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 | FAQ Why do you post IMDB comments? Why are your IMDB reviews so (your pet peeve here: arrogant, pompous, personal, emotional ...)? Why report “Ted’s Evaluations?” How are “Ted’s Evaluations” figured? What do all these fields in the database mean? You made a mistake in your comment. Why not correct it? Why the interest in “self-reference?” Why so many different uses of the term? Why is the site so sparsely designed? What's all this other stuff, Alice and Alf? I'm not interested in that. Why do you post IMDB comments? Answer 1: I enjoy films. I get as much enjoyment out of thinking and writing about them as I do watching. So I do this for fun. In writing, I use areas of my visual imagination that have been tickled but not made "visible" until I write about or discuss it. So the activity is selfish. I post because it gives a discipline, requiring that the observations tickle similar memories in readers. Sometimes it does, Answer 2: I have been a senior researcher for a very long time in an area that has a very serious problem. Solutions to this problem will greatly benefit mankind. FilmsFolded is for me part of a very high risk, high payoff research strategy that could help. Visitors to the site generally divide into those interested in the study (which you can visit here), and those who just want to have fun with films in the database. Answer 3. It is a new art of filmmaking. Visit this observation. All the IMDB links to my comments are here Why are your IMDB reviews so (your pet peeve here: arrogant, pompous, personal, emotional ...)? My comments are not reviews. The beauty of writing for IMDB is that most comments are surrounded by hundreds of reviews, some quite competent. So I can assume that the reader already knows salient facts about the story and the quality of the production. In fact, I also assume the reader has shared the experience of the film with me, so I can have a similarly shared exploration of one or two interesting threads with them. I deliberately intend to go where other commentors do not. I would rather be wrong than unoriginal and I expect to be often wrong; ideally the readers will enjoy the conversation whether they agree or not — the content is not so important, rather the manner of exploring the experience. Why report “Ted’s Evaluations?” Simple: reader demand. Actually, I do not expect my opinion on recommendations or ratings to be very interesting, but since so many people requested them I now add the “evaluation.” I keep these evaluations and other personal views in a database so they already existed. The term “evaluation” is used to convey that these are my own categories since taste in film is so personal. Nearly half of the films commented are evaluated worth watching or better. You can search the database on these factors if you wish, though most other search attributes will be more rewarding I expect. How are “Ted’s Evaluations” figured? What do all these fields in the database mean? There is a separate page dealing with this. It should be accessible from every database page as well. Mail varies from two to 25 messages a day. I cannot answer all. In fact you may have been directed to this page by a form response. Sorry. Gosh, I hope not, at least to judge from the main body of what is published. Our goal is to discover and describe stuff that is interesting and fun for large numbers of filmgoers while at the same time being useful to a specific community. The community of interest for the study consists of regular people who need underlying formalisms but who want things plain and straight without obfuscation. You made a mistake in your comment. Why not correct it? I am often wrong. Either I form a notion that is superseded by something better, or I get facts wrong, or I say things clumsily. An example of the latter is in the "Monsters, Inc." comment where I said I "haven't had this much fun since 9-11." (Should have said "before 9-11," which several score readers pointed out.) There are so many things that I would change. I AM in fact doing so. That's what the "book" is. Why the interest in “self-reference?” Why so many different uses of the term? In the first thousand or so comments, I used the term "self-reference" in a broad way to include all sorts of layered and reflexive phenomenon. The existing literature addressing these matters is remarkably and unnecessarily obtuse. So I have decided to be less precise and more accessible. People know what I mean. The study itself uses a more careful terminology which we have coined. Some of this is reflected in the database search terms. Why is the site so sparsely designed? Because unnecessary eyewash insults us both. What's all this other stuff, Alice and Alf? I'm not interested in that. The navigation bar at the top of all pages includes all sorts of stuff. No one will share interest in most of them, but they all fit together in my own world. Having the site organized this way helps me keep perspective. It is a selfish thing to do, and I apologize. Because the study will use an avatar, a synthetic being. We suspect that the crispest persona, the one most comprehendable and useful for our purposes is defined by the redheaded, female film character. Disney surely thinks so and has done lots of related work along these lines. This hasn't been worked out by us yet. But we do have a personal database of redheads that is not yet ready for publishing. We need help with this. I need help with some elements of this database, the forthcoming database on film redheads, and the study proper. Send me a message if you are interested in helping.
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