Damn it, Chris!

Well well well, Markus decided to show up!

Damn it, Nick!

Real question to the overseers:

W.A.S.P. - Re-Idolized used to be set up so that all the reviews would re-direct to original Crimson Idol reviews. It looks like that was changed, making it a virgin. I wrote a 2-paragrapher in 2018 for another site, one about the music and story that was copied from the original, one about the changes that were made. Is that an Archives-acceptable review? Or would copying over an older review be cheating?

I've revised the numbers from the last day, and removed GrizzlyButts per rule #4, as it's been proven to me that his reviews were written far in advance of the challenge.

Sweetie: A copied over old review for a virgin wouldn't count.

Alright, then I'm gonna hold off on W.A.S.P.

To be fair, I don't think he had any notion that he was even taking part in the challenge, since he doesn't seem to use the forums. I think he publishes on his own site and then exports the reviews whenever he feels like he's accrued enough. We could probably have used the extra numbers though.

Aye. I don't suspect he knows either. If he submits something from this point on, it'll be stuff he has written this month at least... which would qualify for the challenge.

Hoping we get more numbers. Turnout has been high so far!

Planning to submit a few myself shortly.

Whelp, work basically ate up my entire Tuesday and I'm nursing a nice little migraine due to the stress, which is why I didn't contribute anything yesterday. I plan to try hitting my SS (not the 1930s version) fairly soon. Not expecting to top any of my personal records at this point, just hoping to help get our cumulative total up as much as possible.

Only had time to do one today, unless I can crank out another before the cut-off. Very busy day, I'll try and do better tomorrow.

Doesn't look like anyone will go for a record of any sort. Personally, I was burned out after the last one and didn't bother to do any preparation until I made a list of stuff about the time SS got announced. It's quite irritating to do some of the listening now, because I just want to write.

On the other hand, we seem to have quite a few new participants, which is promising.

My momentum got crippled by yesterday's Comcast outage and I ended up just wanting to relax by the time that got settled. My goal has been to write fifty reviews but I have doubts about getting that number now. We'll see how things go this weekend.

Daily Tally for Jun 3 2020
Total Reviews: 65 / 226
Total Virgin Reviews: 58 / 190
Percentage (VIRGINS/TOTAL): 89.2% / 84.1%

Participant List for Jun 3 2020
Total Participants: 32 / 57
Today's Totals per Individual:


Did not participate this day:


Compared to the third day of the last challenge, participants are up, but virgins are down.

We had 11 new people join us yesterday. Welcome aboard.

Congrats on gasmask_colostomy for being today's leader with a solid 8 reviews!

We've had so many new folks this time around. Awesome! \m/

Oh yeah, I keep forgetting that this goes through Sunday! For some reason in my head it ends Friday. Although I'm pretty busy this weekend.

Ouch, what happened there?

Apparently a sizable number of people who use Comcast nationwide lost internet access. No idea what caused it. Thankfully it was only out for about an hour but since it also happened toward the end of a work shift, I didn't have much motivation left yesterday. Thankfully I'm getting a couple writeups done today and should have a couple more in me this evening.

Good to hear you're getting the mojo back. How about I make you a deal? If you can get to 35 by the end of Saturday, I'll review your demo Sunday. If I review your demo, you have to do all you can to hit 50

My goal was 25, still doable but I got to push myself a bit.

You may have noticed I've been absent for awhile. Reason is I've finally started writing fiction (a novelette to be specific) like I've wanted to for decades and so I no longer have the drive to write reviews. I didn't want to leave reviewing completely so will occasionally submit reviews and these challenges seem like a good excuse to do so. Won't break even my own measly record, but that's okay.

Really enjoyed that Shitfucker review, dude. It was on my long list for that challenge so I'm glad you tackled it. I'm glad you mentioned those awesome promo pictures too!

Thanks. My sabbatical has me rejuvenated so I was able to kick that out in one sitting. I'm trying to shed my perfectionism and remember I don't have to lay out every single thought I have about a release. The announcement of the album was exciting enough, but those promo pictures sealed the deal.

No need to treat yourself to such a punishment. I'll see what I can get done but I'm definitely starting to feel more writer's blocks.

Writer's block is hitting me too, I think I'm at like, 12 total, and I'm burnt out. How people do upwards of even 25 let alone 100 is beyond me. But, yesterday I beat my day total with 5 and my overall total is already at a new record. I'm gonna drop one more today and call it a week. Got an overwhelming amount of plans this weekend as is.

Stats will be delayed slightly this morning. Expect them in about two hours.

I don't have writers' block during these challenges exactly, it's more like a week-long battle about where to put commas. And you thought it was about the music...

Thing is, I start to run out of things to say about albums after doing so many back to back. I find myself saying "hmph... I just said the same thing about that other album but slightly re-arranged the words," which is boring. I need breaks. I learned that the hard way a few weeks ago before I went on my reviewing hiatus. This challenge spawned my first reviews in about three weeks.

Daily Tally for Jun 4 2020
Total Reviews: 63 / 289
Total Virgin Reviews: 51 / 241
Percentage (VIRGINS/TOTAL): 81.0% / 83.4%

Participant List for Jun 4 2020
Total Participants: 31 / 67
Today's Totals per Individual:


Did not participate this day:


Compared to the fourth day of the last challenge, participants are up, but virgins are down.

We had 10 new people join us yesterday. Welcome aboard.

Congrats on gasmask_colostomy for being today's leader with a respectable 7 reviews!

A bit of a quieter challenge, but definitely a lot more turnout. Not bad! \m/

Definitely the most tiring thing is to review about 3 or 4 mediocre albums (50%-65% scores) in a row. Almost no passion to keep things going. This challenge I haven't found much that I really liked, and the highest score I've given is to one of droneriot's experimental things. That said, trying to come at albums from different angles is essential to keep the writing interesting and to keep your mind going. I've noticed that I tell more jokes in virgin reviews, because I need to keep a sense of fun even when the music doesn't inspire it. Finding a little gimmick for each review works too.

Turns out the next album I was going to review already got taken back in May. Oh well. There's still plenty in my backlog.



I think any decent reviewer can write well when it's on a subject they have strong feelings about one way or the other. It's the great writers who can still be entertaining when they're lukewarm on the subject. That helps explain why so many reviews submitted (here and elsewhere) are rated on either extreme (including my own).

I understand the drive to review as much as possible, but it really is a good idea to take breaks to avoid burnout and repeating the same sentiments in review after review.

Fun fact: there are not as many negative reviews as you think there are. In fact the number of reviews is quite proportionate to the score. The higher the score the higher the number of reviews (mostly).

Daily Tally for Jun 5 2020
Total Reviews: 68 / 357
Total Virgin Reviews: 65 / 306
Percentage (VIRGINS/TOTAL): 95.6% / 85.7%

Participant List for Jun 5 2020
Total Participants: 34 / 72
Today's Totals per Individual:


Did not participate this day:


Compared to the fifth day of the last challenge, participants are up, but virgins are down.

We had 5 new people join us yesterday. Welcome aboard.

Congrats on gasmask_colostomy for being today's leader with a solid 8 reviews!

We've now surpassed 300 virgins. Can we reach 400? 500? Keep up the great work! \m/

I've been preoccupied all week but finally got one for Acerus in even though it's the same score as Tony's. Oh well. Got a few more I will do soon too...

This is definitely going to be a more modest challenge for me, I'm going to try to get more in this weekend to help try and get the cumulative score up to 400, but between being busy all day Tuesday and getting nailed down with a nasty migraine for Wednesday and most of Thursday, I just haven't been able to produce as much as I usually do. On the bright side, at least I got my SS completed. lol

Haha what are the odds of us both giving it a 89%. Good review, I like that we both heard different things, it's a really dense album.

That doesn't contradict my comment. I said reviews tend to be at either extreme, which doesn't mean there's an even distribution of reviews between the two extremes. I may be overestimating how many negative reviews are really low, but I bet the least amount of reviews are within the range of 40%-60%, where you'd expect most reviews to be, except that albums of those scores are least likely to inspire people to want to review them. Of course, any study of review scores is difficult considering there's no standardized grading system. A lot of reviewers seem to regard 80% as barely above average and anything below 60% as terrible.

What Paggy is trying to say is that the distribution doesn't fit that idea at all; in fact, the numbers skew more positive than negative, and if graphed would appear more like a slope than anything else.

Here's the latest data on the number of reviews per rating:


You have a small uptick in the number of reviews between 0-5%, which is not unusual considering how many reviewers sometimes give 0% to album they don't like. However, that's also the only range where six numbers are in play, not five like the others, and so that 1,306 is somewhat inflated compared to the rest of the data. Generally, it seems, the reviewers here will typically prefer to review albums that they like, which makes sense. I guess, if you have to listen to something, and write about it, you're probably more likely to lean towards something that you enjoy. Interestingly, the highest number of reviews for any range isn't in the highest 96-100% range, but actually in the 86-90% range, which could indicate that people are more inclined to review things they like but don't necessarily love, or are still somewhat critical of albums that they enjoy, not seeing them as "perfect".

Thanks for providing the hard numbers. I never said scores didn't skew positive (if I searched through my comment history, I'm sure I'd find examples where complaining that on the whole reviewers aren't critical enough), but I expected those low scores to put up much higher numbers. 1,306 is a significant increase for the very bottom scores, but not to the degree I expected it to be (0% reviews tend to be more memorable). Interesting that the middle scores aren't too bad, though ideally those should be the ones getting ~13,000. 86-90% is still a very high score. It seems to be a sweet spot where you're not ranking an album as a classic, but you're still giving it an enthusiastic recommendation.

Sorry, gasmask, it's after midnight and I have only got up to 34 reviews.

Better luck next time. Still have my own stuff to go through hahaha.

Can’t tell if that’s a sign you don’t want me to review the demo or don’t want to push for 50 reviews I might still give it a try if I have time, I’ve got like 4 things I’m committed to write today, and obviously I’d like to hit 50 too. A challenge where no one reaches 50 seems a bit dull.