Kirok:
I have discovered the Personal Message system! The wonders of modern science!
However, I took long enough in the discovery that you ended up posting anyway in despite. Ah, well. I'm sorry for the added labour. I'm sorry about your illness, but I'm glad to hear you're on the mend.
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Sounds interesting! I do wonder though if the large number of groups announcing their expansion into audio drama realise the particular challenges involved in writing for audio.
I have to admit, I don't know
anything about the new shows (though I am keeping close eyes on the Wowbagger List for updates). Still more unfortunately, my secret contacts who unwittingly fed me inside information on
The Continuing Mission have all dried up of late, which leaves me with information that's months out of date. But I need only point to the success of "The Darkness of Thoughts" for evidence as to the likely (high) quality of the rest of the
Sword of Romulus trilogy (and anything else written by this David Raines character). A couple of the other older, established, but not well-known shows are making good noises, too. The new shows? We'll see. I always find it disturbing when a show goes into a multi-month hiatus right after their first episode, and it takes a couple of smooth releases after that to regain my trust.
Diplomatic Relations did that,
Starfleet Renegades did that, and
Dimensions not only did it, but have now announced what appears to be a spinoff! (Multi-month hiatuses are, of course, practically a way of life for
Eras, but I don't include them because
Eras is pretty honest about being a slow-paced production up front, and they do release regularly, if slowly.
Eras gets big points in my book for that long-term reliability.) Those newbies might turn out to be amazing in time, or they might fold up on themselves like a Romulan warp drive on overload. If I were a betting man (and I am), I'd put my money on
DR to be the big success of the 2008 freshmen.
I'm certainly pleased you don't hold my reviews against me (and, now that I've read what you're talking about, I begin to see the distinction you're drawing). You, personally, perform a great service to the community in your role as "unofficial promoter," and I don't think you're thanked or even noticed nearly often enough for the amount of work you do. Certainly, in such a position, you can hardly afford to be negative about any production. Of course, you have your favorites, but you couldn't do what you do without having genuinely warm feelings towards everyone in the field. I like to think that I approach every production with an open mind and a real hope that they will succeed in entertaining me, but, as you know, there are some shows that really don't do that to me, for any number of reasons, and I take them to task for it. I can be rather harsh. I justify it much less eloquently than you: I do it because I'm being paid to tell people what I really think. (Strange realization: in the entire fan film community, which must consist of hundreds upon hundreds of people by now, I may be the only one getting paid. Of course, I am not getting paid very
much, but it is real cash money.)
However, my base capitalism aside, I think you may be dismissing the opinions of random forum-goers and blog-ranters too lightly. There is a wisdom among the average folk, the unpaid commentators and random* websurfers, that we creative types ignore at our own peril. I believe that any normal person who views any work of art or entertainment can
intuitively draw important conclusions about that work based on his own experience and the work's relationship with objective human truths, and these intuitions, I find, are generally quite right. The difficulty comes when one of these average persons, with neither the vocabulary nor the requisite deep thought, tries to put his feelings to text in a rant, a rave, or even a balanced recommendation. It's not that their feelings about whatever they've just experienced are wrong; it's that they've failed to fully understand their own reasoning process, and so they resort to inaccurate complaints, or, worse, the media and journalistic tropes you mention. For instance, take the example of the "Mary Sue." This is a word that is thrown around
far too often for the word to even have a meaning anymore--it's become possible to name nearly any character in any story a "Mary Sue" based on some of the looser criteria that have been thrown around over the years. So, when a writer labels a character a "Mary Sue," this tends to be shorthand for any one of a large array of problems the writer saw with the character, but which he
couldn't accurately identify. It may be that he thought plot developments around the character were too convenient, or that he's too "cute", or too human, or too inhuman, or that he faced too many challenges or not enough or didn't fit with the show's "feel" or just plain got too much air time. This is useful, and usually (to a greater or lesser extent)
true, but the author wasn't thinking deeply enough to get that out there. And why should he? He's not being paid!
I suppose that the point I'm trying to get across at great length is only this: under every unconstructive review, however short, however long, however mild, however snidely cutting, there's a superbly valuable
constructive review waiting to come out. There's some use to arguing a bad review, but there's much more use, I find, to trying to get down in concrete terms
exactly, in clear and unambiguous terms, what caused the review to be a bad one. A lot of learning about art and human nature gets learned right there. On the other hand, this basic trust of the hidden wisdom of nearly everyone has gotten me into an awful lot of trouble, such as religious belief.
I refer here, of course, to those who are listing honest opinions (however brusquely) and are not in it
purely to be snide. This generally means I exclude YouTube commentors from my "wisdom of the crowds" philosophy.
Finally--and this is the part where I trumpet my own horn instead of everyone else's--on the subject of cliques in fan filmdom: I think that cliques are bound to form. Indeed, I think they
have formed: there are some
extremely strong cliques surrounding certain (unnamed) productions. At least one production out there believes that, by virtue of predating most others, it has thereby laid claim to the
entire post-War twenty-fourth century canon, and any productions that don't "respect" that claim are to be appreciated for their hard work but otherwise severed from the "network." This is but one example--one sees it in several places at varying strengths.
I believe that the orthodoxy of positive feelings that dominates the fan film community
helps those kinds of cliques to develop. Rather than being judged on quality, shows instead are judged based on their connections to a complicated fan film network. Little shows get publicity and therefore downloads
not by putting out a superior product to the others, but by being taken in under the wing of more prominent ones and doing crossovers, cross promotions, scavenging for "plug" opportunities, and so forth. It's not a good model, and it allows big shows to turn into kingmakers surrounded by competitive cliques of the worst kind.
Now, things are not nearly so stark nor so grim as all that--the big shows really
do put out good products, and little shows really
can get noticed if they do amazing things. But it
is a problem, and the fact that nearly no one is willing to speak objectively about the various shows and put them on what I like to call "the sliding scale of win vs. suck" only perpetuates the cliques. There
will be winners and losers; the only question is whether they'll be determined by quality or by raw power.
In this respect, I like to think that I provide something of a public service, not only by providing a useful guide to audiences, by recommending changes in productions (the fruitful dialogue you mention is indeed the summit of that relationship), and perhaps by getting at certain important truths best conveyed by but not expressed in art, but also by helping the fan film ecosystem gain a little bit more of a rational power equilibrium.
This may very well be nothing more than frightfully egotism, but it strikes me as at least having the ring of truth.
I've now gone off on quite the tangent from what you were talking about, though. Sorry about that!
WJT
*Note: Much noise has been made lately of the "abuse" of the word "random" to mean the same as "various, with no distinguishing characteristics defining the set." It is contended that "random" has been reduced from its meaning as "utterly unpredictable" to this common usage, and that this debasement has damaged a delicate and scientifically precise term. For a time, I, in my self-appointed role as Grammar Nazi, attempted to enforce the "proper" use of the word. However, I recently learned that this whole position is a load of dingo's kidneys. The vulgar use of "random" dates at least to the mid-nineteenth century, when no less a personage than President Lincoln used it in his celebrated July 4, 1861 address to Congress. So feel free to keep on talking about "that random guy who came up to me and started saying this random thing. Oh, it was so totally random!" You, the commoner, are in the right, and the dictionary-beating grammar zealot shaking his head at the impending ruin of civilization through bad grammar is wrong.
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Shock! Horror!
The wheels have sort off fallen off my life over the past two months and the next two-three months represent the "Long March" back from, uh, there. By all means, if you're thinking of writing a full blown article on any of the mini reviews you did, feel free to use them as the basis. I'll let you know as I get closer to releasing so that i can get some comparable comment.
Thank you, rest assured I'm determined to get back into the saddle. Thanks for reminding me that I still need to listen to the latest DR episode and I agree that the last installment of The Continuing Mission was masterful stuff both in terms of its writing and production. 
