The 100th Post

100 posts already?

It’s true. My first post was on August 16th. Like this Substack itself, it was made mostly due to a half-baked whim. I wasn’t sure if I really wanted to do anything with it, but I might, so I set it up. My second post wasn’t until over a month later, on Earth, Wind, and Fire Day Eve, September 20th, after I had sat with it for awhile and the idea of what was to come was beginning to solidify.

My first “real” post was on September 24th, which can be found in The Archives, waaaaay down at the bottom of the long, long list. And now, seven weeks and 100 posts later, here we are. What a sprawling collection to amass… 93 reviews, 4 short stories, and all in such a short time?

Why, thank you!

So, where do we go from here?

Well, I still have a backlog of old reviews that I’m transferring over here. 81 of them, to be exact. As long as there’s nothing new to post, I will continue to post them over here at a pace of three a day until there are none left. Once that’s all cleared up, things will obviously slow down around here a bit, at least as far as my subscribers (My Super Sweet Sixteen) are concerned, as that will mean fewer daily emails in their inboxes announcing new posts, but until that day… the work will continue.

After that day, I will continue to post new reviews.

I don’t go to movie theatres anymore because of two reasons. One, COVID isn’t over. Two, I worked in movie theatres and multiplexs of all sizes, for well over a decade, and let me assure you, there is no stink quite like the smell of 400 plus people after they’ve been sitting in a warm theatre, doing nothing but stare at a screen for two hours. It is a pungeant mix of butt and sweat and breath and popcorn, a proverbial putrid foot to the face as you enter the theatre as the credits are beginning to roll and the audience is beginning to stir, an eye-opening reek that tells you one thing clearly… there’s no air moving around in there, so only an absolute fool would trust the best mask to hold up to two plus hours of just sitting in a windowless box, surrounded by an eager horde of irresponsible hoi polloi, soaking in the murky miasma of their infections.

Besides… what’s a movie without snacks? Fuck that.

As a result, my reviews for newer films come a little later now. That’s okay, there’s plenty of other things to watch in the meantime. A general good rule of thumb for how to spot a Fake Film Fan is to find the person who claims that Hollywood only makes superhero movies now, that there’s no smaller or mid-budget films anymore. What this person is actually doing here is, well… whining like a privileged baby who needs to get a real problem, but also, they’re telling you that they don’t actually know how to find movies outside of the multiplexs, which is just some of the most basic-ass pumpkin spice latte shit, my friends. Personally, my queues on the various streaming services never ever seem to get any shorter, no matter how many films I watch, and frankly, it’s a not insignifigant source of stress for me.

So many movies, so little time.

So, look for those rando “obscure” film reviews too. Also, we are currently heading into the time when all the big summer movies will begin to hit the various previously mentioned streaming services, so I’ll have those to talk about soon enough.

Plus, I’ve also got a small stack of physical media sitting under my TV… the new Planet of the Apes movies, Attack the Block, Top Knot Detective, One Cut of the Dead, World’s End, Children of Men, Spider-man: Into the Spiderverse, Pig, Green Knight, Miller’s Crossing, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, films that I love, but last watched long before I started doing all of this, and now, because possession of your digital copies is always tenuous, I have picked up a few new blu-ray/DVD copies of my favorites, so I think I might watch them and then post a review.

Along those same lines, I was also thinking of maybe doing a series of “All Time Favorite” reviews… Raiders, Empire, Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, Roadwarrior, Fury Road, both Dawn of the Dead movies, Jackie Brown, Winter Soldier, Terminator 1 and 2, Goodfellows, Aliens, Wizard of Oz, Infinity War and Endgame, Casablanca, and the Lord of the Rings Trilogy… who knows?

That might be fun.

Plus, I love those flicks, so any excuse to rewatch them. Still, those are secondary plans, not quite set in stone, y’know? The last thing I want to do here is to make this into a chore, right? That’s not why I’m doing it, so… as long as it’s fun, look for those reviews too.

Additionally, there will be more short stories too. For a little while now, I was kicking around the idea of putting together a collection, and maybe calling it:

But doing it this way instead feels like the same destination, just by a different path, which also feels kind of appropriate…

Anyway, I’ve got a couple of old stories on deck right now, one about Freelance Monster Hunters in a world ruined by magic, one about one person’s random choice and the multiverse of consequences, one about your future self saving the past by sacrificing your future, and one about a gang of orphan kids using a mech suit to raid a predatory candy shop, but… I need to go through them a couple times first, they still need to cook a little more. I’ve also got some new ones simmering on the back burner, a whole host of a dime a dozen ideas that might turn into something, not to get too into the weeds over potential short stories though, that is not my main focus when it comes to my writing. Much like the Favorite Movies reviews, we’ll see what happens.

My initial pattern here so far has been to post a short story for every twenty-three reviews. Why? Absolutely no reason at all. Completely arbitrary. But that pattern will most likely continue to hold, even though there’s no reason why it needs to.

Just fyi.

I was also considering posting the first couple of chapters from some of my old novel projects too, my long-abandoned books that might still have a little bit of life in them, but not enough to ever warrant me returning to them, like my zombie apocalypse-based Gunslingers of the Apocalypse, or my Fantasy Post-Apocalyptic Dirty Dozen story Agatha Ironhand and The Dragon of Old Minneapolis, or some of The Broken Telluric epic fantasy, a kind of reverse The One tale. I might even post the leftover pieces of some of my failures to launch too, like my “Lost, but the plane crashed in prehistoric times” idea, or my "Supervillain rebels surviving in a world that is ruled by fascist superheroes” idea, or my “Parents enslaved Narnia and now their kids start a rebellion” idea. Or my “Seven Samurai/Magnificent Seven in a Zombie Apocalypse” idea. I’ve had a few Zombie Apocalypse ideas… Like, I might even have enough of my “Heist during a Zombie Apocalyse” idea, that I started because the movie Army of the Dead disappointed me so much, that I can share some here.

We’ll see.

Like I said, these are all potential plans, I’m not going to get too focused on the task of dragging up old barrels from the bottom of the lake just to show you all the corpses stuffed inside, that’s not the focus of my writing right now.

The current focus of my writing right now is the work in progress, the aforementioned WIP. It’s a big project. The first section of six (…?) is done. The second is in progress. I’m feeling very good about it. So, there will most likely be a lot of that too, at some point. Not yet. Soon, but not that soon. You can probably count on it though, as it is, after all, the entire reason I started this Substack, not to mention the reason for the Substack’s title, as that’s what the WIP in question is currently called…

The All-New Vindicators: At the End of Everything.

(It’s a working title.)

Other than that, who knows, we’ll see what else I might find in deep storage…

Thanks for reading!

Jon