Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Okay, this is looking pretty official now.

Jeez, this kicks livejournal right in the dick. Either that or I'm easily impressed within a very short amount of time by free webhosts that require a minimum of effort to get your shit online (probably why I was with geocities for 11 years). If you have a compelling argument to sway me over to another blog site, send it on, but right now this is looking like the place!

Some history for the uninitiated:

The Cavalcade Of Schlock started in 1998-ish when I didn't even really know I was writing movie reviews. At the start, I was just writing posts on the alt.horror newsgroup detailing why I wasn't enjoying the movies that the newsgroup's regular posters were regularly hailing as classics. Basically, it was me bitching.

Soon this had happened often enough that it seemed like a good idea to compile all these posts in one place, and thus the COS was born.

This was quite the snazzy novelty at the time - remember, this was back when the internet consisted of six guys with tin cans and string - and it was helped by my being cheerfully prolific, watching and writing about four movies a day for months on end (probably had something to do with my best friend at the time being some guy named Captain Morgan...and where the fuck is he now?!?). Over the next whole buncha years I drifted away from the newsgroup, as my pop-culture interests looked to a more all-genre inclusive appreciation of movies, but also music, comics, strippers, neighbour-killing, whatever - but I kept posting, if increasingly infrequently (for which my sanity is grateful), to the COS. This went on until October 2009 when apparently geocities called it quits, and I found myself having to rescue about a thousand movie reviews from cyber-oblivion. I am of mixed feelings about this; about 80% of these, I can't even read without cringing a little. But, they're an honest representation of my thoughts at the time, and I'd rather be honest than try to retroactively correct my thoughts about anything.

Another aspect of the Calvalcade was the "horrormetal" section, where I compiled a fairly vast trove of samples used in metal music, linking them to their original sources - which was, to my knowledge, the only resource of its kind for a while. How many of us can say that? Fucking me and no one else, that's who. But I didn't really have a lasting interest in it; the problem was, I got a ton of emails from people listing the samples they'd heard in songs by bands I'd never heard of and had no interest in. This is the kind of thing that would work best in a wiki-style user-edited database. I haven't rescued all that information from the archives yet, but that endeavour is in hand.

Now that the Cavalcade Of Schlock has found its new home, this is what you can expect:

-Smaller, but more regular updates. I won't wait until I have a dozen reviews up to post - if I have one, I'll throw that up there once it's done.

-More interaction between me and you, the reader. I've been pretty much shit when it comes to answering my emails - and that's honestly not going to change, because my hotmail account has always largely been used as a spam sink and not something I attach to the really important shit. My reviews were originally intended as a starting point for discussion about the movie I was writing about, and that's what I want them to be. You want to comment, please comment! Just leave a consistent name, even a made-up one, I don't want everything to come from one "anonymous" after another.

-The occasional bit of non-review bullshit. Once in a while I'm probably going to want to ramble on about some sort of thing that's tickling/bothering/arousing/stabbing me that day.

-The horrormetal thing is done, for me anyway. If somebody wants to take it over, get in touch with me.

-"Classic" reviews - the ones from the geocities days - will be reproduced verbatim, over time. If I can scarcely live with myself for having written them, I'll mention that in a comment.

That's all I've got for now. New reviews will be coming, and I've gotta alter tyrannorabbit.com to redirect to here instead of the now-dead geocities, but this is the Cavalcade Of Schlock's new home. Hope you enjoy it. And thank you for reading all this time.

7 comments:

  1. The only thing I don't like is not seeing all the funny pics of you :(

    They were supposed to be funny, right??

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  2. Only the one where I'm giving the photographer the finger OH YEAH!

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  3. There is a new "cavalcade of Schlock" website which is listed first when googled. It took me a little while to find your site as I only check it every few months (thanks to your depressing post rate). :) Sue those poseurs for lifting your name!!!

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  4. Hello! I enjoyed your reviews since 2001, so i archived your old site before geocities shutdown with teleport program just in case. So if you need it, i can e-mail an archive to you (it's 3 megs only in .rar).

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  5. Hey, glad to see that some of the old reviews will be back. The Cavalcade of Schlock was one of the first movie review sites I ever bookmarked and I'm really looking forward to reading new reviews from you.

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  6. Hey, I just found your site again for the first time since a while before Geocities closed. I found your site originally through the IMDb external reviews and have been visiting for several years. Like another poster, I found the other site of the same name by mistake. Good to see the Cavalcade back up and running.

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  7. Hi, handsome. Remember me from alt.horror? I've missed you!

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