Understanding my numbers

Europe sure seems to like The Audient.

What other way to explain the huge spike in my readership while I was on my trip?

Of course, there are likely other ways to explain it. But you should know that I am not a blogger who uses any sort of the analytical tools made available to bloggers, tries to increase readership. I don't ever talk about my posts on social media, with two lone exceptions per year, which are my year-end rankings and my annual portmanteaus posts. I kind of hope that anyone who checks in on those might stay for the other content, but I don't do anything the other 363 days to build that or promote the blog in any way. 

But I do like looking at the number of page hits I've gotten on my posts, just as a casual thing. 

My readership has been down since I got back. Way down. My first post after returning, written on October 4th, has 34 views. (As a side note, I'm not sure exactly what registers a view. Do they have to click directly on a link? I would think so, but what about those who come to the top of the page and then scroll down?) My next post has 48, which is my high since returning, and all the subsequent posts have 31 or fewer. Yesterday's has only ten so far. 

This wouldn't alarm me in normal times, and is keeping with a general pattern. I have some loyal readers who check in on me no matter what, and who I suspect get notified when I have a new post up. Thank you. I appreciate you, big time.

Over time, the numbers on each post tend to go up so they come in at somewhere under 100. Consider the posts in the first half of August before I left, which all have between 65 and 106 views. I'm very happy with that, it's more than enough people looking at my words to keep doing it. (In fact, much as I love you, I don't really write this for you anyway. I'd probably write it even if no one was reading it.)

When I say my readership since returning is "way down," I mean only compared to the phenomenon I'm about to describe to you. 

After my post of August 17th, we start to see an interesting pattern. The numbers go up significantly for the final two posts I wrote before I left.

The first is "Paying $20 for multiple Eddington gains," which has 142 page views. I can reason out that one. Eddington was a film that a lot of people talked about at the time it came out. Maybe people who still had a little room in their stomach for more discussion gravitated toward it when they saw I had written about it. (Though they may have been disappointed, as the post was mostly about why I was willing to shell out the premium rental price: so I could review it the first week of my trip as well as catch up on podcasts where it was being discussed.)

The really notable spike, though, came in the post I wrote on the day I departed, announcing the trip. That was "Holiday ro-OOOO-oooo-ooo ... um, uh, OOOO ... ooooooo ... oooooad." and it has a staggering 316 views. (Staggering by my standards, of course, not objectively staggering.) 

This one I can't reason out. The poster was for National Lampoon's European Vacation, not a movie anyone should have any reason to be talking about or even thinking about in 2025. The title was an SEO unfriendly gobbledegook meant to approximate Kenny Loggins singing. And the content was just an announcement about a six-week trip to Europe. 

316 views?

The boost continued in Europe. I won't continue to link the posts, but I'll list the dates, post titles and page views:

8/30 - 8,000 channels and nuthin' on - 135 views
8/31 - Why do movie characters where college shirts to bed? - 124 views
9/3 - A vacation movie intersecting with my personal film/music history - 115 views
9/4 - Something Bri-ish to watch in London - 110 views
9/5 - Feast or famine in holiday review posting - 168 views
9/6 - A quick survey of French movie posters - 467 views (!!!)
9/14 - Squeezing in a Barcelona movie - 228 views
9/16 - A quarter baked - 145 views
9/17 - R.I.P. Robert Redford - 121 views
9/18 - Flirtations with Italian cinema history - 114 views
9/19 - Late deliveries to Italy - 209 views
9/22 - I finally saw: She's All That (sort of) - 40 views
9/24 - From Paris (Texas) to Cairo (Illinois) to Athens (Georgia) - 111 views
9/25 - Non-documentary colons - 190 views
9/28 - Understanding Editing: The Right Stuff - 92 views
9/30 - Slim pickings for Greek cinema - 144 views

Sixteen posts in about 42 days away, not too shabby, especially when it took me a while to figure out how to properly download photos on my tablet. 

I considered the idea that having a city or country name in the title of the post increased its prominence within search engines, but that doesn't explain all of what we're seeing. Several of the posts with geography in their titles are only slightly higher than the high end of where the rest of my posts eventually end up. 

The one with nearly 500 views, about the French movie posters, must have attracted readers who are into movie posters, particularly French ones. This may have also disappointed them a little bit, since I wasn't talking about the posters for Jules and Jim or Breathless. I was talking about French language versions of posters for current Hollywood releases.

And then the fourth most views in this period is for a post about the colon in the title of Please Don't Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain? Nothing to do with any country. 

Also it's not just that my readership was generally elevated while I was gone. The post about She's All That still has, rightly, only 40 views. But the posts around it are all higher than my average. The poor performance of that post rules out notions like I was publishing posts at more optimal times on this trip, times that lined up more with the times my actual or potential readers want to read my posts. That theory especially doesn't hold water because my posting was not consistent in terms of times of day or days of the week. Some of these undoubtedly aligned with times people were ready to read The Audient, some of them clearly didn't. Just like when I'm posting from Australia.

So ... I don't know. 

If any of you have an explanation, I'd love to hear it. But as of now, I don't think there's anything actionable from this data. 

I could test it by intentionally including a country name in the title of a post, but that's not really what I'm about. Baiting and switching people is certainly not a good way to build readership. I do that often enough, unintentionally, without going out of my way to do it. 

As with many things in this world, I think the answer is "Shrug?" 

A personal blogging streak that will probably never be broken

You may recall -- though it's far more likely that you don't -- that at the start of 2020, I was having such a prolific period on The Audient that I posted on 41 consecutive days, accounting for the last 27 days of January and the first 14 of February. I wrote about the end of that streak here. 

In retrospect, it's funny that this was just before our world turned upside down with COVID. Since one ended before the other was really beginning, they are totally separated in my mind, and it took looking it up just now to remember that both things happened at the start of 2020.

Forty-one consecutive days seemed like an impressive thing at the time, especially after some really lean periods in the year immediately leading up to it.

Nonsense.

At the start of 2025, I've felt a similar sense of having a lot to say, and not always the space I need to say it, considering that I have a rule of never posting more than once in the same day. As it did in 2020, this led to certain periods when I had four, five completed posts backed up and waiting for their turn, which I would often need to juggle just so, to allow the time-sensitive ones to go live ahead of the evergreen ones that might have been written earlier.

Only this time it didn't go for 41 straight days. It went for 65. 

That being the last 29 days of January, all 28 days of February (the first complete month in the history of this blog), and the first eight days of March.

Sometimes when you break a record, you blow past it. Earlier this week, after a fish and chips dinner on the beach, my younger son and I threw around a frisbee, seeing how many catches in a row we could get. We worked our way up through various low records, like 7, then 9, then 11, then 17. But we were stuck on 17 for a really long time, and we were not even getting close to beating it. Then when we started getting tired and ready to wind down for the night, we said we'd make one more attempt, which would qualify as our last attempt if we completed at least five passes in a row. That time, we got 43 consecutive catches before we dropped it again. 

This is a bit like that. 

Of course, it could have gone a lot longer, if I'd forced it. But the thing I thought was impressive about this streak in 2020, and again in 2025, is that I did not need to. I never wrote some stupid observation just because I wanted to get something up on one particular day. Oh, I wrote stupid observations, don't get me wrong -- they were just organic in nature, not forced. In other words, I never wrote a post for any other reason than that it tickled that same place in me that tickles Jerry Seinfeld every time he writes a "Did you ever notice ..." joke.

The streak ended on a weekend out of town to go a water park with my kids. We alternate between the two big ones in Victoria, and we missed last year entirely, so it had been three years since we'd been to Adventure Park in Geelong. That itself wasn't the reason the streak ended, because I had plenty of time to do computer things in the hotel room. But maybe not watching a movie on either Friday or Saturday night -- it's hard to watch a movie when you're sharing a room with two kids who are going to bed by 10:30 -- meant that I didn't have any new material occurring to me organically.

Actually, I am writing this post on the 66th day -- though of course it doesn't count as the 66th straight post, because I can only post a post like this after the 66th day passes. I did wait for long enough to ensure I didn't have something else to write about. Nope, this is it.

Because I think it will really feel stupid to write yet another post on this blog to mark the end of a consecutive day streak of blogging, I'm really hoping this 65-day streak holds. However, what evidence do I really have that it won't happen again? The end of one year, start of the next is always a fruitful time for me. I know I'm going to get excited and write a lot of things about movies, whether you want to read them or not. Who's to say I won't start another one at the end of this year and it will run, I don't know, 79 days?

I suppose if that does happen, I will have to write about it again -- and think of yet a third variation on this subject, because another rule I have is never to repeat a subject.

It's a bit of a relief now that it's over. But the fruitfulness will likely continue. In fact, as I am now finishing this post on the actual day I'm posting it, I thought of two more things to write about while watching Scott Cooper's Antlers last night. I'm not sure if either of them really rises to the level of post-worthy, though -- even with the minimal standards I apply to that. 

Tune in tomorrow, I guess, to see what I decided. After all, I still have the record number of posts written in a calendar year -- 264 in 2010 -- to shoot for. 

Residual enthusiasm and productivity

Note: I wrote this post more than five weeks ago, expecting it would post within a week. The reason it didn't is more proof of what I'm writing about. So I will leave the original text intact and add parenthetical responses written today, March 10th, in bold.

It's funny how cyclical blog writing can be.

A little over a year ago (more than 14 months ago now) I wrote a post in which I marvelled about the productive year 2020 just completed, in which I wrote more posts than all but one other year in the history of this blog. Then later in 2021, my updates got so infrequent that I wondered why I was even still doing this -- resulting in fewer posts than all other years but one since 2013, and third lowest overall. 

Well, as the cycle I alluded to in the opening sentence of this post would indicate, I'm back again. (Boy am I ever.)

There have only been 69 days so far in 2022, and I've posted on 65 of them. 

Posts are always in heavy supply at the start of the year, since that's when movies are most front-and-center in my life -- even more than usual -- as I look back on the year just completed. That's no guarantee, though, that I'll keep writing at such a furious pace after I officially move on to the new year. (Such a furious pace.)

But this year there has been residual enthusiasm and productivity -- even if those posts are just a case of writing about that very enthusiasm and productivity, like this one.

As I write this, it can go up no sooner than two days from now, as I already have a post in the can for tomorrow. (Remember, I never post more than once per day.) (Which is why I kept saving this one until I didn't have something else written that I needed to post first.) It might be longer, though (more than a month longer), as who knows what tonight's viewing might inspire me to post -- not tomorrow, but the day after that. I've also got another post in the can that just needs to go up sometime in February. (Note: This parenthetical comment is being added about a week later, when I have six -- yes, six -- posts currently in the can.) (I was already adding parenthetical future comments back then.) 

I assume I will be posting the post I'm currently writing in February, but at this point, who knows. (Nope. March 10th.)

And to give you an indication of that uncertainty, I've written the earlier sentence in this post as "There have only been xx days so far in 2022, and I've posted on xx of them." I hope I remember to update that before I post this. (Yup. Remembered.)

I suppose calling it residual enthusiasm from the end of the year would be correct on some level, but 2022 has excited me in a whole bunch of new ways. Not only do I have my recurring series, Audient Bollywood and Settling the Scorsese, but I've also determined to post all my previous film rankings from before I started this blog, as a way of backing them up permanently, so a hard drive crash (and a failure of my primary backup) don't leave them lost out there in the ether.

Those posts require some additional analysis and computing of numbers, so they give me something to work on even when I'm not aiming to post them the next day. Then there's also the accompanying project, which is rewatching all my previous #1s in 2022 in order to rank them at the end of the year.

So never fear, Audient readers. I'm not closing up shop anytime soon.

And I need to remember this post the next time I have one of my inevitable droughts. Because movies always come back around again, don't they?

Lifelong passions are not easy to squelch, and a writer writes -- in my case more than most. (Understatement of the year.) I'm at the point now where I feel like if I don't write at least a thousand words a day, I'm not fully satisfying the deep urge to write that most writers feel. They feel it even if they are not always in a position to write, or even if they sort of hate writing on some level. (Hating writing obviously doesn't apply to me.) Writing is a complicated passion. 

Film is a more uncomplicated passion, and it is a resource that gives forever. There's no getting to the end of watching movies. 

So until blogs are just such a ridiculously archaic form that only the most self-absorbed TV characters still pursue, and that's the TV writers' idea of a joke, there will still be posts on The Audient. (Though possibly not tomorrow, as the well has run dry at the moment. And though I'm never more than an idea away from my next post, I'm going to Sydney this weekend, so it could be a few days off you get from The Audient -- finally.)

Health check: Lookin' good

The decline in everything related to movies, which has been prominently discussed in 2020, has already been underway for a number of years on movie blogs.

That might be in part just the blog format itself, but I feel like movie blogs in particular have taken a hit, what with there being all sorts of entertaining YouTubers who discuss and review movies. I know many of the blogs I read when I first start blogging have ceased to exist, while others continue to plug away in the same sort of semi-anonymity that my blog has. 

Two years ago at this time, I myself wrote this post, commiserating the slow and steady demise of the movie blogger. It was after a particularly anemic 2018 on The Audient, in which I wrote a mere 171 posts. That's less than one every other day, and it was the only time I'd written fewer than 200 posts other than 2013, the year I moved to Australia and my computer situation was in chaos for a large part of the second half of the year. That year I managed only 151. It was the only time under 200, that is, until the very next year, when I wrote a mere 190 posts in 2019.

Twenty twenty has been a different story. If I wrote my second fewest posts all time in 2018, I wrote my second most in the year just completed.

That's 234 total posts, fewer only than the 264 I wrote in 2010 -- which was only the second year of my blog, when the ideas still felt limitless. Somehow, the ideas where limitless as well this past year, as I slid just head of the 231 posts I wrote in 2016.

It started with my record consecutive days streak of posting on The Audient, commemorated here. And since I never do more than one post per day, that meant that I wrote 40 consecutive posts from January 6th to February 14th. Once those were already in the bank, I probably only needed to have a relatively average output for the rest of the year to reach these heights.

Certainly my prolific production had to do with the pandemic. For sure, being at home from March 24th onward made it easier to squeeze in a cheeky blog post during working hours, when no one was looking over my shoulder and shaking their head at my failure to be dedicated to work. 

But you still need something to write about, and for this entire year, I had that something. I don't remember forcing any posts; if you force yourself, you can write something every day. But I've generally only written blog posts when I've had something to say, throughout the history of this blog, excepting only a time here or there where I'd gone a whole week without writing, and felt like I just needed to post something to reassure you I was still alive.

Will this carry on into 2021? Your guess is as good as mine. But I see no reason why it shouldn't. I'm feeling limber, and except for a callous and some resulting numbness on two fingers due to an ill-advised, high-impact Christmas project, my typing fingers are ready to go.

Stay tuned, and see how I go. 

I suppose this post wouldn't be complete without the requisite wishing of Happy New Year! to you. We did that about eight hours ago in Australia. And even if I wrote a lot in 2020, it's a year I am eager to put behind us. Looking forward to you doing the same in a few hours. 

Divided attentions

I’ve taken on a new initiative and I thought it was time to tell you about it.

The reason it’s been six days since I’ve written a post doesn’t really have anything to do with what I’m about to tell you. It doesn’t have to do with coronavirus, either, you’ll be glad to know. (Though I can see why your mind might have gone there, considering that my last post was about the virus.) Actually, it has mostly do with being out of town for 48 hours over the long Labour Day weekend here in Australia, and then feeling a bit like I’ve been playing catch-up since then.

However, I do suspect that what I’m about to tell you could lead to a reduction in my posting to The Audient. I’ll just have to see how it goes.

So that thing is: My blogging/film posting attentions are now divided between two film websites.

No, I haven’t started a new website. I’ve taken over one that might have died without me.

ReelGood (reelgood.com.au) is where I have been writing reviews for the past five-plus years, starting with my review of Birdman in late 2014. It’s also where I’ve been podcasting for nearly that amount of time, though quite intermittently and sometimes with breaks of as long as six months between episodes.

The thing is, the guy who has been running that site does not have the time to do it anymore. He’s in grad school to become a professor and I can certainly understand why that limits his bandwidth.

Without him putting up posts, the content there would quickly go stagnant. And more importantly, without him paying the (minimal) monthly cost to keep the lights on, they would go dark.

That’s where I come in.

I’m taking the reins from him on running the site. That means not only posting my own reviews, but posting his (I hope), as well as finding new writers and ways to grow the site.

In any case, I expect it to take a lot of time, if I want to do it decently.

Let the site die? No way. This is the site that is currently legitimizing me as a film critic, not to mention allowing me to continue getting my annual critics card that allows me to see movies for free. No way I am consigning it to the dust bin of history. 

Now, most of what I write on The Audient is not appropriate for that site anyway. No one coming to a proper website that isn’t focused around my personality wants to read my arcane lists and rambling posts about viewing coincidences. No one wants to hear funny movie opinions held by my kids or why Tangled is the best movie of the 2010s.

That’s good news. It means there will always be a place in my blogging brain for Audient-specific content, and I have no immediate or long-term plans to stop running this site or merge it with ReelGood.

It does mean, however, that it’s perhaps inevitable that I’ll need to devote some of the energy I devote to The Audient to ReelGood instead. It likely means longer breaks between posts and certainly no streaks of productivity like earlier this year, when I posted for a very biblical 40 straight days.

That said, the quantity of my writing on The Audient has always been a function of what I’m inspired to write based on what happens to me in the course of my day-to-day interactions with film. So working for another site does not rule out a 40-day writing binge either.

Anyway, it’s too early to say how much one site will cannibalize the other. I certainly won’t cross-pollinate, as it’s (at least informally) against internet rules to post the same content on two different websites. But there may be posts I would have previously written for The Audient – say, that most recent post about James Bond getting coronavirus – that I will now feel it better serves me to post there, rather than here.

So stand by … we’ll see how it all goes.

The film blogger as Wingless Thrush

Warning: The following contains spoilers for The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.

We film bloggers don’t get a lot of comments these days. Some, but not a lot.

So it’s especially great when not only do you get a comment, but the comment actually gives you a new perspective on the thing you wrote about.

A week ago I published my ten-year anniversary post for this blog, and I actually got two comments, bless my readers’ hearts. (And I feel bad that it took me five days to carve out the time to reply, though I did take care of that just a few minutes ago.)

In that post, called “Stumbling to ten years,” I talked about how the anniversary arrives with me running out of steam in a major way. As an aside that ended up running longer than I thought it would, I mentioned the frustration of no longer getting many comments. I actually don’t think it would matter all that much to me whether I got comments or not if I were happy with what I was writing, but since I’m not, it caused me to play the “lack of comments” card.

As a response to this, my commenters opened my eyes to a big change in the blogging landscape dating back to about five years ago. That probably is around the time I experienced a dropoff in the comments I once got, and they pointed out that this corresponded directly with the time that YouTube channels really took off as the way people expressed their thoughts/opinions on the internet. Writing of any length became too much or too lengthy for readers to consume. Around that time, even the blog – once considered a form of “new media” – went the way of its forebears, like the handwritten letter, the newspaper, even email in some respects. Many active and dedicated film bloggers subsequently closed up shop.

This was really useful insight for me. It wasn’t just me losing steam. It was the entire blogosphere.

As often happens, a film corollary came up only a few nights later when I rewatched the Coens’ The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. I’d had a strong response to the film the first time, but it wasn’t currently holding a spot in my top ten for the year. I suspected it might move up on a second viewing, and whether it did or not … well, it’s only 12 days until I release my rankings in total, so I’ll make you wait until then for the answer.

However, I did realize that that poor armless, legless man in the third short, Meal Ticket, is me.

He’s called the Wingless Thrush on the posters we see Liam Neeson hanging around various municipalities and other isolated outposts they visit through the cold and wintry west. He’s played by Harry Melling, the actor people never tire of telling you once played Dudley Dursley in the Harry Potter movies. And yes, he has no arms or legs. (The character; Melling is fully limbed.)

The Wingless Thrush is propped on a chair on this small stage, lit by foot candles (though scarcely protected from the elements). His act consists of oration of great passages from Shakespeare, Shelley, the Bible and Abraham Lincoln, in a show that seems like it must run for about 15 minutes. The sheer fire and commitment of his performance is enough to keep audiences rapt, at least initially, though most of them appear to be frontier types incapable of grasping the finer details of the literature spewing toward them. At first, the performance is enough, and the hat passed around by Neeson at the end comes back clinking with coins.

As time goes on, though, audiences dwindle. The Wingless Thrush is still committed to his work, for the most part, though the sheer repetition of his routine can’t help but crush his spirit, particularly when he is physically unable to engage in other activities of his choosing. But audiences of a couple dozen drop to a single dozen, then just two or three. And tose two or three either don’t have any coins, or they haven’t been sufficiently inspired by the show to part with them.

Neeson sticks with his meal ticket as long as he feels like he can. But certain financial realities start to rear their heads. It’s at this point that he notices crowds of people hooting and hollering around a show whose star he can’t quite make out. As he moves in, he sees it’s a chicken that appears to be skilled at mathematics.

Before long, Neeson has bought that chicken and dumped the Wingless Thrush over the side of a bridge to drown in the icy waters.

I’ve heard speculation that this piece is the Coens poking fun at themselves for selling out to Netflix, and that may be true. However, it has clear resonance for anyone who feels like they’ve become obsolete, replaced by something shinier but of clearly lesser value.

A grumpy author who thinks movies and TV ruined the book industry might be the most obvious comparison, given that it’s the literature the Thrush shares that’s become devalued. But it works really well for the decline of the film blogosphere as well. There are still a number of us Thrushes out here, shouting away day by day. But increasingly we are shouting into the void.

Meanwhile, shiny objects that compress and devalue our primary output, the written word, are the counting chicken. That’s YouTube, but it’s also Twitter. It’s any place where someone can present a thought or an opinion with the kind of extreme economy of words that’s anathema to blogging. Or where the content can come at you passively, without you having to do the work (like watching a chicken do math). Much easier than having to listen carefully and at all moments, to make sure you haven’t lost any of the meaning (as with the Thrush’s ornate literary passages).

And in making what is a useful comparison, I think, I’ve also outlined the very problem we film bloggers have. I’ve written a thousand words on this when 500 surely would have sufficed. In fact, perhaps even the headline would have sufficed. Yet I had to include a lengthy preamble, as well as a plot synopsis of Meal Ticket, to get to my point. Which I have now likely belabored.

Once a Wingless Thrush, always a Wingless Thrush.

Forever Frankenweenie

I've seen a new movie since Frankenweenie.

It was Neil Marshall's The Descent, which I started watching on Wednesday morning when I inexplicably awoke an hour earlier than I needed to. Since movie-watching time is rare and precious, I put that extra hour to good use, and finished watching on my lunch break.

I've also revisited a movie since This Is Spinal Tap. It was Quentin Dupieux's Rubber, which my wife and I liked so much when we first saw it, I decided to buy her the BluRay for her birthday in February. We watched it again on Friday night.

Neither of these viewings is reflected in my Most Recently Seen For the First Time or Most Recently Revisited sections on the right of my blog, however, because Blogger is broken.

I don't usually have to write too much -- or anything, really -- about the functioning of this free service that Blogger provides me, because usually that functioning is top notch. But since Wednesday, when I tried to update you on the fact that I saw The Descent, the gadget that stores that list has been busted.

See, everything that appears in the right column on the blog is called a gadget. A gadget is basically a blog part that has a certain function. You can have as many or as few as you want, but many of them are pretty core parts of the functionality of the blog, such as the display of my followers, the listing of recent posts, the quick bio of me and my extensive list of labels.

The Recently Seen lists (which were accompanied by a Recently Reviewed list when I was still regularly writing reviews) are just a gadget called a list, which can be anything you want it to be. I decided that these lists would be a good way to keep you up to date on the most basic level with my viewing habits, since I certainly don't discuss every movie I see in the form of a blog post.

I've been unable to since Wednesday, however, because when I try to delete Butter as the third most recent movie I've seen, move the others down to slots 2 and 3, and add The Descent at the top, I get the following error upon saving: "Please correct errors on form." In fact, I get this error if I try to do any one of those things, so it's nothing about the "complexity" of my transaction that's causing the error. In fact, even if you just open the gadget, do nothing, and then hit save, it still gives the error. Your only choice that does not produce an error is just hitting cancel and closing the gadget that way.

I didn't even notice the form had given me an error on that first day. In fact, I was at work, and I just hit save and shifted my attention to another open window on my computer. It was only the next day, looking at my blog, that I noticed Frankenweenie was still the most recent movie I'd seen. Surprised at the oversight, I then noticed the gadget window still open, hidden behind my other open documents, with the error. I repeated the action and got the error again.

A couple hours later, after another failed attempt, I finally googled it, and discovered that dozens of other people reported the same issue -- with no response from anyone at Google (which owns Blogger) about what was happening and when it would be fixed. Not to mention plenty of bloggers frustrated with Google's inactivity.

Since then I have tried it again about once a day with the same result.

I don't care all that much, really. Although it's a bit annoying, I don't sit here and say I have some right to a string of perfect, unbroken functionality on a service I don't even pay to use. Of course, Google gets its money from me in other ways, charting my activities and selling it to advertisers. Still, I think I've gotten a plenty good deal by writing this blog for over four years and never paying anyone a single dime.

I did want to let you know that no, I did not go blind, or no, my DVD player and internet are not broken, or no, I'm not suddenly too broke to go to the theater.

I did want to give you some sort of explanation about why Frankenweenie will forever more be my most recently seen movie ... either forever more, or until sometime this Tuesday, when someone at Google finally finds the small piece of screwed up code and fixes it.