Tag Archives: meta

The problem with posting reviews …

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Is that eventually your opinion will come back to haunt you.  I was just re-reading some of my reviews of movies, and it struck me that I may be completely insane.

Did I actually say that Attack of the Clones was more ‘entertaining’ than Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring?  What kind of a dick would say that?  Apparently – me.  Here.  I’m not sure I still think that was the case, but clearly at some point I did.  I’m not in the habit of making shit up, especially not stuff that makes me look like an idiot 4 or 5 years later.  I think it’s kind of fascinating how your own opinion or view can change, sometimes without noticing, over time.

My memory now is that Attack of the Clones was weak.  But how much of that is my memory and how much of it is being reminded for the last 4 years about how terrible it was?

These days, I can’t conceive of many movies being more entertaining than the Lord of the Rings, I love beyond all measure of love the extended movies.  But let’s be frank, there’s still a fair amount of trudging goes on in the third one.

Maybe reviews should be ephemeral.  They should fade over time, they are the product of a moment.  Your mood at the time, the context, the situation, the journey to the cinema or the day you had before you put in the DVD.  They are coloured by your expectations and your desires, and then as time moves on and you watch the movies again, or hear about them, or understand more about your own views maybe your opinion changes.  You come to love something more or perhaps see flaws where there were none previously.

Maybe it’s naive to imagine we should always feel the same about any kind of art.  That somehow ranking something or giving it a score sets in stone how much we like it.

I was reading a piece on Den of Geek this morning, including references to how Blade 2 was better the Blade.  If anyone reads my review of Blade 2 they’ll find I had a slightly, different, opinion.  But if I watched it now is that how I would feel still?  Was I so disappointed because it was bad, or because it was not at all what I was expecting?  I ordered fish and got steak.  Even if the steak is awesome, if you were expecting fish you’re going to be a little unhappy right?  But a few years later you can look back and think, hang on, that was a mighty fine piece of cow after all?

Perhaps.  Maybe I’ll get Blade 2 on DVD and have another look.

So anyway, what’s the point?  The point is, all my reviews are a view from a point in time, in the moment, expressions of what I felt at the instant I wrote them.  No more.  Maybe no one cares but me, I was just surprised to read back some of the things I said about movies I thought I hated or loved, and marvel at how my view has changed.

My perception.

And hence, my truth.

Gaming diary redux

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So, I’ve decided to stick to simple categories instead of marking the diary posts as part of an article.  So gaming diary posts are in that category and movie diary posts in their own.  I’ve hacked the category page a little so that the post titles have the dates next to them (and they naturally show in reverse date order, newest first anyway).

That avoids any complexity, I can just name the posts after the game or film and let WordPress sort out the rest, but people can still see them in the right order as it were.  The only other issue is that I’ll probably write any gaming diary posts a few days after the fact, so now I have to work out if I’ll post-date them to match when I played or not worry about it!  I know, I know, I should just go with the flow.

Usual problem

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So the gaming and movie diary stalled at the first hurdle, after the first updates.  As usual, I get stuck up on the technical details and don’t just get on and do it and worry about them later.  How do I write entries for the same games, but keep them sorted in the right way, do I include the date in the subject, or do I write one blog post per game and just keep adding to it over time.  Is there some other option I should investigate, etc., etc.

All the thinking about it gets in the way of writing the posts, so maybe we’ll see what happens.

Gaming and Movie Diary

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A couple of folk I follow on Twitter write gaming diaries, where they talk about the games they’re playing / have played.  Not reviews as such, but just an update on what they’re playing.  I thought I might give it a shot with both games and films.  I’ll start with the games I played over the weekend, and I think I’ll expand it to include more than just computer games.  You’ll be able to find them in the regular blog posts, but they’ll also show up in the relevant section in the articles page.

Fixed (kinda)

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So it turns out it wasn’t anything I did re: the change of themes, it’s a small problem with the Mandigo theme not linking to the theme options page in WordPress v3 correctly.  I can work around it for the time being, although I am hankering for a new look for the site (but still want to keep / use some of the header images).

The new default theme is okay but it’s all so big and I much prefer small sites.  I guess I can edit the theme options and have a play.

Anyway, I finished my little plastic knight, and it’s not a half bad job considering.

Stupid Spammers

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So I’ve commented before on how stupid spammers are, mostly blog comment spammers clearly in the context of this blog.  Obviously there are bots which submit spam, and there are clearly people being paid a tiny amount of money to post spam, and here’s another favourite.

If you are given some boiler plate text to copy into blog comment spam, and the boiler plate text says ‘examples in this post’ then you really should replace that text with some examples, rather than leaving it in verbatim, otherwise it doesn’t work.

I really enjoyed this post, especially the ¡°examples in this post¡± portion which made it really easy for me to SEE what you were talking about without even having to leave the article. Thanks

See what I mean?

Also, if you post this comment to a blog,

Great crap as usual…

with the hope that it’ll get approved and your URL will get spidered, think again about your choice of wording.  Seriously.

Sometimes I wish they’d just stick to selling fake watches.

If you write – they will come

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I’m interested, peripherally, about how people find web pages and why they read them.  Especially with respect to personal blogs (such as mine) for people who are neither famous nor especially interesting.  The two things I can tell you are,

  1. If you write it, they will come.  People will read anything, and if you eventually get your blog to show up on searches, some people will turn up and read stuff.
  2. The more you write, the more chance you’ll get visitors and the corollary, if you stop writing, they will go.  It doesn’t matter what you write, almost, if you write every day you’ll get visitors on that basis.  If you write once a week you’ll get fewer, if you write once a month you’ll get fewer still.  If you write sporadically you’ll get sporadic visitors, if you write consistently you’ll get consistent visitors.

So there.