November 2021 Review – Flaming Fingers

That’s right; my fingers are red hot due to the sheer amount of writing I’ve powered through this month. The backlog of scheduled content I have is quite frightening. In fact, it’s grown to the point where I’m keeping a lot of my posts in the drafts tab so that I can make room for any spontaneous posts I think should take priority in the schedule. I don’t anticipate that happening, but it has happened in the past where I’ve moved things around for posts I thought to be more important or of higher quality.

Most of all that writing happened at the beginning and the middle of the month because, at the end, I started a new job which left little time for writing during the week. For the foreseeable future I’ll be a weekend writer, lest I be blessed with a day off. Well… A weekend writer in so far as this blog goes.

I still like to journal every few days to keep myself sane. It’s not just getting your thoughts out that makes journalling feel so worthwhile – after all you could spill your problems to someone and get the same relief – but it’s the strange intimacy of putting pen to paper that is absent when you type on a keyboard. Regardless of subject matter, writing with a pen-in-hand always feels more closely personal than doing so on a computer. Or, maybe, I’m just a bit of a nerd. Perhaps both.

So, there are a lot of films and games lined up for the weeks ahead all the way up until Christmas at least, with enough posts in the backlog (with more to come) for me to formulate a schedule for the months afterwards. It also occurred to me that I so often celebrate my love for film through my exploration of franchises like Godzilla and Halloween, but that I don’t often do so with my gaming reviews. I mean, sure, I review franchises like Life is Strange, but I don’t rank them the same way as I do with my movie franchise reviews, and thus they feel a little less special. It’s also always the gaming category that takes a loss whenever I want to fit in a TV review.

HOWEVER, with that in mind I have formulated a celebratory end-of-year post that will go up on the 31st of December to shine some more light on the gaming side of this blog. I assume many of you won’t read it until a few days afterwards, on account of the late nights and alcohol that tend to come about at the end of December, but I think you’ll like it. I know I’ve certainly enjoyed thinking about and starting the process of writing it.

I also have news regarding the rather dead TV section of this blog; I had planned of reviewing all the seasons of Better Call Saul in preparation for the sixth season said to come out in 2022, but the truth is that it’s been a very long time since I watched the show for my initial Seasons 1 and 2 reviews, and longer since I’ve felt as though I have anything worth saying. As a reviewer, I feel it would be a bit shallow of me to post a review of it with so little to add – My thoughts on Better Call Saul Seasons 3-5 are essentially the same as those expressed in the Seasons 1 and 2 reviews. Truly the only new thing I could think of mentioning was the increased personal stakes of these later seasons. So, in light of that, I opted not to review the entire series.

I have, however, started a new thought-provoking series that I am going to be writing a review on soon: The Crown. It’s a show I never really thought I’d like because of my own disinterest in the Royal Family, but somehow find myself enticed by. I recently finished Season 2 and have decided to review the first two seasons. I am currently watching Season 3 and, if by the end of Season 4, I find I have more to say than I did for Better Call Saul, I’ll consider reviewing the whole lot.

It was never my intention to let the TV section of the blog get left so far behind, but I never expected it to be as dormant as I’ve allowed it to become. I suppose that’s what happens though when you make a new category of review just so you can tell people to stay away from a truly awful documentary. Yes, indeed Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel was so bad and left me with so many thoughts that I couldn’t contain them and needed to warn you, blessed readers, away from it’s disgrace, even at the cost of making a category of review for this blog that I would rarely contribute to thereafter.

I suppose I contributed a fair amount when those Marvel shows were going up on Disney+, but the fact those shows seemed to get progressively worse completely hindered me from trying to watch even a single second of What If. I have been tempted to dip into Hawkeye, but something about watching middle-aged Jeremy Renner shoot things feels so needlessly insignificant after having watched Loki find out the entire MCU was an authoritarian dictatorship.

Finally, I want to acknowledge that we hit a milestone this month; Alex’s Review Corner hit 5000 all time views. I would say that’s pretty good for being on the job for a year, but let’s not forget the many time’s I’ve mentioned this blog being reset. So, in reality, it took about 2-3 years to hit 5000 all time views. Nevertheless, it is a nice milestone worth acknowledging, and I am glad to of hit it!

So that about wraps up November. More Halloween reviews to come, other movies too and a celebratory end of the year post to look forward to. I hope you have a great December and Christmas before I write again for my review of the whole year. Have a good one.