Not a front for a secret organization.
Written by Rob Schultz (human).
It was a nail-biting, photo-finish, just-under-the-wire conclusion, but Sam's Kickstarter was a terrific success!
He fell short of the backer goal that would have gotten me making a new Transit style cartoon about a math subject, but who knows? If and when I finish the next couple of those I have planned, a math story could happen anyhow...
We're tallying up my Kickstarter adventures. So far, I've backed 10 projects out of friendship or professional self-interest, and I've given 5 of them the 👍 seal of approval. Also, 8 of them actually delivered! In today's categories, I am backing as a pre-order. A down payment on stuff I want to get, own, have, and enjoy.
These categories here are responsible for my second era of kickstarting. After getting burned on some expensive and disappointing projects, I changed my habits to buying almost exclusively from proven professionals in their respective fields. I figured they would have a much better chance of actually knowing how to make their thing, and maybe that thing would be less likely to suck.
In almost every case below, I didn't end up liking the actual music that came from these Kickstarters as much as I liked the music they had already made, which was what convinced me to support their art in the first place. I have no regrets about choosing to help any of these people.
This is actually two categories. Video games are a bad deal on Kickstarter. As a general rule, assuming the project doesn't fail, you're paying a premium as a backer. Especially if it's going to end up on Steam one day.
I don't think I'm likely to back another video game project. I think Kickstarter shines as venue for creators who have created something, but need a financial push to make the leap from bits to atoms. It's awesome that everyone supported the very idea of Tim Schafer (and Zarf) making a new adventure game, and that seems to be turning out well, but backing digital goods that haven't progressed past the idea stage feels substantially riskier – and more importantly, less fun.
Board games, on the other hand, are expensive to physically produce and ship, and might be a pretty good value in pre-release.
That's another 16 projects. Of those, only 9 are complete, and of those, only 3 got a 👍.
Total score to date: 26 projects. 17 completed, 8 that I'm glad I backed.
Next week we'll actually get to some of those disappointing tech projects, a category that's an even worse deal than video games, and maybe a list of projects I backed that didn't fund.
Kickstarter is a source of almost endless fascination for me. I performed on a comedy show at SF Sketchfest this year that challenged each performer to write a new set on the topic of obsession, and so I got to say a bunch of things about Kickstarter to a paying audience. Click above to see how that went. Click below to read brief reviews of the Kickstarter projects I have backed as I attempt to establish my own Kickstarter Happiness Index!
The Kickstarter Happiness Index, or KHI, or KkrHppdx, is derived through a simple formula: it is the ratio of projects I still happy I backed by the time they were over (denoted by the thumbs-up symbol, or 👍) to the total number of projects I backed (denoted by a number, like 51).
Yes indeed, I've backed quite a lot of things on kickstarter. I daresay it's become my number one use of irresponsibly spent discretionary income. I don't buy a lot of movies or games these days, but sometimes I buy one that doesn't exist yet for too much money. In order to simplify this process a bit, we're going to look at these projects in categories. What's more, because we're both such busy people, we're going to spread these categories over a few posts this month.
As a general rule, I don't feel comfortable contributing to projects I am scheduled to work on. There's some kind of conflict of interest there, and anyway, I think it's weird to buy myself a job. One of these was the award-winning short film Broken Things. Others, I have sometimes given a donation of $1, just to lend moral support or get the backer updates. These include:
This hasn't happened nearly as much as I might have thought it would. As a big kickstarter user, and a guy who lives in LA and mainly knows people who seem to be struggling to make things, I don't know how I've gotten off so lightly.
That's it.
These aren't so much excellent deals as they are situations in which I bid $1, usually for moral support or just to keep tabs on how they turned out.
Today's score: 10 projects backed. With 5 happy returns, I'm going to guess that my ratio so far is better than the final score will be, but maybe that's because a lot of these projects gave some of their money to me.
Next time I'm going to cover some projects I backed without personally knowing anyone involved, and maybe how I totally use Kickstarter as a store, even though they explicitly say not to do that.
This week, the reviews are pretty low on critical thinking. I'd apologize for that, but I'm too thoroughly employed to do anything about anything at the moment.
Devil in a Blue Dress - ★★★½☆
A fun companion to a recent run of movie club movies that included LA Confidential, The Long Goodbye, and Changeling. Good movie. Bad title. Makes me want to start a letterboxd list called "We were SURE this was gonna be a franchise!"
The Drop - ★★★½☆
Went into this one cold. It's pretty good! Pleasantly surprised to see it's written by Dennis Lehane. My favorite thing about Hardy and Rapace are that I don't really know what they look like yet, so I don't have to spend the first twenty minutes of the movie waiting for the character to take over in my head from the big star. (Ahem, Devil in a Blue Dress, ahem.) Movies like this are tough to give a score though, because while I liked it, have no real complaints, and would recommend this movie to YOU, I don't think I will ever want to see it again.
L.A. Confidential - ★★★½☆
I think all I knew about this movie was the clip shown on the Mystery Science Theater 3000 Vice Presidential Command Performance Academy of Robots' Choice Awards Preview Special, so I thought it was going to be a lot of boring standing around and saying cryptic things with Kim Basinger, who turns out to be in this movie about as much as Danny DiVito is in the poster.
Instead, I liked La Confidentiál, and that I'm glad it was made in the 90s so that it didn't turn out to be Gangster Squad, which I have not seen but I'm willing to assume puts more emphasis on speed ramping the camera than an intriguing plot. I look forward to seeing that movie in 2029 and coming back to write about how wrong I turned out to be.
Gone Girl - ★★★★★
My experience with this movie is similar to Inception, in that I liked it, I'm glad I saw it very close to release day, and I dread most of the inevitable internet conversation to follow.
I didn't know anything about Gone Girl until a week or two ago when my twitter feed started to bubble over with equal excitement for the director, Fincher, and the editing system used, Adobe Premiere. That's probably because of how much I've cut down on reading movie news blogs. If the result of that choice is movies like these popping up out of nowhere and being great, then it was an excellent choice.
My friend Sam is the world's foremost mathematical podcaster. He's done math news shows, math chat shows, mathematician interview shows, a show about cult movies that might not have all that much math in it really, and perhaps most notably a lovely and lively series of math radio documentaries called RELATIVELY PRIME.
Well, it turns out that Samuel wants to do more math podcasting. Sam is a math guy in a much bigger way than he's a video guy, but I'm a video guy, so he asked me to shoot his kickstarter video. I did want to help him, but what I didn't want to do was go to Wisconsin, so we made a cartoon instead.
Sam says he likes this video and I hope everyone else on the internet does too, so that he can raise all that money he needs. You can help him out by visiting his kickstarter today. And everyday.
