Reviews of movies, anime, and the occasional TV show mixed with warnings on Blogger spam. Also to be found are musings on whatever I am thinking about - all from the point of view of being left to watch everything from the sidelines of life.
While I’ve been struggling with my health and what few activities I’ve had, having an entire month go by without posting is ridiculous. That will be rectified in the near future, as I’m going to be making some changes in my life to reduce demands on my time and energy.
At the moment, I’m too tired to write anything at the moment, however there will be more posting on a variety of topics coming after I get over a bug I picked up this weekend.
Testing the android app for Blogger to see if it still works. Annoyed that it lost an entire post already.
Since I’m not getting anything done in the way of reviews, a report on why is in order. Simply put, things have needed doing and they have exhausted all my energy while absconding with my brainwaves. The trigger was having to mow the lawn, which is not good due to depleting my limited stamina along with the fact I’m allergic to grass. Not just grass pollen, but the plant itself.
A week later and the itching is finally gone, but the sinuses still hate me. Can’t say I blame them.
Dad may finally making some small progress. For the first time since March there are indications of fluids (water in this case) making its way from the stomach to the intestine. Cheap no calorie drink mix with very potent red dye revealed this when his feeding tube in the small intestines became tinted pink. Having spilled this stuff on white clothing, I can say it was a positive match.
Also, he has been measuring oral intake in milliliters in comparison with what he drains from the relief tube in the stomach. In the past few days, more than one hundred milliliters of water has gone missing with the implication that they have passed through the gastric outlet.
Too early to get really excited, but hey this is something that hasn’t happened before.
The last couple of weeks have been difficult, so none of the reviews I’m working on have progressed very far. Dad simply isn’t showing any signs of getting better or a willingness to work at it, so I’m trying to push him to do things. That’s been difficult, not to mention time consuming.
As I’m typing, U2’s new album, Songs of Innocence, is playing in the background. A free download until the middle of October, it is proof that the music industry is in trouble. CD sales have dwindled to nearly nothing and now digital download sales are in free fall. Streaming from Pandora and Spotify are being blamed, however the quality of product is more to blame in my opinion.
Songs of Innocence illustrates this well -- for you get what you paid for it. It isn’t even mediocre. Only The Miracle (Of Joey Ramone) is interesting at all, the rest is banal. In fact, the album sounds like a band trying to sound like U2.
Now that things have calmed down somewhat, I’m hoping to have a movie review up by the weekend. That is barring unexpected circumstances, which have gotten dangerously closer to the norm than one would wish.
Everything is done but the writing on the review and that was started over a week ago. Now to remember the film! There’s a reason I take several pages of notes…
Hints would be dropped about which film it is, but nobody would get it since it’s an obscure ‘60s flick. Instead I’ll tease that actor starring was most famously associated with the color of pink, was something of a goon, and wasn’t all there even when he was being there. For posterity and the random chance someone will actually pay attention to this post a final clue will be given to actor’s identity:
He was the kind of guy who drive his boss homicidally insane.
Now off to work on the thing…
Despite a paucity of energy, it is time to get reviews written again if only to see if I can still string words together in a coherent fashion. A review is already in the pipeline to get things rolling again. Okay, I only have the DVD out and am looking at it intently, but one has to start somewhere.
In a post in October of a previous year (I will not state which one), a list was put forth of movies that would be reviewed or have their reviews rewritten. Out of 26, only six remain to fulfill the promise made there. That should keep me busy, plus I did pick up the ritzy Criterion Blu-ray release of Godzilla/Gojira which means a rewrite of those reviews at some point.
I had considered finishing out the orphaned anime series reviews started before. However, this is one case where following through is unlikely as much as I despise not finishing a project. Instead, I may write an overall series review as a conclusion for each with other series getting that treatment in the future.
Hopefully, there will be time and energy for all this. It’s hard to believe that July is more than halfway over. Time really flies when you aren’t having fun.
To celebrate the upcoming new American Godzilla coming out in May, I’ll be writing as many Godzilla movie reviews as I can up to the release. Rather than tackling the entire series in order, I’ll be starting out with comeback movies by the big G. Over the past sixty years, the radioactive lizard has had more comebacks than Rocky Balboa as times have changed.
If I pull off all four reviews planned, I’ll see what else I can fit in. The four will be:
If you are a North American fan of the Godzilla, you should be aware that a slew of releases on Blu-ray are out or will be in May:
Many of the Heisei era have never been released in widescreen or the original Japanese language versions over here, so it is a pretty big deal. Others have commanded premium prices due to the DVDs being out of production for a decade. Prices are around $13-15 each on Amazon and other e-tailers so it is quite the bargain.
Also coming out on Blu-ray to ride on G’s tail are King Kong Escapes and the original Gamera films, the latter in two volumes of four movies in their original Japanese cuts.
It’s a good time to be a kaiju fan!
With my father home from the hospital as of yesterday, my hope is that events will approximate what we normally go through, albeit with many concessions to his health problems. Due to the financial drain of the past week, we won’t be doing much unrelated to medical treatments. Scrounging up money for more wood pellets is something I’m attempting, but it will be ten days before more money comes my way.
Financial problems are far from uncommon when cancer strikes and I’ve always been very aware of the fund raisers done for people in the neighboring small towns. Often it is for people struck during the prime of their lives with families to provide for. So it could be far worse. I just hope that more people are aware of this being par for the course than not when they deal with cancer victims.
Sadly, awareness is not a trait associated with modern Westerners, though I often find myself suspecting it is simply human nature to be oblivious to what’s happening to others. Well, aside from salacious items that make fodder for gossip.
Since activity will be down, that means a chance to get this blog back to normal. One movie review needs to be finished, another has complete notes taken, and a third is partially noted. A small amount of referral spam has been recorded with an intent to investigate as well. Updates on my father’s battle with cancer will continue, hopefully with less drama.
The outer world is definitely seeing an increase in international drama with the return of the Cold War, airplane crashes, jet fighter shoot downs, and continuing economic woes. Therefore, I may end up posting on what’s going on if something really big happens…
…but I’d rather ignore the world for a week. Less stress equals better health, so a plan to bombard Dad with mass distraction is in the works. Time for nostalgia like the Emma Peel years of The Avengers plus family favorite movies of the past.
Or any other ridiculous excuse that you can imagine for not getting more done on the blog in November.
A wintery mix of weather, intestinal bug, and doing more in the real world than usual has led to my getting very little accomplished online lately. When it takes forever and a day to recover from expending energy, productivity suffers greatly. A couple of weekends ago I went on a trip up to the St. Paul area where I ended up assisting a close friend in teaching a merit badge course on computers to Boy Scouts.
Since then, I’ve been one of the walking dead and some extended trips out helping my father on some repair calls made me hungry for brains. Wait, that came out wrong. I lost my brains somewhere along the way, that’s what I meant. If you find them alongside the road, please send them to me and I might remember to repay the postage.
It depends on what shape the gray matter is in, you see.
It was an interesting year for From the Sidelines with unexpected solid growth in traffic ending in an abrupt collapse in visits and pageviews. A picture is worth a thousand words as they say, so take a look at this traffic cliff via Google Analytics:
While I still can’t concretely say why things went that way, the most likely explanation is that Google demoted my site after I altered the robots.txt. That was done to make Bing/Yahoo finally index everything. Despite submitting the proper sitemaps to Bing, that search engine was never able to crawl the whole archive of posts after many months of trying.
So I tried adding the relevant sitemap coding for overcoming Blogger’s limits of showing only the last 25 posts to the robots.txt. It worked like a charm and made everything visible to Bing’s spider. A week later and Google capped me at 150 impressions a day for the blog. Suffice it to say that the microscopic uptick in traffic from Bing/Yahoo failed to make up for that.
Really, does anybody use Bing?
There will be some changes coming for the blog in the new year, but most will not happen for a good amount of time. One thing that will happen sooner rather than later will be a new second blog that will be a major project in 2013. Work on that will commence this week, in fact. It will take time from this blog, but it shouldn’t be too bad. There will be more reviews, life events, and the occasional essay.
Plans also include finally learning proper HTML and XTML coding to create my own template for this blog. That will be awhile, due to other things I will be trying to learn including how Linux works (going Kabuntu for that), playing guitar (yet another try to remember to try), and hopefully some fiction writing.
Why am I making plans when I think the country and the world economy will probably fail? Because if one knows history, one understands these things happen all the time. Funny thing, humans always survive these periods -- though I sometimes wonder how we survive the periods of plenty given how self destructive so many of us are. So when I have typed about the very bad stuff coming down, I do not believe it is the end of the world. In fact, it is the height of arrogance to believe the downfall of one’s society is the end of the world. It smacks of every ancient culture who thought the sun rose and set because of their pharaoh or king.
Life goes on and only cowards die a thousand deaths, though given our hyperactive modern lifestyle and inflation, it is probably more like a thousand deaths per day. I don’t live that way because that isn’t living. If I were to give one message to the world outside of a call to come to Christ, it would be to man up.
So those are my big plans and we’ll see if I pull any of them off. There are a billion and one other things going on and always new developments to deal with as well. This keeps life from being boring, but it does mean being mentally nimble on your feet. Attitude dictates the altitude your spirit flies at and nothing will teach you that better than dealing with the unexpected.
Since last Thursday, the traffic to the blog has dropped to a fraction of what it normally is. I don’t know if it was my tweaking the robots.txt earlier in the month knocking me down in the search rankings or what. That has since been returned to the Blogger default since the tweak served its purpose in getting Bing to actually index the whole blog. Arcane stuff, but interesting to learn.
It’s a good thing I don’t earn any money off of this site!
Shortly after writing my last post on health, I fell completely apart. It is probably a virus of some kind, but I ended up sleeping most of the afternoon into early evening. So not much got accomplished. By the way, have I ever written how much I hate sneezing? It makes my teeth, back, and elbows hurt. No clue on how the last can be affected by it.
I did watch the second half of The Return of the King Extended Edition in preparation for The Hobbit coming out this week. Something that struck me while watching the Blu-ray versions of the trilogy was how well the CGI effects blended in with the rest of the footage. It may be my imagination, but it seemed like it was more seamless in 1080p than when I watched it on DVD on the old television. Specifically, there was little of the “popping” where outlines of composited effects stood out. Gollum looked particularly good.
Since I don’t feel well and writing was not happening, the work I planned on The Last Starfighter review did not progress. So I took notes while watching The Dark Knight Rises on Blu-ray instead. It is a fantastic transfer of a brilliant film, but it will be awhile before it is reviewed thanks to all of the extras included.
Meanwhile, I’m downloading some games that I only played as shareware back in the ‘90s. GOG.com is having a winter sale, check it out for DRM free games from yesteryear. Given how slow my reflexes are now, I’ll be playing them on easy mode.
Well, my thoughts are moving about as fast as cold molasses, so I’ll quit writing while I’m ahead.
It has been that way trying to get the Spirited Away review written and I hope to get it up soon. It has been a case of interruptitus from many sources this week should be better – after this afternoon. “After this afternoon” sounds redundant doesn’t it? Yet it isn’t. So there is my weird thought for the day.
This afternoon involves a tooth extraction, so I’ll be able to directly compare the experiences. That’s one way to find out if a statement is hyperbole, but I don’t recommend following in my footsteps.
At least weight training is working out. While I’m still at pathetically low weights, it is nice to be able to consistently do it again. In fact, I need to go do it right now, so time to wrap this up!
Updated in the early evening:
Well, I forgot this was the consultation phase of things – it has been a stereotypical Monday. So it will be Thursday bright and early before the tooth pulling actually happens.
Only dread one day at a time…
After only getting the two votes in the poll, I briefly put up another only to yank it down since it wasn’t going to get any votes anyway. So ends one experiment on the blog. Today starts another experiment with introducing ads to the blog.
I will try to have them be as unobtrusive as possible and am looking at tailored ads for the review posts -- if that can be made to work. There is much for me to learn about how all of it functions, which is half the reason for the experiment. The other half is to see what if any money can be made to support my DVD and Bluray addiction.
Since I use movies that I purchased or were given as gifts, there is an actual financial cost to writing those reviews. No rental discs are used and the only reviews that I didn’t own the discs involve one of my father’s DVDs and experiments using streaming from Crackle and Hulu. The latter two led to purchases and the reviews are being rewritten over time.
We will see if I even make it to my first dollar on the ads. Such are the perils of the mad scientist lifestyle.
