(Not Very) Special Announcement

Hello, blog fans! I find myself all caught up on my blogging backlog, and with a little free time, so I thought I'd do a little random post.

I had meant to commemorate my 1,000th post, but we passed that about 50 posts ago, in early July, say. I've started my tenth year of blogging - when I started, blogging was cool. But I remember back in the 1990s, when I had a movie review program - sort of a Leonard Maltin on a floppy. It let you comment on films, and I kept that up for years. I think I rated about 200 movies before I quit using it. So I was proto-blogging before we really had an internet.

Since this blog is about my Netflix queue, that means Netflix has been around for more than 10 years. Hard to believe. It has changed a lot in that time, becoming a streaming service and a content creator. They want 50% of their content to be created internally. That's fine, they make some great shows. But they seem to be getting to 50% by decreasing the amount of external content available. I like streamed content just fine, but what I really want is selection.

The number of titles available on the DVD/Blu-ray side is much greater, but there are still too many unavailable movies. I have 114 "Saved" movies: movies that are in the system but not going out. Only two are recent releases that aren't available yet. Some are obscure: Old kung fu films, obscure musical documentaries, black-and-white comedies that belong on TCM. But, come on! You can't rent Speed!

Speaking of TCM, there is a new streaming service in town: Filmstruck. It's a streaming service run by TCM and Criterion featuring classic and hard-to-find films. I might give them a try but:

• "Rotating, curated collection": in other words, we choose, not you.
• I've seen a lot of the classics. Are there enough hard-to-finds to make it worthwhile? They advertise "hundreds" of films, not thousands.
• I don't have a way to get this on my TV, and I don't want to watch on my laptop.
• The site doesn't seem very browsable. It might be hard to find anything here, unless it gets "curated" 

And of course, we need to keep Netflix so we can see all the superhero movies that we love, even though it isn't cool anymore.

So we'll see how it goes. I would love to see a platform like the old Netflix, with every DVD you can think of, with some curation available - maybe even third-party curation. I originally thought of this blog that way: Maybe you would want to watch what I'm watching. I was frustrated by a lot of film blogs talking about movies that were only available as bootlegs, or at film festivals. So for now, I'll keep plugging along the old-fashioned 2000s way. Hope you enjoy.

And thanks for reading!

Oh yeah, the reason that I'm all caught up on my blogging is that I BROKE MY STUPID ANKLE! So I have to get around on crutches, so I have plenty of time to blog. That's my announcement.