The 2000th Post Spectacular

Yes, this literally is our 2000th published post. Go back and count. We dare you.

Toast, I feel like we should just leave it at that. It would be funny.

Sure. 

<deletes rest of post>

!!!

[Kent is in italics. Toast is in bold. That's the only way to tell us apart in life]

Bold is not a word I would use to describe myself, but 'lower case' won't come across as clearly...

If we look back on 2000 posts across 13 years and one month we can see we spilled a lot of words, sweat and tears over our mutual desire to ruminate on the moving pictures we've engaged with. There's been a lot of movies, a lot of TV, some video games, maybe even a play or two and some stand-up comedy. Have I missed any media that we've dipped our toes into writing about?

For me, a few audio drama podcasts and, weirdly enough, a few books? I feel I could write a few more posts on book I read, given I read at the rate the universe is expanding, it would only be on the rarest of occasions. what else could we shoehorn into this place? Cookbooks? Could I write about my ever expanding collection of cookbooks, where the "That Guy" lamentations are replaced with the repeating commentary that I buy cookbooks, but don't use cookbooks as often as I should?

I want to know what a cookbook review would look like?

Presentation, balance of yummy vs not, clarity of recipe writing, volume of content vs thickness of book, etc.

Toasty, you and I met through blogging circles in the early 2000s and we became fast friends over a shared love of movies, music, and general pop culture ephemera. Even though blogging basically dissolved win the wake of the Facebook juggernaut, I guess we weren't ready to give up on the forum so quickly. We also were not ready to do this through any other type of medium. What are your recollections of starting the blog? Was it really Battle: L.A. that spawned us starting this, or was it a film we saw immediately prior. 

Fictional, actually. False Memory Syndrome! A recollection from an alternate reality!

I recall the blog beginning in the back of a streetcar during the debate about Source Code. 

That's what I thought! But I then second-guessed it because  our Battle: L.A. reviews published before Source Code. Probably because it took us so long to do the back-and-forth writing of it? Some things never change....

As you say below, you were still trying to convince me that we needed to do a podcast, but I hate (haaaaate) the sound of my recorded voice (almost as much as I hate seeing my image on screen) but words. I can do words. Somewhat. Kinda sorta. And it was that debate that told me we could have something to say, even as "blogging" was waning. But even then, I worried I could not properly do "movie reviews" as going beyond the elements we would blather on about, actually discussing the structural elements, the good's and the bad's, would not be my strong suit. 

Doing this in another format is something I think about often. If you recall Toasty, our dear departed friend Jeremy really wanted to produce a podcast with you and I talking movies... but the idea never found solid footing given various life fluctuations.  The idea still sits in the back of my brain as a lost opportunity, but now I don't feel like it would be what it could have been without hearing Jeremy's laugh and "oh snaps" in the background. (Way to bring the celebratory mood down Kent).  Just as a provocation, would you ever consider doing a YouTube  (I note that Blogger's parent company, Google, autocorrects youtube and google with upper cases) channel or podcast talking about movies and junk? I know the answer, but I just want to immortalize the response.

Bittersweet memories. I still like to think that one of the five clicks I ever see on my posts is him.

*sniff* */wipes tear*

Look at above comment about my face on the screen. I can do silent background work, where I am pretending to be someone else. But me, being me? Nothankyougoodsir!

But maybe. I don't so much as evolve as become someone I don't recognize. Who knows, maybe That New Guy desires to mug it to the camera.

I have it...just do the podcast in character. Different character every episode.

Throughout this blog, you seem to have been more motivated to write individual entries than I have, which gives the appearance (and probably is the reality) of you being pretty prolific in your film watching and writing. What motivates you to keep writing these after 13 years (we'll talk about The Dark Times/The Gap Year towards the end)? 

The expected answer? Because I still feel a need to tell you, tell someone about what I am watching, what I am enjoying, what I am not enjoying and the vast amount in between. I will always feel compelled to put words to media, whether it be typed or written in one of the ten thousand (mostly) blank notebooks I keep on a shelf.

Obviously we share this compulsion.

I still enjoy the concept of watching movies, the idea of being wrapped up in a story, in a visual, in a mood, in a ... what is the word all the kids are using these days... a vibe. But I rarely get it these days. Though you & I are getting out to the cinema more in the last six months than we have in years (post-pandemic, new glasses help) I still don't feel as deeply immersed as I used to, and the whole sofa watching, with mobile phones always screaming for attention, and cats, and housework, changes that dynamic. BUT I still enjoy, and I still try to watch a lot, and I still have such a vast backlog.

BUT the real answer is that I hate endings. I hate stopping doing things. I have abandoned sooo much in my life, let dozens of interests and loves and desires just drop to the wayside, I just tenaciously hang onto this one, as part of my identity. I might not be That Guy anymore, but I still want to be the guy who writes about movies on a blog.

I feel like I keep trying to push you in different directions ... podcasts, letterboxd, substack... and your resistance, well, it means we're still here, and I'm grateful for it.

I recall that I quickly slapped the blog together in a format and layout that's remained relatively unchanged since 2011. The only difference is the name. Longtime readers (hah) might recall that this started life as "Graig and David Sometimes Disagree", but I think it was during our double feature watching of Prospect and Fast Colour [Toast | Kent] that you mentioned that we refer to each other as "Kent" and "Toasty" when writing so I decided to shift the name, as well as give you the lead spot for a while.  The whole "sometimes disagree" thing is just my sense of humour...and you never complained.

I never called myself Toast, but you did, and I love the playful affection, especially when you say "Toasty!" But I literally did give myself a nickname, added the 'toast' moniker to my online personality way back in the pre-blog days with a website called Boy de Toast, which became my first ever weblog. TBIT (thisboyistoast) is what most people call me online, which makes "toast" or "toasty" more special.

As for "sometimes disagree", of course we do. And considering that's how we evolved this thing, the disagreements, I still love it. But we have never painfully felt the disagreement. We have never disrespected the other's opinion. I mean, just go back and read the Suckerpunch posts below.

On that note, I did kind of wince at the vitriol in your comment on Babylon -- "utterly repulsed" woo wee. But keep em coming!

So I have to ask, over the past thirteen years, do you feel we've disagreed on much?  Does anything stand out to you as particularly fraught or one that you can believe I didn't like (or did like)? I know Suckerpunch was our first big shared writeup, and was supposed to be the template for what we were intending the blog to be. I also recall us being at odds about our double feature viewing of  The Raid: Redemption and Lockout. [Toast | Kent]

I need to think about this one. Yes, there have been many. But more likely, more a, "I kind of wish you did like that stuff," like I wish you liked swords & sorcery / fantasy as much as I did.

Hahaha. Fantasy/Swords'n'Sorcery have never been my bag. I keep trying. Every now and again something clicks, buuUUuut....

I am not wading through 1999 posts to find something that spoke volumes on our level of disagreement, but considering nothing stands out, nothing stung, I would say we do chalk it up to "to each his own". I am the horror guy, you are not. You are the comedy guy, I am not.

We've had so many intentions for this blog over the years. Like my first "review" was actually just a rebuttal to Roger Ebert's review of Battle: Los Angeles, and my second post was just a "thinkpiece" about Tarantino based on a conversation I had with a video store owner, shortly before Netflix terminated its existence. We've had so many different subheadings or "features"... let's run them down:

We Agree/We Disagree

This one we still use from time to time when we remember. It's one of my favorites to use because it makes the title make sense.

I see this one used when we are both seeing a movie, either together or apart, within the same close time period. Then we can bounce off each other. I always loved the rebuttal, back-n-forth posts, like this one, but they are hard to time considering my pendulum swing of attention span.

I try to remember to look for your reviews if I'm doing something older but sometimes forget. Toast and Kent sometimes forget....

DOWNLOAD/netflix'd/dvd'd

Early, early on we weren't sure how to highlight how we were watching things. By month three, it looks like you settled in on the "Year, Director -- format" structure for the "pertinent information" we put at the top of each review.  It's stuck ever since.

Yah, given the original intent was SEE ALL THE MOVIES (!!!) in the cinema, but that got frittered away by Life, there had to be a way to reference the different experiences. And considering you don't download, I needed to show how I could see something that may not yet be on "legal" media.

In the years hence, as forms of media have been altered by the Purple Suits, changing the timelines and the access (i.e. buying / watching physical media is going away) it does provide a way to record the HOW. 

Also, I like how you caught onto me alternating between sharing a well-known movie they did and something rare/gawdawful/better forgotten, in both the Directors and the actors.

It's one of my favourite running gags of yours. I tried it once or twice but I often even forget to credit the actor nevermind a past credit.

City Theatre 

Remember when we planned to make a visit and do a write-up on every theatre in Toronto? Or maybe that was just a Kent thing...?  I wish I/we had followed through with that.  I/We got as far as the Humber (no longer here) and I think I started a post on The Fox that never got published.

That would be a fun one to pickup again. Rather than doing our usual locations in downtown Toronto, find something different, out of the way, maybe one of the few remaining rep theatres in town for a unique viewing? 

3 Short Paragraphs

What I imagine is your favourite "feature/subheading" and no doubt the most-used one on the blog. I know I tried it for about a year (even hacking it into "3 short prgrphs") but it didn't stick with me. What about it works for you, and can you speak to the fact that, so often you use the heading but deliver 4 or even 5 fairly long-ish paragraphs instead?

I am rather surprised I picked up the format in the first few months. I guess I realized rather quickly I was not always going to be able to commit to the Long Format Post. I just don't have as much to say (about movies) as you do. I originally intended there would be two primary posts: the 3 Short Paragraphs (originally, I did intend on actually being short) and the Primary Post; the latter being saved for big movies that I had a lot of thoughts about. But of late, since I adopted the "Or Not", it has become my defacto.

31 Days of Horror

Another perennial Toasty favourite in which you and your partner, Marmy, watch a horror film every day in October. Or attempt to. At the start of each year's "31 Days" you tend to do a recap of what it's all about (see last year's, for example). Was this something you and Marmy were doing before the blog, or did it become tradition because of the blog?

I always surprised we started that at the beginning of the blog. It was a Marmy idea, which may have been spurred by my desire to watch more movies so I could write more. At the beginning we debated "what is it to be a horror movie" and ruled some things out firmly, but eventually eased into what we consider Halloween, not just Horror.

You also attempted a 31 Days of Xmas in 2011 but didn't quite make it and made a one post effort at X Days of XMas in 2013 and 2014. We've started our own joint X-mas tradition since then (which I love) but care to reflect on the aborted X-Mas version of 31 Days?

Xmas is just a hard season to dedicate to watching so many movies. And since we added in the Hallmarkie feature, which allows us to alternate, and curtails the season to end at Xmas, I think we are doing it justice.

I still wouldn't mind trying it again. There are many Xmas related movies, movies that beg the debate of "what makes it an Xmas movie?" such as Die Hard or horror movies that take place at Xmas.

DOUBLE FEATURE | Tenuous Ties | Double Dose

This is one of my many, many abandoned subheadings. "DOUBLE FEATURE" was literally made for times where I watched two films in the same day (which is not all that odd an occurrence anymore) while "Double Dose" was for reviewing any two movies loosely tied together (same director, actor, general plot, whatever). I keep forgetting about "Double Dose" as a concept, and should try harder.  You, on occasion, take a stab at these little experiments I'm selling, Toasty, but not this time. "Tenuous Ties" lasted two posts in mid-2016 and was abandoned.

I have, on occasion, done a double post which had the movies loosely tied in some fashion. But not as an intentional concept, just as a matter of timing. 

What I Am Watching

Another Toasty favourite. This is your TV catch-up pile, which you've been doing since 2012, though a little more sporadic these days. Do you recall the gestation of "What I Am Watching".

I watch too much TV; I admit it. Instead of giving time to watching a movie on The List, I will often just find a show to watch or re-watch. And not a lot of it is good TV. So, if I write about it, and tell people about it, then maybe it validates why I am watching it?

That said, I took a specific break from writing about TV for the past 12 months or so. Not for any particular reason, but partially because I wanted to think about what I was watching. That said, I think that particular hiatus will come to an end soon. I mean, I just have to blather on about the latest video game adaptation, so I can pair it with the actual game post (pt 1, pt 2 and pt 3).

There is soooo much TV available to me. There are the streaming channels I have (Amazon, Disney and Netflix) with their own shows, their imported shows and their legacy shows. There are shows from services I don't have, but I can download on a whim. There are the shows that everyone is buzzing about, and there are the shows that are in my particular wheelhouse of genre(s), and then there are just those shows I know are not very good, such as light drama cop procedurals that just fill a back tooth in the comfort food zone.

In December 2012, you started Catching Up which may have been your movie version of "What I Am Watching". It was short-lived (basically Dec 2012 & Jan 2013). I did a couple because I liked it as a vehicle to just crank out as many quick-thought write-ups in one post as possible. For me it was me abandoning "3 Short Paragraphs" and the start of my big group-of-stuff posts which would evolve into I Saw This!!, then 10 for 10 and now KWIF.  Just so you know you're to blame for those.... You did some "I Saw This"es and even maybe a "10 for 10" or two. Do you recall testing these waters?

Yah, Catching Up was just abandoned for your I Saw This(!!) which is was a way to jam everything I had not written into their own posts, into a single, wipe the slate clean post. There is so much unneeded desire to do this blog justice stuck in my head, that I always felt guilty when I didn't write about something.

The 10 for 10 is just something I couldn't wrap my head around. I tried, I really did, but to no great success.

Both "I Saw This!!" and "What I Am Watching" have lived on in one form or another and at one point I started getting confused about the different purposes of these two headers.  "I Saw This!!" was for things that sat in our "to review" pile for too long, sometimes a year, while "What I Am Watching" was specifically for TV, right?

Yes; and I think it was my fav thing, to mash-up I Saw This (!!) and What I Am Watching with the key focus on, "if I don't write about it now, I will forget I even watched these things!"

Double-Oh

Also in December 2012, I decided I was going to run through every Bond film, of which there were 25 of them at the time, I think (not counting the original Casino Royal or Never Say Never Again). In the first post, I thought it was only going to take me a few weeks, but I got through 14 films by April 2013, then took a good long break until picking it back up in January 2014 for four films before taking another hiatus.  I recall these being absolutely arduous to produce. I had created a template for myself and in order to adhere to it, I needed to make notes as I watched the film. I'm notoriously bad at being able to do something and listen at the same time, so it was a nightmare. Hours upon hours of effort each of those posts were.  And you know what? I'm probably never going to read them again, at least not in total. I got to 22 (Quantum of Solace) by June of 2014 with only Skyfall left in the hopper...which I wouldn't do in the "Double-Oh" format until years later.

These formats of writing out the plot are such a burden, it's absolutely crazy I decided to do something similar again with watching all the Godzilla films with Go-Go-Godzilla, the attempt to do a weekly Mandalorian thing, and even the A Toast to HallmarKent (but with that at least misery has company).

I love your "projects". They show forethought and dedication. I have considered doing a bunch, but... oh look, new shiny (and less dedicated) thing !!

One Episode

Do you remember "One Episode"? I think we should have done that more. You did quite a few in this feature in 2014 and 2015. Correct me if I'm wrong but I think you still do a "One Episode" from time to time.

I could do more, in fact, it will probably be part of the resurrected writing about TV, when I look back at the last 12 months or so and hand-pick what I want to write about.

Notes for the End of the World

This one was all you, three posts circa June 2014 covering Po-Ap films. I don't think it ever came back. Any regrets?

What? I don't recall that! 

<clicks>

Oh yeahhhh, I was just on a kick for some PoAp stuff so I decided to give them a tag-line but it was never an intention to start a Kent-style "project". I could easily resurrect that into a proper tag-line, but do we really need ANOTHER tag-line on this blog?

['other voice' usually speaks in italics, but since that's your schtick in this particular post, let's let him talk properly with a, "yes, yes we DO need another tag-line! we can never have enough tag-lines!"]

I spied another in April 2015...that I did this time. That was a surprise.

Rewatch

I think you used this a few more times than I did, but we never really did figure out a really good vehicle for commenting on films we've seen before (or love). Over the past few years, I don't even bother with writing about rewatches unless I have something new to say about them. 

ReWatch is something I could do sooooo much more of, but it always feels like I am cheating on the blog if I actually acknowledge it (a rewatched movie) and write about it. ReWatches for me are stress-reducing, distraction-minded filler. They are not even often movies I particularly love. For example, last night, I rewatched GeoStorm which never even got a proper original post. Gah, now that I have said that, as an example, I am thinking I need to write about it, so it gets a proper post, even if the original watching got ate all up in the Great Hiatus of 2018.

Series Minded

This is one I started in 2015 and wish I did a few times a year. I would love to just watch all the films in a particular franchise and then just write one long entry about them. I had planned to do the original Planet of the Apes and Lone Wolf and Cub last year but attentions had been divided when I was farting around writing about toys on my Substack. Remember when Substacks were a thing? Seems so long ago now. 

Projects! I could write so much about series from The Shelf. But again, like...

10 for 10

Toasty, are you on the record as hating this format? I mean, I'm not sure I'm exceptionally enamoured with it either, but I was the one who kept using it starting in 2016 thru to 2022, though I tried to kill it a few times. The idea of only having 10 minutes to write anything meaningful about a film is absolutely daft, and I fudged those numbers so, so much in those posts...often pausing my timer. They were marathon writing sessions... I mean 10 films at 10 minutes a piece is an hour and forty minutes and I guarantee you at was at least two and a half hours working on each of these only to have utter mediocrity at the end of it.  It was a stupid format and I'm glad its dead, but it served its purpose as a frameworks for just getting films off my "to write" docket.

Not hating, just not subscribing. Its far too confining for my weasel loosed from a cage brain. Much of my writing is spread out (this is the eighth time I have come back to writing this post) so the, "Timer started, WRITE!" aspect doesn't work for my brain. 

Moving Comics | 20/20 

By the end of 2016 I had really tapered off in my reviewing and was having a hard time writing anything. A look at the last three months of 2016 and most of 2017, you were pretty much holding the fort down, when I'd just chime in here or there when the mood struck, vomiting massively long "10 for 10" posts or making little projects out of it like my three-part look at the glut of comic property media "Moving Comics" in March + April 2016, my "20/20" backlog clearance where I gave myself 20 days to do 20 reviews with 20 minutes each per review, and then just a bunch of random things like "A Netflix Thursday" or two-fers that should have been "Double Doses" or whatever. If there's a common theme to this blog, it seems to be watching things, not reviewing them in a timely manner, and then trying to figure out some way to still write about them even though time has passed.  What for you has been most effective, or are you still figuring that out?

The most effective method is the most recent one. Instead of adding the movies to a "to be reviewed" draft post, I immediately create an empty post. That way, every day I sit down on the Throne of Writing, I can filter to Drafts and see what's due. The other tactic has been to NOT write, which is always something I have returned to. Not writing about TV right now, and not writing about rewatches is helping.

It's a good strategy, and I should probably adopt it. Get it started, and I'm more likely to finish it... 

The Dark Year

If we look along the side at the Archive links, it handily tells you how many entries were posted each year. We're in the 130-ish posts range for the first 7 years and then 2018 drops to 32.  This is The Dark Year, or the Gap Year. Do you have a different name for it? 

The Hiatus. There have been many hiatuses but this was the active one, when my life outside the blog just didn't allow for any brain space for much else. It was a year of watching utter shite, and not caring if I didn't watch anything or even paid attention when I did. But there are regrets, and another tag could easily be "I didn't write about that?!?!?"

You had gone on a self-imposed posting-everywhere hiatus at the end of 2017, so I had decided to start posting things in Letterboxd in 2018.  But Lbxd it didn't have the same charm as ye olde blogge, and most of all it didn't have Toasty. The blog is very self-serving in that I need to write down these thoughts about movies and TV and such because I won't remember them a year later. I put them here to have a record of them for when I want to recollect how I thought or felt about a film or TV show. But a very, very close second is the comradery, the audience of two, myself and Toasty.  If nobody else ever commented on a post (and it's rare that anyone else does) it's still always a joy getting a Toasty response, every time.

It was, I think, doing "31 Days of Halloween" again that reignited the spark. You still pretty much took November + December 2018 off, but you were back at it regular time in 2019, and brought me right back with you.

I need to comment more. I mean, its the point of this place, for us. Maybe I should let The Other Voice do the commenting, as he always has a lot to say, but then again, have you seen comments sections of other blogs?

Horror, Not Horror

This was an experiment for myself as a tourist in the horror genre. I think a lot of films labelled "horror" aren't really all that scary and are more thought exercises in genre than something that's actually meant to scare anyone. I like those kind of "scary" movies.  I did a lot of these in 2020 and throughout the pandemic, but I've kind of forgotten to keep doing them, and when I watch a horror flick I've been forgetting to think about this aspect of it. It's amazing I can walk and breathe at the same time, it really is.

It kind of made me beam that you at least considered the idea of watching some (not) horror movies.

So many "horror" movies are really horror/something genre movies, be it sci-fi/fantasy/paranormal/western or whatever. It's hard to just write it off as a singular genre. 

Men With Guns | Women With Guns

Now the "Men With Guns" header you've only used a couple of times, very sporadically, and back in the pre-Dark Times era of the blog. But the "Women With Guns" you've used a bit more.  Do you ever feel like your "3 Short Paragraphs" gets in the way of using features like "Women With Guns"? I can't specifically point to an example but just wondering if you ever deliberate between going the 3-para route or if you think about the various dumb features we seem to keep coming up with around here?

Sometimes I want to write about something in the context of me watching them, and other times I just want to write it down. For me, "Women with Guns" is a distinct micro-genre I enjoy, and while the John-Wickian "Men with Guns" should dominate, I realized really quickly it takes a certain kind of movie for my brain to fit it into that mould. Not many come up.

That said,  I really need to go back and finish the "Women with Guns" collection, with a handful of rewatches. And I don't think there has been any new entries into the collection of late.

Toast and Kent's X-Mas Advent Calendar

Not sure about you, but this is my absolute favourite feature. I love each year picking out a list of movies to watch and then anticipating each other day what you're going to write about.

THIS. This is why we created the blog, I think, these days, of late. If ever there was a project that sang to my heart it was the dumb dumb heartfelt nature of how we watch these movies. The mix of genuine enjoyment, vitriolic dismissal and heavy-dosed ironic watching is just perfect. You made a template for our watching, as you are wont to do, which I do my best to keep to, and while our enthusiasm has waned for the project over the years (the weight of the Hallmark banality can break shoulders) I still love we have done / are doing it.

Oh, my enthusiasm for the Advent Calendar has not waned at all. My enthusiasm for Hallmark, though, has. I talk through my feelings about the state of Hallmarkies each year in the Advent Calendar, but I'm really loving exploring older (and newer) Christmas movies, because, I was never a Christmas movie guy growing up, and I was a bit of a Grinch.  (Not really true, I still enjoy hunting for indie XMas songs.)

Of note, I always considered "Angel of Christmas" as the inspiration for this project... but did you ever actually write about it?

I'm surprised to find that, no I never did write up Angel of Christmas, but then all you need to know about that movie is... this...

T&K Go Loopty Loo

What do we both love?!? Time loops! It's something we discovered as much as a result of writing the blog together as hanging out. It was your brilliant (not facetious, it is brilliant) idea to do a shared post back-and-forth style project to go through ALL THE TIME LOOPS as a pandemic project. I was definitely on board.  We batted back and forth a few different stabs at the template before we settled in, and I think it is so great.

We went full guns a-blazin' for a couple months in 2021 (I think we were absolutely craving the creative outlet at first) and then it waned into a bit of a slow, irregular trickle. I get it, they take a lot of time and energy, but I would love to get back to it.

I think it was the 90s TV show that derailed me. Or was it the Mickey Mouse post? I cannot remember. But I definitely want to get back to it, especially since I binged two seasons of "The Lazarus Project" and didn't write about it. The show pretty much spins off all the questions we ask in our format.

But if we were to kick it off again, I suggest we do it with a proper rewatch of "Groundhog Day" as it is the source of the genre, in modern parlance, or maybe even a rewatch of "Source Code" in nostalgic self-referential style considering its place in this blog?

WFH

Speaking of the pandemmy... I counted about five entries with a WFH header in the summer of 2021. Do you remember the purpose of this header?

I don't WFH well. During the heavy days of The Pause, I was most often in the office supporting a new CEO and the other C-levels who were coming in. But then said C-levels buckled to Lockdown pressure and I was told to go home as well. At some point, I just decided to sit down and watch movies during my usual 12pm lunch time. It would take more than a few sittings, once you factor in making lunch, and eating it, so the writing style would be impacted by the start-stop-start manner.

Lockdowns ended, I am back to most often going in, but still, on occasion, I have taken to watching movies in that manner. Its probably not the best method to watch em, as the disconnect does cause a loss of thread, but... its still going on, less when WFH and more often as I wake up, sipping coffee, sick of the morning "news" shows.

New Year's Countdown...

I try to take a bit of time off at the end of each year, and my little pandemic pet project was to watch ten movies in five or six days leading into New Year's Day.  After the back and forth of the Advent Calendar, I still wanted the dopamine hits of daily.  It was my version of your 31 Days of Halloween. I tried to come up with a theme for what to watch. Horror, one year, and classics the following.  But I switched jobs in 2022 and the new job meant to time off until the New Year, so there went that "feature".  

I think I normally just end up taking a break at this time, and reading you :)

3-2-1/1-1-1/KWIF/KsMRT

At the start of 2023, I tried to coax you into joining me into transitioning the blog to a Substack, another of my stabs at trying to push you into something new. You had a poke around and didn't like the setup there. I was messing around with new formats, like 3-2-1 Great/Good/Bad, which was meant to make my posts really structures, but instead proved really, exceptionally cumbersome, and my posts were taking even longer than before.  Switched to a more simple 1-1-1 Great/Good/Bad, and while less cumbersome but also not always conducive to letting me say what I want. I relegate 1-1-1 to TV reviews now.

The Substack I built for us became my Toy Blogging page, until Substack was revealed to be if not endorsing, then not admonishing the neo-nazi and extreme right wingers using their platform, and using Substack's algorithm to help promote their content, which Substack was capitalizing off of the subscriptions there. So your instincts were good there.  Since I didn't really want to do movie and TV blogging without you, I happily stayed put, but I needed a new format to entice me.  "Kent's Week In Film" and "Kent's Month Reviewing Television" as mentioned before have become my regular outlets to just poop out write-ups everything I've been watching in a given period. Of course, I never stick to a schedule, so I'm really not doing these things weekly/monthly, so I wonder exactly how long they'll last before I try something new.

I think I really should try your tactic of just starting a post for everything and just recording thoughts as they come to me.

These are your formats. I find them rather too opaque for my brain to wrap around. You have structure, and forethought, and care in feeding your posts. I see mine as more being word vomit, which I then push around with my finger tips until something looks good... or complete, or I have just had enough of it.

I did make one attempt at the 1-1-1 but I didn't do it justice.

I have to admit, I always read the "kSMIRT" and "KWIF" as words, not acronyms. Both sound mildly naughty, and make me giggle, and I eventually ended up forgetting what they stood for.

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Before we close this out, we need to talk about the meme: The Purple Suits, which has become shorthand for the producers, studio heads, bean counters, anyone way behind the scenes who are pulling the strings on creative decisions for non-creative reasons.  Detail the origins of this tribe of peoples, and how would you race/classify them in D&D?

The Purple Suits are lost legion of angels that came down from the nether regions at the beginning of film. Prior to that, they were invisible entities that leaned over the shoulders of poets and convinced them to add in more rhymes.

TPS enjoyed earthy bodies and suits of silk, satin and polyester and eventually forgot their own origins. They started working to bring a divine vision to Mankind, but eventually their own agendas won out, and they ended up not giving a fuck about what people actually want to see, what creators actually want to create, and just focused on the meddling for arcane... reasons.

So, now they are CR 8 creatures, neither divine nor infernal truly, but still magical in nature with an ability to influence, capable of elevating what they meddle with, but more often just completely fucking ruining it. They have a high AC due to the suits, but low damage rolls, as in the end, the are cowards. They are most often found in elevators, sunlit cafe patios in West Hollywood or lurking in the shadows of movies being made, whispering toxic suggestions into the ears of second-unit directors and producers.

Any other memes of the blog that you would like to highlight. I have to admit I'm terrible at memes. As much as I love comedy, I'm awful at callbacks and recall, especially for my own jokes. My brain just isn't wired right for 'membeburying things.  Like, I totally fell off our joke of "The Flash Ranking" ranking of every movie as better or worse than The Flash.

You already pointed out the great "Cast Member, Obscure or Irreverent Credit" citations you do. Any other injokey bits you recall, or think we need to resurrect? Of course, pointing them out will probably only kill them faster.

There are a few quirks of my writing that appear here and there, but I wouldn't go so far as to call them memes. There is [that other voice], the more irreverent version of myself who just wants to say what is on his fucking mind instead of coaching it all in well-thought text, but he is an odd duck, only seen here and there, as I am pretty irreverent in my thinking on the usual. And for a few posts, I was adding in fictional bylines, more stream of consciousness filler text and I did because... oh, I have no fucking clue -- better they die forgotten.

Final words?

Keep writing. Keep adding new things, new projects, new ideas, challenging me, inspiring me, impressing the ever living Hell out of me. I don't evolve. I am a pretty static mind. I don't strive to get better, but you do, and please, keep doing that and I love that about you. But also, should you just feel the need to, don't worry if its just three crappy short paragraphs.