Dick the Birthday Boy: The Legacy Continues [video] | Hacker News Reader

Dick the Birthday Boy: The Legacy Continues [video]

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125 pointskencausey39 comments

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.

And yet they are my bestest screen friends of all

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.

A parasocial bull session[1]?

(I don't mean parasocial in a negative way; I enjoy a lot of RLM's videos.)

[1]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bull%20session

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.

> Of course to balance it out they’ve trolled the audience again with this video.

How?

What was the point of the video? The big reveal is that they’re never going to reveal these pictures.

What was he point of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin Wu-Tang Clan album?

To make money selling music of unknown quality to a supervillain maybe.

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.

> and they are still in character?

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.

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.

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.

Also there plinkett prequel reviews are classics.

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.

Can't be subreddits since this isn't reddit. Subhackers?

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.

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=silo%20by%3Adang&dateRange=all...

What better place than Hackernews for sharing the newest video of the biggest selfproclaimed hack-frauds on the web?

hurt

AI generated ar to meet metasocial relationships would be a very good start up idea.

I feel the HN readers could have helped Space Cop:

Space Cop: Every day I'm haunted by how I couldn't save her.

"But you have a time machine."

(Sadly) Nothing I could have done.

"Your Space Cop Car has a time machine. You use it all the time."

"But here I am, trapped in the past."

"It's only seven years from now. And you have a time machine."

"Knowing seven years from now she's going to be murdered."

"Let's just go to where she is living right now."

(Heavy sigh) "It's all so hopeless."

mkay, I couldn't find the real quote but that's how I remember it

Their "Nerd Crew" [1] was some kind of relief valve for anyone who has experienced what can be described as "movie shill" channels on youtube.

The Nerd Crew: A Pop Culture Podcast by Red Letter Media

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sExTt4j69zI

Finally, something good and also inexplicably off-topic gets posted to HN. It broke new ground!!

I remember having the same feeling when a nice article about the hip hop duo Outkast's Aquemini album get a bunch of points and interesting comments.

This is a bizarre thing to see on the front page of HN.

Anyway, here's their review of The Star Wars Holiday Special: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CtUd0yuYN4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xW4m0oYK0WQ

RLM on HN... What is this, some kind of crossover episode?

Didn't expect to see it, but I'm not disappointed!

My first thought was some tech article referencing RLM in the title. Nope. Ooh a new video!

It broke new ground!

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.

Some video recommendations:

- Phantom Menace review - what they are most famous for (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxKtZmQgxrI)

- Jack and Jill - my personal favorite (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXNsT7-Lwsk)

- Bruce Willis fake movie factory - more recent (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cd1eNS9HtXo)

- Scientist Man Explains Terminator: Genisys (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXJiSZhA5cg)

- Prometheus (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiQfbgDPz6o)

Just curious, isn't that gaussian blur effect reversible in some cases... so these pictures could be de-blurred to some extent right?

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

lol, that was a trash album of random verses that almost none of the artists gave their blessing to.

Haha. See! I didn’t want to know that.

I was wondering the exact same thing.

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?

Outing myself as an RLM fan; I’ll bet Jay did the blur while Mike hand waved the whole thing.

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.

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