[Kestrana]

This may be getting nit-picky, but figured I would ask anyway.

I have a really good shot from when we were all out in Vegas. Problem is, it is in a National Park and there are a line of cars by a place to park, take pictures, and hike.

No problem if this is not allowed, I have a few other ones that easily fit this theme.

I’m not really sure what your question is here. There’s nothing in your description that screams out to me that it would not fit the theme.

Kestrana, I’m still a bit confused as to whether we’re looking more for ‘desolate, dead, nothing to be seen here’ or ‘remote, no one around, living vegetation, can be pretty’ types of things.

Desolate to me is ‘ugly’, while a winter scene or the desert can be beautiful.

Desolation is just the theme name. This theme is about landscapes that imply remoteness.

Your picture should:

-be a landscape, meaning it should show a scene, not an individual or object
– try to evoke a feeling of being remote, distant, separated from the rest of society. This could be interpreted many different ways – as being barren, abandoned, pristine and untouched by man or simply rural.
-Your picture can include people and objects.

Three examples: A bustling Saharan oasis fills frame left while the lone and windswept sands stretch off to the right.

A white farmhouse sits far away, surrounded by wintery fields.

A person stands silhouetted on the edge of a precipice, looking down into a valley.

[Kestrana]

An urban landscape can definitely fit this theme, but I did intend it to be landscapes, not close ups or portraits. If I had a chance to go to Detroit for this theme, I would.

[Kestrana]

I’d like to suggest something.

Have the boobies poster make a 2nd post right after the boobies stating “For this week’s contest, only “Best” votes will be counted”. See what happens. I can’t imagine we’ll get many bc it’s a serious contest.
Next week, have the boobies poster make a 2nd post right after the boobies stating “For this week’s contest, only “Best” votes will be counted” and see how many “Funnies” we get in a funny contest.

[Kestrana]

Copy + paste?

[Kestrana]

Got a response from Drew re: new voting. He said to let him know what happens with us after a couple weeks and as he said “we’re never opposed to fixing something if it’s broken”. Whatever that means.

There’s other people pissed off about it, so maybe majority rules will revert to the old way.

[Kestrana]

I don’t think this is a good contest to judge on and I agree with your earlier statement that we need more evidence.

This is an open theme during our lowest voting season of the year. Fortunately, January/February tends to be our biggest voting season of the year and the next two weeks are a clearly “not funny” followed by a clearly “funny” theme. Ultimately we should probably wait the next two themes to see what happens.

[Kestrana]

Heh I had no idea they weren’t from an actual polaroid.

/not a professional
//plays one on tv

[Kestrana]

Or you get split votes so that you win neither category, if people end up voting for one or the other :/

[Kestrana]

Oh and I wanted to respond to everyone being afraid of becoming overrun with Fark cliches and memes… I don’t want to say it’s baseless, because it’s possible that could happen, but how many random Fark cliche pictures do we see a week? I think it’s usually 0. Unless the theme lends itself to satire and sarcasm, like “Five is Right Out” – but even then it was Monty Python jokes which was perfectly keeping with the theme. We don’t see a Beer Looter rip off every week like the PS people do.

Secondly, because we have dedicated regulars who shape the contest, we lead by example based on what the TFers post, and we also represent the largest chunk of our voting block. We have between 30-70 “regulars” ( people who participated in at least 3 of the last 12 contests ) at any given time, based on the old FSM statistics for participation. The average votes for a 1st place photo is between 35-45. Assuming our regulars vote, and most of them agree with the #1 photo, that means that the majority of voting still comes from our regulars except when we have break-out contests that get into the 50+ vote range.

Basically what I’m saying is: we have the power. We’re not going to get overrun or see a fundamental change in the content of the contests due to this change. We just have to decide how to track our statistics from now on. CISS said it’s possible to display both category winners but it’s time consuming work for him, and useless in 50%+ of our contests, which aren’t funny oriented (who cares who wins the Funny vote for Desolation). Therefore the most fair option is count them all and total them.

[Kestrana]

I’m fine for counting them separately, but here’s why we should count Funny votes too:

A photo like ennuipoet‘s DM bag vs. my HDR shot. In the D&D theme, my HDR shot would have tanked and in Software Hootenanny the DM bag would have tanked.

In a theme like today’s, they have an equal shot at garnering votes.

But, now that the option for “best” and “funny” are both there, there is no stopping someone from voting “best” on mine and “funny” on ennuipoet‘s, where previously they would have probably just voted for both. If we don’t include Funny votes, we are discouraging people who may care about statistics (and even if you aren’t striving for votes, it hurts when you repeatedly suck in the polls) from posting photos that may be considered “Funny”, regardless of the photo’s technical merit. We didn’t ask for this change, but why discriminate against votes? [Technically voter discrimination is illegal 😉 ]

And with that said, I’m still in favor of just combining them into a Total votes for the winner. Especially because if you can create a humorous photo that’s also technically superior, I think you probably deserve to win.

[Kestrana]

I’ll second the investment in Lightroom. Holy crap, it’s amazing. I’m now slowly working on going back and reprocessing this year’s pictures because I can actually save some that were unrecoverable before.

Unfortunately I don’t know anything about the catalog feature, how to use it, etc. and it’s not very bonehead friendly. The processing part is very friendly. And all the plugins you can get for it…

[Kestrana]

I thought I forgot to enable voting on my second post and then noticed the “Best” “Funny” buttons above everybody’s pics. What’s up wit dat?

I think Drew got drunk and switched us over to farkbook.

+1

[Kestrana]

U-Man see the thread in the Bibliostats forum for more on that new “feature”

[Kestrana]

Well we stayed up a little too late the past couple of nights and he has to work tomorrow and we’re going up to New England this weekend, so yeah all in all it was too much.

[Kestrana]

And FWIW, I sent an email in to admins just letting them know that the new voting kinda farked up Farktography statistics and we were concerned about the impact it would have on the contest.

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