Update





The past couple of months have been a pretty busy period of time for me where I haven't had much time to think about the blog. Over the course of the past few weekends I've been to various different capitals, including those of England, of Scotland, of the former Viking world and of West Yorkshire. I enjoyed a geek-tastic time at Comic Con in my adopted home of Manchester. I ventured to the brilliant Fringe Festival in Edinburgh, taking in the sites and sounds of cutting-edge theatre and the high spirits of revellers and performers. I've been preparing to go on holiday to Iceland in a mere two weeks. I've started to take part in a weekly podcast, Sunday Cinematic Service (check it out on SoundCloud), where me and a couple of chums explore the strange world of religious cinema. I have also begun the preliminary planning on two novels I have in mind, which I am very, very excited about. Plus there's work, life, being healthy (ha) and other stuff. Even my regular Dungeons & Dragons sessions have been on hold until recently!

Time is a funny thing.

This has left relatively little time for making casual trips to the cinema plus the fact August's roster has been fairly uninspiring. I didn't even bother seeing the new Marvel film Ant-Man and the Wasp despite having a clean record of seeing most of them in the cinema. It just looked meh. This is mostly because my "media-time", where I have grabbed some spare moments, has been been filled by enjoying the latest releases in video-games (I've fallen in love with Octopath Traveller and Hollow Knight), catching up on TV shows (we have finished our re-watch of the monumental Deadwood and are getting caught up on Doctor Who in time for the new Jodie Whittaker series and the new season of Orange Is The New Black) and re-discovering my love of reading through authors such as Neil Gaiman, Ursula Le Guin and several others. Plus most of this stuff I can enjoy whilst travelling, which I've done a lot of recently.

This has given me some reflection time on where my blog currently stands. Moreover, I don't really know where to take it. I have been finding writing my regular reviews of the latest cinema releases slightly unsatisfying as of late and I don't know why. I'm motivated to write when I am genuinely enthusiastic about something which I have found increasingly harder to do, which maybe could be down to the fact that most of the films I have seen recently haven't been all that ... spectacular? I don't know, I can't quite put my finger on it. It started to become a little bit of a chore going to the cinema, I guess. I'd want to see films simply so I could write a review about it. I want to keep doing it to a degree because a) it's good for my writing skills and b) it improves my critical functions. However, I think my priorities need to change on how I write these things. Going forward my film reviews will be a little snappier (something I experimented with and enjoyed on the First Reformed review) and I want to start getting into writing longer form pieces on topics that genuinely interest to me. I've recently finished the latesg God of War game and I want to explore how the game reinterprets a slightly troubling series for 2018. In short there will be shorter reviews but more meaty content every month or so. It's been an interesting few years writing reviews and I've continually developed this blog to suit what is going on with me and I feel the time has come to change my approach again if I'm going to keep going with this. It should hopefully work out.

And I will continue the Ghibli Retrospective - I promise...