I like how the RLM guys subvert the parasocial dynamic with their viewers by telling us that we aren't part of their group and never will be. They never ask for comments or for interaction with fans, and I remember Mike specifically saying once to the camera 'we don't want to hang out with you -- ever' or something similar. It is refreshing and a reminder that we do not know these people.
Yep. I was telling my wife a few weeks ago that the RLM guys have really satisfied a social need I have had for the past few years. I don't know what it is about them.
They recently played a fan-made RLM-themed video game on the channel, which seems to be the most they’ve done to acknowledge their audience in a long time.
Of course to balance it out they’ve trolled the audience again with this video.
The persona they deliberately give off is of being deeply unkind. It was fantastic when they did that in character for the take-down of Phantom Menace but it’s less attractive knowing they might be like that in real life. Maybe the joke is on me, and they are still in character?
It’s as if we were to discover Stephen Colbert is actually a neocon boot licker.
That's the whole point though -- if you only see someone in media or on a stage, then you never know them at all. I personally believe that they are acting to an extent -- I would be very surprised if Mike were actually a scumbag who abused his best friend and that Jay is either too stupid or too sadistic to have empathy. You can see glimpses of their actual interpersonal dealings if you watch the special feature on the Space Cop blu-ray call 'How Not to Make A Movie' which is a kind of documentary-style collection of them behind the scenes starting when they first mean up with Jay in the 90s. They seem like normal mid-western white boys who like weird films and probably got a bit bullied in high school.
That said, I remind myself that even though it is tremendously fun sitting and watching them and thinking that we would probably have a great time being friends, they are real people with real faults and I already have great friends who have those. The difference is that if I met not sets of those people on the street one of those sets would have no idea who I am and the other would be my actual friends.
They go to conventions and interact with fans in public, and I haven't seen anyone mention it having gone poorly. I see this more as a consequence of "mid-level fame" on Youtube. You might be likely to draw a rather fanatic following while being much more accessible to them than other celebrities. I take it more as preemptive means of avoiding this issue.
I'm an unabashed RLM fan-boy and glad to see them on the front page of HN. If you have any interest in (bad) movies, watch a couple of their Half in the Bag(s) or Best of the Worst(s). They rarely ever miss in terms of entertainment/comedy and appreciate all the work they do to put a smile on my face.
Heartily agree. The Plinkett Prequel reviews are much, much more entertaining than the prequels themselves. (And they're not JUST raves against the prequels: while they do it in a humorous manner, they carefully list just exactly what is objectively bad in the prequels.)
Listen, I love RLM, but I came here to ask why this is on the front page. It's a strange feeling to see a site I used to associate with tech (and startups), now have so many irrelevant posts.
Would categories/subreddits help this site or hurt it more?
HN’s mandate is anything people find intellectually stimulating, not just tech. This is a video that explains a meme, and that kind of stuff shows up on HN every once in a while.
IMO Subreddits would hurt it, as there’s really not that many posts on the front page on any given day (60?). Most of these cultural ones degrade faster than the technical ones that garner a lot of discussion.
dang has, on multiple occasions, commented on why he doesn't want subreddits (or their equivalent) for HN. For material you don't think belongs, there's always the flag option. If you just don't care for it, hide it.
For people who are confused by this, Red Letter Media is a youtube channel that does movie reviews.
I have been following them for over ten years and thanks to them I have learned a lot about movies, actors, directors and movie making in general.
They have a very particular sense of humor, very dark and full of sarcasm; they like to troll their own audience and don’t care about what youtube wants.
They respect my intelligence and never asked me to like and subscribe (unless it’s a joke) and for that, I like them even more.
This is possible only in very specific and controlled cases. We would need the original uncompressed footage, before Mike encoded it and published it as compressed video. It would also need to have been 16 bits per sample or greater, to provide enough precision for a good deconvolution. And we would need to know the blur radius that was used.
If we don't have all those things, it would be like asking: If the average of two numbers is 10, what were the original numbers?
I think of it like the Wu Tang album that Martin Shkreli ended up with. I like the idea that these things exist and won’t be available for mass consumption. YMMV
Having seen a lot of red letter media videos this was very strange for them to make/release. They're directly talking about themselves and a photograph of one of them that has become a meme. For a channel that is basically a bunch of guys watching movies together (BOTW) or movie reviews (HITB) they tend to be very anti-parasocial.
