I'm enjoying reading others' viewing lists over on the Lists thread and I urge others to do the same. Who knows, you might get some ideas.

Thanks! I might look around and sample it online first, but this Fox season was so good that I can't imagine not wanting to own the cable stuff.
Thanks to you and everyone else for the Marvel/DC insight. I think I'll stick with the DTV films this time, if only because I have enough stuff to cover the next 5 Animation Challenges.

I think I'm going to concentrate on a few TV seasons, and a pile of 30 or so animation BDs.

http://www.veoh.com has a bunch of films in their animation category. When looking at the category, you can get more things if you edit the advanced settings.

You can download the videos, like the new Batman Under The Red Hood http://www.veoh.com/browse/videos/ca...291609gkWxkK7e if you install their web player. If you install it, do the custom install so you don't get the MS Bing toolbar. I have an older version of WMP at work and it wouldn't play the file but it worked fine with VLC.

I've run across some hard to find foreign movies through their site, which was pretty cool.

Before anyone asks, yes, it is a legit company http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veoh that had Michael Eisner on it's board.

Does Percy Jackson count with CGI? I wasn't really going to watch anything like that, but my netflix screwed up and I got it a day after the sci-fi/fantasy challenge.

Go for it.

So I just finished the first disc of Greg The Bunny (IFC Series) and it is very different from the FOX Series.

One of the main differences is that the show is given a lot more room to do whatever it wants to do. This means there is more explicit material, which is both a good and a bad thing. I think sometimes they overdo it with the vulgarity, but most of the time it works to the advantage of the show because it's funny to see these cute little puppets saying such dirty things. Seeing the puppets doing drugs, getting drunk, making pornography, beating each other up, etc. is pretty funny if disturbing. I do love the surreal nature of the show, sort of like how all these puppets have sort of fallen on hard times. It's twisted, but entertaining.

The setting for this show is also different. There isn't any mention of the Children's Show (Sweetknuckle Junction) and the humans aren't seen all that much. They're usually off camera as the director or their body is shown. Seth Green does make an appearance and it is implied that the two worked together in the past, but not explicitly mentioned or anything.

The premise is that Greg & Warren work with a few humans (one of them is Greg's roommate) on the IFC producing film parodies, very bad film parodies. Some of the episodes actually feature just a parody, whereas others show the day-to-day lives of the characters, and others still show behind-the-scenes of filming (or trying to film) the parodies.

Of the episodes I've watched so far, I've enjoyed the vast majority of them and I think if you enjoyed the FOX Series you'll probably enjoy this one too. It's different, so don't expect to see the same thing, but a lot of the ideas are the same and there's still that twisted perspective in play.

Mr. Peepers, we discussed the checklist a day or two ago and you had the Ratings part (G, PG, R, X, etc.) as "optional." Well, the checklist as it exists right now on the Lists thread does not have "(optional)" next to the Ratings part. Is that an updated checklist and you decided not to make it optional or is there another more current checklist floating around somewhere else? Please clarify.

Thanks.

it's optional, i'm just poor at syncing things

Huh, you know that these are illegally uploaded by users, right? I thought you would just be linking legal stuff...

We need somebody to do the math. Since a lot of us will be watching old studio cartoons like WB's Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies and since those tend to be seven minutes, we need a hard-and-fast rule about how many count as a single entry. Three of them=21 min.; four of them=28 min; eight=56 min.; twelve=84 min.; 16=112 min. Do we really need to watch 16 to make up one entry?

My suggestion is to make three count as 1/4 of an entry, six count as 1/2 of an entry, and 12 count as 1 entry. My reasoning is based on when they used to run these on TV as half-hour shows and they would generally run three in a half-hour (21 min. plus comm'ls.). (Granted, ABC would squeeze four into a half-hour by cutting out the opening music/credits and then cutting the cartoons as well, but let's not go back to such barbaric practices, okay?)

And what do we do with longer short cartoons? (E.g., Some of the Lantz's were 10 min. each. The Fleischers did three Popeye two-reelers in the '30s. Disney shorts varied in length. Etc.)

It'll just make it easier for all of us if we had concrete numbers here. It's a problem unique to this challenge.

Anyone else?

Thanks.

Ash, we've already covered this, it is clearly explained in the first post.

And not that it matters, but it's not unique to this Challenge. Short films of varying lengths exist in great numbers for all genres.

So Michael Eisner, the former CEO of Disney, would get on the board of a company that pirates movies? Not only that but Time Warner, Jonathan Dolgen (former chairman of Viacom Entertainment Group), Intel, and Goldman Sachs would be major investors of a company that did this?

Not only that but Apple would allow them to sell their app to view illegally uploaded movies when they won't sell other apps for silly reasons?

Microsoft allows them to install their crappy toolbar into your browser unless you uncheck the box, so they're aware of the company.

Not only that but the MPAA or anyone else hasn't bothered to go after them in the 5 years they've been operating just seems odd to me, considering very public places like that get into trouble in much less time.

But I'll admit I could be wrong and I'd rather not fight about it. That's just some of the research I did before touching the site since I wasn't sure if I'd get infected from it. I've just been watching some old hosted horror movies on it

edit: Talked to a guy at work that knows more about it than me. Illegally uploaded stuff gets shut down fairly quick but they have their contracted movies too. That Batman one's been up for almost a week, so I'm not sure of that one.

And in post #11:

Take a look at my list and how I'm doing it. Near the bottom you'll see my Temp part with a running count. When I hit 90 minutes, I'll join them together for an entry. You can see what I did for my first entry on August 1st.

I was just going to use 5 minutes as an average. Some are shorter, some are longer, so roughly 18-20 shorts.

That only works if you don't really separate the entries by dates. If I watched something, I prefer to have it on my list on the day I viewed it.

Personally, I'm not really a fan of how my list looks, but I put my entries individually in an excel database and the vbulletin formatting is done in other cells, so I'm keeping it that way unless I get a bit more motivated. It became too cumbersome to figure out how many things went into one entry, so I assigned a fraction to each viewing.

My own personal guidline is that I fit everything into 1/16, 1/8, 1/4, 1/2, or 1 increments.

If something is less than 5 minutes, I don't know what I would do
If something is 5-~10 minutes I count it as 1/16
If something is 10-~17 minutes, I count it as 1/8
If something is 18-~20 minutes, I guess I would count it as 3/16ths, I haven't ran into that yet
If something is 20-30 minutes, I count it as 1/4
I haven't ran into anything from 30-40 minutes yet
If something is 40-50 minutes, I would count that as 1/2
Between 50 minutes and a movie I haven't ran into yet, so I'm not sure what I would do.

Yes, I know the above isn't necessarily mathmatically consistent, but I kind of use the guideline of how it was originally aired as the guideline. I.e. (2) ATHF episodes are aired in half an hour so those should be 1/8th. The Bananaman shorts are what forced me into the above considerations. I am trying to use my best judgment and I'm trying to avoid things like 3/16ths or 5/16ths or funny stuff like that.

I'm sorry, but it's not clear to me, which is why I feel compelled to bring it up again. When three WB cartoons = 21 min. and 4 cartoons = 28 min., there needs to be a decision made as to how many count towards an item. "23 min." doesn't work here. Are three WB cartoons 1/4 of an entry or are four WB cartoons 1/4 of an entry? That's not an unreasonable question to ask. And no decision seems to have been made. Everyone seems to be making their own rule here. This isn't rocket science, it's simple math. Why can't we have a set rule over how many short cartoons = one entry? I'm not asking too much here.

Granted, I seem to be the only one bothered by this, so I'll just have to make my own rule for this as well.

I think it depends how granular you want to get. The engineer in me says that we could just pro-rate every viewing to 90 minutes. So a 23 minute show would be 23/90 (and then what about seconds??? ). However, that is a bit overboard, and I think that is why people are being a bit generic in their answers. I prefer my way, but my way isn't very clear-cut, so other people probably won't do it that way. I don't think I will run into some of the odd times you are having, so my way will work for me. For me, if it is 23 minutes or 28 minutes, I would count that as 1/4.

Veoh is the exact same thing as Youtube. Illegal stuff gets put up all the time, and sometimes it stays there for years. It's pretty much up to the copyright holders to ask for them to be removed.

I just watched Batman: Under the Red Hood on it. I own the DVD, but it was just simpler to stream it rather than search for my copy. Great film!

Exactly. Sort of. It's impossible to have absolutely precise to the second rules. The variety of lengths to shorts is immense. You could spend 5 minutes on Google and find 100 animation shorts; one of 1 minute, one of 2 minutes, one of 3 minutes, ..., and one of 100 minutes. And probably one of every seconds variable as well!

Just use your own judgment but keep to the basic simple guidelines in the first post:

~ 30 minutes = 1/4 entry
~ 60 minutes = 1/2 entry
~ 120 minutes = 1 entry

As discussed, films have a "counting advantage" over shorts/shows since one film counts as one entry, even if it's only 45 minutes long.

Everyone is going to count slightly differently, and organize their list slightly differently. I prefer to keep my items in chronological order as I watch them, and separate entries for everything, even shorts. Most others group them, and save items until they equal one entry. Just come up with your own way Ash, as long as it's close enough to the 22/30 minutes per 1/4 entry guideline no one is going to care. I'm sure there will be some things that I'll "over-count" and some things I'll "under-count" if I keep watching lots of shorts and variable length shows, but I'm not going to worry about it.

I round up at 30. I figure it averages out in the end.

Ash, if you're watching stuff with commercials, it should fall into the 30/60/90 minute category in the rules pretty easily. If you're watching stuff without commercials, and they're not films, then you just get as close as you can to .25/.5/.75 of an entry as you can and group them that way, or just keep track of the times until you hit around 90 minutes.

I do the latter on shorts, some do the former. Whatever works best for you.

I just add them until the total is over 90 minutes and then make them one entry on the day I finish that total up.

Puppet shows? That's the one category I'm having trouble with. All I can think of are Muppets stuff and all those old adventure/sci-fi marionette shows like "Captain Scarlett" and "Thunderbirds." I doubt that I have any of this stuff in my collection, not even a Muppets movie or even an old "Beany and Cecil" episode.

What else qualifies in this category that I'm not thinking of?

Thanks.

We've been talking a lot about Greg the Bunny. Then there's Alf of course.

Film wise there is Magic.

Puppets Who Kill
http://www.hulu.com/puppet-master
http://www.hulu.com/puppet-master-ii