intermission: spooktoberfest ’11 / programming notes

i don’t know if you are aware but there are these things that people write on the infranet called blogs, and a lot of them are focused on movies (we are one of them). many of them are good, many of them are popular (we are not one of them). in compliance of the blogniverse laws provision # m0v13s, we have to do a month of horror movies, which we called spooktoberfest last year. none of us here are really that into horror movies, so spooktoberfest ii or spooktoberfest ’11, won’t be as resolute as the other themes we’ve done. it’ll still be more or less a main focus for this month but we won’t neglect other genres of movies that we want to. although i did have to skip watching the “game changing” “best action movie ever” transformers 3: the pink floyd years. gosh darn it.

onto more important things. we’ve been around for more than a year. it’s been pretty good content-wise, in quantity and quality, i think. the last three months have been our busiest months. and now that i am free from things like being employed, i have more time on my hands. i think it’s the right time to expand this blog into a full fledged website. none of these ideas are as game changing as transformers 3. they are mostly features that you see on plenty of other movie sites but instead of the simply copy-and-paste jobs that i usually see, i think we will be able to put our own spin into each post.

no matter what, the movie review posts will always be the meat (or tofurkey if you’re vegetarian) of saturday night screening.

-cosmetics: since we are on the free version of wordpress, there are not a lot of options as far as how the blog looks and works. these are mostly little things like the shit brown link color and being only html. though i’ve been browsing through different themes (wordpress speak for templates), none of them are really that different. worse comes to worse, our other options are wordpress.org, blogger, or just start a whole new website from scratch.

-ads: i really want to put on here an amazon widget in that huge long empty space in the right hand side under all the links and comments. and one at the end of each post. i love the look of it on vern’s site. it should not feel intruding or take much longer for the pages to load. unfortunately, we are on wordpress.com and they have a pretty weird policy on ads. according to their term of service, they can suspend your blog anytime they want, taking away blog name and content forever. again, wordpress.org –> blogger –> a whole new website from scratch. there’s also the paypal donation option, which wordpress.com doesn’t have a problem with. it’d be nice to get paid doing something i love.

-special features: this includes things like regular weekly columns, rants, editorials…etc. these would include things like trailers and news, though i’m not sure if the world needs more repostings on what catwoman is wearing, what catwoman is driving, when christopher nolan farted, who’s in the expendables 2 now, netflix’s latest great idea, how nicolas cage looks like someone from the 19th century, how this weekend’s box office result signifies some kind of big deep meaningful thing for the film industry. you won’t see it here unless we have something different or interesting to say about it.

-lists: this seems to be always popular among blogs and websites. i’ve been against this simply because there is really no need for them except for maybe one at the end of each year. most of them seem arbitrary, pointless, and poorly constructed. but they are pretty good conversation starters and our view-to-comment ratio is pretty unbalanced. though i’m pretty sure that we can do better than something like this: http://www.divinecaroline.com/22317/50235-ten-worst-movies-made

-guest blogger: we have our first guest reviewer a couple months ago, joey from bad movie knights. we would love to have more submissions from those interested as long as the movie fits our theme. we would prefer it if it’s something that’s not published somewhere else before. there’s email, facebook, twitter to get in touch with us, all available in the top right corner of our blog.

-reblog: this is an option that’s been available from wordpress for all the blogs that i subscribe to. i’ve never actually done it but since we can’t possibly review every single movie that we want to do, i think it’ll be fun to link to new post from all the wonderful sites and blogs out there that we like. as you can see on the right, and there are many more. it’s pretty much what i’ve been doing on twitter anyway. except in bigger form. unless the original author objects. as much as i love looking at myself in the mirror like patrick bateman and obsessively checking the stats of my own blog, i also love keeping up with the posts of blogs i like and check out sometimes opposing views or movies i’ve never heard of.
by the way, i never noticed bateman and batman is only one vowel away. hmm…

-roundtable discussion: this will probably be the first one of these ideas to materialize. we are working on the first topic right now. the idea originated from the slate movie club. it will be done mostly through email and resulting in a post at the end of the discussion or the time limit. it could also work as a simpler q&a session to those who would like to participate similar to the onion avclub’s avq&a. an email will be sent shortly. or if you know for sure that you would like to join, feel free to contact us with your email address.

 

there are a few other ideas that’s been brought up but these would be further down the horizon(al) line / road:

-books/games/music/tv: this came up during our video game movie month. though i’m still not sure since i would like the saturday night screening name to be about movies. i would probably start a sister blog site for these.

-forum: this was an idea from when we first started but i thought it would take away from the comment section at the end of each post. but at the same time, it’d give us a more community feel and just a place to chitchat and such.

-podcast: there are probably as many podcast out there as there are movie blogs. and frankly i’m not big on talking. but the idea was brought up so i have to put it here. i’ve personally never listen or download any podcast. despite what my favorite band sings, words are very, very necessary. that and i hate my own voice and not good at off the cuff improv. on average it takes me at least a day after watching a movie to form thoughts and words about it, whether it’s direct-to-video b-movies or kieslowski.

please let us know what you think.

that was kind of boring. here’s something awesome: