Sick of Polls? How About Another One?

 Don't worry, this one isn't political.

Since I have decided to devote even more time to the blog, I thought I'd try an experiment and ask visitors to vote on the next movie to review after I finish up the one I'm working on left over from Halloween. Whether or not I get much feedback is iffy, but hey -- it is worth a shot.

Take a look over at the right hand side, the poll will be there for a week.

So please vote!

UPDATED Well that went slightly better than expected, since I did not expect any votes at all. But the bad news for me is that it is a tie with two votes cast in total. So now I'll have to do both reviews to be fair.

The winners are Spirited Away and The Last Starfighter with one vote each. Given the quality of the DVD editions I have the reviews will take some time to write. They will be posted the same day in order of the votes received.

Blogger Stats Vanish and Life Goes On

It was interesting to log into Blogger’s Dashboard tonight and see all the stats had vanished. This messes up two widgets I used, so it is inconvenient to say the least. I am not alone in this with the support boards lighting up with hordes of unhappy bloggers complaining.

While I do use the stats for auto arranging the top posts for the past week and all time, I had been thinking of embedding a tracker besides Google Analytics, which is still working. I will have to dig into those services and see if there is any widgets that perform a similar task available, but it isn’t a priority. With Noscript and Firefox being popular, it isn’t like we can get a perfect record of traffic anyway.

This outage certainly won’t stop my posting and I have much to do besides.

UPDATE: 10-15-2012

I see the stats are back. Life does indeed go on.

More Movie Reviews in the Pipeline

Since it is October, it is time to do more scary movie and creature feature reviews. Due to September and now October becoming unexpectedly hectic, my initial plans to do more Universal monster movie reviews simply became impossible. But since I believe in back up plans to back up plans to back up plans, there will be some reviews coming out before Halloween arrives.

In the pipeline are:

• Godzilla Raids Again/Gigantis the Fire Monster
• The Mummy (Hammer Films version)
• The Legend of Hell House
• Gorgo

If time permits, there will be more, but I suspect time will not permit. Already up is the rewrite of Disney’s The Watcher in the Woods. That took more time than expected, which seems to be par for the course these days.

In the meantime, last year’s Halloween lineup can be perused:

• Dracula (1931)
• Dracula (Spanish 1931)
• Frankenstein (1931)
• The Curse of Frankenstein (1957)
• Horror of Dracula (1958)

Plus the original Gojira and its American version Godzilla King of Monsters.

Odds and Ends 9-15-2012

It baffles me that certain movies are not out on Blu-ray or took many years to get issued, such as Lawrence of Arabia. Having obtained a minty used copy of the special edition DVD set of The Right Stuff and watching it last night, I can’t understand why there is no Blu-ray of it. It is a stupendously beautiful looking and sounding movie that deserves the full high definition treatment. It also is the shortest over three hour movie I have ever watched. By watched, I mean repeatedly over the years.

While I like my Iview Cypad 7” Android based tablet, I do need more horsepower. The Google Nexus was a disappointment in my view, since it has no HDMI out or memory card slot. The new Kindle Fire HD 7” looks terrific, but still lacks the slot and leaves you tied to Amazon’s proprietary store. Even with that, it is the current top candidate for a replacement. Ainol, a Chinese manufacturer, has a new tablet, the Novo 7 Fire, that has everything I want, but there are some early technical problems involving overheating. Its specs beat both the Nexus and Fire HD, so if they work out the difficulties, that is the one I would like to get.

After many years, Black Mesa rolled out yesterday. Black Mesa is a mod for the Source engine that recreates much of the original Half Life with all the bells and whistles of newer technology. I did a short run as far as the highly annoying jumping the crates level and have to say the wait was worth it. The attention to detail is simply amazing and the voice acting isn’t bad at all. There is a possibility they may do the Xen levels later, but hardly anybody liked those. I can’t wait to get into the fire fights and see how they are executed.

Slow Motion

Since Saturday, I have not been doing so great, but managed to get out to socialize and go to church, though I missed the first hour of that. The drive home felt like it took a small eternity, which made me think of the excessive use of slow motion in modern action movies. Interesting in small doses and a massive chore to sit through when over used.

So today has been more of that wading in mud feeling. For over a week I have been working on two review posts and hope to get them up tomorrow at the latest. Part of the delay has been not feeling well, the other… well, sometimes reviews are painful to write. I have no idea how professional movie critics retain an ounce of sanity.

Actually, that would explain a lot of reviews, wouldn’t it?

Six Years of Blogging

In all the events of yesterday, I forgot to post about it being six years since I started this blog. It can safely be said the blog is not exactly what I thought it would be.The first post was not anything profound, but was in the spirit of trying to keep a journal of some kind.

At the time, I figured I would post about daily things and links to articles I found interesting. While I still do that from time to time, the desire to write and resurrect my rusty skills at it gradually took over. Most of that took the form of reviews, which I never expected to get involved in writing, and the occasional essay.

Six years. That is hard to comprehend, but looking back at the first post I notice they do not have any tags on them. Time to fix that.

Looking to the future, I expect the blog to keep changing. It is a reflection of me and my refusal to be complacent about life, so change is unavoidable. Hopefully it will be an interesting journey and some of the posts will be too.

More Renovations

Looking back at my early review posts recently, I realized I need to do some serious rewriting of a good number of them. Some will required a new DVD purchase, but most need better screencaps and text refinements to cover the technical merits of the release.

A good example of what I am up to is the first renovated review, The Black Hole. It required a new DVD because of the HDTV and so it was an excuse to rewrite an early review. What I did not expect is how much of the text needed to be rewritten! One bonus from all this is that the structure for reviews is finally standardized.

Reviews to be reworked:

• Godzilla: Tokyo SOS – DVD in hand so better screencaps DONE
• Gammera – DVDs on the way and will be both versions DONE
• Stargate: Continuum – full rewrite DONE
• Forbidden Planet – full rewrite, maybe Blu-ray upgrade? DONE
• Howl’s Moving Castle – minor tweaks plus better screencaps DONE
• Something Wicked This Way Comes – full rewrite DONE
• The Watcher in the Woods – Full Rewrite DONE
• Smallville: Absolute Justice 1 and 2 – Full rewrite
• Godzilla: King of Monsters – Better screencaps, tweaking DONE
• Gojira – Better screencaps, tweaking DONE
• Zulu – better screencaps, tweaking for Blu-ray release DONE
• Battle of Britain -- HD screencaps, rewrite DONE
• Only Yesterday -- Better screencaps, technical details

The reworks will be alternated with new reviews, despite the temptation to get them done and over with.

New reviews planned, in no particular order:

• Godzilla Raids Again/Gigantus, The Fire Monster – DVD, Japanese Original and US DONE
• Whisper of the Heart – Blu-ray and DVD DONE
• Animal Crackers – DVD DONE
• Troll Hunter – Blu-ray DONE
• TRON – DVD DONE
• Love and Honor – DVD DONE
• The African Queen – Blu-ray DONE
• Tora, Tora, Tora – Blu-ray
• The Last Dinosaur – DVD DONE
• The Bobo – DVD DONE
• Ikiru – DVD
• The Burbs – DVD DONE
• Beowulf – DVD DONE

With a personal library of hundreds of movies on DVD and Blu-ray, I am not lacking for material. If I were to give up all new shows and movies, I would still be set for a very long time.

Rotation

Besides being an awesome tune from Herb Alpert’s amazing Rise album, it is also a word that means going around in circles.

In this case, I am writing about the reviews of series I cycle around. With too many in rotation, it is time to finish out two to streamline things a little. So for the near future, Squid Girl season one and Bleach season one will be fast tracked since they are almost completed. Then the rest will resume their normal places.

The movie reviews will get loose rotation too. Marx Brothers films will be joined by Godzilla movies and Studio Ghibli animes, with other movies slotted in between. A couple of relatively unknown foreign films will be prioritized before I fully start rolling on that rotation.

But before any of that gets posted, I have to put up the 1979 video of the title tune. While Rise is a great tune and made the album a huge hit, this is by far my favorite track from it:

Pure music, late ‘70s style.

Enjoy.

Renovations to the Blog

This summer, I decided to do a little remodeling to the blog. Rather than change the visuals, I decided to change the accessibility of older posts. It has been a work in progress and I will continue to refine the layout as time goes on. One of these days I may even replace the old photo of me with something more recent, which will not be easy since I avoid having my ugly mug photographed.

The latest change involves using Blogger’s pages feature which was introduced last autumn. In keeping with the KISS model, there are now simple indexes to reviews with a new bar near the top allowing easy access. Eventually there may be new pages, but for the moment the categories of Home, Movie Reviews, Anime Series Reviews, and Television Series Reviews will be it in the tabs.

Hopefully, this will help people searching for more content they are interested in, since tags have turned out to be a little messier than I expected. With people clicking in from countries all over the world and from many different languages, simplicity is a must. Enough people have been using the tags for me to realize there might be a better way to go about things. It means a little more work for me, but it it should be worth it.

Comments are not allowed on the index pages in order to keep them neat, but any feedback is appreciated on individual posts, of course.

I never expected to have many hits on this blog, but I passed the 20,000 page view mark a month ago to my amazement. While it started out as a journal of sorts, it has become something more experimental than that. Being in on the Web relatively early, I find myself missing the random surfing of web rings and the excitement of finding something unusual. The Web may be more useful now, but it was a lot more fun back then.

So From the Sidelines is not going to be the usual blog that is purely personal, political, or other niche oriented. It is going to be an  oddball mix of some of my many interests with no apologies for any of it. Much like my DVD/Blu-ray collection has anime sitting next to highly acclaimed films next to cult classics next to box office hits without segregation, the posts here will be the same.

If I have managed to inform, entertain, or intrigue just one person having trouble sleeping or simply surfing the Net, then I am satisfied that I have returned a little of what I got to experience back in the 1990s when the World Wide Web was new.

So I thank all who have visited thereby keeping me intrigued and entertained from showing up in my stats and comments. It adds something to my life here on the sidelines.

Odds and Ends 6-16-2012

I have spent some time going back through old review posts and have done some minor editing to improve layout and add needed tags. Tagging is still underway, because I had previously thought of it in a master index way instead of how people actually use tags. If a tag is used to look up other posts, it is off of the post, not the side bar and I finally got that through my thick skull. New genre categories of science fiction, fantasy, comedy, and classics have been introduced to help with that.

One consequence of looking over the older reviews is finding the need to rewrite or update seven of them. In one case, that will require a newer and better DVD, but fortunately that will be under ten dollars to do.

Posting and Health 3-21-2012

The current slow down in blogging is due to the slowdown of me. Since the unusual and record setting heat began, I have had a hard time adjusting to it. Radical changes in temperature hit me in two different ways, with a sudden cold snap causing sneezing and sudden warmth causing my digestive system to get out of whack. The latter is the problem right now and I am being a bit of a zombie. Part of this is fallout from having a more active week before, but most of it is the heat and my body’s poor coping skills.

Sleep has been sporadic and of low quality thanks to all this, which is not helpful. As the week has gone on, things have improved gradually. It is annoying to be yawning as I type this. The good news is that I have not been totally incapacitated and have been working on a monster of a movie review. The screen captures need to culled to something workable and after they are edited the writing will begin.

After that, I will be beginning a new series to review – my favorite one of all time. Expect a lot of theorizing as attempts are made to understand the thinking of its creator and star.

Then there is a post that has slowly been forming in my mind about how hatred and raw emotion have come to dominate what passes for discourse in society. That will be quite a long post.

Winter Pays a Visit and Blog Renovations

Crystalized water keeps falling from the sky, blown about in the well chilled air. Between that and the cold water to the bathroom repeatedly freezing, I have to surmise Old Man Winter has decided to pay us a visit. Now if I could only find the adapter I need to plug in the space heater fan to aim down the crawlspace! It has been a mild winter so far and it is no surprise that we are not getting off scot free.

I have been tweaking the layout and features of the blog again. Certain gadgets have recently become available that I think will help people navigate and explore the posts. At least, I hope that is the end result. After over five years of blogging here, I only just discovered how to insert breaks in long posts. Yeah, the feeling of being a real genius completely avoids describing how that made me feel.

Check out the top visited posts on the right hand sidebar. Also now there are a list of the most used tags on my posts. If you want to share a post somewhere else, check out the bottom of each one. Linking it to your Facebook, Twitter, or blog account should be easy now.

Meanwhile, things have moved ahead somewhat on the car. We’ve scraped up enough money to buy it back from the insurance company and now have to figure out how to get it back home since it is now over one hundred miles away. Having depleted all our money on this, it will be a long time before we can buy the needed parts for it and it will be many months before it runs again. But it is the only way we can afford a vehicle, I am sorry to say.

An unexpected movie will be the subject of my next review thanks to a make on demand service that will also be part of the essay. It is one near and dear to the immediate family alive and dead. That last sentence sounds awkward, doesn’t it? It happens when you have a very small family.

To the Future… AND BEYOND!!!

I have no idea why I typed that title, but there it is. Working on posts for the future is the topic, it beats me what the “beyond” is all about.

Zulu is up for my next movie review and is currently in the first draft stage. Being a beautiful film, I took far too many screen captures and culling them too too long. There will be two companion reviews of the soundtrack, one right away and another to come later. Any excuse to play John Barry composed music is a good excuse.

It looks like I will be getting an early Christmas present of a Blu-ray player for the PC, which means redoing the screen caps for TRON: Legacy and the making of lots of wallpaper for my desktop. With Zulu out in an affordable and apparently brilliant Blu-ray, I will have to get my hands on that sooner or later.

Captain America: The First Avenger will be reviewed in the near future in DVD and Blu-ray. That will be easier than usual, since I have the in-theater review to work off of.

I will be starting reviews of one my three favorite animes of all time, Area 88. Besides Studio Ghibli’s movies, this TV series helped convince me that the format can produce legitimately good material. It has a film noir feel about it without being visually noir, strangely enough. It certainly is grim material, being a story about mercenary pilots fighting and dying in the skies over a fictional Middle East country in the 1980’s.

Sorting all my DVD’s into alphabetical order has shaken up what I planned to review yet again. The desire to tread down less seen paths is strong and that means my more obscure titles will get some attention. But do I dare review The Lord of the Rings movies as well? If nothing else, they would be good exercise in shortening reviews which is something I need to work on.

I am still working up the courage to review the worst movie ever made. Being one of the few in the world to actually watch the entire thing, I dread seeing it again.

Numerical Uncertainty

Or how you never know what is really going on around the Web.

For my personal amusement, I have had Google Analytics running on this blog site for some time now with only a brief lapse of a couple of days when I changed over to the newer template. Thanks to things like NoScript and other blockers of content, I can never be sure how accurate the visitor stats are, but it does give me a rough idea of who, what, and where.

Being a tiny fish in a vast blogosphere, From the Sidelines’ stats are nothing to brag about. Still, it is interesting to me what gets looked at since I do not flog the blog in dreams of gaining wealth and fame. This blog has been up for over five years now, something that surprised me when I went back through my posts a little while back.

One thing that fascinates me is how Google Analytics and Blogger’s stats do not quite line up. Let us take a look at the top posts past month, October 16 to November 15, for comparison. Blogger is first, then Google Analytics:

Bleach Season 1: The Substitute, Episodes 1-2
Jul 26, 2011   
149 106 Pageviews

CITIZEN KANE (1941)
Jun 22, 2011   
132 102 Pageviews

Howl’s Moving Castle
Nov 25, 2009
106 80 Pageviews

Gojira (Godzilla 1954)
Nov 25, 2009
80 26 Pageviews

Godzilla: Tokyo SOS (2003)
Dec 18, 2009, 2 comments
61 30 Pageviews

Battle of Britain (1969)
Jul 22, 2011
56 85 Pageviews

Bleach Season 1: The Substitute, Ep. 2-3
Jul 28, 2011
43 44 Pageviews

Smallville: Absolute Justice Review Part 1
Sep 13, 2010
40 39 Pageviews

Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidora (2001)
Dec 9, 2009
39 36 Pageviews

Only Yesterday (1991)
Dec 3, 2009, 2 comments
34 29 Pageviews

So there are some very large discrepancies between the statistics gathered. One pattern I think I am detecting is the blocking of Google scripts by people concerned about their privacy. All of this makes me wonder how in the world the advertising rates can be calculated for websites.

Note: Blogger doesn’t list the home page for some reason. Google Analytics does and says it was visited 87 times for third place by its stats. It also has a whopping average time of 5:18 spent on it. Yes, that is five minutes and eighteen seconds. In 2009, the average time spent on a web page was 56 seconds. Something is very screwy with that number, methinks!

Now for some fun if probably inaccurate stats for the past year (12 months) from Google Analytics:

2,304 Visits

1,816 Absolute Unique Visitors

3,927 Pageviews

1.70 Pages/Visit

67.45% Bounce Rate

00:01:05 Avg. Time on Site

77.82% % New Visits

Browsers used to visit:

1. Firefox 1,120 48.61%

2. Chrome 511 22.18%

3. Internet Explorer 389 16.88%

4. Safari 205 8.90%

5. Opera 41 1.78%

6. Android Browser 11 0.48%

7. Mozilla Compatible Agent 11 0.48%

8. Playstation 3 5 0.22%

9. IE with Chrome Frame 3 0.13%

10. Opera Mini 3 0.13%

Firefox is still on top after all these years, but Chrome is gaining. Internet Explorer is fading fast.

Visitors came from 78 countries and territories:

I looked at that and I suspect that is a fair representation of Internet penetration across the globe.

What does it all mean? Well, not a lot but one thing that I have confirmed is that pop culture dominates the Net. Also, most of my hits come from people doing image searches, something I rarely do these days. That intrigues me.

I am pleased to report that the Citizen Kane review is one of the most hit pages on the blog. Battle of Britain is slowly climbing up and thanks to the Philippine aviation buffs at timawa.net Thirteen Days got a lot of attention. Bleach becoming hit so often is quite a surprise, since I would have thought reviews of it are done to death and images from it are abundant on the Net.

The biggest surprise is how popular the Smallville: Absolute Justice review has been. There are a lot more Justice Society of America fans out there than I ever suspected. It is nice to see those 1940’s comic book characters still getting some love seventy years after being created.

Best Laid Plans…

It was while working on The Big Sleep review to be posted later today that I realized what month it is. October is here and I really should be watching some “scary” movies and their kin. For the last few years, I have really fallen out of the holiday spirit regardless of which holiday is around the corner.

So it is time to revive at least a little of the Halloween spirit and that means delving into some classic horror films along with not so classic monster movies. Of course that means delaying the planned movie reviews because I must share my viewing pains and pleasures!

A look at Hammer films 1950’s reinterpretations of the Universal monsters of the 1930’s will have to be part of it. Grown men in rubber monster suits will also be a necessary ingredient for these Halloween treats. So expect chills and thrills, kiddies!

What’s On Tap

Finding myself brain dead, but ambulatory today means a serious post is not likely. Instead I will toss up another Squid Girl episode review to make sure I keep typing words.

I plan to alternate reviews of movies between serious and not so serious films to keep me from being bored with it all. Most come from my personal DVD collection and right now the tentative plan looks something like this: The Big Sleep, TRON, Zulu, Gamerz: Dorkness Rising, and The Maltese Falcon. Two of those will have spinoff soundtrack reviews.

Meanwhile, I am watching HBO’s John Adams miniseries and so far it is excellent. But I am disappointed they had unnecessary nudity in the first episode. This whole “we have to have something R rated because we are a pay cable network” thing is extremely annoying. Doubly so for me, since I was thinking there would be no way they would insert any – about two minutes before they did.

Since I do not bother much with television these days, the only thing out of the new season I am looking forward to is actually streaming on the Net. Squid Girl season 2 has begun in Japan and is being streamed in the USA by Crunchyroll. Since they do not have enough of interest to pay for a membership, I will settle on the one week delay and resume the squidvasion on Monday.

Does This Thing Still Work?

Four score and seven years ago I last posted - or so it feels. Now I had to deal with the fact that Google has made users of Blogger use a Gmail address and that entailed some jumping through hoops to get started again. While little has changed in my personal life since the last post, a few things have changed here and there, such as the ending of the Help Defeat Cancer project at World Community Grid. I felt good about the project and it looks like it achieved what it set out to do, but I also admit a little melancholy crept in when it finished. I'd actually upgraded my dual core PC to 2 GB of RAM just to run it smoothly on both cores. Still, there are other good projects there and I keep crunching.

Meanwhile, the Chicago Cubs are finally above .500 and it only took them until May to do it! Yes, I'm damning them with faint praise and yet I hope to see them do a lot better with the rest of the season. The bright spots have been watching Rich Hill become the pitcher I thought he was going to be and Derek Lee's hitting doubles like a madman. While most people love the home run, I love the double. Why? Simply put, a team that hits a lot of doubles will score more runs than a team of sluggers, as I've noticed that doubles hitters tend to hit for average. Most sluggers are an all or nothing proposition and therefore are less reliable. I was spoiled by watching Bobby Dernier and Ryne Sandberg hit what Harry Carey called "the daily double". Dernier would double, then Sandberg - presto, instant run. Now if rookie Felix Pie could get into that frame of mind, this will be quite a season.

I think I shall end this post on that positive note and continue in another.

A Work in Progress

It looks like this blog will be a work in progress for awhile, as I'm still trying to figure the HTML out in the template. Most likely it is time to find where I put that book on HTML I purchased a couple of years ago. IF the dust bunnies haven't eaten it. I'm fairly sure they ate one of our old encyclopedia volumes from the early 1980's a few years back and aren't to be trusted.

In the beginning...

After threatening to start a blog for years, I now have found myself compelled to just because I wanted to leave a comment on a friend's blog. Odd how such a small requirement leads to further action, I think I hear a butterfly's wings flapping somewhere in the Pacific islands. Eventually, I will get around to properly posting here, but it may be some time as being a political volunteer has mushroomed into far more than I expected this year.

The county fair is nearly here and I have to prepare for it, as nearly everything is falling onto my shoulders. It will be a long week of manning the booth and also assisting my father at his Fairtax booth. Come Wednesday my life as I know it will end (well, at least until the following week) while I hope to stir up some enthusiasm for the election in November.

Alas, I'm running out of time before I must get my Monday workout in on our brand spanking new home gym, a Hoist V2 with the VLP leg press. So far I love the thing and have regained some of my flexibility back after only a week of use. Now to get the strength back!

Note: Written under difficult conditions involving a small white kitten who is having entirely too much fun.