Legendary Amazon mega-reviewer Harriet Klausner has passed away. I assume she’s leaving loved ones behind. My condolences.

She embodied everything wrong with criticism, both at the professional and amateur level (it’s unclear which class she belonged to). For people who mistrust online reviews, for people who assume it’s all just an incestuous, payola-greased web of marketing, cross-promotion and buddy-buddy backslapping, Harriet Klausner is Exhibit A. She is the smoking gun, with a complementary five star review on Amazon.

31,014 reviews, largely of romance novels. 99.7% of these reviews had four or five star ratings. She reviewed everything, and loved everything, but it’s clear that she didn’t read everything. Someone wrote a book that (strategically?) included a character called “Harriet Klausner”, but her obligatory glowing review made no mention of this. There’s also the fact that there’s only 24 hours in a day.

Her reviews had a nebulous, creepy quality, like they were written by a computer. She was the queen of vague adjectives, vapid cliches, and rewritten cover blurbs. Have you seen the video where rapper will.i.am has bullshits his way through an explanation of logos and branding? That video is Harriet Klausner’s entire life for the past fifteen years.

She was so prolific and so worthless that for years there were conspiracy theories about Klausner – that she didn’t exist, and was an account controlled by a shadowy cabal of publishers. In the end, it was confirmed that she was a real person, which is probably worse. At least a shadowy cabal could conceivably have the manpower to actually read the books. The truth is this (h/t to this guy’s sleuthing): she received large numbers of Advance Reader Copies from publishers. She didn’t disclose that she was getting ARCs (in breach of FTC disclosure rules, but nobody on Amazon cares about that) and she would then re-sell them via a third party (apparently legal, but frowned upon). Books got promoted, Klausner could pay her cat food bills, and everyone won except for the people reviews exist for in the first place.

With Amazon now taking steps to protect the integrity of their reviews, but you wonder if outright grifters are the problem here. The issue seems to be an economic one: reviewers want free shit, publishers and writers want favourable reviews. The actual consumer is very much an externality here – they don’t have a skin in the game, so they just have to hope and pray the reviewer has the integrity not to whore out their opinions to keep the majestic Free Shit River flowing in full flood.

I used to read a metal site called Teufel’s Tomb. While every other metal site had a chummy “support the scene, bro!” ethos, Teufel’s opinion was that 90% of bands, labels, and distros should just eat bullets and die. It was a refreshing attitude. You could trust their opinions.

Someone had the misfortune of interviewing Teufel. The guy was obviously drunk and spent most of the interview pushing the interviewer’s buttons, but he also says some interesting things about “objectivity” while staring down the barrel of payola. “Objectivity, in metal reviews, is to say as much about the music, without saying anything at all. All the bands and record labels want is for you to say things that will help them sell more records. They don’t want you to state an opinion, unless your opinion is positive. Really, objectivity in metal reviews is to simply drone on and on and on about “this is the lyrical subject matter, this is the band line-up, this is the style of music they play, they sound like these bands, you should buy this album if you like these bands.” […] I’ve been on all of the major metal label promo lists, and they all took me off after they actually read that I was stating opinions that some of their releases are just plain boring or sucked.”

Pauline Kael once said “In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.” To which Harriet Klausner and her spiritual descendants say “why not both?”

Social groups can be compared to a hurricane – mildly interested folk at the edges, more dedicated followers towards the center, a tight group of fanatics near the middle…and dead center, someone who doesn’t really care that much.

Here’s an interesting article about Loose Change creator Dylan Avery. It’s sort of the equivalent of Rosie O’Donnell coming out of the closet – everyone knew it, but it’s nice to have it in the open.

Loose Change was originally conceived as a fictional film: a way for Avery to polish his filmmaking skills and get his name out there. I don’t think it ever stopped being a fictional film. This thing was huge in 2007, and Dylan became the unofficial spokesperson of the 9/11 Truth movement, but I always wondered if he really believed what his film says. Now he basically says that no, he didn’t.

“Loose Change happened because I wanted to make a film,” he said. “It was born out of the passion of wanting to be a filmmaker. And then Loose Change took over my life, and it’s almost like filmmaking is completely out of the question.” […] “Am I going to be 60 years old, still getting hate mail about a movie I made when I was 20? That’s not what I wanted for myself.”

That’s a strange thing to say if you believe you’ve uncovered proof of a conspiracy to kill 4,000 US citizens in a false flag attack. The biggest domestic scandal of the eternity and he’s bitching about his lost career and how he receives hate mail? It’s like if the Watergate guys had said to the press “hey, while we’ve got your attention, can you also run a piece about the Watergate hotel? Their room service was three-star at best, and my soap had a hair in it.”

Somehow, this unconcerned doofus became the 9/11 Truth leader…or the closest thing to one, because they never exactly had a leader. Its boosters say it doesn’t need leadership: it’s a grassroots organisation, the will of the people coalescing like iron flakes around a magnet. Some even think having any sort of leader is a drawback, that you’ve got to flow as water, etc.

I kind of think that leadership is impossible for such a movement – that the movement fundamentally doesn’t agree on anything beyond one or two talking points, and they can’t actually move in any one direction. Those who live by sharp thingies die by sharp thingies and those who prize ad-hoc networks die by ad-hoc networks.

The “9/11 should have been investigated better” crowd has a goal, but pushing for a better investigation is lost on the section that believes all levels of the US government is complicit in a conspiracy.

Personally, what killed me on the film was how it was obviously porn. Not literal porn, but conspiracy porn. You could see storywriting oozing from every pore: Loose Change was designed to be exciting, not truthful. You could postulate any number of conspiracies that are both a) more boring and b) more practical (like the US knew the attacks were coming and didn’t tell anyone, or they trained the terrorists, or whatever.) Instead you’ve got this convoluted Die Hard plotline with planes getting switched out and simulated with holograms or whatever. I’m surprised there isn’t a part where Hani Hanjour hijacks a plane by holding a gun sideways.

So that’s the sad truth of the 9/11 Conspiracy. It was actually a meta-level 9/11 Conspiracy Conspiracy, with Avery faking it like a Jewish wife in the bedroom in return for fame and riches (which he didn’t get). Although you never know. Maybe he really does believe in a conspiracy, and is now trying to rehabilitate his filmmaking career.

Some jokes require you to think about them for a bit before you laugh. For example, that classic knee-slapper we all heard in the locker room: “ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn”.

Some jokes are the opposite: laughter requires that you do not think about the joke, at all, and that as soon as you hear it you must jam a screwdriver through your eminence ridge, giving yourself a frontal lobotomy.

Playboy’s recent announcement that it will stop featuring pictures of nude women provoked in me a “hahaha” reaction followed by “…makes sense, I guess. Not like they signed a contract saying they’d print porn forever. They’re in a declining market. Or rather, a market that has declined so much that it has ‘declined’ into a hill on the other side of the world. Might as well jump ship and start doing something that makes money.”

Welcome to 2015: there isn’t a market for print porn. Photographs of naked women are worthless now. This isn’t the 70s, or an Amish community. We have a military-funded porn delivery system in our houses now. Porn is so common and ubiquitous that they might as well have decided not to print photographs of wallpaper.

Playboy’s selling point was that it had a thin veneer of class, you could read it without feeling like a total sleazeball. So why not focus on the class? Playboy’s value is not that they provide porn. Any idiot can find porn. Their value is in their brand. They’re an iconic household name. There’s all sorts of ways they can spin it to make money. They don’t have to do porn. And that’s good, because they’d file chapter 11 if they did.

The magazine actually has really good content. Porn is worth literally nothing against exclusive new writing by Stephen King and Haruki Murakami, or interviews with Metallica. It’s safe to say that the average person in 2015 actually is reading Playboy for the articles.

Times change. Playboy’s Playmates have their time in the spotlight, then they gracefully age into real estate agents and radical feminists. Hugh Hefner’s changing too – once he was the icon of crazy wild partying, now he’s the icon of crazy wild oxygen therapy (does he even have sex anymore? At that age all I’d want from my girlfriends is a nice long foot massage.). Why shouldn’t the magazine itself be ready for change? Remember, there’s no stasis anywhere in nature. If you’re not evolving, you’re regressing.

(Also in the funny if you don’t think about it category: this. That’s like a 50 meter walk. Would you want to carry heavy bags of groceries and furniture that far? Let the man have his car. Jeez.)