You might think that it would be a risky enterprise for someone like myself, so given to dozing off in the cinema, to go to a film with hypnotism – and therefore presumably the putting to sleep of various subjects. I am positively thrilled to report that not a wink was had – much less forty – although I seem to have most handily forgotten all about the movie trailers we saw just before the main feature, so I may have been somewhere else at that time.
A wacky premise here: high end art auction house with a set procedure to save the most valuable art from theft. Theft situation arrives and then it gets complicated for us all. The gang that has arranged to steal the painting finds itself with an empty frame and needs to find out where the painting is. The trouble? The auction house employee who conveyed the painting – or at least the sleeve that was supposed to contain the painting – to the safety slot was knocked out and has lost his memory.
The "randomly chosen" hypnotherapist who is going to help find the missing painting has secrets of her own, including some bad experiences with unsavoury portions of our auction house employee's past and some rather close encounters with one of the members of the gang.
There's a fair amount of violence and some surreal gore (the above head was talking quite clearly), and it takes quite some time to unravel the complexity of the layers of deception planted by some handy hypnotism. For my money, though, this was a much better way to get through layers of complexity than was Inception, and Rosario Dawson is both hot and cool in her role.
If you're wondering who comes out on top, I will only say that it's someone who is both hot and cool (and I never said that Rosario Dawson's character was the only one in that category).
A little post screening amusement, too. A couple a couple of rows ahead of us was making out during the credits. It has been quite some time since I have seen that in a cinema (maybe not seeing the right films?), but I can understand how gunfire and explosions would make you want to kiss…
Whenever I see news reports about anything related to HIV, I have to brace myself for the parts with numbers. Not because I'm afraid of numbers – I'm geeky enough to have participated in math contests when I was in high school, and even won prizes at them (math books). No, I brace myself for what people will do with numbers to try to validate their points of view.
Most of the uses of numbers that leave me shaking my head involve a lack of context. A classic is the use of percentages to describe trends in HIV infections. First of all, one should be clear that in our society without compulsory and regular testing of the entire population, we are usually talking about statistics regarding diagnoses, and only sometimes about estimates of actual HIV infections. Second, one can't compare on pure percentage changes in these diagnoses without suggesting that an increase of diagnoses in a particular group from 2 to 4 (100%) is somehow more significant than an increase in another group from 300 to 303 (1%). If you see the percentages, you need to also look for the numbers.
When you don't see the absolute numbers, you might not understand other aspects of the meaning of what you are seeing. It is all well and good to say that gay men are an increasing portion of the new diagnoses, but are they a bigger slice of a shrinking or stable pie? Could those absolute numbers also be decreasing, while the percentage goes up? The percentages won't tell you that on their own.
There are other times when the absolute numbers on their own don't tell the whole story. I remember my own reaction in the context of a national meeting once when someone from a more rural area talked about a "huge" increase in people being seen in the local AIDS organization. The number was 4 or 5 in the past year. The organization I worked for at the time regularly welcomed between 40 and 60 new HIV positive people every year, and it was only one of almost twenty organizations in the city. In the context of the population of the region being served, however, those 4 or 5 people were probably very significant.
Another little statistical game occurs in the classifying of the data. It is a very difficult task to classify people when we are talking about those numbers of new diagnoses. People don't stay in their own boxes, so might just fit into several different categories or might even justify a new category that epidemiologists and those responsible for surveillance are not ready to create (it's difficult to follow trends when you keep splitting the lines into their sub-categories). There's more than a little interpretation involved in the classifying, so it's worth asking questions about the results.
One of the things that has most annoyed me recently is the interpretation of how prevalent condom use is among gay men. We all know the community started at zero – or almost zero – condom use at the beginning of the 1980s, adopted the condom strategy extremely successfully, and that use seems to have declined lately. When the proof of that decline is shrouded in odd definitions, however, I get suspicious. I recently saw one definition that classified people into two groups: those who have consistently used condoms in the last six months, and those who had at least one incident of not using a condom in the last six months. Now suddenly the portrait is of condom-users and condom-eschewers and the person who had sex sixty times in the last six months, only once without a condom, finds himself in the latter group. That's how you get to a rate of consistent condom use somewhere south of 30%, but it doesn't seem to be a very accurate portrait, does it?
Although I have not entered any math contests lately, I reiterate my geeky childhood love of numbers. I just have to add to that love a cheeky appreciation of context and a freaky suspicion that will always drive me to see what else my little number friends might be telling me. Or hiding from me.
This article is also published on Positive Lite here.
What a delightful film this was.
A frustrated teacher of French facing a class full of underachieving teens happens upon one with a difference. No two-sentence summary of his weekend for the assignment, no! A two-pager full of descriptions of his nefarious plot to insinuate himself into the home of a classmate. But was it good writing or pure impertinence and disrespect? À suivre…
The pretext is math, at least at first. Raphaël fils is not very good at it, but our hero Claude is. This serves to get him into the house to help out with the math homework and exam preparation. Plan the study session right and you will have time to explore.
The normality of the family, the scent of a middle class woman…these morph into a developing story which veers toward an obsession with the alabaster skin and the middle class beauty of Esther, Rapha's mother.
Each short episode submitted as a writing assignment to his French teacher, who starts coaching him in his writing and contributing in other ways, too, while he and his wife are always waiting for the next episode like addicts waiting for their next drug delivery. Well, that might be a bit extreme. And the Raphas? None the wiser.
There's a funny little side story about the teacher's wife and her efforts to book an exhibit for the small gallery at which she works that will save it from closure by the twin owners. The Tyranny of Sex, pictured above, is not the final choice, but probably the most amusing. At the vernissage of the multiple and imperceptibly different views of the sky over Shanghai, many were present – including the Raphas – but the twins didn't bother to show.
We can't really be sure how many of the scenes in the house actually occurred, especially as we move into revisions and running commentary that translates as out-of-place characters walking into the scene. Enough happened, I suppose, to turn Rapha fils against his new friend, and maybe more importantly against his teacher.
Things don't end well. The Raphas likely return to their middle-class normality (which would be a tragedy for anyone else), the teacher and his wife end jobless and apart. And Claude, well he seems as amused as ever, observer and manipulator of lives around him.
À suivre…
There is an adage in the study of law that holds that "hard cases make bad law". It essentially means that, in seeking the desirable solution for a particular problem with which we are confronted, we may put into place rules that are not only unworkable, but quite undesirable in the cases to which they will be subsequently applied.
I see something going on in our society right now that is provoking "bad public sentiment," if I can apply the legal adage in a different context. A young woman was sexually assaulted and then hounded by social media sharing of photos that were apparently taken during the incident. She recently committed suicide, and the community outrage is entirely understandable and legitimate.
Here's where things go off the rails (not that the original incident and the social media harassment were not outrageous and completely objectionable, but I want to discuss our collective reaction to this awful crime). Anonymous claimed to have identified the culprits and threatened to publish their names in social media, but has backtracked on that, preferring that the persons responsible be punished under the law and not simply humiliated publicly. This backtracking has not stopped other individuals claiming to know who did what from publishing names and pointing fingers, quite possibly at innocent parties.
What alarms me is to see the bandwagon effect with respect to the idea of naming the perpetrators, all because of the nature of the original crime and the tragic outcome of what is surely criminal harassment that followed. I agree that these things are awful and reprehensible, but I am not ready to renounce the protection of my civil rights as a consequence of the horror of the original events.
What? Well let me outline a few of those protections that we have decided are appropriate in our society:
- The presumption of innocence. I remember reading (in translation) some of the debates in the Soviet Union around the adoption of their criminal statutes early in the existence of that state. One representative referred to the presumption of innocence as "worm-eaten dogma of bourgeois doctrine". I do love hyperbole, but it wouldn't be completely outrageous to question the effectiveness of this legal principle in a context where many accused do not face trials, but feel compelled to plead guilty for lack of resources to fight the charge (the rate of pleading down the charges is really quite high). In this case, however, the presumption of innocence bit is about not publicly pronouncing someone guilty before – or in lieu of – the laying of charges and the completion of a trial.
- The right to face one's accusers. This is all part of the trial process, too, allowing both sides of the trial to test the validity of the facts that are being presented and the credibility of the person bringing the evidence. It goes without saying that an anonymous source of information could not meet this standard.
- The right to protection from unreasonable search and seizure. Linked inextricably to the previous point, this is about how the information Anonymous claimed to have was obtained by them. When the police and the prosecution bring forward evidence, there are rules that apply to ensure that laws are not broken in the gathering of that evidence. These are the laws that prevent the police from breaking down our doors looking for anything they want. With unidentified computer hackers, you don't get a lot of control or surveillance over the means of collecting evidence. Non-state actors, you say? Can we be sure?
- A differentiated treatment for young offenders. We recognize as a society that children develop awareness of the impact of their actions over time, so we set a minimum age of criminal responsibility, but we also put into place a system that treats them differently if they commit crimes, with more emphasis on teaching the lesson and returning to society a more responsible citizen. An important part of ensuring that the second chance will work out well is the non-reporting of the names of young offenders, even after conviction, so the usual biases that would push them to a lifetime of limited choices (our tendency to exclude those with any kind of criminal record) will not turn them into lesser citizens forever. You've probably caught on to how the publishing and non-publishing thing might be in conflict if any of the accused persons should turn out to be under 18.
As someone active in the fight against HIV/AIDS, I have been disgusted by the use of criminal law to prosecute cases of non-disclosure of HIV status in cases where there has not only been no transmission, but also where there was no scientific likelihood of transmission. The parallel with this situation is in the proposed treatment of the accused, police being alarmingly likely to publish names, photos and medical details of an accused in the search for "other victims". Some time ago this went to the extreme case of a young woman (under 18) being sought through such public methods of vilification, and this despite the legal barrier to reporting the name of an accused or a convicted young offender.
I often get to feel like the extremist civil libertarian who would let killers walk free when I insist on the respect of these "technicalities" in the system. Surely it isn't unreasonable to expect that the enforcement of the law should not involve any breaking of the rules in doing it.
As I was getting up this morning, news was breaking of the death of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. I thought I knew what would follow: the usual uninterrupted stream of praise for her "great contributions" to public life in her country and around the world, the beaming faces of people who can find one platitude or another, one personal anecdote or another to tell about the dearly departed. We certainly got hefty doses of those things.
We saw something else, though, something we are really not used to seeing in the staged reactions to the death of anyone, let alone a public figure. Dancing in the streets in various corners of Britain, toasting the demise of a hated enemy with a pint of beer – or of milk, recalling her cancellation of the school milk program as Minister of Education earlier in her career. An article recalling the twenty-one songs recorded to show disagreement with her direction, even a movement to encourage people to purchase the tune "Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead" this week, so that it would be number one for online purchases in the week of her death.
I can hear the clucking now: "Terrible!" "Tasteless!" "Lacking respect for the dead!" I will allow that even the most horrible of individuals may not be so horrible to those close to them, and I would never sanction the seeking out of those people to denounce the wickedness of the deceased. I have a certain respect for that level of personal loss, having suffered it myself on more than one occasion. For anyone who wasn't a close personal friend or family member, get over it. A public figure will continue to evoke positive reactions from allies and negative ones from enemies. It's the nature of the choice to assume power and push a particular agenda forward.
This was a woman who championed greed over compassion, who did her best to dismantle social supports and the collective rights of workers while reducing the "burden" of taxes on the wealthy and corporations. She was despised by those she attacked and liked by those she benefited, at least until her popularity started to fade and then even her party dumped her unceremoniously. For those people to heap praise upon her now is pure hypocrisy.
She was on the wrong side of history on the issue of apartheid in South Africa, and on the morally wrong side of many other issues. She hasn't been able to cause any new damage for years, though the lasting legacy of her policies continues to contribute to the deprivation of many. I think I've been pretty clear that I am not a believer, in the religious sense. I don't think there's a special punishment waiting for her, or a special reward either. She, like each of us, will now decompose or have that process hurried along by cremation.
There's a pithy statement attributed to Bette Davis on the occasion of the death of Joan Crawford that I have to adapt to this situation: I believe that one should only say good about the dead. Margaret Thatcher is dead. Good.
Okay, not our most intellectual of choices for a Friday night movie. But could we go wrong with skimpy swimwear and James Franco?
If it weren't for all that swimwear and the excess partying, we might have thought that the "breakers" part of the title referred to the writers, who seemed to have had a relatively easy job if they were not, in fact, on a break. How many times can you repeat the words "Spring Break" in a mocking and menacing tone before the writers realize that they have possibly cut and pasted the same line too many times? A couple of gems, though: "Are you jacked up on Jesus?" was my personal favourite.
Basic premise: four friends have tried to amass enough money to make the trip to Florida for Spring Break from their college in a small town somewhere. They haven't succeeded. So three of them get the excellent idea to steal a professor's El Camino, arm themselves with a squirt gun full of alcohol and what looked like a meat tenderizer and rob the local diner and everyone in it. Enough money for the trip and a bonfire as they burn the El Camino after their getaway.
Crazy bus ride to Florida and then it's wild party after wild party until the police descend on a party and put our four friends in the same cell at the local jail. The judge gives them a fine or two days more in jail, setting them up to be liberated by the benevolent intervention of the local hoodlum played by James Franco. I was dreading the kind of "benevolence" he might show them, but none of my fears came to pass.
Might I just say that Franco's smooth-talking character was extra creepy for me especially because of his presumably gold tooth-armour. Okay, not armour, but a mouth full of metal that must surely have been a little difficult to speak around. I was surprised when the girls who eventually kissed him didn't balk at it. For him, though, a status symbol of which he was most proud indeed.
They lost the most timid of their foursome early on (back to college on the bus) and then set out to rob all the Spring Break enthusiasts they could, a task surely rendered easier by their various states of inebriation and undress. They did this with a scarily impressive array of weapons that were, shall we say, more real than the water gun. The girls handled these like pros, though, as I guess one would with an extensive background in alcohol shooting and meat tenderizing.
They lost another of their number to the bus home after she was injured by a rival gangster's spraying their Camaro with machine gun fire. After that, I thought for a moment that things might be going the wrong way for Franco's character, as the two remaining girls had him on the bed with some very real and loaded guns stuck in his mouth. He turned it around, though, giving an apparently expert blowjob to one of the guns….
Then it was off to avenge the earlier attack. Franco was shot partway down the pier, but out two pink balaclava and bikini wearing gals from up north shot their way through the entire contingent of armed lackeys of the rival gangster and then shot him in his own Jacuzzi. Not a scratch on either of them, as you might expect. No police intervention either.
At least they drove off in a better car than their host's shot-up Camaro – it looked like a Lamborghini. I hope they also remembered to gather up some of the cash that was lying around.
To recap: credible plot, intricate script, excellent acting. Oh, and sarcastic reviewer.
I can't say that I can remember the historical moment depicted in this film. I have a distinct memory of related events earlier – like going to hear a speech from a former Allende-era cabinet minister in the building now occupied by the Public Health Department in Parc Lafontaine. That was an evening of speech in Spanish (which I didn't understand) translated into French (which I did, except that it got increasingly Spanish as the evening went on). I remember going to this with my friend Monica, whose family had fled Hungary to Chile, only to later find themselves in a situation that must have looked as free as the one they left.
So, yes, aware of Chile and Pinochet. Saw the dissenting American view in the film Missing. When I came out of that film, in the former Place du Canada cinema, we had to walk past artillery installed as statuary in the park, which I always found a bit creepy. I suppose I can be happy that I was not in Montréal during the October Crisis in 1970, when I would have seen actual troops on the streets. My life is truly sheltered. So I really had no conscious awareness of this plebiscite as it was happening, and went into this not knowing what to expect, from a historical standpoint.
Gaël Garcia Bernal played his creative advertising guy role excellently. Not particularly political, at least at the beginning, he brings his expertise in selling things to this most political of questions. And, like in countless referendum/plebiscite situations the world over, he is challenged by how to make the negative answer positive and happy. In the Chilean situation, with historical extremes of violence and repression, that would have been particularly difficult, especially with passionate people who believe in their option, but also want to use their unprecedented opportunity to set the record straight on what the Pinochet regime had done.
Our hero persists, sticking to the positive message, even as the regime tries to intimidate the "No" side, and even as the creativity of his own boss is brought into the mix on the "Yes" side. He goes from someone who is not quite apolitical (who could be in the context of a brutal dictatorship?), but certainly not politically active, to someone who sees the violence up close and threatening to his own friends and family and has no choice but to become more invested in the work he is doing. The struggle to stick to what you know about marketing must be so much more difficult when you start to get a personal understanding of the motivations of the people who want to show the ugliness of the regime.
Positivity wins every time, though. And the "No" jingle is stuck in my head, or at least the tune of it, as I am no further ahead on my Spanish than I was in the late 1970s/early 1980s. That's marketing.
The other thing the film really underlined for me was the importance of international attention (except mine, I guess, not having been aware at the time!). The regime was pushed into the plebiscite in an attempt to legitimize itself in the eyes of the world, and you won't be believed in that process unless you let the world in to watch how it unfolds. The presence of foreign observers and journalists made it much more difficult to falsify the result, as much as you might want to.
The film is shot with techniques to make the integration of actual footage from the time more seamless, so it isn't as technically pretty as we are used to these days. Some of it even looked like it was in 3D, but we didn't have the glasses, so it just had that "shift" effect.
The other shift effect that happened during our screening was that two guys in the row ahead of us, off to our left at the beginning of the film, suddenly got up and moved over to sit in front of us about halfway through. Why will be forever a mystery to me, but I might just go with the explanation of another friend of mine who wasn't there: they must have wet their pants and wanted to move to a drier seat. Their quest for dryness made it more difficult for us to stretch out our legs. "No!" to moving seats mid-film!
Tuesdays continue to be reduced-rate nights at my local cinemas, and that is a very good thing. It is also a very good thing that I went to see this movie alone (I'm on vacation and my friends who returned to work today after a long weekend had other plans)…I wouldn't want to have been blamed for the choice of entertainment. (I'm even rushing this item past the film I saw yesterday in order to make the most of the Tuesday discount experience.)
The acting, as you might imagine from my naming of this blog entry, was stellar. Now, I understand stellar to mean pretty, yet emotionless and seemingly frozen in position. Or am I really thinking of "wooden", as in "post"? That might be unfair. It might just as well have been the fault of the writing. But I did mention pretty, right?
I am generally a big fan of science fiction, even lame-o science fiction. I guess I had just never tried the version written (and produced) by the author of the Twilight series (not one word or scene of which I have read or seen). Oh yes, Twilight means scrubbed squeaky clean.
There was some – gasp! – kissing in this movie. We knew it was getting out of hand when the main female character told the boyfriend of the young woman whose body she was occupying to "kiss me like you want to get slapped". That was just one of several moments when major portions of the audience burst into laughter that I'm pretty sure was not intended by our writer/producer friend.
Nice seats in the cinema, though. Probably the best part of the experience.
I was recently rattled from both sides by a PositiveLite article and the reactions to it. I took to my keyboard to rattle back, as calmly as possible. You will find this article also posted on PositiveLite here.
I'm a gay man of a certain age. My experience with HIV in my community goes back to the beginning, even if my awareness of my own infection does not. I was there as we learned from the first reports that something was going very wrong and that – given apparent indifference on the part of many, but not all, authorities – the community had to do something about it. I have watched friends die. This long history has shaped my relationship to HIV and my attitudes about it.
Having been diagnosed at a very advanced stage of my HIV infection in 1997, I will never be sure about when I might have been infected, but I'm pretty sure I know how, not having had a blood transfusion or injecting drugs. Who was a question I studiously avoided because, like others of my generation, I embrace the concept of shared responsibility and I believe that my energy is always better spent taking care of my health rather than seeking to assign blame outside of myself.
Another reason that I have (mostly) avoided trying to identify the who and when of my infection is to avoid the distinction between the "generation which didn't know better" and those "who should have been able to avoid HIV infection", a horrible distinction that fingerpoints at a younger generation when they, like we, were just being human and pursuing our amourous interests. No human can fault another for having an occasional lapse in judgment or action that might have led to exposure to a risk of transmission. I've never met anyone who sought it out or who sought to transmit intentionally; I look on it as a hazard of our time.
I am also an aging poz guy living with all the benefits of developments in treatment, and that is shaping some of my perceptions of HIV and my relationship to it, but these are layers added on top of my previous baggage. When I was diagnosed at 37, I didn't think I would ever be 53, as I will be later this year. I'm still banking on not making it past 65, as I have no retirement plans beyond poverty and loneliness (c'mon lottery ticket!).
I have excellent access to health care, and that is surely the reason for my relatively good health. I am preoccupied by the fact that others don't have this access – including people living with HIV who have a more tenuous relationship with "the system," but also many of my HIV-negative friends who are part of this community that is disproportionately living with this disease. I hope that we can all decry that lack of access, and do something about it, without blaming me for taking up too much of it. Without it, I will probably die, but without it I fear that others will find themselves in my place, living with HIV.
I've had a few of those serodiscordant situations that we seem to be talking about more these days. Of course, we now like to call them serodifferent, because we don't want to sow the seeds of discord with our terminology, but I think we all understand what it means whatever the term used. I like to think that I have lived up to my own expectations of myself in each of them, that I have avoided transmitting HIV and that I have treated my partners with the respect that I expect for myself.
I remember a time early on, before I knew of my own infection, when I met one of my favourite bartenders outside the bar after hours (there was always a bit of a crowd milling about after the bar closed in those days). This unattainable object of my desire struck up a conversation with me and, as he seemed to be expressing some interest in taking me home with him, added the information that he had HIV. My reaction was similar to that of others in my community from my generation, at least at that time: I told him that wasn't a deal-breaker for me, that there were plenty of ways for us to enjoy ourselves without having to worry about HIV transmission. The relief that washed across his face bespoke the ravages of past negative reactions, and I felt bad for him about that. After we got to his place, he had more revelations for me, and we took more precautions to make sure that I didn't get anything else either. And we both (well, I can only speak for myself) had an excellent time.
I spoke of another of my experiences here. A time when I knew my status and didn't disclose until asked (after the fact), but ensured for my own mental peace that I did nothing that would have possibly transmitted the virus I never wanted to someone else, even someone I knew only fleetingly. I know I didn't disclose because I feared the response would be overblown and negative, and the reaction when I responded honestly to the question asked late confirmed that for me. If I am at all disappointed in myself, it would be in not affirming my status at the outset, but in my defence that is often unrealistic in the face of expected hostility. I would note for those readers about to accuse me of being a criminal that I then satisfied all the criteria as set out by the recent Supreme Court decision to NOT be criminally responsible, so please keep your insults to yourselves.
I had another experience that put me in the position of my bartender friend once. We were still in the bar and the "run for the exit" lights had not yet been lit, but the guy to whom I disclosed my status was straightforward and realistic in his response. We went to my place and we were able to negotiate what we both felt safe about doing. He could express his fears, even the irrational ones, and I could respect his choices and not be slighted by them. Again, we (there I go again!) had an enjoyable time.
Let me add another one. A guy I met on the street who came to my place, who disclosed his status to me upon hearing where I worked (always a good sign that knowing I worked for an AIDS organization made him feel comfortable enough to disclose his status to me). His disclosure led to mine, and he proposed an activity (not the one you're thinking of) that ran up against my own hardwired behavioural restrictions that are part of my HIV baggage. I couldn't bring myself to do it, we discussed it (not discussion group style, but the quick exchange of words) and we adapted ourselves. I knew that what he was asking of me was not particularly risky and, considering our seroconcordance, not at all risky, but I couldn't go there and he wasn't going to take that personally.
Somewhere in all these tales and thoughts I would like to find a lesson, for me and for others. If we could all be counted on to treat each other with respect as human beings, we might be able to end this epidemic. I should be able to disclose my status and not be faced with automatic rejection and fear. I should also be able to work with the fears and limits of my potential partners. For some, this might mean not having sex at all, or having a different kind of sex than either of us set out to have. But we should still be able to be respectful in how we express ourselves.
Or maybe we should just call me Pollyanna.
Yes, housekeeping. But before my friends get excited, this is housekeeping issues for the blog, not elsewhere.
Sometime this week, I hope to get to setting up a new template for the blog. I decided when I started that I would never include advertising, so I can hardly imagine why I would want to leave all that unused space on each side of the screen. Time to spread out and stretch a bit! (I hope I find something pleasant to use…suggestions welcome!)
The other thing I want to talk about is statistics. I've never been in this for the numbers – hence the lack of celebrity gossip and naked men, I suppose. My original goal was to get out and talk about my life as a gay man living with HIV. I'm happy to see the large variety of people who have come to see my blog, but not driven to do an analysis of how long they spent on the page and such…things that are largely more useful if you're hoping to make a living from it. Not my case. I have had trouble with the counters, though. I like the revolving globe thing, but I only installed it last year, so it's giving a minimized perspective on my numbers. I've tried a couple of other counters that seem to have gone off the rails from time to time. For my own use, I'm counting the pageviews that Blogger gives me (closing on 48,500 as of Sunday morning, and up to about 1,800 per month), and going to Google Analytics when I feel particularly geeky. I may yet play with other options on the counter thing, but we'll see about that.
I have adopted the practice of promoting my posts, too, via Twitter (automatically posted to Facebook). Three tweets per post, preferably at different times of the day, and I try to make sure that one of the three is a haiku, apparently not really following the rules of the form beyond the syllable count! Just to amuse and challenge myself. And I follow the clicks from my tweets and Facebook posts using bit.ly to shorten the URL, which gives me another set of stats that, of course, do not concord with the Blogger hits. Whatever.
In terms of subject matter, I hope I can be as complete as my life. I started making sure this year to write about every film I see with my friends. This is about making sure we remember what we saw and making sure that I write regularly, but the film-going for me is also about making sure that I don't retreat within myself and my apartment, which would be too easy. The challenge to write about every film has been quite effective in getting me to write – not quite the "Thirty Rants Hath November" challenge from 2011, but much more sustained and sustainable.
I'm a bit worried that my content has gone a little light on the HIV content, as I am writing that for Positive Lite and have been worried about rehashing content at the same time as I am rather busy with my actual work (also in HIV). You can see how that might start to take up too much room at the same time as it is absenting itself my my original vehicle for self-expression. I have decided to publish my Positive Lite articles simultaneously on this blog, with a link to the other place in case there are more fun or aggravating comments there. That starts tomorrow, and I only write once every week or two there, so you'll still be drowning in more movies than HIV…the HIV just won't be undetectable here as it is in my blood (*groan*).
I don't get a ton of comments, but I did put in a comment approval step because I got a few of those spammy commercial promotion things that I really didn't like. I do publish respectful comments that diverge from my point of view, but I also usually respond to them. Since it's my space, I always get the last word! (Very satisfying – I have to recommend blogging if only for that!)
So enough of this self-indulgence and back to the usual self-indulgence of spouting off my thoughts about this, that and the other.
