Day: April 8, 2002

Over the weekend, I went to see Panic Room. If you like, you can read my thoughts in the little “Seen Recently” sidebar over there to the left. Personally, I like what Roger Ebert had to say about the film, which should come as no surprise since I tend to agree with Ebert on a lot of films and can usually understand where he’s coming from when we don’t. He writes:

The end game in chess, for the student of the sport, is its most intriguing aspect. The loss of pieces has destroyed the initial symmetry and created a skewed board — unfamiliar terrain in which specialized pieces are required to do jobs for which they were not designed. There is less clutter; strategy must run deeper because there are fewer alternative lines. Sacrifices may be brilliant, or they may be blunders, or only apparent blunders. Every additional move limits the options, and the prospect of defeat, swift and unforeseen, hangs over the board. That is exactly the way “Panic Room” unfolds, right down to the detail that even at the end the same rules apply, and all the choices that were made earlier limit the choices that can be made now.

The Peer-to-Peer Review Project seemed like a good idea at the time. The objective was “to let bloggers review other bloggers in a huge ring [and] introduce more bloggers to each other’s sites…” It sounded interesting enough, and far be it from me to pass up the chance to whore my weblog around, so I signed up.

Then, months later, when I had all but forgotten about the project, an e-mail arrived with the link I was supposed to review. I followed the link, poked around the site a little, and realized that I had almost nothing constructive to say. I wasn’t impressed or upset, and it wasn’t brilliant or awful. In fact, it wasn’t much of anything. There just wasn’t anything to write.

So I ignored it, until this morning when I checked my e-mail again and realized that the deadline I had thought was at least a week away — plenty of time — was, in fact, today. So I went back to the site, and I poked around a little, and eventually this is what I wrote:

My overall impression — and I wish it was not so; I wish I had more to say — is that newsance, aside from the amusing pun of its title and its straightforward, if relatively unexciting design, doesn’t have much to offer. The fact that there are only nine days of short entries, ending more than a full month ago, doesn’t help matters any. Authors Tom Biro and Misha Glezin bill the site (all eight entries of it) as “a collection of satire-ish articles manufactured by some of the most fantastic brains of our time for your reading amusement.” Obviously, that’s meant to be somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but, in all honesty, I wasn’t terribly amused by any of it. This short and seemingly discarded weblog reads like a halfhearted attempt at what the Onion and others do much better on a regular basis. And while perhaps it isn’t fair to hold newsance up to the standard of a professional publication like the Onion, it offers no special features and nothing to recommend repeat visits. A chuckle maybe, here and there, but not much else. I realize that, as a part of the peer-to-peer review project, we are encouraged “to go into detail with a few things”, but how much detail can there be in just over a week’s worth of entries? If its own authors lost interest less than two weeks into the endeavor, why should the average reader bother to even care?

And then, of course, after all of that was done and I’d fulfilled my end of the peer-to-peer responsibilities, I wandered over to Tom Biro’s personal weblog, where, wouldn’t ya know it, he writes: “i was thinking of going away from the silly newsance thing i had posted here for a while, and still haven’t deleted… i don’t obviously think i’m matt drudge or anything, but think it would be neat just to have a page with interesting news articles, rather than me posting them all over the place in my blog….”

I wish he had told someone that earlier. It might have been nice to review an active weblog.