to share stuff that had to go a little beyond flash.

if you look at our last several submissions, what you basically see is a number of people writing reviews who are completely unreasonable or have some very ignorant views about the "rules". They don't want us to use youtube, ok, so then how do they suggest we get our work on this site without COMPRIMISING our art? We are not shills for youtube, we can't control where youtube puts their logo, is there some "cooler" video site we should be using is there some more chic brand name you would like to see on our video? if it is all about the art then why is our art consistantly being shit on for commercially sensitive reasons? Simply because we have to resort to embedding our movies because newgrounds only accepts "art" in the prescribed format.

Sometimes artists have to bear a little commercialism to survive. Of course, since very few of you know what it means to support a family, I doubt you could sympathize with people who have more to worry about than feeding their own bloated bellies.

We are going to continue to upload our stuff to youtube and embed it here, mostly just to piss off our enemies.

[It's The Puppet Show!]

Once again, as a collaborator on this project I would like to leave a few remarks for posterity. I don't personally get the aversion of some to embedding our youtube video in a flash, it seems almost purely to be a knee-jerk reaction based on personal feelings and prejudiced impulses. Some people have a very narrow understanding of how media is created and how it may be effectively shared. This knee-jerk fear of embedding has never been satisfactorily explained to me. A few ignorant persons have suggested that this sort of submission violates terms. But I have read the terms of service several times and this kind of embedding does not violate terms in any way shape or form. Those of you who think it does, need to read those terms again, and this time turn your brain on.

I think this is the clause they misread:

"Your submission must not auto-redirect to a new site or open pop-ups. If your submission auto-spawns something to boost stats on another site, your account will be deleted and admins for the target site will be notified."

There is no auto-spawning in this submission, there is nothing sinister or devious about it. We submit our movies in the spirit of purest innocence. We did not want to compress the hell out of our pretty little movie. That is all, anyone with half a brain can decompile this swf and see. We did not submit "a youtube video" we submitted our own original content, the HD video of which happens to be stored on youtube's servers.

When we initially conceived "the Stringini Bros" we imagined doing a flash version for NGs and a full production version for youtube, but as we progressed it became obvious that the original idea would not stand up to reality, the difference between our flash animation and the finished movie was too great to just go back and output a swf.

I wanted to just forget about Newgrounds, I'm not a fan. But my brother thought we could do something to compress our videos. We ended up chopping our big submission into pieces and demolishing the quality. But people were telling us "Your Dora video is getting bad marks because of the video compression, you need to embed your HD youtube video." The whole notion of embedding was not our idea, as others, we IGNORANTLY thought it was against the rules.

So after some checking we did what people suggested. And now our videos suffer artificially in the rankings because of knee-jerk reactions, ignorance of terms, and prejudice against embedding by "NGNazis." I'm not talking about the 2 or three star ratings from people who dislike the video based on personal taste, that is expected. I'm talking about all the 0's people are giving it for no other reason than their own prejudice and ignorance.

We intend to continue embedding our HD videos. Visually, it is the best option for us. Flahs can't handle our content natively, and we are not going to dumb it down for poor little flash.

It has become a bit of a perverse pleasure to watch our videos get shot down. It feeds into all the negative impressions I have about Newgrounds being a place infested with too many narrow-minded people with their heads in the sand. And now it has become a matter of principle. We are going to continue to submit high-quality animations using embedded videos and we are going to continue to get ridiculously low ratings. This will be a testimony against Newgrounds, when your system ranks high quality projects like ours ridiculously lower than some of the absolute trash that makes its way on to this site, it becomes obvious that something is amiss.

So until next time, when we bring you another technically stunning production which will be crapped on by a few zealots for whom this is more religion than entertainment.

Hard at work,
The Other Stringini Bro

[Dora No More *complete*]

As a collaborator on this project (I wrote and performed the mind-worm song, and assisted with some of the art) I would like to leave a few remarks on the animation for posterity. I suppose the most remarkable thing about the reception of this project on NGs is the fact that dog-crap projects that we threw together in a week got higher marks than this. That goes to show that no matter how hard you work things can go flat if you don't consider the audience. But we did succeed with the audience we targeted.

This is flash animation, not everyone can make Flash do this, that is why the bad marks are kind of puzzling, I have to wonder if they are ignorant or just prejudiced. "Everything by Everyone." No one has ever seen anything quite like this. nevermind the characters or the color scheme, don';t be blinded by the happy flashing colors kiddies. On a technical level, this animation turns over new ground. I'm personally pleased that the animators whom I respect, respect this animation. That is not surprising and gratifying.

So, what is wrong? Why does a technically groundbreaking animation get so little love on a website that is all about breaking new ground. maybe it was the character, maybe it was the music, maybe it is a small segment of active and narrowminded reviewers who have forgotten that newgrounds is not about conforming to their expectations. It is not about creating a new conformity to a paradigm that they approve. It is everything by everyone, the video should have been judged on its own merits, not based on the cultivated tastes of a vocal minority of conformists.

The youtube embedding is a technical restraint, Frank could have taken my advice and avoided NGs altogether, I wrote the song for mass appeal, some people say that means that we should not be on NGs, whatever happened to "Everything by Everyone." i think the staff believes in it, but I think some of the users are starting to get the idea that they define just exactly what qualifies as "everything" by their own conformist tastes.

One thing that I think is wrong with newgrounds, the voting system powers up on a basis that is not democratic enough. You should get more power based on the number of people who click on the little green icon to say "this review was helpful" those are the voters who should be getting the most weight.