Apr 04 2024

The Road to Reconstruction – Day 31

I got the remaining 75 reviews in the shorts section done, so that’s one more section taken care of. I then did some more manga reviews, but only a few as my evening was mostly spent catching up on anime and not the kind I want to be multitasking while watching. (You can look forward to more on that this weekend.) I’ll be cycling back around to the movie reviews, but I need to make some time for actual story writing if I want to get an update out. Stay tuned.

Apr 03 2024

The Road to Reconstruction – Day 30

I only got 50 reviews done, mostly because it was taking so much time to go over the Kimetsu no Yaiba reviews. Then I go to the Fullmetal Alchemist reviews and its much more in line with my other reviews, a quick summary of impressions, generally spoiler-free, rather than what’s basically a full recap. One day I might go in and rewrite more summary-style reviews and make the recaps separate posts. Anyway, I’m going to switch over to the shorts section and hopefully wrap that up. We’ll see how it goes. Stay tuned.

Apr 02 2024

The Road to Reconstruction – Day 29

I was reminded of how much time new review posts take as I’ve restarted updates. As a result, I didn’t spend as much time on restoration work as I would have otherwise, but it’s really high time I start moving things forward. I only got 25 reviews up. It’s something. Anyway, as there are more comic reviews to be done, I’ll go ahead and switch over to that. We’ll see how much progress I can make. Stay tuned.

Mar 31 2024

The Road to Reconstruction – Day 28

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.

Mar 30 2024

The Road to Reconstruction – Day 27

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.

Mar 29 2024

The Road to Reconstruction – Day 26

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.

Mar 28 2024

The Road to Reconstruction – Day 25

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.

Mar 27 2024

The Road to Reconstruction – Day 24

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.

Mar 26 2024

The Road to Reconstruction – Day 23

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.

Mar 24 2024

The Road to Reconstruction – Day 22

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.