It's my anniversary again

It's hard to believe, but I've been blogging now for five years. A few days ago, somebody rather rudely commented to one of my posts about how I get very few comments, so why blog? Well, why not blog? Blogging is more meaningful than something like Twitter, in that you're not constrained to 140 characters in which to make your statement. Indeed, if you wanted to write a ten-page post on a subject, you could. And how many people read the average Twitter message anyway?

I think it's also a good thing to get in the habit of writing every day, if you're going to try your hand at writing on a topic. That's why I try to put up a post every day, even if some of them are relatively meaningless in the sense that they're going to become out-of-date right away, like mentioning all the Guest Programmers. I find it keeps the old (well, not that old) noodle active as well, which isn't such a bad thing. There are a lot of blogs out there where people made a few interesting posts, and then never kept it up.

Third is that that it's nice to have an easily accessible archive of things that I've wanted to say about a bunch of movies, especially the lesser-known movies. If I want to make a reference in a blog comment or Internet forum someplace else about something like Forever Amber, I suppose I could just send people to the IMDb page. But that's impersonal, and doesn't particularly link to my own thoughts. I also find that sites like IMDb are generally a lot more bloated than most individual blogs.

Finally, why not blog? It's my own damn life, and if I want to make this my hobby, who's to boss me around and say no? There are a lot more harmful things out there one could do than just say nasty things about a movie where the lead actress has been dead for close to 40 years. It's not as if the professional critics are all sweetness and life, either; just look at any movie that allows them to make a political point. I make no claims about being a great writer, but I'm sure there are quite a few people out there who have interesting things to say about movies, but never got to be in the right place at the right time to get a professional gig writing about them. It's never ceased to amaze me that the man who wrote the screenplay to Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, for example, went on to become one of this country's most popular movie critics.