Sunday, September 25, 2016

Grave Considerations – Future Events, Because the Future is Where You and I Will Spend the Rest of Our Lives, In the Fture



Hello, Coffin fans.

It’s been a busy few weeks over here, again, and as a result, again, Child Sized Coffin has suffered for content, despite my actually having some things to discuss at present. I’m working on new material, pretty much as fast as I can, but I’ve also been mulling some new directions for the blog.

For starters, if you’ve been following the Coffin for its year of existence, you know that things have been  changing around here from pretty much post #1 onward. It’s taken me awhile to get this project 


working the way I wanted it to, and we’ve gone from taking pictures of figures on two different turn tables to an actual table now. I’m trying to improve my photography skills as well, but that’s been a slow project, mainly because when I get a chance to take pictures, I try to take as many of as many things as I have time for, so that when I get the chance to post reviews I can hopefully get more than one thing up at a time.

Maybe my problem is time management, but it’s not a lack of enthusiasm or desire. As I’m fairly sure has been mentioned before, both my wife and I are adjunct college instructors, and that carries a time commitment far beyond any of the actual work. We spend hours every day driving to our various schools, and then of course, teachers have to grade papers and all that crap. Quite often, I try to use my work on the Coffin as a way to relax and actually enjoy being alive, but more often than not, this results in half articles that I’m unhappy with or an exhausted “I’ll do this over the weekend” that never pans out. I have so many plans, but never enough time; I have five or six reviews lined up, and a few topics for Grave Consideration, and a bunch of music I want to talk about, and I just met Tommy Wiseau, but there’s never an opportunity to just sit down and do any of it.

But, I’m not really one to admit that I’ve got too many balls in the air and that I can’t take on another. My usual response to matters such as running too short on time is that I’m just not working hard enough. And, when I’ve got no time to do anything, that’s the perfect time for me to come up with all kinds of new ideas, right? Just ask all of those musical ideas I’m so, so desperately trying to remember because I haven’t found time to execute them over the past few years. One of these days . . . !

So, here’s what I’m hoping to roll out for the Coffin in the near, near future:

                --We have to try to get something posted every week. As I type that, I think “yeah, no problem.” Largely because I can most likely count this post as the post for this week, and coast on the artificial bump to my feeling of accomplishment for a day or two before I start thinking that I will fail this goal a week after setting it.

                --I’m thinking of doing a discography review. I would select a band who has a discography of, say, 5 to 8 albums, and listen to them chronologically, and post a review of a new entry each week. Live albums and EPs would be excluded, but I’ll go through a full discography, even bad albums. I’d be looking at things like progression and development from album to album. I’m tossing around a few ideas for bands currently, but I’m pretty sure right now that this will focus, at least for the first attempt, on a band I’m already familiar with rather than a new band I’m just discovering.

                --I want to get more active on the music front regardless. The music end of this blog has really just been something I’ve done when I’ve had some time, but was really a thing that I wanted to do well even from the start. I’ve got a few music articles on the back burner, but one of them is for the great Motörhead boxed set that came out in July and quite honestly, I’m still having a tough time with that. I was watching the concert video this afternoon, and, well, there were a lot of feels. But I guess the good news is that I may actually be capable of finishing that review now.  

                --I want to spend more time away from Transformers, but there hasn’t been much in the way of any other figures recently. Out of the next five reviews I’ve got on tap, four of them are Transformers. Part of the problem is due to the apparent disappearance of the Star Wars Black Series line, but I do have some other things that I want to write up, even though they are a little older at this point.

                --But, on the Transformers front: my wife and I may stop in at TFCon Chicago in a few weeks, and if we do, I think I’m going to try and pick up a third party figure. My wife was encouraging that back at C2E2 in March, but the one seller that had a selection didn’t have anything that I really wanted, and for the price of some of these toys, I am certainly not going to just buy one just to buy one. Probably going to go in on one of the combiner teams, if not some MP scale Decepticon. I’m looking at, or am going to look at, once work gives me some time (lol), TFC’s Hades, their take on Liokaiser, or their Poseidon, the Seacons. I want to take a bit of time and read up on the two, since they would be combiner teams that don’t really appear to be coming any time soon. This way I don’t end up with another Bruticus.

                --With the Halloween season approaching, we bought a small coffin. Probably intended to be a box for trinkets or some kind of decoration, it is pretty good sized to hold action figures –sort of—and you know, the blog is called Child Sized Coffin.

Well, anyway, there it is. A handful of things that I want to try to do with the Coffin moving forward, and I really am going to try to implement them all. Wish me luck Coffin fans, and I will do my best to be a better blogger.

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