Lists and Randomness

As I predicted in my first entry, it turns out that sometimes I don't have much going on in the way of serious or meaningful thoughts. But, this is my blog and I'm free to post whatever random stuff I come up with, so in that spirit I've added some lists to the right-hand sidebar of the blog. I noticed that due to my general long-windedness when talking about serious subjects, there was starting to be a huge chunk of boring white space underneath the information over there on the right, so this is the beginning of my efforts to fix that.

So, the first list is of my favorite (read: most used) websites, sites that I think are exceptionally useful, fun, or well-made. Basically, anything I link to in any of my posts will show up there, so that if you like one of the links in the posts you won't have to go searching through all the entries to find it again. Believe me, this will be much more important someday when there are more than five posts here. (As a side note, I bet that a pretty fair percentage of blogs started on free sites like this never end up with more than, say, 3 posts on them before people quit/lose interest. However, I'm not one to do things like that, and I'm in this for the long haul. Someday there's going to be a heck of a lot of text on this blog, and at that point you really won't want to search through all my rantings to find one stupid link. I'm just planning ahead.)

Second, we have a running update on the bands (in order) that currently find themselves in the honored position of having all their cd's in my main case. This is subject to change based on my whims and tastes, and based on whether I ever have enough money again to buy cd's. All of these artists are very anti-bubble (see previous post) in my mind... a lot of them are Christian bands, but ones that are more outside the Christian system and on the indie side of things. A lot of people will not have heard of a lot of the stuff there, but that's fine by me. Check it out if you want, as it's all quality music first and foremost (and by music, I mean music and lyrics. I find that the music that I really like over a long period of time always has interesting/meaningful words, not just creative instrumentation).

Finally, and probably most controversially, I included a list of my favorite movies ever. Not what I think are necessarily the BEST movies ever, just my favorites (which is an important distinction: otherwise I'd have no justification for having Citizen Kane lower than Mystery Men). And yes, these are generally in order, so you can see my rankings. However, the ranking process was far less than scientific, and it may be prone to gross miscalculations and glaring omissions. Those situations are where you should post a comment and remind me of important movies I may have forgotten and/or campaign for movies you like to be moved up or movies you hate to be moved down the list. I welcome all manner of comments about this.

By the way, this list was created with a great deal of help from IMDb, another amazing website now appearing in the links list. (http://www.imdb.com/) This site is definitely the most comprehensive website on the net for information about movies. Ever see someone in a movie and be like, "I know I've seen him before, who is that??" This website can tell you, in painstaking and beautiful detail. It's fantastic. It also has information on objectionable material, so you can avoid a movie with stuff you don't want to see. In fact, by way of disclaimer, that may come in handy with my list, since even though these movies are very clean for the most part, there's a few movies on there with some stuff that you might want to skip. I know I skip certain parts of some of these movies when I watch them, so don't take my recommendation as proof that there's nothing bad in there. Be wise and skip it. Also, feel free to let me know if there's something you think I should remove from the list.

And with all the lists, feel free to suggest sites/bands/movies that I might like that aren't currently on there. It's always fun to see what other people think is the greatest and why. That's all for now... stay tuned for more poetry coming up soon.