- DB
Blog | Evolution Never Stops
Once again there are more changes in store for the site that are currently planned to come into effect at the start of July. There are two main changes planned:
There will be a new look for the site that will also finally add a search function that should have been there from the start and will hopefully also improve text readability.
There will be a post every day of the week. A challenge? Yes, but there will be a key difference, as not all of these posts will be reviews and there will be no guarantee of length for these posts, so some days may simply be two to three paragraphs and others might be ten times that length.
There will also be some changes to how review posts work:
Movies
Review length will be determined by how much I genuinely have to say about a film. There are some movies that I have seen and enjoyed, but don’t really have a great deal to say about them and don’t want to drag things out if I can’t justify it.
An example for this would be something like The Disaster Artist. I saw the film and enjoyed it, as it had some great acting from the Franco brothers as the leads, with some truly hilarious moments especially knowing that most of this actually happened.
Outside of that, I’ve never seen the actual film that Tommy Wiseau made – The Room – and so have no analysis or comparison I can provide for the two movies. Do I recommend you see it? Absolutely. Should I waste my time and yours writing a six hundred word post that’s mostly filler when I can give my opinion in less than a third of that? Absolutely not.
Also, I will still try and review new films when I get the chance to see them, but also have a huge backlog of movies that I’m watching/re-watching that will fill the gaps in-between which will be published on Mondays.
Games
Again, review length will depend on how much I have to say about a game, but due to how long some games can be, it might be broken up into instalments to make for both easier playing and reading.
As an example, I do want to play through the Dragon Age games again in the near future, but considering the dozens of hours it takes for each title, the games will be broken up into multiple posts taking on a section at a time otherwise the reviews would never see the light of day!
There’s also the issue of some games that just aren’t my type, and the reluctance to commit to completing a title that I’m not enjoying. Therefore, I’m going to implement a simple rule: every game gets a minimum of two hours.
If, at that point, I don’t want to continue as I’m not enjoying it, then I’ll simply stop. If I do choose to continue, then the game will get another two hours and the process will go on from there until I either finish it, give up, or feel that I can provide an informed opinion if it’s an unending game like one of The Sims or something that is simply a ‘score attack’ game like Audiosurf or Beat Hazard.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m going to rip into games that I stop playing early and complain about them – it might just not be a game type that I enjoy and the post on that game will reflect that. I’d rather be up-front about this and move on to something else rather than pointlessly frustrating myself and criticising a game that I was probably never going to enjoy in the first place.
TV
One last time, the amount I write will depend on how much I feel I have to say about whatever I’ve watched. There may be some shorter reviews like many of the Netflix Originals, where episodes are so serialised that it makes more sense to talk about the show as a whole.
There may also be longer reviews if I have strong feelings about a show and want to either praise or pan it. Hell, there might be just a subplot or particular character who stood out and I centre the review on them – it simply depends on each show.
And similar to games, there’s going to be a limit of watching one season at a time. If I enjoyed the season or at least think the show has the potential to become something I enjoy (like my recent post about The IT Crowd), then I’ll move onto the next season when I get to it.
If I don’t like a season, then that might well be where I stop and the post about that season will explain why. I doubt – and hope – that won’t ever actually happen, but just a warning in advance in case it does.
Blog
There will be more of these posts in the future, although they may be very short if there isn’t much to write about on that particular day. It could be quiet for me and it ends up being a couple of hundred words, or there might be something I want to vent about and I keep going for ten times that length.
There will also be more book reviews at some point as I’ve started reading both It and The Handmaid’s Tale. There’s also some Marvel omnibuses I’m working through, plus I still have The World of Ice & Fire to read, although that might also be broken into chunks like games depending on how it’s structured to read.
There’ll also be more Arsenal stuff, and probably the World Cup too over the summer, even if that bloody tournament means that Ant-Man and the Wasp is delayed until August in the UK! Seriously, that movie is going to make no money at all in the countries with a delayed release as the entire story will be known, with leaked footage and memes galore plastered all over the internet by the time it finally comes out.
I do have long lists of movies, games and TV shows that I want to watch, re-watch or play, so there’s not going to be any real order to these unless it’s something that I get to watch or play straight after release and want to jump the queue.
Plenty of stuff to write about and reducing the pressure on myself about how much I have to write about – good times (I hope).
