Introducing LITKOG

It’s been a while.  Years, in fact.  While having a second child has a way of shifting your priorities and demanding even more of your time, I never lost my love of watching movies.

So here we are.  I’m a little bit older and (hopefully) a little bit wiser.  But I also have a decade’s worth of movie reviews to write.  This might take a while.

After the movie review juices dried up, I sporadically tried to revive my blogging with book reviews.  My love of reading is still very real, but my desire to read through the early post-Covid era lagged.  Sometimes that happens.  Life throws you a curveball, you find yourself in a funk, and the recreational activities that you’ve enjoyed your whole life don’t serve as that catalyst for sharing your passions quite like they used to.

And now?  A new leaf, a new page, a new era.  A season of change that technically marks the end of my old blogs, but not one that sees me hanging up the indulgence for good.  This is, rather, a reset, an evolution, a rebirth.

So what does this all mean?  Change.  Lots of change, but also some familiar sights.  Here’s a breakdown of what you may find here:

-Movie Reviews: I started using a rating scale for movies during my freshman year of college thanks to an amazing comp and speech class where we watched movies and wrote papers about them.  This will return as it once was.  Mostly.  I may write individual reviews or combine a few into essay-like posts.  I’m not going to restrict myself to a specific template or format anymore, but I will continue to prioritize brevity and conciseness.

-Book Reviews: Reading every book in my house is still very much a crazy goal that I am chasing down.  Gone is the rating criteria I started out with.  More on that in a bit.

-Induct This: A long-gestating idea of mine to listen to and rate all of the albums by musicians and bands inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, in chronological order no less.

-Revised and Simplified Rating Scales: I tried to get too cute with my book ratings, and my early music rating schemes were all over the place.  It’s time to apply the same methodology and rating structure to everything.  Click the link near the top of the page for 'My Universal Rating Scale.'

-Lists: I’ll now track everything I rate in public Google docs to make it easier for you to peruse.  I will soon add a link at the top of the page layout that will take you to a page where you will be able to access links for full lists of all the movies, albums, and books that I have rated.

-Sports Statistics: I’ve got dormant spreadsheets filled with data about the four major North American sports leagues.  Let’s wake them up and see what fun we can have with them!

All this, occasional reflections on life, and maybe more.  We’ll see where this new era leads me.  But these identified categories are the main cultural, intellectual, and entertainment pursuits that result in LITKOG: Life in the Key of G.