I once again let myself get wrapped up on the back end (not to mention spending an hour making adjustments to the currencies of the Tellus Arc and researching Hellenistic warships), but I still got 75 movie reviews knocked out (making my current total of reviews uploaded 666, just in case you find that at all ominous). In the course of some of the adjustments I was making, I discovered I had three more movie reviews than I originally thought (due to a couple absences of linebreaks throwing off my count), so eagle-eyed readers noting the change to the count in my “What’s in a Name?” post now know the reason for it.

I’ve got some big plans for Easter, so I may not make that much progress, but what progress I do make will be in the TV section. Stay tuned.

I was rather overoptimistic, thinking I might have a shot at finishing the shorts section all in one day. In my defense, I was doing a lot of work on the back end, things like the spellcheck sweep and making the naming convention more consistent throughout (as the shorts section was particularly bad about inconsistent file naming). Of course, all this work you can’t see will ultimately speed up the work that you can, so that’s something, I guess. I managed to get 60 reviews knocked out, so that’s nearly half. Not too shabby.

One minor thing worth noting is that I reclassified the miniseries Childhood’s End to the shorts section because, well, miniseries get covered there and it never should’ve been filed in the TV section. It always stuck in my head, but I could never commit to changing it until now.

Tempting as it is to just go ahead and finish the shorts section, I think I’ll cycle back around to the movies and continue with the iterative model of reconstructing the remaining four sections of reviews one chunk at a time. I’m definitely not going to meet my previously stated goal of having the site fully restored by Easter, but as long as I’m still moving forward, that has to count for something. We’ll see what the new day brings. Stay tuned.

Not having to run around and such, I was able to devote a lot more time to my work and got a much more respectable 75 reviews posted. I probably could’ve finished another page, but in the interest of future efficiency, I decided to to do a spellcheck sweep of all the reviews to add names and such to the custom dic to ensure consistent spelling and whatnot. This will save time that would otherwise be spent correcting entries as I go. There will still be some of that, but now there’ll be less of it. Now, if you’re wondering why I didn’t spellcheck them in the first place, recall that I haven’t added terms to the custom dic in years (for reasons I’ve explained in a previous post), so I’m used to seeing tons of red squigglies that don’t mean anything, which makes it easy to overlook actual typos and such. Anyway, I plan on giving the shorts a go next. If I’m super efficient, I could conceivably finish the whole section in one day, but I doubt I’ll do that well. I may knock out the remainder Saturday if I’m fairly close. You’ll find out the plan in the next post. Stay tuned.

The day’s progress wasn’t all that impressive, just 25 manga reviews posted. I think I might spend another day on the manga reviews before switching over to the shorts, try to get a little more knocked out first. We’ll see how it goes. Stay tuned.

I decided to break into the TV reviews today and got 75 knocked out. I didn’t do quite as well as yesterday, but I had a couple big meetings at work and I napped a good chunk of the evening. Still, it was a respectable bit of progress. Next we’ll work on some manga reviews. Stay tuned.

Taking a day off from my labors should have hurt my progress, but I seem to have worked at double the pace of earlier efforts. I knocked out a whopping 123 movie reviews, and that was with some adjustments to multiple entries. Why, if I could keep up this pace it’d only take another… two weeks or so… -_- Yes, the load remains a heavy one, but there’s nothing to it but to do it. I’m thinking about rotating sections so I’m not just hammering away at the same thing, so maybe we’ll dig into the TV stuff for tomorrow. Stay tuned.

I didn’t do any work on the website, so I might as well talk a bit about what I did instead. You may recall that I mentioned doing some reworking of the House Wulf family tree. Of course, if I did it for one of the Eight Stars, I’d have to do it for the others, and some were a lot more effort than others. I was just kinda picking at it until I just went in full-bore and devoted a whole day’s efforts to it.

One of my dictionaries, one with encyclopedic material, included a section on the etymology of names and that was my first reference when it came to naming characters. I would go on to transcribe by hand a dedicated dictionary of names and compile numerous other sources as well. That being said, when I was first naming characters, I was only looking at the meaning of the name. I wasn’t thinking about the heritage of the character, whether the name was anachronistic or not, etc. I’ve gone through one or two passes of revisions over the years, but amid the reconstruction efforts (and my earlier campaign of proofing my manuscripts), I started thinking about these things even harder and working to amend incongruencies where I found them. While doing this, I was also painting a clearer history of the families. For instance, House Wulf was originally based in Gotland before moving to Skadia and later Titan (then to Gladius and ultimately back to Gotland). Despite the heirs of House Wulf ultimately becoming more Northman than Gotlander, they nevertheless maintain an old Germanic naming convention. Claudius is actually the first exception (which shows that Randwulf regarded his queen more than family tradition).

Anyway, it’s been a lot of work and the results are going to reverberate throughout the Gladius Cycle. Instead of making piecemeal changes here and there, I’ll just wait to fully implement the changes when it comes time to proof the manuscripts. Fun, fun, fun, but before that, I should get back to work on the site. I imagine other detours will crop up amid the slog of plugging in the remaining 1926 reviews, so I’ll be sure to comment then. Stay tuned.

Rather than just continue to slog through movie reviews, I decided to shake things up a bit. You could argue that there’s no point in putting up the skeletons of the other sections until I’m ready to start plugging in content, but that’s what I decided to do. I realize my book review section is comparatively low priority, but with only eleven entries, it didn’t take long to get it knocked out and have one less tab in the text editor. I decided to reindex the video game reviews into decade sections like I have elsewhere, even though I don’t have all that many at present. Might as well be consistent across the board. (The book section is an exception because A) I doubt I’ll ever have that many book reviews posted, and B) indexing by decade could get ridiculous given the time span I could be dealing with.) Since I had the reindexing of the video game section on my mind, and because it just has 45 entries, I devoted my day to finishing that, so the two shortest sections are done. That’s something.

There was a minor detour when I realized I’d been mislabelling this series as “The Road to Recovery” since Day 8, so I had to go back and correct the entries. An editor’s work never ends.

I imagine I’ll get back to the movie reviews tomorrow. What I may start doing is alternating each day with the four remaining sections so I’m steadily building up all of them instead of just weighting my efforts in favor of just one. Something to consider. See where those efforts get me next time. Stay tuned.

Although I didn’t have any work-work making demands of my time, I decided to spend some time with my financials, to include filing my US taxes. I’m sure Intuit appreciates the $60 to keep Uncle Sugar off my back for another year.

Anyway, even just working on the site after lunch, I made some good headway, posting 59 reviews. The afternoon went so well that I can be forgiven for slacking off in the evening. I decided to take a trip down memory lane to review the misadventures of ten years ago. I just recently cleared the ledger of that fumble, so I guess that’s one more mistake of the past safely interred. Will I have the sense to stick to the safe and level road or will I venture off the beaten path again? I’ll be honest with you. If certain plans come together in the next two or three years, it may be the latter. More on that when there’s something to report. In the meantime, I’ve got a lot of work yet to do, so we’ll see how productive I can be over the weekend. I decided to start keeping count of the reviews I’ve posted to measure my progress. I currently stand at 177 of 1019 (and that’s just for movies). My labors continue… Stay tuned.

Today didn’t see massive progress, only about 20-some-odd reviews. I managed to finish my work-work, which gives me a little breathing room during the daylight hours, but when I finished, instead of working on the site right away, I was fiddling around with the Tellus world map. I’ve been trying to rework the scale of things for a while now, trying to cross-reference with some of the more proportional projections of our own world and adjusting things accordingly. Anyway, one idea I’ve had was to move the Hannibal region from the northwestern corner of the Central Continent down to the southwest, so it would be nearer to Zephyr, Notos and Euros. (You see it never did rub me right the way Boreas was so far removed from the other Kingdoms of the Wind.) To avoid changing the overall geography too much, I had to flip the Hannibal map, which then required me to adjust all the references in the peripheral materials and later in Tellus when I get to proofing it. The Eastern Steppes where the Dragonriders hail from is no longer quite so expansive, but they’re closer to the Valley of Tiamat, which makes sense. Also, with the Dwarf and Goblin communities closer to the ones we know from TTWC, it makes more sense that there would be a lot of cultural and linguistic continuity between them. It’s a bit of a sticking point that El-Sidar, El-Alar and El-Haman are now somewhat clustered together, leaving El-Simil as the only one of the Five Ancients in the Northern Hemisphere, but I suppose it could work conceptually for El-Simil to be more isolated among the Elven communities. As for the former location of Hannibal, I’ve decided to dub the region “Hyperboreas” and add a legend that King Boreas fled there after his ouster. It’s not the northernmost land if I maintain my current configuration of the world, but it is the northern extremity of the Central Continent, so there’s that.

What does all this have to do with the reconstruction efforts on the site? Other than being the reason why more progress wasn’t made, not much, but in the absence of more to report, it’s something to talk about, right? Anyway, there should be less stuff making demands of my time tomorrow and there’s the weekend beyond that, so we’ll see what we can get done. Stay tuned.