Category: Uncategorized

I must be mad. I’ve just a horrible experience reviewing a comedy site and here we go with another one. But hey, it couldn’t be as bad… surely. The self deprecating comments in the banner hint at something a little wittier.

I liked the look of the site. A simple design with a left side panel. A nice blue, my favourite colour and easy to read black on white text. The usual about me, why this site and other links sit in the panel along with a working calendar that ferries you to and from posts. My only gripe here is that the calendar returns to the latest month when you access a particular post. That aside the links work. There is also a comment board which is cool. The banner is a home page icon which is always useful.

There is the occasional use of pictures and links which all work. There is a comments facility and this sometimes generated some interesting and occasionally funny moments. These interactions were particularly good when other comedians offered advice and assistance to the young man.

The author has just made a decision to think about making a decision to pursue a career in comedy as a writer. He is too shy to perform. His web log is a mixture of his thoughts and feelings about making this decision, his disbelief at being able to write funny material – he is a comedy magnet for good ideas (his words!) and his material. Comedy is so subjective, but I was pretty much mildly amused throughout. His comedy is situational in the Seinfeld, “what’s the deal with…” mould.

Some of the material was a little underdeveloped and could do with working on, but there were some real high points. Boxing got me laughing out loud and the Victory Q is a great story well told.

The site has been up and running since January 2004 and although he isn’t a prodigious blogger he has posted regularly enough since. There is a wealth of material here should he finally take the plunge and get up in front of an audience.

I’ve enjoyed this second comedy experience. The web log is reasonably well designed and written. At times I laughed out loud and have enjoyed his journey towards the bottom rung of the show business ladder. A three out of five.
I think I want to be a comedian.

Upon arriving at Screen Rant I found an aesthetically simple, easy to read to read website. The content is mainly reviews, news and commentary involving various forms of entertainment, mainly TV and movies.

The author, Brian, is conscious of his reader, usually letting them know if there will be *spoiler* content within the review. Which is great…there is nothing worse than reading a review to see if it worth watching only to read the movie ends in the first paragraph.

As the website subtitle title says there is little ‘sugar coating’ within Screen Rant’s content. Brian writes straight-forward, down-to-earth prose which allows for a highly accessible and easily digestible content. Screen Rant’s articles are at times reflective, such as in this entry, which I couldn’t agree more with entitled ‘Talking in Movie Theatres’. (Indeed! My Gawd people shut-up!) There are also many thought provoking entries such as ‘The End of an Era?’ or ‘Is Hollywood really this bereft of ideas?’ or his personally introspective review of the Mel Gibson’s ‘The Passion of the Christ’. To balance the serious, there are also some amusing entries such as ‘What would Simon Say?’ or ‘Green Lantern… a comedy??’.

There wasn’t a whole lot of content in the earlier months of Screen Rant but the author seems to have found his writing mojo in the past 2 or 3 months. The Sci-Fi reviews, movie content and commentaries are the most interesting entries… the numerous entries about American Idol were not… I would have preferred to read more reviews, articles or commentary other than another article on one of the various over hyped ‘Idol’ shows. The Michael Moore bashing also gets a little tiresome – ok, I get it – you don’t think Fahrenheit 9/11 is a documentary.

On the whole, there is a lot of great content at Screen Rant. There are even some embedded movie trailers and images that compliment the text and entries. If you’re looking for ‘another’ opinion on a film before you see it, Screen Rant is a good stop prior to renting or going to the theatre. The ‘topics’ link sorts things quickly and allows quick access to the meat of the site, the reviews. Well worth a bookmark to get some insightful entertainment talk.
Screen Rant

I liked this one. The title suggested dreams and I was not disappointed. “When our conscious sinks and our subconscious emerges, we can only witness what the mind truly has to offer in the night.” I am interested in dream interpretation so what was on offer was appealing.

The design is simple and straightforward – a blog*spot template. The look is okay and easy to read. There is a left hand side panel with links to other blogs and blog related sites. There are links to dream related sites and the perfunctory previous posts and archives. There is a link to site statistics. Some of the links open in a new window; some don’t.

The site has been in operation since May 12th 2004. It is operated by two women. Jen and Karen who contribute postings. Jen more frequently at a 2:1 ratio. Jen is 28 and a student. Karen’s profile is not public.

There is a comments facility in which Karen and Jen occasionally comment on each other’s posts. There is a small amount of other use.

Now to the content – dreams. What I like here is that neither Jen nor Karen tries to analyse their dreams. What we get is pure dream narrative. Both write well and provide descriptive dream sequences. The pair only post when they dream. I like this discipline and for the first time appreciated the space between posts. This lent an air of authenticity. I intuit that both dreamers “lie and dream things (and relate things) true” to paraphrase the quilled one.

I read through all the posts and managed to maintain my interest. There a couple of posts which deal with the mechanics of dreaming and blogging. For instance how to remember – “Whenever I awaken from a dream, I try to write down the key elements, things, feelings, sensations, etc. before the dream slips away from my conscious memory.”

I can’t remember any dreams but will be trying to when I wake tomorrow. Perhaps I’ll be haunted by Zaque? He, he.

I liked this web log which has a nice unpretentious feel to it. It made me laugh on one occasion too. Meow Hitler! I will be popping back and hopefully may contribute a dream or two. A well deserved three and a half out of five.Nocturnal Elucidations

Deathnoruk is not a word I was previously familiar with. I’m now convinced
that it’s completely made-up and unimportant, since it doesn’t translate
into a word in eight different languages. Despite that minor technicality, I proceeded
to deathnoruk.com and was quite pleased with what I was first presented with.

My first thought was, “It’s always great to see a blog that doesn’t
use a template”. The image at the top looks great and matches the rest
of the site’s blue color scheme. The interface appears wonderfully clean
at first glance. This blog is easy on the eyes.

After remarking to myself that the presentation was definitely better than
the average blog, my eyes wondered to down to the content in the first article.
In less than a second, I noticed glaring spelling and grammatical errors. Some
of the articles are actually difficult to read and entire paragraphs can ramble
on without being broken up into sentences.

Curious about the author, I browsed to the About Me page. All of Jamie’s
personal details – including likes and dislikes – are listed in point form.
This blogger is from the East Midlands, in the United Kingdom and has had a
blog for many months. Initially residing on GeoCities he later switched to ModBlog
and now maintains both http://deathrowuk.modblog.com
and http://deathrowuk.com.

Jamie writes articles that appear to be sincere and from the heart. It’s
great to see bloggers post exactly what’s on their mind without holding
back.

Looking closer at the design of the blog, I notice that the first page –
a spash screen – doesn’t have a title specified and displays the
standard “Untitled Document, oops! Attention to detail in this blog is
lacking; minor design issues and the spelling and grammatical errors are two
such examples.

This blog offers a huge number of interesting features, all of which are a
tribute to Jamie’s creativity. He allows users to register to create blogs
of their own, which are displayed on the site. There is absolutely no documentation
for this process, however, and it’s not completely clear what this feature
is capable of. I decided to be the first person to sign up for a blog, and I
was presented with this after clicking the submit button:

Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error ‘80004005’

[Microsoft][ODBC Microsoft Access Driver] Field ‘publicblog_users.user_favfilm’
cannot be a zero-length string.

/simpleblogreg.asp, line 78

Oops! You’d better get that ironed out before offering
the feature to your readers.

There are a number of fully functioning features, however. Using inline frames,
there are many alternate layouts, including his blog presented from a mock iPod;
this blog is merely a rendition of one located at http://deathrowuk.modblog.com.
Did Jamie code all of this himself? He should take credit for that. If he didn’t,
then he should indicate that also.

I noticed that there were a few features on Jamie’s old modblog website
that he doesn’t have on his new one. The picture gallery, the calendar
browser and guestbook are just a few examples of absent features.

It seems that this blog is not yet complete. There are technical bugs, a couple
of missing features, and some desperately needed spellchecking. I’d suggest
that this blogger perfect what he already has before creating new features.

After writing this review, it has dawned on me that Deathrowuk can be separated
into Death-Row-United-Kingdom. Death Row has content that is only slightly more
interesting than what’s found on most personal blogs. Features are meant
only to compliment the content. Features are cool to check out and play around
with, but you can only do that once or twice. Without excellent content there
is little reason to bookmark this blog.

Deathrowuk!! 100% Genius

The Land that civilization forgot loads a nice-looking layout. White background (neat and tidy) and a right-hand side bar with a green military camouflage background. It goes with the header pic (a jungle) and the soldier pic which is in the side bar (even if you’re not a military aesthetics lover, it is a nice layout you have to admit.) The side bar navigation includes his posts by category, a dream-woman pic, a tagboard, his music, google ads, and a little information about himself (very little, just a paragraph; although he does have a post where he gives more).

There’s also a brief introduction to the blog in the side bar where the author says it now takes less time to load (sadly, it was not the case on my browser and some post pics did not load) and it also warns that the blog is in Hinglish (Hindi-English).

The author (name withheld) who calls himself “Insomniac” is a 19 year old born in Delhi who is afraid of Pink and loves his “mum and sis”. He is a likable guy and he usually posts on random, every-day occurrences, funny personal views of the world and amusing events from his past. In his earlier posts, he used the word “coz” a lot. But he seems to have gotten rid of this bad habit in his recent posts. There were a few spelling mistakes, but of course, the author is Indian so they’re forgivable.

While not a spectacular blog, I found it to be well thought-out and more mature in style and content than most teenage blogs out there. So it very well might appeal to a broader audience than just the teens.

In spite of his young age and recent blog birth, I feel Insomniac has potential. His blog is a nice light-hearted one that deserves a visit no matter your age. You know, I would have liked to have given this nice kid a higher score, but the blog loading time was a little too much and I missed the unloaded pics. Nevertheless I’m giving him a nice 3.5 and encouraging him to blog on…

— The land that civilization forgot —