Welcome.
Welcome to the future.
Welcome to the future of Internet.*
*Before reading any further, please turn on the nearest strobe light, or have a family member/roommate start rapidly flicking the light switch in your room on and off. If you are reading in a public location or café, locate the nearest available steaming machine and fill the room with billiard lounge-levels of thick fog.
With the launch of WoolfWideWeb, we have entered a shining new epoch of our shared cultural heritage. Not just as readers, or writers, but as human beings. The release of WoolfBlog Software 2.0 marks the turning point for digital platform-based cultural analytics, a singularity of seamless integration between consumption and creation.
That’s how the number crunchers back at the lab would describe what it is we’re doing here today. But between you and me? I see this as the beginning of a revolution: a revolution of one, and many. Together, we will actualize what mankind has striven towards since the dawn of creation, an old dream that has finally become a new reality: the creation of a website entirely devoted to self-promotion.
Truly, we are swimming in uncharted waters here.
Don’t be afraid. Innovation demands visionaries, pioneers willing to strike out into the unknown.
I’m inviting you to become one of those pioneers.
So take my hand, and together, let’s discover how WoolfWideWeb is going to make the world a better place.
Thank you.*
*Now please listen to the chorus of this Imagine Dragons song for a good two hours while you futilely try to reassemble the pieces of your irreparably shattered world.
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So, hey! New website! And an actual blog post update! How’da thunk. I’ve been meaning to shake up the old blog for a good long while now, mostly for the following two reasons:
1) Woolfonfilm as a title didn’t make sense once I stopped writing about film exclusively, which was like two years ago.
2) Wordpress is the fucking worst.
Caveat to that latter point: at least they were nice enough to install software that made moving most of my content from the old site to this brand-spanking new one as painless as possible. But the real reason behind the redesign was to clear up the biggest thing on my “To-Do/Bad Excuse” list that was getting in the way of me actually doing more writing.
A lot has changed for me over the last few months, including a change of vocation (as in: from having one to not), and a potential move cross-country is potentially in the cards over the next few months. During this time, I’ve looked at my output of writing over the last year and decided it’s in desperate need of improvement, so to help facilitate that, a fresh start on a new site has been priority #1.
After several dozen hours of transferring and configuring I’m happy to announce that WoolfWideWeb is go! Isn’t it pretty? What with the minimalist design, and giant, Netflix-y article portraits!?! I don’t make for much of a webcoder, and seeing as every podcast I listen to is sponsored by it, I went with Squarespace to build out this new site, and it’s been a fairly smooth experience so far. That being said, the site is still something of a giant mess. You’ll find plenty of features yet to be installed some of the URLs make no sense, a lot of the deep cut movie reviews are completely out of chronological order, and the mobile version of the site is pretty well borked right now.
But it’s less of a cluttered mess than the last site, and that alone has me excited to start contributing to it more. I’ll still be posting most of my work to WeGotThisCovered (hence why most of the actual content here is just portrait-based links to that site), but I want to start using this site for its original intent: a combination of portfolio and confessional, where I can just spit pop culture game on whatever’s on my mind, regardless of the size of outlet with which I have to share it.
To that end, I’ve got a new feature I’ll be doing called TIT for TAT, AKA Thoughts in Ten for This and That. It’s about as elegant a title as I could come up with for a rather specific idea: spending exactly 10 minutes writing about the stuff I consume, no more, no less. Over the last few years of doing this, I’ve learned one of my weaknesses as a writer is focusing too much on crafting the ideal sentence the first time, instead of finding it later during editing. Increasing my output is going to be as much about sitting down and producing something as it will be increasing the speed with which I can put digital ink to cyber paper, and I think trying out a “sprint” style of writing should help with that.
Two really great pieces of advice spurred the development of this new feature. The first, from Roger Ebert heir-apparent Matt Zoller Seitz: “Just puke on the page, knowing that you can clean it up, and make it structurally sound later.” Second, from my younger brother: “no one will read anything you write nearly half as attentively as you will.” Both tips speak to a skill I basically ground out of myself working through university: writing off the dome, shooting from the hip, or just saying the first damn thing that comes to my head, because that’s what I’m actually thinking. TIT for TAT will provide an outlet for this kind of rapid-fire thinking, and I could use it. After all, the only thing more important than writing well, is just writing, period.
As such, these blog posts will hopefully become less backed up with content, and more just a hub for links to what’s been going on, or whatever else I feel the need to talk about. Seeing as this is the first update in 3 months, there’s plenty I could go into extended discussion about right now: movie reviews for VOD imports, and new indies; TV reviews for episodes of a new show I watched over multiple weeks, and an overall review for the entire season of a show I watched in a single day; an interview with the biggest star at last week’s box office; more than a dozen regurgitated news post from E3, because I thought doing a little games journalism would make for a fun change of pace.
All of that will still be available on this new site, just more intuitively categorized into separate pages. And it’ll be even more intuitively categorized once I figure out how to work the damn tags and search engine on this thing. But for now, thanks for clicking, reading, commenting, tweeting, or whatever it is you’re doing, and take care.
Play me out, catchy Korean acoustic guitar jam!