Today I published my 500th review since starting a little thing at nowverybad.blogspot.com in 2012. (The review was The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension…)
There weren’t many reviews at that point, as I was just starting to experiment with blogging, including random thoughts and opinions.
Started off doing book reviews mostly. The first review was for my friend Steve Himmer’s debut novel, The Bee-Loud Glade.
It wasn’t until September 5, 2012 that I started doing the 140 character reviews. The first film review was, of course, Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope – my all-time favorite movie. (I actually still haven’t revisited that review to update it.)
Only about 25 film reviews on the blog that fall, although I was already trying to tie into anniversaries and such. Let it drop for a while, then on June 3, 2013 I found out that it was the 30th anniversary of one of my favorite films of all time, WarGames. I quickly put out a new #140RVW on the blogspot site and simultaneously resolved to create a new site, nowverybad.com.
On June 21, 2013, after back-filling the site with some of the reviews I ported over, I published reviews for a few of the Superman films. From that point until summer 2014 I published at least one review every day. To be honest, in 2013 that wasn’t all that impressive, as I was still only writing 140 character reviews. It still took a fair amount of dedication, though, since the business of gathering trailers, posters, stills, quotes, formatting and preparing for social sharing was pretty time consuming, despite the brevity of the reviews themselves. Not to mention the fact that I actually had to watch a two-hour movie in order to have anything to write about.
For that reason (in addition to an increasing dissatisfaction with being limited to a couple sentences) I started writing longer reviews as 2013 wound down, beginning writing full reviews exclusively at New Year’s. The challenge of continuing to put out something every day now that I was writing much longer pieces was still exciting.
Unfortunately I had simultaneously fallen into a habit of trying to match the reviews to major anniversaries. This soon became unwieldy, and eventually sort of sank the daily project. Too much coordination. So after a stumble last fall/winter, the reviews are once again flowing and I’m enjoying them again. I hope you are too…
Some numbers:
- Reviews: 500
- Number of reviews that are only 140 characters: 231 (46%)
- Types of Reviews:
- Books: 31 (6.20%)
- TV: 26 (5.20%)
- Games: 1 (0.20%)
- Movies: 442 (88.40%)
Now that I’ve hit the milestone I was aiming for, I feel I can change things up a bit and not feel so locked into any one pattern. You’ll start to see more long-form articles in addition to the reviews.
I’ll try to get back on track with book reviews (there’s a pile of finished books queuing) and maybe some more music posts. I’d still like to get into some interviews and I still need to figure out how to work some Tumblr-style micro-blogging into the architecture of the site so I can post more frequently without the back-end stuff involved in posting a full piece.
Also, I’m taking this opportunity to announce a new group I’ve been planning for some time:
Ford Feeney and the New Hong Kong Cavaliers
With the help of my band of hard-rocking scientists, I plan on breaking through the next dimension, adding video reviews and commentaries. And yes, I have a few openings…can you sing?
Thanks for reading. I hope these posts are interesting and fun for you…
And remember, NMWYGTYA…
MTFBWYA,
Michael Ford Feeney
March 31, 2014
