Next Year’s Model

Film Century is cracking right along, and I’m already getting ready to plan next year’s project. How shall I torture myself in 2010?

The whole premise of doing this was to drag myself through a journalistic version of Jonathon’s Coulton’s Thing a Week project, where I’d set an ambitious long-term goal, stick to it, and try to develop my writing talent a bit along the way. I’ve already learned a little bit about writing, about cinema criticism, and about epicly shitty direct-to-DVD film. So, whether or not I actually succeed in hitting the 150 mark, this experiment is at least a nominal success.

What’s next? Being that I’m a creative but basically unoriginal internet hack, I was thinking of going back to the “review a number of things in a time period” well, but this time with games. Dear God, what a bad idea.

On the up side, this’d probably be cheaper, in terms of dollars spent versus time occupied, than going to the movies. And I do quite like games and gaming. To be honest, the FC 1.5 project has eaten up a lot of my gaming time; it might be nice to get some back.

On the down side, I probably wouldn’t get to spend as much project time with The Baker, who is perfectly happy to watch any old garbage as long as it’s projected 30 feet tall on a big white sheet and bless her for it. In fact, I’d probably have to reverse the current trend and give up movie time for the most part to make more gaming time. It’s also pretty tough to just up and finish up a couple of games in a weekend; at least with the movie project I can always cram in a 90-minute action movie here and there to catch up. And there’s the tricky issue of deciding just when I’ve played enough of a game. RPGs and a lot of action games have a story that can be started and finished, but when have you really “completed” Madden NFL or Bejeweled?

I’d have to lower the number of reviews by a lot, obviously, but I could make up for it by writing something longer. 2 sentences, perhaps? How about 100 words for every month that’s passed in the year? That way I can start small and ramp up. I know I could just write however much I have to say, but come on. At least half the point of this is to torture myself with novel and arbitrary limitation. It’s like haiku.

Or maybe games aren’t the answer. Maybe reviews aren’t the answer. There’s still plenty of time to come up with something.

I may regret this, but let’s open this up to suggestions. What will be the next year-long journalism project from fns.com?

-ssr