In this strange complex of time and space anything can happen

In September 2021, Talking Pictures TV launched the Cellar Club, a Friday-night horror / SF triple-bill introduced and hosted by Caroline Munro. Usually they start with a good solid classic, followed up by two more films which are - shall we say? - usually more deservedly obscure. For the first three weeks, the top-billed movies were Hammer's Golden Trinity: The Mummy, Dracula and Curse of Frankenstein (working through them in backwards chronological order of production for some reason). Combined with Caroline Munro hosting them, of course I was going to make the effort to watch those live. And, as I could see that lots of my friends were also talking about them excitedly on Twitter, somehow it felt right to live-tweet them during broadcast.

I don't usually live-tweet films. It's not really a great way to watch a film you haven't seen before, because half the time your eyes are on your device rather than the TV, so you miss visual details and quite often plot points too as you write about the last thing which happened. But I gradually realised there was a whole community of people watching and live-tweeting the top-billed Cellar Club film each week, led by the TheFilmCrowd account. Soon I was not just tweeting my own thoughts into the void, but engaging with other people's and getting feedback on mine. So, although it's still not how I would watch a film I really wanted to engage with deeply, I've come to consider it a different but fun way of watching in its own right. I've also made a bunch of new Twitter friends that way and really enjoyed interacting with them, including between the live-tweets.

The whole thing has posed a problem for the way I record my film viewing in this journal, though. I've been writing at least something here for every film I've watched since 2007. It's a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it absolutely definitely means I don't watch as many films as I might if I didn't do it, because the 'cost' of watching any film is that I have to write an LJ / DW post about it. Although I tried to set a rule at the beginning that they didn't have to be extensive reviews, and just a record and quick reaction would be fine, that simply isn't what I'm like. I always have a lot of thoughts I want to record, which in turn becomes a burden. On the other hand, though, the knowledge that I'll need to write something down after watching has definitely made me more attentive to what I see, and the regular practice of articulating my thoughts has probably made me a better film critic. I'm pretty sure it's the reason why my Cellar Club live-tweets ended up getting me invited onto a live webcast to discuss Hammer films on Sunday.

But I've been struggling with what to do about the fact that I've been gaily watching all these films, and without yet 'writing up' a single one here. Initially I told myself these views 'didn't count', because I wasn't watching 'properly' (due to looking at my device half the time), and at least initially had seen the films before so had written up 'proper' reviews here on earlier occasions anyway. But increasingly as the Cellar Club moved onto films I hadn't seen before, including some I'd been meaning to watch for a while, that position has become unsatisfactory. And in any case, the very nature of the whole thing means that I do have a written record of each film anyway. That's what the live-tweets are! They just aren't here.

So, all this is by way of saying that I'm now going to perform the rather tedious (probably for both me and my subscribers) task of importing the content of these threads here, so that I can integrate them into the record of my other LJ / DW write-ups. Thankfully, every live-tweet is neatly threaded - something I did in the first place mainly to avoid swamping followers who weren't interested with a barrage of tweets about a movie they weren't watching. So my plan in each case is to link directly to the first tweet in the thread, which will mean I can see them again easily in their original context in future. But I'm also (this is the most tedious bit for me) going to copy and paste the content of each individual thread into the body of an LJ / DW entry, so that I don't have to go to Twitter for the details, and indeed I have an independent record in case some day Twitter ceases to exist. (More likely for LJ at the moment, but that's why I also use DW.)

Some of the individual tweets won't make sense any more out of context, even to me, but that's the nature of the thing. I reserve the right to quietly correct typos, break hashtags which I don't want LJ to replicate or insert editorial comments where I can remember the context and want to clarify it, and indeed to include a paragraph of prelude or commentary where I want to say a bit more here than was included in the original thread. It'll take a few entries over a few weeks, so sorry for the spamminess while that's happening. Each thread will always be under a cut anyway, so hopefully not too annoying. And then once I've brought things up to date, I can just keep up the habit on a weekly-or-less-frequent basis, and I'll be back to business as usual but with a better record of my film viewing. Phew!

( 12. The Mummy (1959), dir. Terence Fisher, broadcast 3 September )

( 13. Dracula (1958), dir. Terence Fisher, broadcast 10 September )

( 14. The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), dir. Terence Fisher, broadcast 17 September )

OK, that wasn't too bad actually. I think I can catch up in this way reasonably quickly. Probably not this week, as I'm going to Oxford on Thursday and need to pack for that tomorrow evening. But judging by this first experiment, it seems feasible and a reasonable compromise for the sake of my record-keeping. Cool.

My first film of 2017, seen this afternoon with ms_siobhan and planet_andy at the Hyde Park Picture House. They were, of course, showing it in tribute to the late Debbie Reynolds, and I'm pleased to say that she got a healthy audience and a round of applause at the end.

Ironically, having made a point of clearing my review backlog so that I could start my 2017 film reviewing with a blank slate, I find I don't have a huge amount to say about the actual film which I didn't already say four years ago when we saw it at the Cottage Road cinema. I can certainly say that I came out of the second viewing feeling just as enthusiastic about it as after the first, though. It is a bit bare-faced about crow-barring the song and dance numbers into the plot, but you forgive it anyway for doing so with a nod and a wink, and for being so consistently funny and beautiful the whole way through. And I think it's probably humanly impossible not to be just a little bit in love with Gene Kelly by the end of it all.

One thing I see I didn't mention in my last review (but ms_siobhan did in a comment!), and which deserves due tribute, is this wonderful Silent Movie Vamp Lady in her spider-web dress:




Simply, wow!

One more thing which should be noted here, and which I've only just realised while filling in the tags for this entry: I have now been reviewing all the films I see here on LJ consistently for ten whole years. Here's where it all began, with Metropolis in January of 2007. I have sometimes got behind on my reviews, and felt burdened-down as a result, but overall I am heartily glad that I have done it. It has definitely helped me to get an enormous amount more out of what I see, both at the time of viewing and while writing about it afterwards. I think it has also enabled me to home in more efficiently on films I will actually like. Whether I will keep it up for another ten years from now remains to be seen, but I certainly don't intend to stop any time soon.

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Dear Livejournal,

Happy birthday! It is ten years today since I first set you up. I didn't actually start writing entries here until the following April, but today is the day I joined the LJ community and started reading and commenting on other people's posts, so I think this is the date that counts.

You and I have changed a lot over the last ten years, and sadly not always in ways we probably would have chosen. Certainly, on my side, between parental health issues and appalling workplace mismanagement, the last six years of my life have been pretty shit, all things considered. I know it's naive to expect life to be in any way fair, and I have tried to make the best of things and not get angry and resentful about it all, but it's got to be said that I thought my thirties would be more about happiness and achievement than they have actually turned out to be. Still, you have been there for me all that time, whether I needed to write about the problems I've experienced directly, escape from them into various sorts of film- and television-related fantasy worlds, or (just occasionally) explore and express enthusiasm for new things. I wish there'd been more of the latter in particular, but I'm grateful for all of it.

As for you, the sad reality is that other social networks have chipped away at your userbase. Facebook offers ease of usage, other blogging platforms offer search engine visibility and a sense of professionalism, Pinterest makes sharing picture content quick and easy, Tumblr encourages collaborative discussions, and Twitter captures trends and breaking news and opinion in a way that you never could. As a ball-park figure, I think only about one quarter of the people on my friendslist are actually now active here in any way at all, and my stats tell me that my posts now rack up about 2/5 as many views apiece as they did five years ago. Inevitably, these things snowball, so that once people start drifting away there isn't as much left here to keep the remaining people interested, and in turn they drift too. What started as a slow but noticeable decline three or four years ago has definitely speeded up over the last two years.

And yet, somehow, here you still are in spite of it all. Just like me, in fact. What that tells me is that you still have something to offer which other social networks can't match. Obviously for any individual user, part of it is a combination of nostalgia, and the particular friendship connections we have here. But most of my LJ friendship connections are replicated on other social networks, and yet it obviously still seems worth it to me and to others to keep writing here. LJ allows long discursive writing and considered discussion threads, all of which other blog platforms can match. But where it has and keeps the edge, I think, is the ability to do all of that in a personalised format, addressed to a reciprocal audience of known and trusted friends - either pseudonymously or even completely privately.

Twitter and blogging platforms are largely predicated on the assumption that they are publicly visible and associated with known identities, while once-cool Facebook is now increasingly full of work colleagues and family members whose expectations of our personas may be restrictive - indeed, this is a recognised factor in driving teenagers off it. But LJ is both old enough and small enough to somehow have slipped under all of those nets. The fact that it is unknown territory to those who are anyway unlikely to 'get' it has always been part of its attraction. Certainly, I can write here about my parent and job woes in a way I wouldn't dream of on Facebook or Twitter, and I've seen many other LJ users coming here after long absences in similar circumstances. But it isn't just that. I can write long, self-indulgent film and TV reviews here which are about how I responded to a story, including expressions of extreme geekiness and digressions into my personal history, which I feel comfortable sharing here to a known (and often equally geekish) audience, but wouldn't want associated with my professional identity on a blog.

In short, I still love you LJ, and I don't intend to stop writing here any time soon. You are still an essential element in my online life, even if you're not the only one any more. In fact, I have made you a present in honour of our ten-year anniversary. See, I'm not saying everything I write here is cutting-edge essential content, but it matters to me and I do like writing it. I also think that one consequence of your drifting user-base is that there are people out there who might like to read some of it, but no longer even really know that I am posting here.

So I have finally done something I've been thinking I ought to do for a while. I have sifted through my Facebook friendslist, and put all the people who are or were once on LJ themselves, or who never were but whom I don't mind knowing about the sort of stuff I post here, onto a single 'LJ friendly' filter. From this entry onwards I am going to link to my public LJ posts from my Facebook feed, but filtered to that group only. Not, I think, the friendslocked stuff, but at least my film and TV reviews, and probably some general 'what I've been doing lately' updates too.

I hope you like it, and here's to the next ten years. I'll still be here if you are.

Lots of love,

Penny

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Well, it is done. The results of my poll suggested that most of you like it, and I certainly do. So purple_pen is no more, and strange_complex has taken her place.

It felt a bit weird immediately after I'd done it. I was expecting it to maybe take a couple of hours to go through, but as soon as I'd paid up and returned to LJ, there it was - my username of seven years had unceremoniously vanished from its old home in the menu bar at the top of the screen, and some new name had appeared to take its place. It was hard not to feel deleted, kicked out and body-snatched for a moment, there. But I think I've pretty much got the hang of it already. It's like a brave new world. With, um, exactly the same stuff in it.

You, gentle reader, should be largely unaffected. All my friends contacts are exactly the same, and even if you forget my new username and type in <lj user=purple_pen> by accident, it will display as strange_complex. I think you should also find that every comment I've ever made, or every reference you have ever made to me in the past, has also been changed to show strange_complex as the username. So all you have to do is remember that that is the same person who used to be known as purple_pen.

Now I am off to round off the process by replacing my journal header, figuring out how all this has affected my OpenID (the official word is that it's anyone's guess), and also seeing whether LJArchive will be affected. Have a strange and complex morning!

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Following on from the entry I made this morning about reconfiguring my LJ to suit who I am and how I use it in 2010, I'm now about to perform a very minor friendslist cull.

This shouldn't really affect anyone who actually reads my LJ, because I am only removing journals which as far as I can tell are no longer active. I don't actually think the likelihood of those accounts falling into malevolent hands is very high, but I do want to keep my friendslist neat and tidy, and especially to have a clearer sense of how many journals I am actually reading.

If I'm wrong about how abandoned any of the journals I'm removing actually are, and in fact you do still use your journal to read even if you aren't posting much, do please let me know and I will happily re-add you. I will leave this post public so that anyone who has been removed can see why and ask to be re-added if relevant.

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One year ago, I embarked upon the project of recording in my LJ all the books I read and films I watched during the course of the year 2007. I'd written about things I'd read or seen fairly frequently before then, but had never done it systematically. I decided to start because I'd tried to look back over the books I'd read in 2006 when answering the end-of-year meme for that year, and was rather perturbed to find I could barely remember any. I didn't want the same thing to happen again, so the new year seemed like a good time to emulate many of my fellow bloggers in recording them all here.

One year later, I'm thoroughly glad that I did it. ( Looking back on the best of the bunch )

( Quantities )

( Content )

( The blogging process )

So, here's to another year - and one with less middlebrow fiction, a postal DVD subscription and the occasional one-sentence film review.

Dangit: I was so certain I was never going to post anything in this livejournal, and now I've been sucked in, just as venta predicted in the first place!

It started with more regular checks on my friends' journals while I was in Hong Kong and bored, then I got into dropping in on random people's journals from time to time[1], and finally I discovered communities. Already becoming hooked, I was then pushed over the edge into actual posting by flattery: I spent this weekend with brummiepaul and his lovely wife and son, and was repeatedly told my Paul that I 'should post on livejournal' because I have 'something to say'.

Hmmm, well we'll see about that, but you all know who to blame now if I don't!

Not quite sure what sorts of things I will say just yet, or how often. But for today, proclaiming my intention to post in future rather than just responding to other people's posts will do nicely.

Love to all for now (and see some of you in the pub later!)

Penny

[1] From which I learnt that most livejournal users are either goths, Russians or teenagers: or sometimes a combination of these.