The End of Dr Blood's Video Vault

Yes, it's really the end of the blog this time.

This news will come as no surprise to my readers who have noticed that I've slowed down a lot over the last couple of years and not watched many movies at all. For one thing, I don't have the time or patience for reviewing horror movies anymore, and for another, I've lost interest in movies completely. I could blame it on various health issues that have come and gone, but really it's just part of getting older and growing out of stuff.

I'll leave the blog up as some of what I wrote is funny to go back and look at. In particular, the horrible punctuation mistakes of the early posts are somewhat amusing, and all of the vitriol I poured out on crappy low-budget horror is still relevant. Pointless movies made by delusional people which I really only wrote about because I had nothing better to do. Meh, we live and learn.

So what's next? Nothing really.

Up until fairly recently, I'd still been buying the occasional DVD from CeX, and although I wanted to write a series of posts called "The Joy of CeX", it's just not the same as those fantastic pawn shop scavenger hunts I used to go on. There's no satisfaction from the hunt when you can easily look up whatever you want and buy it from a website. The bargains are there, of course, because DVD and Blu-ray are almost dead as a format. Hell, the entire movie industry is pretty much dead now too, or if not dead, it's certainly extremely poorly and ready to kick the bucket at any time. There's nothing relevant for anyone my age. In fact, there's very little which is relevant for anyone over 18 now. It's mostly a lot of misguided, preachy, virtue-signalling, political crap which is so poorly disguised with feeble "storytelling" that only the very foolish still buy into it.

Having said that, I don't even watch the older movies I collected, they just sit on my bookshelves as a reminder of this great time-wasting folly. Same with the books I will never read and games which I never play.

So yeah, that's it. Nothing more to see here unless I change my mind again one day. I can't really see it happening though. There's no money to be made from any of this. In case you missed it, the magazines are slowly disappearing, and the big name blogs (which have never been acknowledged by normal people for having any credibility) are apparently e-begging. Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and all those Patreon pan-handlers can fuck right off. If you really want to pay "idiot tax" to a bunch of people who don't care about anyone except themselves, go ahead, but I'm not falling for it.

The whole "scene" is now an even bigger pile of cliquey shit with nothing but the really shitty people left in it. When they aren't cross-promoting each other, or falsely playing the victim while bullying and inciting witch-hunts against anyone who challenges their brainwashed opinions, they are regurgitating the same old nostalgia crap as clickbait. It's pathetic and boring. The rest of us, the good people who've seen the light, have kicked the dust of this crap off our feet and moved on.

Later, gators.


Update
Photobucket is holding everyone to ransom over third-party image hosting. It looks like they finally did what all the trolls, haters, psychopaths, bullies, and pathological liars couldn't do. They killed my blog.

Still nothing good to review

Every so often I think about reviewing something again, but unfortunately, there's been nothing worth watching this year. The quality (and quantity) of new horror movies is even worse than last year, and the year before, and the year before that. There are lots of reasons for this, but the blame mostly lies with lack of talent and new ideas. It doesn't help that the various nepotistic cliques of niche reviewers keep praising utter shit (when they aren't writing lazy nostalgia pieces) because it's all they have left to talk about.

The only "Summer movie" I watched.

Yes, we've had "The Conjuring 2" which deserves some kind of mention for trying to match its sets to how things looked in the Enfield poltergeist haunting videos on YouTube. I noticed the pop posters and had a bit of fun trying to identify the ones which were obviously different or in the wrong places. The Bay City Rollers, David Soul, and Joanna Lumley posters were close, but I don't remember The Kinks pullout poster from Jackie magazine actually being one of the girls' decorations. I also have some concerns over the family owning 1960s-style telephones (especially the wall-mounted kitchen phone) rather than trimphones from the late 1970s, but I can let that pass as "good enough". British telecommunications were not this movie's focus or forte. As for jump-scares, yeah, the nun-demon got me, and old Reg had a good moment.

Some people remarked how "The Conjuring 2" felt like more of a Christmas movie than anything else (duh, because it's set at Christmas), and I have nothing else to add to that uber "insightful" (oh God, that awful low-brow word overused by sheep across the internet!) observation. It's not Christmassy like "Gremlins", but the seasonal trappings are there in the background if you bother to look for them.

Maybe I should congratulate James Wan on trying his hardest to make heroes out of a pair of known charlatans. I'd never even heard of the Warrens before "The Conjuring", mainly because I don't really "do" paranormal investigation bullshit, and of course, I'm not American. According to ghosthunter Harry Price, the Warrens only turned up once, very briefly, and weren't big players in the Enfield poltergeist investigation at all. Patrick Wilson singing an Elvis song as Ed Warren is also a bit weird, out of place, but probably kind of nice for the ladies. So kudos for having very little historical accuracy then. But hey, the whole thing was a hoax anyway, so who even cares?

Not the worst thing I've ever seen but damned close.

I've also watched some horrid Kevin Bacon movie called "The Darkness". It's filled with clichés and the usual predictable possession guff, albeit with a couple of seemingly original "native American" touches which fall flat. Typical Blumhouse shit and as worthless and instantly forgettable as everything else they churn out. I think they tried to make it controversial by having an autistic kid in it and making him even more evil than autistic kids usually are in movies, but it didn't work out too well. Most "reviewers" simply saw Kevin Bacon attached, exclaimed "Doesn't he look old now?", and that was the highlight for them. "The Darkness" was rendered virtually unwatchable, however, by being filmed with a handycam with its very noticeable quivers and judders. Could nobody afford a tripod? Perhaps they spent all the budget on advertising their website. I don't know and don't care.

From other genres, "Green Room" bored me rigid. American Nazis (for lack of a better term) imprison a punk band in their backwoods concert hall and much merriment fails to ensue. I couldn't understand what that Yeltsin guy (who died by running himself over this year) said in any of his mumbled lines, and the namby-pamby feebleness of the instantly unlikable characters frustrated me. A couple of gunshot effects were undoubtedly cool near the end, but "Romper Stomper" is still the go-to movie if you like this kind of thing.

Fuck me, I liked something!

The biggest theatrical release for me was "Gods of Egypt". I actually enjoyed "Gods of Egypt" to the extent that I got threatened with physical assault on Facebook (and one person blocked me) because I dared to like something. The fucked-up-ness of that whole situation is quite hilarious. I've seen people getting all bent out of shape because I didn't like something but never the opposite. Even my infamous and blatant love for the "Twilight" movies never went that far. To this day, people still bitch about how I liked an incredibly successful franchise which they consider to be "non-horror" even though it had vampires and werewolves in it, while at the same time, they rave about their shitty horror-comedies which are even less worthy of being part of the genre. Some people, as we know, are just nuts.

Don't get me wrong, "Gods of Egypt" isn't a great movie, but it's easily as good as "Clash of the Titans" or any of those other adventures meant for little kids. It looks fantastic, the story is okay-ish, and it certainly didn't wreck Egyptian mythology as much as "Immortals" shat all over the ancient Greek legends a few years ago. I saw some SJW bullshit about "whitewashing" with the casting, but since those comments came from people who have no education or faintest idea about the diverse ethnicity in Ancient Egypt, I can laugh that off. There's no point arguing online with liberals, SJWs, or any other brainwashed "causers" because their combined IQs are less than a tin of pilchards. They clearly didn't watch the movie anyway, because if they had, they would have realised that there are more black characters than any other race portrayed. It may be one actor (Chadwick Boseman playing Thoth) repeated hundreds of times, but it still counts!

Starring lots of beautiful actresses whose names I can't remember.

Lastly, as far as new movies go, I watched "The Huntsman: Winter's War" and almost loved it. Again, nothing all that new, and no Kristen Stewart in it, but it has some nice bawdy British humour and a little bit of visual subtext which reduces the current "gender wars" (which really only exist in fake realities such as American college campuses or online, you know) into the minuscule kerfuffle that they truly are. If you don't pick up on it, you aren't good at reading images and certainly shouldn't review movies.

Among many things I've boycotted, I obviously haven't watched the remake/re-imagining/reboot/sequel of "Ghostbusters" because I don't like horror-comedies and didn't ever like the original or its sequel. The original failed at everything I call entertaining, apart from the one scene with the old woman/librarian ghost, and is just too sickeningly "American" for my taste. In other words, its comedy is fucking lame. Big deal that they changed all the genders, I couldn't care less if they replaced the characters with talking bags of shit. I doubt that anyone would notice the difference, but it's possible that I'd be more inclined to watch it if they had. Replace the cast with cats though, and I'd definitely watch the next one.

Please don't make any more of these!

Thanks to Amazon Prime (and a mixture of curiosity and boredom), I suffered through the three "Divergent" movies. I had no idea what to expect, and now wish I hadn't wasted my time. They are full of "pretty" talent, owe a lot to "Starship Troopers", and have some decent eyecandy here and there, but sci-fi blows anyway, and this is particularly shit sci-fi at that. When the kids all celebrated one of their minor victories by self-harming with tattoos, that was enough for me. I'm not the target audience for this crap, and even if I was, such trendy teen sci-fi has really gone downhill since "The Hunger Games" ripped off "Battle Royale".

In other news, I may start a new blog eventually about computer games. Aside from making cat videos and intentionally awful 5-hour podcasts, I've been playing computer games more than watching movies this year because, as I said at the start, this has already been a truly shit year for movies, and it isn't going to get any better.

Onwards and Downwards

I've noticed that a lot of bloggers who were contempories (and occasionally friends) of mine when I first started doing this "blogging thing" have given up in the last couple of years. It's always annoying when you go to a favourite blog and the blogger hasn't posted for ages, but unfortunately, enthusiasm doesn't last forever, and that's just the way things are.

Each of them had their own reasons for quitting, whether it be due to health problems, financial difficulties, or simply the fact they couldn't be bothered to write anything longer than a status update on FaceySpace anymore. In a few cases, real life changes which prompted some people to start writing are the same ones which eventually contributed to them not wishing to continue. Sadly, some very good bloggers got ill, and a couple of them even died.

I'd also hazard a guess that the reason why the majority of bloggers gave up is when they realised that they weren't going to make it, or more specifically, they weren't going to make any money out of blogging aside from a pittance of Amazon affiliate revenue.

The thing is, if you think that you're going to become rich or famous from blogging or podcasting (which is so 2006 and utterly worthless that it's hysterically funny to me and my friends), you need a damned good shake. You're too late, the ship has sailed, and the people at the top who got there first have no intention of ever letting you join them. They're laughing at you, not with you. Even the new YouTubers with floppy hair, British accents, and/or big boobs aren't getting anywhere now.

I don't mind telling you that I've made just over $10 out of this blog in the last five years, which I blame more on the rise of streaming services and hardly anybody buying DVDs/Blu-rays anymore than the more obvious fact that I'm a shitty writer. Oh yes, I do realise that I'm not much of a writer, especially when I go back and look at earlier posts where I didn't have a clue about what the Hell I was doing.

If you're new to blogging, you'll soon discover that there are very few people at the top of the writing pyramid. As the rest of us know now, that area is full of nepotism where the same bunch of people (who don't write any better than anyone else) continually cross-promote each other, kiss each other's asses, and slither around the social networks like a poisonous nest of vipers ready to knock anybody down who might look for even a moment as if they could take a few pennies away from them. Yes, it really is that cutthroat, and it's the reason why you often hear that "everyone hates everyone else". The root of this evil is jealousy over tablescraps. Like most things online, including the passive-aggressive gaslighters themselves, it's truly pathetic.

Plus, even without those horrible yet seemingly "successful" people (trust me, they really aren't all that!) to discourage you, the poorly thought out and insulting comments which all bloggers get every single day are not something which we in our naiveté ever thought we'd encounter, especially from just talking about stupid movies which we have no financial or emotional investment in. Rarely do we get something useful such as "you spelled that wrong" or "your comma is in the wrong place", but that would be nice. The Internet, generally, brings out the very worst in people and hardly ever anything nice.

I've heard that women who blog get worse insults than men, but I doubt it. There's always been too much "crying wolf", attention-seeking, and card-playing from the person who told me. Having seen how this person operates, I don't believe a word of it, and neither should you. Although the nature of the insults may sometimes be different, it's not worse. We've all been lied about and insulted because of our perceived intelligence, our looks, our sexuality, or ridiculed for the things we like. There have been often comical attempts to demonise us, label us as things we aren't, and dehumanise us to a point where we can be "called out" or "brought down" (which ironically implies that we are considered above the attacker). We've even had death threats. Death threats over movie reviews? You have got to be fucking kidding me!

Yes, the bullying is real. It usually starts with two people disagreeing, then all their social networking buddies have to join in and one-up each other with insults, and then some random idiot (usually a whiteknighter who isn't even part of the often already resolved original problem) decides to continue the vendetta because he or she has no life and this is fun. Oh, it's so much fun, isn't it? It doesn't matter that whiteknighters invariably become ostracised by everybody including the very people they pretended to be defending. So think on that the next time you want to light your flaming torches. Online grudges remain for years, and even if you think you've escaped because all you did was comment, you're all on somebody's shitlist and your time will come. Of that, just like death and taxes, you can be sure.

Blogging is not a game for sensitive souls, and whoever wrote the famous blog post which said, "Why not write a movie blog? It'll be fun!" wasn't telling you the whole truth. If I'd known what I was getting into, and the type of disgusting and clinically insane people who I was to encounter online over the years, or that I might often be tempted to become just like them, I never would have bothered to create my first website. Self-praise is no recommendation, but I can assure you that even with the mistakes I've made in the past, I'm not like them and I never will be.

As I said, I make no money from this, and blogging for me has only ever been a folly to pass the time. I'm better at it than some, and not as good as others, but from time to time, I do try to write something interesting. I probably shouldn't, but there are still a few decent people out there who like reading blogs, and we're all each other's entertainment anyway. There are even some people who enjoy reading my blog posts and for the right reasons. Imagine that! What a novelty.

Rather than go on what certain toxic people on almost defunct message boards (including their equally cowardly inciters on social networks) refer to as "an insane rant"—because I hate to break it to those armchair-psychiatrists, wordy-pricks, and holier-than-thous, but apart from occasional minor bouts of depression and physical ailments, I am perfectly sane—I'll move on from this to tell you about some things which I will endevour to be changing on my blog.

"Stick to what you know" is the best advice that you can ever be given. I've passed that cliché to people who've ignored it, and I've even been told it myself and ignored it, but we all should have listened. What I've been doing on my blog is not what I ever set out to do, and I really have no idea why. It's all pointless anyway, but I'm going to stick to what I know from now on.

Over the years, I've been dabbling in subgenres of new horror movies which I don't even care about, and that has to stop. Not only is my jaded attitude to that utter rubbish boring to read, but it's boring for me to write.

Even my cat laughs at you!

When the Summer movies dry up, all that happens at this time every year is that people get frustrated. The social networks and message boards erupt with backstabbing, shit-stirring, insults, and everyone trying to ruin each other's reputations. It's happened so many times that it's predictable and almost funny now, except obviously, if you become the recipient of the wrath of the "horror nasties". I've done it before, and I've had it done to me. None of us are angels. If you could see the thousands of screencaps which I've collected over the years of everybody (from the fandom to "celebrities"), you'd either laugh or never want to have anything to do with them again. I now choose to have nothing to do with any of these people. They can chase my ghost, for whatever it's worth, because they're all dead to me.

I almost fell into the trap of having a pop about somebody else who I don't even know last night, but I'm not going to. The stickybeaks who can't seem to stay out of each others' business online should do what I'm doing by ignoring it. In fact, everybody should be more concerned about what they are doing rather than what everybody else is up to. I can illustrate this with a story about a guy I once worked with who was so intent on watching other people not doing their jobs properly that he cut his own finger off accidentally on a lathe. Hopefully, although I know that a lot of people seem determined to misunderstand the English language that I write in, you will see my point.

Seriously though, take a look at these people who cause all the trouble. There's barely a full head of hair, a mouthful of teeth, or a single-chin between them. Morbid obesity seems to be the fashion, and none of them have a penny to scratch their sweaty old asses with. Those of them who aren't continuously e-begging and who have jobs are a minority, and they aren't particularly great or intellectually fulfilling jobs at that. That's why they come online, because it gives them the opportunity to "reinvent" themselves and milk what little success they've ever had in their lives for all its worth, but nobody believes them or in them anymore. The ones who call themselves "filmmakers" and have IMDb credits for three-minute YouTube video-style shorts which you've never seen, or for donating $5 to their equally fake e-begging filmmaker friends with boring documentaries and camcorder movies which nobody wants, make us all piss ourselves with laughter. Don't even get me started on the hundreds of "screenwriters" and vanity-published authors whose work will never be read.

It's all bluff and bluster, smoke and mirrors, and the drama usually involves the same bunch of self-important, entitled, advertising-conditioned Americans (and a few Canadians, Brits, and Aussies, to be fair) who hypocritically adopt the latest trendy causes and buzzwords as they try to fool everyone into thinking that they are morally and intellectually superior, or just plain better than everyone else. They aren't. Nobody is better than anyone else. We all put on our pants one leg at a time, and have to eat and shit. They just choose to do the latter two things in the same place.

As a fellow horror blogger (who often hates me, but it's all good) once said,

"You aren't a journalist, you aren't a critic, you're just someone who has internet access!"

It wasn't aimed at me, by the way. I've paraphrased it a bit and added the exclamation mark, but his point is still a valid one and is applicable to so many people.

But I said that I wasn't going to rant, so let's move on...

I started off my "reviewing career" (which hasn't ever amounted to much) by writing about vampire movies, sometimes ghosts, and occasionally computers or cats. Those were the subjects which I was most interested in, and although I'm not an expert in any of them, I used to enjoy them. So, to cut a long story short, I'm going to rewrite (or delete) a lot of my older reviews and articles when I get time, and focus only on the things I like from now on.

I stopped writing negative reviews of bottomfeeder indie horror movies a long time ago, because they aren't worth wasting my time or yours on anyway. You aren't ever going to watch them. Really, you aren't, and I wish that I hadn't watched them either.

For those people who still don't get it after all these years (and probably never will), I'm not part of the "horror community" (if such a thing even exists) or any community for that matter. I'm not a horror "fan" or a movie "fan". I may have accidentally used that term to describe myself before, but "fanatic" is not a word that could ever apply to someone as lazy and politically apathetic as me.

I'm not a "nerd" or a "geek" either. I'm not even sure when those terms ceased to be insults, because I still think of the people they are applied to as a type to be despised, wedgied, and locked inside their own school-lockers. Maybe that's why those who think they've "taken it back" have become cyberbullies now. It's their revenge on the world. Yeah, good luck with that.

There's a ton of stuff which I don't know about movies or books or music or games or whatever, and I don't care about any of them. I like what I like and have no interest in what I don't. I have also never had any desire to write for any of the "big name" horror magazines or websites (which I don't think much of and usually avoid anyway). It's all just wasting time between meals or until we end up six feet under, rotting in a box.

Basically, I'm just like you. I'm some average "man in the street" (so to speak) who watches a lot of movies, and who one day just got bored and decided to start writing about them online. Because I don't want to sit here and write "O level exam" (or "highschool" quality) essays every day for no money—I've already been there and done that—I'm probably not going to do it for much longer either. But we shall see.

The Top Ten Horror Blogs You Should Be Reading

...instead of mine. :)

Okay, so you should still be reading my blog, of course, even though it isn't that great, but as I've decided to extend my reviewing hiatus until after Hallowe'en, you may want to subscribe to better blogs than mine until I return.

These are the blogs I read regularly. They probably don't realise it because I don't use the GFC thingummy anymore (and I hardly ever leave them any comments), but I drift their way several times a week to see what's new all the same.


1. The Horror Club - http://thehorrorclub.blogspot.com

2. Raculfright_13's Blogo Trasho - http://www.raculfright13sblogotrasho.com

3. Horror Movies and Beer! - http://eerieeriksreviews.blogspot.com

4. From the Mind of Tatlock - http://www.mindoftatlock.com

5. Pickled Cinema - http://pickledcinema.blogspot.com

6. Left Field Films - http://leftfieldfilms.blogspot.com

7. DirtyGirl's Little Blog of Horror - http://dirtygirlreview.blogspot.com

8. Italian Film Review - http://www.italianfilmreview.com

9. Stabford Deathrage Shoots His Mouth Off - http://stabforddeathrage.blogspot.com

10. Film Plop - http://filmplop.blogspot.com

[Mr Plop has no header logo, but he has the kind of minimalist blog I wish I'd written.]


Laters, gators!

I have over 400,000 pageviews!

It's an omen!

Although I often half-joke about nobody ever reading my blog, and of course, my haters always claim that I'm somebody they've never heard of (even though they obviously have and they're jealous as shit), my stats indicate that I'm doing quite well. Thank you, whoever you may be and wherever you are, for reading.

To all the people who've purchased things from my affiliate links, I thank you even more. My cats are going to enjoy the bag of treats which I can almost afford now.

I'm hardly the best writer in the world, and most of my older reviews are utter crap with grammar and punctuation errors all over the place, but I'm working on tidying them up whenever I get the chance. I think I've improved slightly as a writer since I moved everything from my old website and MySpace to Blogger in 2010, but I'll never be famous for doing this. It's just a hobby, and I certainly don't want to write for any other site or magazine. I don't have any ambitions as a writer because, basically, this blog is just a blog, and it's what I use to keep track of what I've watched or highlight anything else that interests me. If it interests other people, for any reason whatsoever, it's a bonus.

Judging from my traffic sources, most of my hits tend to come from people looking up horror movie titles, so you can ignore that idiot (whose blog is all written with centred text like a poem) who often claims that horror movie review blogs are boring. If you also write horror movie reviews, I'm sure you'll have just as many hits (or more) as long as you stay current.

While I was checking my stats, I saw that a few hits were coming from Horror-Movies.ca, which is weird because we don't have anything to do with each other. Their forum is full of all those "hugs you" and "twirls you round the room dancing" thread-crappers rather than discussions about horror movies, so we haven't seen eye to eye for over six years. I'm not even going to hyperlink their address because they don't deserve the reciprocal traffic.

On further investigation, a link to one of my more viral posts, namely "Who are the Horror Lamers?", had been reposted recently in their forum by one of my jealous haters who thought she'd have everyone on her side tearing it apart. Unfortunately for her, it didn't quite turn out that way, which I find ironic and hilarious in my own special way.

I must be doing something right because one of the posters on that forum had this to say:

"I don't know this guy, or the history, but I actually loved that article. It started off as elitist, but then I realized he managed to knock pretty much every horror fan in a sarcastic way that had some honesty to it.

The 'Other horror cliques online' part at the end was nothing short of brilliant. Yeah its fairly extreme, but there is a thread of truth in all of it. The 'Horror Haters' and 'Horror Contrarians' in particular are very much dead on. I laughed out loud reading that section."

Nice! Thank you, whatever your name is. I'm glad you enjoyed it. I always get a kick out of people who find my articles funny (especially as I have no sense of humour).

In other news, it's nearly Hallowe'en!

That means that I only have to write a few more new reviews about shitty new horror movies, and then I'm done with all that nonsense. Nobody reads anything to do with horror after Hallowe'en anyway.

It's October! And we all know what that means!

Yes, it's that time of year again when all the fairweather horror fans and Horror Lamers start blogging furiously about the second biggest non-event "holiday" (which isn't even a holiday) other than Christmas! Yay!

Prepare to be burnt out by all the tiresome posts about Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, and God knows how many more slashers which have nothing to do with the true supernatural meaning of Hallowe'en. Except on this blog, of course, where everything stays traditionally old school.

This year, however, I have something slightly different planned for you. Whether or not I achieve it will be another matter, but I'm cutting back on the reviews and adding some more interesting stuff. No, I'm not going to write about the pathetic internet dramas caused by chubby little girls and other attention-seeking cyberbullies whose cowardly actions towards free horror bloggers are fuelled by jealousy, nor am I going to post responses to the tirade of misinformed Disqus comments I get every day from people who don't seem to understand that this is my blog not theirs. Do people honestly think that I'm going to change what I write because they don't like what I have to say? It's not going to happen. That would be as dishonest as their blogs, and be even more boring to read than my usual posts.

What I've got instead is a theme:

Ghoulies, ghosties, long-leggedy beasties,
and things that go bump in the night!

I've been thinking of doing themed months for some time. Last month was Spanish Horror (in case you missed it), and next month will probably be all about Empire and Full Moon. That doesn't mean that I'm not going to talk about new horror movie releases anymore, but it does mean that there will sometimes be more than one post each day (or maybe none at all). Remember how I told you a little while ago that I was going to improve my game? Well, this is it. What else did you expect? I'm only a blogger.

Here's something to whet your appetite:

"They'll get you in the end."

Charles Band recently posted this on Twitter accompanied with "By Halloween!". Thus, I assume that this resin "Ghoulies" figure will soon be available to buy from Full Moon Direct. Fantastic! Maybe Hallowe'en won't be such a non-event this year after all!

By the way, don't forget to "like" my Facebook page. The party (such as it is) continues there!

Ten ways to improve your internet life

It's not that I'm burnt out by it, but I often feel mentally drained within several minutes of surfing the internet. There are now too many voices competing for attention, and there's so much mediocrity that it makes me feel physically ill. Okay, maybe I am a little bit burnt out, but it's with good reason.

If something doesn't appeal to me in real life, I can just walk away from it and never have to encounter that thing or person ever again, but the internet isn't something I can abandon so easily. I've been a presence on this worldwide communication tool for over 20 years, and I'm not going to be giving up on it any time soon. Thus, I have now devised a way to make my internet experience enjoyable again which you'd be wise to take notice of.


1. Use AdBlock Plus.

There's nothing I hate more on the internet than advertising for things I don't want or need, so whoever invented Adblock deserves a medal for creating such a convenient tool. Being able to deny lame YouTubers their Google Ads revenue has never been easier, plus I never have to see all the fluff surrounding Facebook or Twitter again either. No more trending Tweets about Justin Beiber or One Direction for me!

AdBlock is just awesome in every way, although you definitely shouldn't use it on my blog if you still want to see all the pretty pictures!


2. Delete cosplayers and gamers from your social networks.

In the thousands of years of human civilisation, I don't think there have ever been two groups of nerds who people despise more than these infantilised idiots. While there's nothing wrong with playing Facebook apps occasionally or dressing up for Hallowe'en, these retards take things to a whole new level of irritating. If it's not a million automated Facebook posts about which level of Candy Crush they've just reached or how many eggs they still need to buy a new chicken on Farmville, they're on Twitter posting dozens of pictures of themselves dressed as some kind of superhero character from obscure Japanese comicbooks, cartoons and console games which nobody has ever heard of. Gah!

Yes, cosplayers, we get it. You're an overgrown child or a wannabe model who doesn't have the looks to be a model. You may appeal to some acne-ridden pubert who wants to see your wonderbra-enhanced boobies in hundreds of pictures which all look the same, but nobody else can put up with that or your over-exciting enthusiasm about "Dungeons and Dragons"-style RPGs which haven't been popular since 1992.

Once you've unfollowed/unliked them, believe me, it's like a breath of fresh air!


3. Unsubscribe from YouTube fluff channels.

Look it, there are only two reasons to watch anything on YouTube - movies and music videos. Everything else on there is a load of bland crap, motor-mouthed Americans who think they're funny (and probably are for 5 year olds), gamers, cosplayers, make-up girls, bad movie reviewers playing "show and tell", and butthurt ranters. Honest to God, I truly believe that YouTube is one of the few sites on the internet where you can find somebody to hate with every fibre of your being within 5 minutes of signing up. And don't even get me started on the grammatically-challenged comments!

Once you realise this and only subscribe to the movie channels, YouTube is actually pretty great except that 90% of the illegally uploaded movies (most of which still don't have a DVD release) will disappear from your playlist within a week of watching them. DownloadHelper is, of course, your friend!


4. Unfollow/block people with mental health issues.

Whether this is on Twitter or Facebook, there will always be people who you followed, "friended" or liked (usually because they were pretty) who then turn out to be deranged assholes. Why they have to spoil it all by being irritating beyond belief is anybody's guess, but one of the answers I've come up with is that human beings really don't need to know that much about each other before they start getting annoyed with each other's follies.

As a rule, the people I tend to unfollow very quickly are those who are an "-ist" of some kind. People with causes are the worst! Primarily, I block feminists, athiests, buddhists (who are just athiests by a different name), anybody who is into politics or boring news items, and vegetarians/vegans. In real life, I would not be friends with a member of any of these "groups", so why would I want them in my internet life?

It also almost goes without saying that I won't follow anyone under 25 years old because their brains don't work properly. I may have to raise that limit to above 30 soon though.


5. Banish lame blogs from your reading list.

I would name names, but what's the point? Instead, I'll give you a few general examples of the blogs which I never return to.

i. Snarks.
I don't like sarcasm or snarky people, and it really doesn't work in literary form. It's not funny, and even if it was, I wouldn't find it funny because I have no sense of humour.

ii. Haters.
Although I've been described as a hater myself, it doesn't necessarily follow that I want to associate with more haters. My blog posts are fair and honest rather than setting out to hate something just for the sake of hating it.

iii. Multi-posters/group blogs.
Any blog which has more than one writer is doomed to failure because they hardly ever agree with each other, the quality varies from one post to the next, and their attached forums are always full of whiteknighting fantards.

iv. Poorly presented blogs.
Whether they are poorly written or ungrammatical doesn't bother me as much as blogs with images which are too big for the posts or hang off the edge of the sidebars. I also won't return to any where all the text is centred like a poem, are too difficult to navigate, or I can't scroll through their posts with the up and down keys. Sites with "Top Ten" lists where you have to click through ten pages to see each each item should be banned!

v. Anything I have to pay to read.
Seriously? Who pays to read a blog? Not going to happen.


6. Never go to Reddit.

Whatever anyone posts on that crappy site will be seen as trollbait or downvoted into oblivion, so it's not worth the effort. As a moderator of several subreddits, I spend more time deleting spam and blocking trolls than enjoying the communities I've created. There are also several long term users of the site who need to be banned from the entire internet as far as I'm concerned.

The only good thing about sites like Reddit and 4chan is that they used to keep the majority of the internet's detritus in two easily avoidable places. Unfortunately, they've spread to YouTube and other places since.

Want a free message board? Just sign up with Proboards instead.


7. Boycott Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and other e-beggars.

Very easily done if you have the good sense to realise that it's all a scam. Normal people work hard and save up for things, or take out loans if they're in business. Giving your hard-earned money to somebody who already has more than you just so they can make something which they then expect you to buy is absolutely bloody stupid! Don't forget that Kickstarter and Indiegogo get paid out of the raised money too, so there's nothing altruistic about any of it.

Just unfollow/unlike anybody promoting one of these "crowdfunding campaigns", and you'll never have to grind your teeth in anger over these e-begging scumbags again.


8. Don't follow the pretty people.

They'll just make you feel bad about yourself as they post a million pictures from their latest free holiday somewhere exotic or tell you about somebody else giving them gifts simply because they're pretty.

Things come too easy to these people anyway, so make internet life harder for them by not pandering to their vanity and narcissism. Give yourself a reality check; even if you had a million dollars worth of plastic surgery, you aren't ever going to bump uglies with them!

As an aside, I won't ever employ pretty people in real life because they are useless at everything, have no personalities other than a plethora of entitlement issues, and are thick as two short planks.


9. Don't follow celebrities.

They are never as cool as the characters they play on stage or screen, and most of them have no personalities of their own. If their posts, status updates, or Tweets are actually written by them, they'll still be boring as Hell to read and will probably involve what they had for lunch.

Constant promotions about their next project will most certainly piss you off unless you are an obsessed mega-fan, in which case, may God have mercy on your soul.


10. Spend less time online.

Once you switch your computer off, there's a whole world of real people out there who are much more interesting. Or if you're like me and don't like people, there are cats to play with and movies to watch! Either way, taking regular breaks from internet bullshit will make you a lot happier.


If you found any of this useful, or even if you didn't, leave me a comment below.

Should little kids be allowed to watch horror movies?

As someone who grew up with a totally uncensored TV and movie watching life, there's only one answer which I can give to this question without sounding like a hypocrite:

NO

For years, I used to think that I was very well balanced and not affected by anything I'd seen, heard, or read, but you know what? I have been, and not in good ways. With every day that passes, I get worse too.

Let me take you back to my childhood because it's the only one which I have any experience of. I'm not a parent (unless a couple of adopted cats count), and I don't know any children. I don't even like children. I never have done, not even when I was a child myself.

The first horror movie which I can remember watching on TV was "Satan's Triangle" (1975) although I didn't really understand it. It wasn't my first experience with horror or fear anyway, I just didn't like the "scary devil man" at the end of it. At the age of 3 or 4, I was absolutely terrified by the voices of the Mysterons on Gerry Anderson's "Captain Scarlet", and there was some weird bird-creature called Raggety on "Rupert the Bear" which gave me the screaming heebies! I didn't like those things at all and preferred to watch "Rainbow" and "Pipkins". I also used to really love cartoons. All the "Merry Melodies", "Looney Toons" and "Tom and Jerry" were my thing. If I watched live action TV, it was always nearly always "Laurel and Hardy" or "The Lone Ranger". I had "The Beano", "Whizzer and Chips" and all kinds of comics as reading material, and thus, I was pretty normal for a while.

I don't remember much about the years between being 5 and 7 except for going to Infant School, catching mumps, being read to, and listening to educational radio shows about mythology. TV shows which were popular then included "Batman" and "Star Trek" reruns, "Thunderbirds", "Planet of the Apes", "The Six Million Dollar Man", and various other American shows which were also family friendly. Never a Disney fan, the only Disney I ever used to watch was "Zorro" on Saturday mornings, and I didn't even know that it was made by Disney. My toys at the time were Lego, a small platoon of Action Man (G.I. Joe) figures, Dinky and Corgi cars, and stuff like that. I'd still say that I was quite normal. I wanted every toy advertised on TV (ah, those sneaky advertisers harnessing pester power!), but I don't think I was a bad kid. I had a cat, liked animals, really liked chickens, and was quite happy. Apart from having to see an eye specialist for a rare condition I have which makes my eyes extremely sensitive to light, which led to me having to wear dark-tinted glasses which got progressively lighter as I got older, I was just like everyone else. The fact that I could and can still see in the dark almost as well as a cat is neither here nor there.

In 1976, the year of "The Omen", some other things happened which changed me forever.

1976 is, as far as I know, the hottest recorded Summer that Britain ever suffered through. The word "drought" was on everyone's lips, "I'm a water saver!" stickers were given out at school for not flushing the toilet (something I still don't do very often!), and it was so hot that you could feel the pavement melting the bottom of your trainers as you walked. I was out in the sunshine every day, wearing my special NHS sunglasses, eating Golden Wonder cheese & onion crisps and "a quarter of" whichever sweets I wanted like a good 'un.

In the midst of this hot Summer, my parents and grandmother decided that we should have a caravanning holiday in Devon. Don't judge, this was a big thing in the '70s. And so we went off to a site near the seaside. I remember buying a comic. I don't know where, but either in Paignton or Torquay was where I found "Captain Atom". I couldn't tell you which issue it was, or much about the main story except for the ending. It's the ending which is the most important part.

In the "Captain Atom" comic which I read, the final frame showed the world being destroyed by the Sun "going supernova!". As a child who had never encountered death before, who still thought that Laurel and Hardy were alive, that the howling wind down the chimney was witches flying overhead, and that little people lived inside the radio, this "supernova" thing was a matter of much concern to me. I knew nothing about outer space, the Earth, or anything about anything really.

Also during this holiday, we went to Widecombe, which is famous for the story of "Widecombe Fair". You know the song, "with Uncle Tom Cobley an' all". I ended up with a booklet about it, and on the last page was a picture of the travellers as skeletons on a skeletal mare. It freaked me out! Big time! This was death in all its glory! This was our insides! This was nasty! It was almost as terrifying to me as a picture of a jack-in-the-box called "Top Knot" who could only be killed by cutting off his one lock of hair. I'd found the latter in a book of fairytales that my mum had one day, and regretted that too.

And then there were the pixies! Oh, Jesus! Pixies were everywhere in Devon, stealing children and eating them, or whatever they did! At least that's what all the postcards and menacing "Lucky Pixie" figures would have me believe! "Don't wander off or a pixie will get you!" was something that the local shopkeepers jovially said to any little kids who were silly enough to go into their tourist trap stores.

Feeling that the Earth was going to end any second, having seen what Death looked like, and now finding out that there were demonic pixies in the world was all too much. As the saying goes, I thought and thought until I thought a hole in the ground... or until I started to have what must have been some kind of undiagnosed nervous breakdown. I remember looking at all the shiny Play People (Playmobil now) figures in a toy shop and imagined them melting. Nothing felt safe anywhere anymore, and it got to the stage where I was in tears, scared to sleep, and was absolutely terrified that my parents were going to die. I had become very aware of death and mortality!

So what's this got to do with letting little kids watch horror movies? Nothing really, except that my own history shows how impressionable kids are. You have to be very careful what you let them see or hear. Reality and fiction are too hard for children to separate no matter what adults might think about their capabilities.

I was still in a very dark place after the Summer ended. I wasn't the happy, smiling little boy that I was before, and something about darker TV shows containing death drew me to them like a bee to a flower, or a fly to dogshit. Logically, you would think that I would have stayed away from such things, so I don't know why. I'm not a psychiatrist.

Maybe I should have had some kind of intervention, medical or otherwise at this point, but instead, my parents left me to watch any TV I wanted and to stay up until the TV stations closed down. Yes, this was before 24 hour TV. We had 3 channels and "closedown" was at 10.30pm most nights. Because of my eyesight "problem", I'd sit in pole position on a footstool about two feet away from the TV set, and I watched it all! The only dreams or nightmares I ever had were of the after closedown static.

I watched the programmes meant for "Schools and Colleges", daytime TV, dramas, soaps, magazine shows, movies, quizzes, game shows, panel shows, evening TV with more adult themes, and pretty much anything but "shouty kids" programmes or the news because it was boring. I was always looking for sinister, spooky stuff, and I found it too. There were so many things that I couldn't list them all, but I do know that ITV's "Beasts" was a favourite of mine, as was a similar series called "Thriller", and the BBC's "Supernatural" series horrified me during 1977! Just hearing Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor being played at the beginning was enough! Many years later I learned how to play it on an organ, but that's another story. Suffice it to say that I hardly ever watched entertainment programmes which were designed for kids. I didn't like other children, and I had nothing in common with them. Children's TV and comedies made me cringe and feel nauseous.

By the time Roald Dahl's "Tales of the Unexpected" came along in 1979, I was a truly hardened horror TV fan and TV addict. I was also listening to a lot of radio plays, reading James Herbert novels—I'd never heard of Stephen King—while the other kids were reading books about Narnia. I still thought that I was normal, but the thing is, I wasn't normal anymore. I'd killed off my childhood, and was constantly sewing seeds of depression. As I started to specialise in horror, I was doing it to fuel those original fears about my own mortality. If there was anything spooky on TV, I had to see it. If there was a magazine or book about creepy stuff, I had to have it.

Unlike other kids, I didn't feel like I could be carefree or act like I was immortal, and I was constantly looking for answers for why I wasn't. Truth is, I still am. I did know that I was a lot cleverer than other kids because things came easy to me and teachers were always telling me so. I was also very destructive, I burnt ants with a magnifying glass, I shut flies in jars and boiled them to death, and I was that "quiet one" in the classroom who hardly said a word. I found it difficult to make friends with other kids as I changed schools from Junior School to Secondary School.

By the age of 11, I was bunking off school to go back home while my parents were at work to watch TV. For some reason—I still don't have an explanation for how it started—I was hitting my parents' booze cabinet pretty regularly. I'd mix a little drop of everything together just so it wouldn't be noticed. Bell's whisky, Gordon's gin, Lamb's rum, Bacardi, Stone's ginger wine, Cinzano, Advocaat, Babycham... I had a go at them all. And these drinks made me feel normal again. I was happier, exhilerated, but never drunk.

Nobody cared that I wasn't at school. Parents weren't fined for their offspring's truancy like they are now, and I'd forge notes as and when I needed to. To say that I was at home more than I was at school would be an understatement. The school was sometimes lucky to see me a couple of times a month! I hated Secondary School. I learnt nothing there except that I was shit at team games, but I still got out of it at 16 with 8 "0" levels.

So what about the horror films?

Here's where it gets tricky because I don't know which ones I watched first. I know that I watched a lot of Universal horror movies, everything by Hammer and Amicus, all the American horror TV movies, "Jaws", "The Amityville Horror", and of course, "Salem's Lot", but these were mostly at night. I also saw "The Collector" one afternoon, and it stands out as affecting me on a "that's not fair" level whereby, in my "innocence", I wanted Terence Stamp and Samantha Eggar to be together. I didn't realise that he was supposed to be mental and that he'd kidnapped her until many years later. There was an old movie one morning about a witch who has a lodger, which I've never been able to track down again, and that one really "shit-me-up"!

The thing is, I was only watching "TV friendly" horror at this point. The age of video recorders had yet to arrive, and the only movies I had seen at the cinema were "The Cat from Outer Space" (which was shit!), "Star Wars", and "Battlestar Galactica". Things like "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre", "The Hills Have Eyes", "Halloween", and even bigger classic titles were completely unknown to me. But as I said, by the age of 11, I was a self-medicating, depressive, truanting, little asshole.

To see why I don't think that kids should be allowed to watch horror movies or anything uncensored before their brains are ready for it, just imagine how much worse I would have been if I'd had access to the types of movies we have available today! Can you imagine what a child would make of "A Serbian Film" or "The Human Centipede"? Christ, if I'd seen those, I probably would have ended up acting them out and killing somebody!

During my time on the internet, I've often seen forum posts and blogs where people have bragged about the movies they watched as kids. It's especially true of Americans born in the late '70s and '80s who say that they were allowed to see "A Nightmare on Elm Street" and all the other slashers. Some boast about they even went into cinemas to watch them theatrically while legally underage.

The questions I always ask about this, is not only what psychological damage did seeing these movies do to the people who watched them, but why did they watch these movies in the first place? Do we all share the same sense of alienation and depression? People may say that the movies haven't affected them, but they're still watching horror movies in preference to any other today otherwise our paths would never have crossed. A lot of these people also collect weapons and own guns, not that there's any proven link between horror movies inciting violence, but statistics like that are always interesting. I know for a fact that there's something wrong with everyone who watches horror movies, especially me!

Nothing like "A Nightmare on Elm Street" or "Friday the 13th" was ever available to me. The cinema owner would have called the police if anyone under the required age had tried to see an "AA" or "X" movie, as they used to be known. My dad would have walloped the living shit out of me if I'd ever tried to do that too! The first horror movie I ever saw theatrically was "Dream Warriors", and that's so '80s that it barely counts as horror anyway. It's still not meant for little kids though!

"Horror Lamers", slasher fans, and the people who think of horror movies as comedies don't get it. They aren't real horror fans anyway nor do they understand the bigger implications. A lot of them are athiests with entitlement issues who think that they're immortal. They are all deluded, live happily in their "world of the invisible death", and would throw the contents of their stomach up several times over if they saw an accident in real life. If they saw a real dead body, they'd faint! Their grip of the difference between reality and fiction is even worse than a child's because they're in denial!

I was always more into the supernatural, especially supernatural movies where there was a religious presence. I wasn't brought up as a Christian apart from paying lip-service to being "Church of England" when asked, so my "religious education" and belief in the supernatural was formed through second-hand information from horror movies. Since I spent more time in front of horror movies than time at school, my whole moral system (or lack of one) is also based on horror movies.

Did I get into the occult like people think all horror fans do? Yes, too right I did, but not as a child. I collected all the paraphenalia and read all the books in my early 20s, and then realised that it was a crock of shit. I believed in ghosts, witches, and those bloody pixies before horror movies took over my life, and spooky books about folklore and legends were just extending my knowledge. The two things went hand-in-hand, but as far as I now know, witches and pixies aren't real. The jury is still out on ghosts. I believe in them, but I've never seen one. I don't believe in aliens though. Aliens are total bullshit!

People sometimes say things to me such as "You didn't turn out so bad!" and "Well, you're not a serial killer or anything!", but the reality is that, yes, I did turn out bad. I may have been to University, had lots of jobs and relationships, and I now live 4000 miles away from home, but I still suffer daily from depression, agoraphobia, vertigo, panic attacks, paranoia, and I really don't like people at all. The only things which definitely don't scare me are horror movies! After having Trigeminal Neuralgia—the worst pain known to man—for 2 years (8 years ago), I don't fear pain either. I don't like it much, but I don't fear it. Until you've ever repeatedly smashed your head against the wall because it's less painful than the pain inside your head, you don't know what pain is!

I've seen lots of dead bodies—too many—seen things done to people which would turn any sane person mad, and I've done some of the most heartless and cruel things to other people in my past which you would not believe! I've done even worse to myself. I'm bitter, have no feeling or compassion for anyone, and I'm almost a recluse! If it wasn't for the guilt which sometimes sneaks up on me like a ghost, I'd think I was a psychopath! I'm completely in contrast to my parents who were social, normal people who never watched a single horror movie in their lives. Actually, I think my mum may have seen "Ghoulies" when I had it on VHS, but nothing else.

Was I biologically determined to be a horror fan or to be this desensitised creature that now exists only for more horror movies and the internet? Or did watching horror turn me into something which I shouldn't have been? Dunno. Children have different ways of processing things, but without question, everybody who has been regularly exposed to horror movies is hardened to the violence and the scares. I say "exposed to" when I really mean "enjoyed watching", but you know it's true. I'm a very bad human being because of watching horror movies.

Still think it's a good idea to let little kids watch horror movies? I don't.

I often wish that I'd never seen a horror movie in my life and that I was still the happy little boy inside that I was 40 years ago, but horror messed me up. I can't turn back time.

Should I start doing interviews again?

I'm not sure if I ever posted a link to DrunkethWizerd's interview with me over at "Horror Movies and Beer" last year, but if I did and you missed it, here's the URL again:

http://eerieeriksreviews.blogspot.com/2012/12/an-interview-with-dr-blood-death-of.html

As you will see, it was just a bit of fun from December, 2012, when none of us had anything better to write about, and pretty much cemented my position as one of the grumpiest horror bloggers in the world. Meh. I have discernment. I am what I am.

Over half a year on, none of my opinions have changed although I have been getting more introspective lately. As my Twitter followers already know, I'm constantly torn about packing-up the whole "blogging thing" and moving on. I've had more backlashes than Spartacus from things I've written including threats, jealousy, stalkers, and more insults than most human beings ever encounter in a lifetime. Behind the scenes of the comments approval list is a daily shitstorm of hate (and spam) which makes me despair of humankind. Thus, when I say "moving on", I actually mean deleting everything and never looking back, but for some reason I feel that would be rather wasteful. So what if people don't like me? I don't like most people, so it's just tit-for-tat.

I've written some good stuff over the years, and a lot of atrocious stuff with commas and tenses scattered so randomly that you'd never believe I spent the best part of my life at University, but that's just what happens when you treat Blogger as a MySpace replacement. I'm not the best writer in the world, but I never tried to be. I was taught one way of doing things in school only to find that a lot of the rules have changed from one English language speaking country to another, and I now spend more time second-guessing myself grammatically than saying things how I want to. If people realised how much time could be wasted on chopping and changing a blog post, they'd never do this as a hobby, and certainly wouldn't do it as a business venture. I swear I don't know why I still do this other than being a glutton for punishment.

The thing is, even though it would be hilarious for me to be interviewed by you to give you something else to post, I'm not famous in any way nor do I have any desire to be. Like everyone, I wouldn't mind having more money, but fame isn't something that I'm chasing. I'm not yearning to write for one of the big name horror sites or a horror magazine, to write a book, or to do anything with my writing at all except just to do it for the sake of doing something other than collecting my own toenail clippings in a jar. I've already done three out of the achievements that I've listed anyway (for no pay whatsoever!), and I'm already on my fourth jar.

Interviews are all well and good as long as the interviewee gives you some promotion for your own site on their blog and vice versa. More traffic is always nice no matter what causes it. In many ways, interviews with other bloggers are little more than a banner exchange-style "shout out". Unless you have a current product or service to promote, it's mostly redundant, but I've noticed that a lot more people are doing it again now. It's trendy, so I kind of want in on the action.

Maybe it's because a certain blogger who shall remain nameless (but I can barely read because of his constantly centred text and childish appreciation of little toys) announced on one his "How to be a Blogger" posts that "movie reviews are boring". The "Horror Lamers" clique then took that great authoritarian on all things "Blogger" to heart and started writing anything but movie reviews. As you may have guessed, that lost them my subscriptions immediately. I may not read many reviews, but I have absolutely no interest in cupcakes made to look like zombies or how to knit your own fangs on a supposedly "horror" blog. As for crappy cartoons about "The Addams Family" or Winona Ryder's wardrobe in "Beetlejuice", well, I think there may be something a teeny bit wrong with you upstairs if that floats your boat or it's all you've ever had to offer other people to read about.

I actually wrote a sarcastic "How to be a Successful Horror Blogger" guide myself which, considering the nature of last week's inter-species drama, turned out to be quite prophetic. I never imagined that anyone would have the balls (metaphorically speaking) to really do such a thing, but she did. I scare myself sometimes with my qualities as a visionary!

Getting back to the subject, on the flip-side of the interview thing, does anyone want me to interview them? I'll gladly do it. Truly successful blogging is all about the content, and lately, there's been precious little of it written by me or anyone else.

If you're interested, I'm offering you a chance for five minutes of "fame" on my blog. Bear in mind that you must be reasonably interesting to my other readers, not be trying to promote some lame hobby horror movie that you made yourself, nor tailor your answers into a socio-political rant which will get us both dragged off to Federal ass-pounding jail. Apart from those rules (and my hypocritically enforced PG-13 language rating to attract more pageviews), anything goes.

I've interviewed some "celebrities" in the past which a few people liked, but it's been years since I last did one. It's just like riding a bicycle (so I'm told), so don't be put off. Let's face it, writing questions and answers is easy. Transcribing audio is much worse, but I can't be bothered to do that. If I wanted to go that route I'd work out how to record Skype for yet another podcast which nobody ever listens to. There are only about a million of those to compete with.

Since I subscribe to a more global version of Alfred Hitchcock's controversial view that "all actors are cattle", I've never cared unduly about film credits or who does what behind the scenes. I'm all about the story being told and how well it's being told rather than anyone being famous for being in that story. Other than knowing the names of the most obvious talents and mechanics, it may disappoint you that I don't have an up-to-date encyclopedic knowledge of all members of the horror genre. I wouldn't know who to contact or who really falls into the "horror celebrity" category now that so many lines have been blurred by age, careers ending, and social networking. We all go to the toilet, so nobody is that special just because they have more money or fame than someone else. I'll talk to anyone no matter how big or small they think they are.

I'm therefore leaving this offer open to ANYONE (apart from my boggle-eyed, goggle-eyed stalker) who wishes to be either an interviewer or an interviewee. Of course, because no payment is being asked for or offered, this may not come to anything at all. It all depends on you. The ball, as they say, is in in your court. Leave a comment below or feel free to talk to me about it on Twitter.

A Week Without Horror

I haven't watched any horror movies for almost a week now.

For one thing, it's been too hot to concentrate, and for another, there's been loads of "horror community" drama going on which is far more interesting than a bunch of silly movies. I am, of course, referring to the latest plagiarism scandal.

Considering how I've already talked about it on social networking sites, I'm not going to get into another huge discussion of that foolishness on my blog. Lianne Spiderbaby won't be the first or last to plagiarise movie reviews from other bloggers, and just from knowing who she's associated with in the past, it didn't surprise me in the least that she turned out to be a fake. As far as I know, she didn't steal any of my stuff, so I don't really care, but I still found it absolutely hilarious to watch "the mighty" fall. Seeing a certain gender-based clique trying to promote their other half-arsed movie reviewers throughout the fallout straddled the line between irritating and desperate. Thus, I've also had a great time pointing a finger at them like Nelson Muntz from "The Simpsons" and laughing.

Suffice it to say that Lianne Spiderbaby's plagiarism highlighted a lot of hypocrisy from people who should know better, especially in the cases of anyone who tried to defend her actions because of her gender or (allegedly) because she's pretty. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and she does nothing for me, but this kind of "white knighting" nonsense is the bane of the internet (and real life). Many people stuck their feet in their mouths and lost all respect among their peers, friendships which spanned decades went down the drain, and insults were hurled at innocent bystanders who did nothing but see Lianne Spiderbaby's fraud for the crime it was.

The result of this is that I'm probably not the only person who is never going to buy another copy of Fangoria, Rue Morgue, or Video Watchdog again. But since I rarely buy obsolete papery media anyway, my attitude to those magazines is kind of redundant. All of them had their heyday before you could look up whatever you wanted on the internet instantly and for free. With the importance of the news aspect gone, these low-brow rags aren't much more than advertisements strung together with badly written fanboy articles which barely interest anyone. Hell, people aren't even reading blogs anymore, so what chance do niche magazines have in the foreseeable future?

In more important news, I've finally started watching the Drive-in Classics 32 Movie Collection which I bought last Summer. Some of the movies are pretty good although they aren't much of a step-up from softcore porn in most cases. I find nothing wrong with that whatsoever though, and I love Mill Creek's Crown International acquisitions for that very reason.

I briefly thought about starting up another blog just to review "drive-in movies", but I can't really compete with an excellent site like "The Deuce". I've found all kinds of interesting movies listed there which I didn't know even existed before. I always give credit where it's due, and I have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed browsing through their database. Check it out if you have the time.

Since I've been sacrificing quite a few of my social networking followers to the horror DVD gods in the hope of something good turning up to write about (although, in reality, it's also because they've bored me to tears with kiddified nerd-crap which I have no interest in such as San Diego Comic Con), I'll probably be back with more articles and reviews next week. It all depends on if the weather cools down enough to not have to sit in a room full of fans and an ancient air conditioner which barely redresses the balance between being boiled alive in the humidity or deafened, but we'll see what happens.

Dr Blood's Video Vault is resting

If you read this blog regularly then you may have noticed things slowing down quite considerably over the last couple of months. There are two reasons for this: There aren't any new horror films worth writing about, and I've lost interest in rewatching older horror films. You could say that I've lost my horror mojo.

Thus, I think now is a good time to take an indefinite break. There won't be anything in the cinemas until the "Evil Dead" remake (which I'm not all that bothered about seeing), and people just aren't reading or writing horror blogs right now anyway. I doubt that the remaining few horror bloggers will last much longer if they keep going back over the same old ground because, quite frankly, they are boring everyone to death too.

Yeah, horror bloggers, we get it. You don't like the remakes, you think practical effects are better than CGI, and you're all stuck in the '80s trying to relive the childhoods that you wish you'd had through yakking about the same old slasher films and their clones until you have nothing else to say. Sorry, guys, but I was never a willing passenger on your nostalgia trips. I'm not American so I don't buy into your hobby horror filmmakers. I prefer extreme horror and the supernatural to your horror-comedies, slashers and zombie films, and if I want to perv over boobs, I'll just Google some real porn. You all need to stop collecting little dollies of Bruce Campbell, tatty old posters, or illegible $25 scribbles from conventions, and move out of your parents' basements. I have nothing in common with any of you, and I don't really like you that much either. I never have.

I might get tempted to do more work on my abandoned "The Pit and the Pendulum" project, and I will undoubtedly still find more to add to "The Horror Cats" eventually, but I feel that I've done enough already. For now, "Dr Blood's Video Vault" is resting. I need to leave the internet alone as much as possible because I've already wasted too much of my life poncing about with horror films meant for teenagers as it is.

It's 2013. Things aren't like they were in 2006 when everybody in horror got to know each other through MySpace and it was all such a novelty. Thanks to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, the divide between fans and their idols is now paper thin. You can message anybody who has something to sell and get an answer instantly no matter who you are. The magic has completely gone out of show business and "celebrity" unless you are an easily impressed twelve-year-old. For those of us who were already in the know, there was never anything there but smoke and mirrors (and bullshit) to begin with.

This is not the end of me, Dr Blood, or my web shenanigans. But whether or not I'll ever want to reclaim my place among the most prolific horror bloggers will remain to be seen. It's very unlikely. I may even invent a new web persona and start writing about something completely different. Stranger things have happened.

I've got nothing to write about

This is awful.

I've been going through various subjects to find something to write about, but other than a review of "Beautiful Creatures" which I'm still crafting into an acceptable level of hatred, I have nothing for you right now.

I haven't been completely idle though. I've been watching a lot of documentaries about WW2 on YouTube to fill in my lack of education about when the world was in black and white. Now I at least know who was in league with who, why, and how it all turned out. You can blame the British education system for that little foray into the realms of the History Channel because all I knew beforehand was that the Nazis had really snazzy Hugo Boss uniforms.

Also on YouTube, the levels of mental retardation have reached a new low with hundreds of channels making their own version of the "Harlem Shake" meme. In case you don't know what that is, some gimp dances badly for a few seconds then a quick cut reveals everybody around him dancing like maniacs to the same crappy '80s hiphop. It's funny once. Grudgingly, I suppose the "Harlem Shake" is slightly more entertaining than "planking" or last year's "coning". The latter was, quite frankly, just a shocking waste of ice cream.

The highlight of February has actually been the latest song from Blood On The Dance Floor. I probably shouldn't, but I do like these guys. This song makes a great anthem against my own haters out there.



In other news, it looks like Horror Movie A Day is going to come to an end any day now. He's either had enough or scored a better gig. I have no idea which it is because I don't read that blog regularly. Some people might call it a shame, but I can imagine how liberating it must be not to have to write about crappy horror movies every day just for a gimmick. I'm 99% sure that this will be the last year of "Dr Blood's Video Vault" too since I've grown out of horror.

As a prelude to my own abandonment of the genre, I've been rather quiet on the internet recently. I even gave up on the "real women in horror" series that I was doing due to lack of interest. Just to be an ass, I was eventually going to post some really sexist pictures of scream queens in kitchens or cleaning toilets to finish February off, but I can't be bothered now. The whole "women in horror month" is a ridiculous joke anyway which doesn't fool anybody. The fact that nobody in his or her right mind is ever going to donate to the "WIH" e-begging/Kickstarter projects (or any other nowadays) is a big enough victory for all of us who appreciate real talent both behind and in front of the camera. I'm not going to gloat or kick those girls while they're down. I may need one of them to make me a sandwich one day.

Maybe for the rest of the year, I'll do an occasional series of posts about multi-feature horror DVDs which I still haven't got round to watching. Maybe something will turn up at the cinema which amazes us all again and creates a whole new generation of horror fans who will flock to my blog to find out what was worth watching years ago. I doubt either thing will happen.

If you have an idea for something I can write about, leave me a comment below. I'm up for all kinds of movie related challenges other than comedies, cartoons or Disney.

A quick tally of the films I've been watching recently

As you know, I have the attention span of a gnat so I often give up on horror movies for a while and drift around other parts of the internet looking for entertainment. Sometimes I find it, sometimes I don't, but this time I got caught up with watching a lot of older "classic" movies which I had to work my way through before coming back to the horror genre.

I intended February to be all about the real women in horror movies from every era, but I got bored with writing about them. What's the point when you can look all that stuff up on the IMDb and Wikipedia anyway? Like so many bloggers, I don't really add anything new except rehashes of the same old information (and misinformation occasionally).

Thus, I started "reading around the subject" or, in this case, "watching around the subject" (because I don't read and I'm ignorant, yo). It all started with tracking down a documentary series on YouTube called "Hollywood: A Celebration of the American Silent Film" which I didn't even know existed back in the day.



It took a couple of days to finish, but I thoroughly enjoyed this series (only two parts about war films were missing which didn't interest me anyway). I learnt lots from it and was going to write something against modern "indie horror films" using things from the earlier episodes as examples, but I couldn't be bothered. You all know that I hate "hobby horror" handycam movies so there's no point in flogging a dead horse anymore. Nobody but the very retarded has bought any of those films for the last two or three years anyway. Let's face it, they were never in the same league as the Hollywood pioneers unless you include "stag" films.

Once I'd finished the series, I got the urge to watch a lot more old movies so I just started randomly choosing films which I'd never watched all the way through before. My list included old Laurel and Hardy comedies (the only comedies I can stand), "Betty Boop" and "Tom and Jerry" cartoons, "Sunset Boulevard" (1950), "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane" (1962), "Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte" (1964), "Mommie Dearest" (1981), "Chaplin" (1992), "Gods and Monsters" (1998), and "The Notorious Bettie Page" (2005). For some reason, I also ended up watching "Behind the Camera: The Unauthorized Story of Mork & Mindy" (2005) which had a great impersonation of Robin Williams in it. When I have nothing better to watch, I quite like biopics depending on who the subject is or who is playing them. I draw the line at Kurt Russell as Elvis though. Puh-lease.

I had a few other films lined up to watch which I ended up switching off because I got bored with them. In particular, "The Wild Bunch" (1969) was supposed to be really good, but I didn't find it very violent and gave up on it after the shootout at the start. One of the top 100 films ever made? Really? Nope, not for me. I'll probably never try to watch "Citizen Kane" (1941) or "The Third Man" (1949) ever again either. Jesus wept! I'd rather watch the banana boat song from "Beetlejuice" 20 times in a row than that shit. Actually, no, I wouldn't. I'd prefer to be struck blind and deaf for a week than have to endure that load of bollocks!

In my "To Watch" list, I still have "It Happened One Night" (1934), "Sullivan's Travels" (1941), "Cabaret" (1972), and "Hollywoodland" (2006). I have no idea about the contents of any of them other than "Cabaret" which I know is a musical and may end up getting snapped in half along with "Chicago" (2002) if I ever watch either.

I'm in the mood for a gritty yet mainstream drama full of taboo subjects, but there's just nothing out there that I haven't seen. Any suggestions are welcomed although I don't do comedies or westerns. Feel free to leave something good as a comment.

Ten Things People Do on the Internet Which Need a Reality Check and Other Follies

It's been a funny old week for me on the internet (and in real life) so I thought I'd share a few random things which have been amusing me. With this nasty, rainy weather outside, we could all do with a bit of cheering up, right? Just leave it to me to spread more mirth, merriment and downright hatred with yet another controversial blog post. Enjoy!


1. Capitalising Every Letter At The Start Of A Blog Post Even When It Doesn't Work Grammatically.

Don't you just hate that? The rule has always been that the words "and", "to", "from", "or", "nor", "the", "an", "a", etc. in the middle of a heading are supposed to begin with lower case letters not upper case ones. I suppose it's better than PeOpLe wHo TyPe lIkE tHiS but not by much.

I also loathe really long blog post titles which take up half my Blogroll. Seriously, if you want to title your post "All the things I did on holiday in Marbella where I went with my mum and dad who got sunburnt and stayed in a chalet by the beach", get a grip!

Don't even get me started on the people who think it's really clever to title their blogs as "[center]Horror Movie Reviews | Games | Books | Music | All things about zombies | Little Cakes | Wicca | Furry Things | Bronies | Horror Rules Okay![/center]" I spend ages deleting all that crap from my Blogroll and then retitling everyone's blogs with all the spelling mistakes and non-functional HTML tags fixed anyway.


2. I'll teach you a lesson, I'll unfollow you... so there!

This one has to be the funniest trend on all the social networks and even Blogger (which is just a glorified MySpace after all).

Over the years, I think I've been unfollowed by as many people as have followed me, and I've unfollowed probably four times that number myself just because I grew out of certain cliques or no longer shared the same interests as former "internet friends". I've blocked and ignored quite a few too. But, I can honestly say that I've never unfollowed someone out of a sense of "I'll show you how much I hate you by unfollowing you!"

How does that work exactly? You hate somebody so much that you unfollow them then continue to kite over their social networking profiles to see what they are saying so that you can whinge about it on your own status updates which the person in question doesn't even read?! Trust me, once I unfollow somebody, it's a case of "out of sight, out of mind". I couldn't care less if the unfollowed are calling me the next Adolf Hitler or worse on their own blogs for all the good that it will do them. I certainly don't lose any followers or sleep through it, and there have even been times when I've gained followers because of whingers whose readers got curious about who was being whinged about.

The same thing happens on message boards. Somebody gets the arse and thinks, "I'll leave the board and take my ball home with me so nobody else can play with it". It's petty, childish stuff, but the internet is full of petty childishness anyway. Fully grown adults are worse than real kids once allowed to hide behind the alleged safety of their keyboards.


3. The Django doll fiasco.

Have you seen the NECA Django dolls which are now banned from eBay for "racism" but are still being sold by greedy Amazon dealers for between $300-1700 each? How can a little plastic figure of a movie character be racist? Even given the nature of the movie, having watched it and reviewed it, I can't see how "Django" might encourage a return to slavery. Did any of the complainers even watch the film?

Who in their right mind complains about collectible dollies? Worse, who complains to the company trying to sell these things on the internet? What moron who ordered the stock would then withdraw the items and lose their investment? Give me a break! The only thing that's happened is that the price has been annoyingly jacked-up to extortionate levels, and some more popularity has been generated for Quentin Tarantino's movie.

Will six "action figures" (only two of which even look like the characters in the film) cause that much racism? It's not as if they come with branding irons and whips. My Broomhilda certainly didn't anyway, and I've had all her clothes off several times to check!

Banning toys won't make any difference to America's history, "white guilt", or the racism in America which is as bad today as it's always been. Doesn't Django end the film as a free man after having defeated slavery single-handedly? Or did I miss something?

This makes me wonder if Princess Leia slave girl dolls will be next in line for a banning? I hope not. I haven't bought one yet, but I have no desire to work like a slave just to be able to afford one in the future. B'dum tish!


4. The "Lamers of Horror" clique.

Have you noticed the different cliques (pronounced "cleeks" not "clicks", by the way) among horror bloggers? There are those of us with a mid-range number of GFC followers (350-450) who attract a certain more intellectual group of readers while there are others with well below 200 GFC followers who tend to attract those you can really only describe as "tasteless morons who would be better off hanging out with the scene kids on Tumblr". Of course, there are some new bloggers who simply haven't achieved any more followers in the short time they've been writing, but that's another story.

I've actually removed my Google Friend Connect widget because it doesn't fit in with how I want my blog to look, plus nobody has used it for the last year. It doesn't do what it was intended to, i.e. block undesirables, so it's a useless addition to anybody's blog if they aren't playing the popularity contest. If you must know, I ended up with 354 followers on it, but over half of them are now from dead Blogger accounts. Some people followed me then stopped writing a few months later but didn't remove their accounts. No, I know I get the blame for everything, but it wasn't my fault. Blogging simply isn't for everyone.

Anyway, I suppose you want to know about the "Lamers of Horror" clique. These are the horror bloggers who have been blogging on and off for the last three or four (or even five) years and still don't have over 200 followers. Some have less than half of that because, quite simply, they have no content on their blogs worth reading and spend all their time commenting other bloggers just to get follow/comment backs.

Their usual trick is to write "Great review!" on each other's blog posts even when the "review" isn't great or doesn't count as a review. Then the recipient is obliged to write something on the giver's latest hogwash containing more sycophantic nonsense. You'll see this quite often if you scan the comments sections of some of the poorer horror blogs out there. You'll also find it rife among fashion bloggers, photo bloggers, and any other "girlie" blogs. You won't see it on a blog like mine because I don't get a lot of that. I also periodically delete the old comments anyway.

The "Lamers of Horror" are mostly girls (or pretend girls) with maybe a few dozen infatuated guys in their clique. Naturally, they all follow each other. "Birds of a feather flock together" and all that jazz. The same avatars show up over and over again in their GFC widgets in almost the same order. Woe betide you if you annoy one of them because all their little buddies who share the same brain cell will instantly disappear from your GFC widget to "teach you a lesson". It's happened to me because I tend to piss off a lot of people. Do I care? Hell, no. Just be prepared for much laughter when it happens to you. Now you know what the phenomenon is, it's hilarious.

Another thing which highlights the "Lamers of Horror" is their appalling taste in horror movies. They invariably prefer "horror comedies" or "horror for kiddies" instead of anything with any grit to it. You won't find them praising the virtues of "The Human Centipede 2" or "A Serbian Film", but you will find them retreading the same tired old ground about "Beetlejuice", "Ghostbusters", "A Nightmare on Elm Street", or R.L. Stine's "Goosebumps" books. For some reason, I always imagine them all as looking like the "Ermagerd Gersebermps" girl but even less attractive.

"Lamers of Horror" also don't know how to write movie reviews. Perhaps they never learned how to do it in school or they are just lazy bloggers. Either way, what they do is retell the story in their own words then just add a couple of lines such as "It was a really great movie. I liked it a lot." Yeah, it makes you not want to live on this planet anymore, doesn't it?

If you find yourself caught up in the "Lamers of Horror" clique, just don't reply to them. It's more trouble than it's worth and will drag your own blog down. In the past, I've enjoyed pissing them off until they've left my GFC widget, but I'm sick and twisted that way.


5. Google Plus is shutting out people who like to use their screen names rather than real names.

This happened to me earlier this week when I got an email from Google+ telling me that their system didn't recognise "Dr Blood" as a valid name. I could either use my real name (which is hardly the internet's biggest secret but no longer leads to my blog since I've been writing under a pseudonym for the last ten years) or I could delete my account. I chose to delete my Google+ account. I never used it much and could barely understand it. All those circles and an interface that I couldn't make head nor tail of! Nope, not for me.

It was an absolute bugger trying to find the place to delete my Google+ account because they've hidden the link to do it so well. After (ironically) Googling to find out the answer, I got rid of the pointless thing once and for all while still keeping all the other Google goodies (such as this blog) intact. Be very careful what you choose to delete if you do the same thing because you might lose everything in one go.

This also brings me back to the GFC widget which Google have been phasing out ever since they removed it from third-party sites such as Wordpress early last year. Apparently, Google want everybody to use Google+ profiles for their blogs which lose all the information that you have on your Blogger ID profile. Don't do it! I did it and then had to put everything back. What a pain in the ass! There's a new "Google+ Followers" widget to replace the GFC, but it's never going to catch on. It does even less than the original GFC widget unless you want to broadcast all your fake friends to the world to make yourself look popular.


6. Little kids on the internet.

Why do parents let little kids around 10 or 11 years old use the internet? Do these kids really need porn at that age? What are they even doing on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and all the other social networking sites which used to demand that kids be at least 13 years old before they could sign up?

I'll tell you what they are doing: Trolling!

Have you ever seen the comments on YouTube (not on my account because I don't allow comments) full of swearing, grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, run on sentences without punctuation, and kids stupid enough to announce their age at the end of them? Typical example: "Hey biatch u cn just kill urself cos lyke ur jelly bro... and u dont lyke anytang cos your stoopid and Imma 12." Jesus wept!

Take your goddamned kids off the internet! Give them a plastic bag and tell them to go play in the traffic or something! Or, I don't know, why not do something constructive like spend some time with them instead of using the internet as a babysitter?


7. Little kids at horror conventions.

LOL WUT? I heard about this on a friend of mine's podcast where a woman phoned-in to say that she was so disgusted by the in-fighting among horror cliques that she would no longer be taking her 8 and 11 year old children to horror conventions! GOOD!

Why would you take kids who aren't legally old enough to watch horror movies to an indoor fleamarket full of wannabe "suicide girls" and sweaty comicbook nerds who are all drinking straight from the bottle and swearing at each other anyway? This is as bad as parents who take their squalling brats into R-rated movies to disrupt the enjoyment of the movie for everyone else.

Keep your kids at home! And "in-fighting cliques", keep on doing it! It's funny!


8. People who get butthurt over movie reviews.

This makes me laugh my arse off (not literally or figuratively as that would require hospitalisation) because it's so stupid!

Unless you made the movie in question, invested your own money in it and stand to lose revenue from a bad review, you have no reason to get so emotionally attached to a product. Movies are just products designed to make money. That's why the "entertainment industry" is also called "show business" with the clue being in the second word.

If I buy a DVD or pay for a ticket to a movie which doesn't satisfy me, I'm going to rip that movie to shreds on my blog. I paid for the right to do so in the same way that if I bought a meal and didn't like the taste of it, I'm going to have something to say about that as well.

Being British, I'm not actually much of a complainer in restaurants or stores (I'm a rather pleasant customer actually, full of "pleases" and "thank yous", and I always leave a tip), but if somebody makes a crappy movie, what do you think I'm going to say about it?

Unlike the big name sell-out sites, I'm not here to promote anything (except when I've been paid to do so, in which case you'll be as surprised as I am!) and all my reviews are 100% what I really think of the films I watch. Although I try to be objective, of course personal taste plays a part which is why I despise "hobby horror" or "backyard epics". That doesn't mean that big-budget theatrical movies get a free pass either. I'm even harder on them because they have the budgets and experience behind them to be better.

I get a lot of hate behind the scenes (on the other side of the comments form) from complete idiots who you would think made the films themselves. I rarely hear from the directors or actors, but in the past, the ones who have contacted me have agreed that what I had to say about their work was fair. One even apologised because I didn't like his film. Yeah, I felt a little bit bad, but his film made me feel worse so I didn't have any remorse for long. Still, it was nice of him to visit.

So when I hate a crappy movie, don't shoot the messenger! I paid to see it, I gave it a fair chance, but it didn't work for one reason or another. You hate me because I hate a movie? Well, I hate you because you're a dumbass. Tit for tat, baby! Feel free to unfollow me for hating your favourite movie because that'll really teach me a lesson!

If people want me to stop hating movies, they need to make some better ones.


9. The number of followers/friends/likes popularity contest and jealousy.

Here's the thing, you can have a million followers on the social networks or your blog, but unless each one is sending you a dollar every month, what good does it do you?

As I said, I have 354 followers on here (maybe more who follow in other ways or invisibly), around 758 on Twitter (although it keeps changing up and down), 312 on Facebook, and various numbers on other sites. Do they all send me money? Nope. One did, once, but as a rule, no. I'm not that popular, but within my little circle of people who I chat to regularly, I suppose I am. I know some actors, directors, and musicians both in real life and online, but that doesn't entitle me to any financial reward or "basking in their reflected glory" either. I'm just a blogger who writes for a bit of fun. So why all the jealousy?

Obviously, if you are a movie star or a pop star, the chances are that you will have several million followers who can't wait to give you all their money for your next product, but that doesn't happen for movie reviewing leeches. Yes, that's what movie reviewers and critics are: LEECHES! We're the worst kind of journalists. We don't contribute anything, we just take and regurgitate. Even the news sites only copy each other with a few words changed here and there. No matter how original your writing is, if you are reviewing a movie, the chances are that somebody else is saying exactly the same things somewhere else but with better sentence construction and more snarky jokes.

Should that make us all jealous of someone who has better writing skills? Maybe. If that jealousy spurs us on to improve our own style, it's a good thing. But this negative, hating jealousness has to stop. So what if someone has 10,000 GFC followers? It just means that they were in the right place at the right time and play the game a bit better than others. Why hate them for it?

In some cases, popular critics and reviewers deserve a certain amount of hate for spreading misinformation and for selling-out. That's understandable. But you really need a reality check if you hate somebody for having a bigger number of "pretend friends" on the internet than you do. That's like hating someone for having more cows on Farmville.


10. Social networking is useless for bloggers.

How long do you spend on Facebook, Twitter and all the other social networks each day rather than writing content for your blog? Hours and hours, probably. Do you realise how much more you could achieve by ignoring them and just blogging? Let me tell you as a person who spends days at a time on Farmville, Angry Birds, and all the other apps, plus bullshitting on Twitter, it's a lot of wasted time.

The other problem with Facebook, Twitter and, especially, Tumblr is that they've become the virtual gated communities that AOL once was. For a while it was MySpace, then it was Proboards and vBulletin sites, but things are always changing. Once somebody is on those sites, you aren't going to pry them loose very easily to look at your blog. You'll read all sorts of crap about how you need to use social networking to improve your audience, but it's a lie.

I have a Facebook page, and apart from five people, I don't think any of them have looked at my blog once. Yes, just five actually clicked the links placed on there by the NetworkedBlogs app. The other 307 (or whatever) just like the silly jokes and pictures that I post so they have something to share with their friends. They aren't going to leave Facebook for a second because it's too much fun to read all their friends complaining about their lives on their own "walls" than come to a horror movie review blog.

Twitter is just as bad. Sometimes somebody will take a quick look at where a link heads, but most of the time they won't. Again it's far more fun for them to list the #tenbiggestthingsIcangetinmymouth or wittily talk to themselves with whatever other topic is trending than leave the comfort zone of that environment.

Outside of Facebook and Twitter is a big, scary internet full of more things than LOLcats and memes, but some people just aren't very adventurous. The only way to get traffic to your blog from social networks is to give things away (which lasts for as long as the giveaway does) or sell a product regularly. If the only thing you have to "sell" is a free piece of writing, nobody wants to know.

So forget the social networks and just concentrate on filling your blog with good content if you want more readers. Fairweather followers and pretend friends who you'll never meet in real life won't do you any good.


If you've enjoyed or agree with anything I've said above, let me know in the comments below. If you disagree, I couldn't care less so please keep it to yourself. Yes, I do only want to surround myself by people who think the same way that I do. I'd be a bloody fool if I chose to surround myself with enemies and haters, wouldn't I?