Here I Go Again

So, after a couple of years now off, I am back with a brand new post. It has been quite a while since I have written anything and after some good discussions at work, I have decided it is time to get back on the horse..... So, here I go again!

The itch began at work as I started a Favorite Movie tournament at work with lowercaseK, CaptainCookie, and VolleyBar. I was going over some old top 100, 200, and 300 lists from before my movie to Milwaukee and decided that it was time to do some more. However, indead of just coming up with my own, I decided it would be fun to do it with some close friends at work, lowercaseK and CaptainCookie. However, quickly word got around to others in our loose group of the fun of our list and we were quickly joined by VolleyBar and occiasional by PongPigeon and KingoftheMidgets.

So, I originally decided to break the tournament into two sets of results, one for the original Trinity and another for anyone who decided to chime in. However, after a week or two, it became clear that the only person truely interested in joining daily was VolleyBar, so we were down to four with ties being broken by the votes of the Trinity.

It became apparent that this was a great thing for those of us involved because it gave us something non-work related to look forward to everyday at work and something to talk about during breaks and whatnot.

Eventually, we were down to the Elite 8 (Fear an Loathing in Las Vegas, Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring, The Usual Suspects, Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Almost Famous, Tombstone, Memento, and Wizard of Oz). This led to a Final Four of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas vs. The Usual Suspects and Almost Famous vs. Memento. The final was a showdown between Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas vs. Mement with Fear and Loathing coming out on top. This was quite the surprise from my original thoughts, but it was CaptainCookie's film throughout.

So, as we were finishing up on this tournament, which stretched into three months, we needed something new to pick up where it had left off. The first though was making another bracket based on the Oscar nominated films of the past decade or so. Other ideas were tournaments based on a genre of movies, sequels, or Best Movie of All Time. However, there was another thought lurking around in the back of my head that I wasn't sure how it would play, so I decided to get some input from the group.

Luckily, one of the first suggestions from lowercaseK was close to the same idea... do a tournament of actors. We batted around some ideas and I went to work on putting something together on Tuesday, July 15. We had taken the previous week off for vacations and it took only one day after to put things in motion for the next tournament. So, my idea was to create a group of 80 actors and 80 actresses, put them in groups of 10 and have the group rate them 10-1. The top four from each group would advance and be seeded by votes into a brackett and compete for favorite Actor.

I spent the next couple of days coming up with candidates and on Thursday presented 101 males and 78 females to the group (listed forthcoming). I recieved a few comments from the group (CaptainCookie suggested adding Daniel Day Lewis and keeping Mila Jovovich on the list, and KingoftheMidgets suggested adding John Wayne). Then, lowercaseK took control. She came up with an add-on list of 43 men and 28 women. We discussed some possibilities and I was left with 144 men and 103 females(three duplicates) to whittle to 80 apeice.

So, the whittling began. However, after a short time, it became apparent that an 80/80 split wouldn't work and wasn't a valid representation of our list. So, the ratio changed to 90/70. Finally, it shifted one more time to 100/60 for the best possible choices on the list and to weed out some people who truely did not deserve to be there.

Next, I sorted the men and women by relative age and began placing them into groupings of 10. Eventually, I had all the groups set and began posting all of the groups on my forum for easy access for the group to vote whenever they wanted to for the entire semi-final round. So, the grouping were ready and it was time to see what would happen at work.