One Ring to rule them all,
One Ring to find them,
One Ring to Bring them all and in the darkness bind them

My good bud Guy sent me an email last week saying he missed my blog postings, encouraged me to keep the faith, that kind of stuff. It turns out what's really been going on is I've been a casualty of my own format. You see, typically I watch a steady stream of movies and then I talk about them on this forum. But I make it personal because my thoughts about the movies I watch are often framed by the things going on in my life and my general mood. This all works great, except when I stop watching movies (and the title of the blog becomes sort of literal...)

No kidding, the last movie I saw was that Warren Miller movie. I've watched others release, bought movies on DVD, had Netflix deliver a few, but I just haven't watched them. There are a few reasons for this.

For the last few months I've been doing this great diet/exercise program that my heath club has. It's pretty comprehensive and includes time with dieticians and personal trainers. The whole thing involved me exercising a *lot* and eating fairly sparsely. I eat enough, and I'm not usually hungry, but by the time I get to the end of the day I'm mostly out of gas. I still need something to wind down with in the evening but I find movies are a little dense for that. That's what I really like about movies - there's a ton of content crammed into a relatively short amount of time. In good movies, everything is intentional. Every line of dialog, every camera angle, every cutscene, they are all in there via a conscious decision and have stayed in through many rounds of editing. This is great, because it makes for great content, but it also means my brain isn't in relaxing downtime mode most of the time when I watch movies - I'm thinking to much.

In contrast serialized content is perfect for down time. Good TV shows can be just as entertaining, but they're significantly less dense. This happens for two related reasons. People don't spend as much time in the creation process so there's just less content crammed into that hour and the creators have much, much more time to tell a story so they can take their time a bit. It's much easier to have a story arc run across 24 one hour episodes then it is to introduce the characters, set the stage, have stuff happen, and wrap it up in two hours.

With my lack of energy in the evenings this fall I've been watching a lot more TV and a lot less movies. This has made for a light fall at the movies for me. This will likely change as all the great December movies come out and all the movies I missed in the last few months hit DVD in the spring - I suspect a binge is in my future.

This has started to get better in the last month. My food intake has gone up and I'm more used to the diet, I have more energy. But in the last few weeks there's been another culprit for my lack of movie watching. As any good nerd I'm also a video game player. And this last month has been a spectacular one for video games. First Halo 2 released. It's fantastic and I played it a lot, until Half-Life 2 released a week later. At that point I stopped playing Halo and played Half-Life, since as good as Halo 2 was Half-Life was much better. But then, like in the Lord of the Rings quote above, World of Warcraft released a week after that and took over all of use gamers who were soft from the goodness of the games this fall. I haven't touched Halo or Half Life since.

Seriously, I think I'm a little bit addicted. I stay up too late, neglect my friends, get distracted by it at work (it doesn't help that my boss is also addicted - we talk about the previous nights play sessions daily.) I've been supremely impressed with this title, and I highly recommend it. Especially if you've thought about trying one of the massively multiplayer games, this is the one for you. It's super accessible to the casual player (at least on the scale of massively multiplayer games.)

So there you go Guy. It's your fault I haven't been watching movies or blogging (note to everyone who doesn't get this statement: Guy works for Vivendi Universal Games, who distribute World of Warcraft - it's his product that's sucking me into the void!)

Other notes:

The diet and exercise thing has been going great. I've lost of lot of weight, am in great shape, and have people claiming they have to do double takes since they don't recognize me at first. It's kind of nutty.

The last game I was addicted to like this was Knights of the Old Republic, and the sequel for that just released this week. I've read some good things about it, but I'm not going to bother to buy it now - I wouldn't play it. Maybe I can just quit work and play games all day for a bit, that'd be fun.

My Lord of the Rings quote just gets me even more excited for the Return of the King extended edition next week. I guarantee I'll take a break from game playing, sleeping, and other random life necessities to play with that one. My biggest curiosity is if they add any more endings...

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