The Hobbit, a New Category and Perhaps News Posts?
Before moving on to blog-related matters, I have to say that I did somehow manage to go and see The Hobbit yesterday, making this the second movie I went to see in a theater on my own. It was the same theater as nearly three years ago, when I went to see Avatar, so could still reserve the seat on-line as long as I got there to actually make the purchase at least 30 minutes before the 12:45 start time, which made it far less difficult, but I still managed to make it “interesting” by going the wrong way after exiting the metro station.
The plan was to leave around 10:30, get there by 11:30 and then spend an hour wandering around that complex once I’ll have the ticket in my pocket. However, it was 10:45, if not 10:50, by the time I was walking out the door, so I was already feeling late and skipped something else I wanted to do on the way. Luckily, the trains came quickly enough, so I gained some time there too and was leaving the station at 11:27, quite on schedule despite the initial delay. The problem then was that the instructions I had fixed in my mind were limited to “you’ll be at the corner of a park, so cross the street and keep going”, not taking into account that there’s an intersection there, making for two streets that may be crossed, and of course I picked the wrong one.
Admittedly, I more or less realized what happened after a few minutes, but without a clear confirmation I couldn’t risk going back yet, and by the time I knew exactly where I was and could return it was already 11:44. At that point, I raced back to the station, even actually running at times, cutting the 17 minutes one way to 12 the other. Then, after crossing the street I should have crossed in the first place, I just about sprinted until I saw the dome and confirmed that I was almost there, rushed inside, immediately managed to find where I had to go to actually purchase my reserved ticket and tried not to give myself time to think about it, getting it within seconds, all red-faced and sweaty. Also noticed that the time printed on it was 11:58, so their clock was probably a bit behind and I had even more time left that I thought, because my cell showed past noon already.
About the movie itself… Well, it seemed to me that it didn’t quite know what it wanted to be and where it wanted to go. Also, too much crazy, impossible fighting. Honestly, felt like it made quite a mockery of the whole idea without being a proper parody, so there’s perhaps not much recommending it from that point of view, but what does still make it definitely worth watching for anyone who liked The Lord of the Rings is the amount of care put into certain things, the way it recreates the “feel” of those movies, how every place, every item feels like it belongs there, how every actor playing a part they had played before makes it seem like this was filmed at the same time as the series instead of a decade later. Also, the tune of the dwarves’ song is carried very well through many important scenes.
And now let me get to the changes I decided to make to this blog as of this year, starting with no longer sticking to one of the original three rules, which was to always have a number of posts in the “Society” category that was more than half of those in the “Personal” category, and creating the new “IT & Copyright” category to move the relevant posts from “Society” to it. I did this today, ending up with significantly more posts to move than I thought, but that was also due to the rather broad area covered by this new category, which includes all posts that have to do with computers and the Internet and can’t be filed under “Gaming“, but also all those related to copyright, “piracy” and new business models for the entertainment industry, even when not strictly related to file-sharing.
Admittedly, I’ll have to go through everything more carefully once again, if not twice more, because there are some posts I’m not sure about, so one or two may end up back under “Society” and one or two from there may end up going to the new category after all. I’m definitely still sticking to the idea that each post should be filed under a single category, with “Society” taking all those that deal with topics that are either unrelated or, while related in themselves, make it impossible to file the entire post under any of the other categories, and in some cases deciding where that line is drawn can be quite difficult, especially since I didn’t write those posts with such a category in mind, so I didn’t feel a need to be strict about the issues brought up in them. Still, as far as the numbers go, this should be more or less how it’ll end up either way.
Otherwise, though this is the first time I’m posting this, I’ve been thinking about writing news posts for the past few weeks. After all, I do keep posting links to news articles on my Facebook page, so it shouldn’t be that much of a problem to take those I have a little more to say about, perhaps even including some that catch my eye but, for one reason or another, I decide against sharing there, and post them here, with a paragraph as comment instead of just a few words, if even those.
Granted that the articles I share there come most often from the BBC site, because that’s where I usually look first when I just want to see the day’s major international stories, and that may need to change to some extent if I’m to do this, but I think it should work well enough. There have been many times when I just wanted to post something but only had a brief comment to make about it, which I felt was completely unsuitable for a non-personal blog post, but this way I could simply create a “News” category, gather several such articles that I found over no more than a few days and post them, with a brief comment about each. It’d allow me to even drop to a single “proper” post per week, which is something I’ve been fighting a losing battle against for years, while actually increasing the total frequency of posts.
