Post-Watership Updates
Hey, everybody! The Watership Down retrospective has concluded! What shall I do next on this blog?
First of all, there are still 19 more articles from the WordPress blog that I want to transfer over to this site before I finally shut it down entirely. These include several movie, television, and book reviews; several episodes of P.J.’s Ultimate Playlist; the last two articles in my “paranormal triangles” series; and two articles from my “Complete Noob’s Guide to the Left” series.
Among those articles are five “holiday specials” written specifically for Halloween and Christmas and one dealing with conspiracy theories surrounding 9/11. If I continue to upload once every weekend (like I have been with the Watership retrospective) and save the holiday articles for October and December, that should leave me with thirteen weeks until I have to start coming up with original material for this blog, which falls sometime in September. Luckily, I have a few ideas percolating in my head that haven’t been realized on the WordPress blog yet. For instance:
One episode of P.J.’s Ultimate Playlist is a list of my top 20 favorite songs by Led Zeppelin. I have referred to them as my favorite music artists for many years. While I still adore their musical achievements, I’ve recently started to hesitate to call them my favorite given some of the more problematic aspects of their legacy, like inadvertently helping to bury rock music’s origins in black blues musicians and especially Jimmy Page’s history of taking advantage of underage groupies. I say all this because I’ve been considering doing top 20 lists of my favorite songs from other (hopefully less problematic) artists I admire, like Queen, Rush, Pink Floyd, Iron Maiden, Metallica, Blind Guardian, the Beatles, etc. I figured that would be fun to do again sometime in the future.
The two Noob’s Guide articles I mentioned above deal with the history of Marxism-Leninism and the conflict between Leninism, Trotskyism, and Stalinism in the early days of the Soviet Union. However, I’m unsure if I want to copy those articles verbatim from WordPress, as I feel like my treatment of their subjects was a bit surface-level and too focused on their failures rather than their successes. I want to research the topics more rigorously to do them justice next time.
One subject from a previous article I want to expand on is some of the more esoteric spiritualities I covered in “My Religious Beliefs,” like Gnosticism and Hermetic philosophy. I feel like they have interesting ideas about our relationship with the divine. I feel somewhat nervous about dealing with aspects of Kabbalah and Eastern faiths, as I wasn’t raised in those traditions, but my curiosity still drives me.
Finally, I want to talk more about animation on this blog than I did on WordPress. I haven’t exactly figured out how yet. My best options so far might be to either do a year-end retrospective where I look at several movies and T.V. shows from the year to figure out which one is my favorite or to search for obscure hidden gems from foreign shores and the underground. The latter sounds like a particularly exciting prospect.
I should also probably clarify where the most recent Divine Conspiracy story stands. It hasn’t been going well as of late. I’ve definitely hit a wall of writer’s block. Either that or I’ve had the passion for writing the story suddenly drained out of me. I’ve been feeling lately like I’m not talented enough to do the story that’s in my head justice. Granted, I always feel that way, but the doubts have grown even more potent in the past month, which sucks for my DeviantArt watchers, as I haven’t uploaded anything there since Christmastime. I know I’ve been flirting with the idea of publishing some creative nonfiction pieces I wrote in college on the site. Perhaps I could do that. I could also start posting some of my fiction pieces on this site to have a place on the Web where all of my writing is archived in a single, easy-to-reach location. It’s worth a try!
That’s all I have to say for now. Here’s hoping I can find my way back to inspiration. Until next time, beautiful watchers.
