Meta-blogging

For a while now I’ve been reading this blog on the internet. It updates every Saturday (most of the time, although he has been known to be a little late and even not show up on occasion). It’s written by a guy in his late teens from what I can gather and yesterday marked its one year anniversary. While it’s predominantly a current affairs blog, he also does reviews of various different media, relates ‘interesting’ anecdotes from his personal life, occasionally writes fiction and showers his readers with photos from the obscene number of holidays he goes on (three in the last 12 months).

As I said his mainstay is current affairs and in the last year he’s rambled and ranted about news ranging from the benign, such as people who think the earth is flat, to the magnanimous, such as the MP expenses scandal. Despite this range he always manages to keep the same tone of not quite taking it seriously, which sometimes affects the quality of his analysis. He does occasionally make some quite telling points, although this is more likely to be sheer fluke given the general tone. He has an annoying habit of segwaying from everything to one of his personal pet topics, such as human rights, the role of government and nationalism. At times this feels father forced and gets tiresome. He also has a tendency to philosophise about even the most unphilosophical matters, leading him to over-think things a lot of the time. However, despite their shortcomings, his entries about current affairs are usually fairly entertaining, if lacking any serious journalistic credentials.

Over the last year he has also done a grand total of ten reviews, half of them about movies, one about a TV series, two about the very same videogame, one about a different videogame and one about an album. In terms of movies he reviewed The Dark Knight, The Quantum of Solace, Australia, Twilight and the Patriot; well to be fair he didn’t do a full review of the Patriot, instead he segwayed onto nationalism, again. Most of his film reviews are fairly decent, although pretty safe; he doesn’t exactly break new ground with what he says. He has a tendency to be a tad inconsistent; he always complains about length, whether a film is too long or too short. He can’t seem to decide whether a film should be short or long and it gets very irritating. His analysis is always very critical, while he often has a point; there is always the feeling that he’s being rather harsh, maybe he thinks being mean is funny. Being mean isn’t funny kids. Don’t be a dick. His reviews of video games are rather limited due to the fact that he clearly doesn’t play many games. Nevertheless his two reviews of Empire Total War were not too bad, mostly because he hid them amid some other stuff which made the entries bearable. Overall his reviews are normally pretty entertaining, if somewhat lacking on occasion. Still the reviews are on the whole better than the current affairs stuff, but maybe that’s because he doesn’t do so many of them.

He’s clearly a fan of music; as well as reviewing Guns ‘n’ Roses (badly) he often recommends various bands that he’s discovered over the last year, in fact one of these seemingly innocent recommendations turned into a full on rant about indie music snobs which was actually pretty entertaining, if a little harsh at times. He has an annoying habit of doing that actually; half the time is feels like his entries have ended going where even he did not intent them to, leading to the writing at time feeling rambling and rather disorganised.

Very occasionally, something happens in the life of our little blogger nerd that he feels he should tell us. Thankfully this has only happened a couple of times because they’re normally not very interesting. In fact half the time it feels like he just wants to laud what he’s done over us, for example he keeps bringing up the fact that he went to the download festival last year, as if that makes him special, the smug git. He also does this whenever he goes on holiday; for some reason he’s got it into his head that we want to see his holiday photos so insists on showing them to us. Annoyingly he also seems to go on lot of holidays; Austria, Japan and Madeira in the last year alone. You get the feeling that he’s just showing off.

So all in all it’s pretty entertaining, if a little inconsistent; at times it seem to take itself too seriously, and at times it doesn’t take itself seriously enough. The writer is clearly pretty intelligent and equally arrogant. He has a tendency to try a little too hard to be funny and ends up just being silly; I mean he even did one entry which was an entirely self-referential review of his own blog. I mean what the hell?

Anyway, I need to go buy myself a new fourth wall, so I’ll just finish by saying thanks for reading all year, I hope you had as much fun as I did. Here’s to as many years as I can be bothered to do this. Personally I’m surprised I’ve kept it going this long.