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Course correction from previous year
April 26th
is the anniversary of when I first started keeping track of how much I write
and really aiming to say more with my writing.
I embraced the adage, “The first 1,000,000 words are practice and began
keeping a journal as to how many words I wrote each day (quickly shifting to
just logging the number of words and writing down the date).
I logged
college papers, memos, journals, emails, and more often than not these
blogs. Because so much of my writing was
tied up with school and the nature of the assignments I was participating in
was shifting and dropping off toward the end of things I also noticed a drop
off in the amount I was writing.
It may
shock you to hear this, but just sitting down and writing can be difficult, especially
if you don’t have a topic already in mind, especially-especially if you are not
required to do it for grades or pay.
Writing as a means of self-improvement is like the mental equivalent of
working out, except it doesn’t make you look more enticing to people which is a
motivator all its own.
Writing can
be tiring and daunting and when you have been keeping a steady measure of your
writing like I have you start to understand the size of the goal I have set. This is the 4th year of this
project and I am still just short of 500,000 words. But this last year was an improvement.
2016 had
the most blog entries of any year I have been on Blogger. It was a rather productive year of writing. Not counting this entry, I have written
162,749 words in the last 12 months.
That I have logged anyway, there is some old trash that I wrote down as
half thoughts and never hammered into anything workable. That is 445.9 words a day. The year prior only averaged 128.1. I managed 3.5 times as much. Good for me.
A Change in Perspective
It is kind of silly to talk about this so short after talking about the 6th year anniversary of the blog as a whole just two months ago. Which I coincided with the 400th
entry overall. This is the 419th
entry… That is not a milestone. It is
not even a mildly funny number like 420.
I have made
some changes since then. For instance, I
have started using Google analytics. Boy,
is it a confidence boost. According to
them more people have been to the moon than have stayed on my page long enough
to read an entire entry. I could be
putting anything on here and no one would read it. Maybe the fat that I do put so much disparate
stuff on here is why no one is reading it?
Whatever.
I should
have put analytics on this blog years ago and I have no idea why I chose now of
all times to do so. It makes more sense
when I look back on my management of this blog. I added the "Please like and
share..." to the end of things in February 2015. I didn't start using "+1" and
Twitter until May 2014.
I guess it
is a good thing that I am not in charge of online communication for any
political campaigns, my guy's online presence would be thin on the digital
ground, in spite of it all being well written.
Maybe I should have written all of this into my 400th entry. Once again,
my writing about something causes me to become introspective enough to find out
what the topic of the thing should have been.
Projects for Scope and Benchmarks
I have been
writing about Dungeons and Dragons near weekly.
I have been doing more 30-day blog challenges (and plan to do another
one in October). And I have been trying to
write a blog entry for everyday on the calendar, which has been going well, I
will update on that project’s progress on the anniversary of starting it,
November 22nd.
Some Old Tripe
Sometimes I
start writing about a particular movie or show and it just doesn’t grab me as a
topic. I figured, for a change, I would
just throw some of these half-thoughts onto this thing to give an example of
what my typical starting points look like.
So here are things for “The Purge”, “50 Shades of Grey”, and “Hail,
Caesar!”.
My thoughts on “Freddy vs Jason” were destined for here, but I somehow made them just
enough more to be their own thing.
----
“The Purge” Franchise
The movies
are all about how "It's my right!" to commit violence and to destroy
each other is an idea sold by the rich to the poor so that once a year the poor
slaughter each other. So, in real life
when you hear someone say, "It's my right to
smoke/drink/own-guns/be-a-dickhead" you can realize that it is all a part
of having poor people take pride in being poor.
You can
take the movie in a completely literal and skin deep reading, which provides
ZERO insight. Or, you can float the idea
that the movie is pointing to how small legal transgressions that people claim
as "rights" are propagating a system in which the poor are killing
each other and the rich prey on the poor.
If you ever
find yourself justifying what you are doing by saying, "I can"
instead of "I should" or "I must" then you are most likely
doing something bad or at the very least unproductive, even if it is only
destructive to you, it is still a bad thing. All of those movies are about
people justifying their bad behavior with "it's my right".
HAPPY
CONFEDERATE MEMORIAL DAY! Remember it's about "states' rights" and
"heritage".
----
“50 Shades of Grey”
I saw this
movie on an invitation from a woman I would have liked to sleep with. That is why this writing exists. I actually saw this in the theater I might as
well talk about it, even though the woman who I went with got bored and played
on her phone the entire time, fun evening that went nowhere.
It is clear
that everyone working on this movie knew that it would be on their resume
whether they wanted it to be or not, so they tried their damnedest to get this
shit together. They did not entirely
fail.
Unfortunately,
only Rumpelstiltskin has displayed an ability to spin straw into gold, and
since King Midas is dead this movie had to do without their assistance. Danny Elfman, mysterious creature from the
universe where music comes as naturally as speech can only do so much.
----
“Hail, Caesar!”
So here is
a quick review of a movie I disliked by writers/directors I respect, the
Cohens, and a bunch of actors I like, in a setting I find interesting, and with
a plot that should be great. The thing
was a boring slog.
“Hail,
Ceasar” is nominally a comedy but I only laughed in one scene that in
retrospect wasn’t all that great. The
whole thing feels like several episodes of a hypothetical TV show (like “Mad
Men”) that were pushed together to make one movie that would appeal to a
particular type of person. That type of
person can be summed up with the phrase, “works in Hollywood”.
I think
that "Hail, Ceasar" might be the first Cohen Bros movie that would
have been better if it were directed by someone else. Shane Black would have made it funnier, David
Lynch would have made it stranger, and Nolan would have made it more
mysterious. As is, the thing falls into
a strangely dull middle ground. It is
boring.
----
The Beg for Attention
If you do
read my blogs, thank you. I hope you continue
to do so and hopefully I sometimes write something good enough for you to share
with others.
I would
also encourage others to do similar self-improvement projects akin my
writing. Try new recipes. Walk to new places. Go to the gym. Read more.
Practice playing an instrument. Try
to be better at the things that you want to be better at.
Even if you
can’t make money doing it. Try to be a
better you because it will make you happy.
I’m happier than I was. Maybe
that feeling will hang around.
Have fun.
______________________________
If you like or hate this please take
the time to comment, +1, share on Twitter, Tumblr, or Facebook, and
otherwise distribute my opinion to the world. I would appreciate it.
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