This is not a writing challenge blog update. Leila is currently inundated with the necessity to write about 6000 words in the next few days, so she can send off a collection of short-stories to Australia for some compeition thingee, so I'm not going to burden her with further blog topics to write about. I haven't really felt particularly much inspiration to write a "day in the life" blog post quite yet myself, although at one point yesterday I did open my my browser window to type it out, wrote the blog entry title, then got side-tracked and never quite came back to it. I wasn't sure whether to stick to one particular day for my "day in the life" post, or to do some interesting composite so at least it had some sort of interest to it. I'll leave that to another day for it to be sorted out.

Had some interesting feedback about the writing challenge blogging that Leila and I have been doing recently. Whether it's just "blogging for the sake of blogging" or that it's something particularly handy to get us both back into it. Imogen also pointed out that I didn't quite answer all my questions that I set myself in the previous post, as I didn't really refer to what I don't like in blogs. For a quick answer:

• I don't like blogs that are only updated once every few months.
• I don't like blogs that are just an enormous number of links to other sites, without real explanation of what one is linking to. It just creates a seemingly mountainous task to understand what the person is on about, as you have to read 20 other pages to get it.
• I don't really like overly "emo" blogs. I guess it's everyone's prerogative to vent on the net, I'm just not particularly interested in knowing about it (most of the time).

OK, well to approach the idea that I'm just "blogging for the sake of blogging". Yes I would probably agree with that, but at the same time I would say that it's better than not blogging at all. I'm a very habitual creature, and if I get out of the habit of doing something, it can be very difficult to get myself back into that habit. With some sort of necessary commitment to write in here, I hope that my 'habit' of updating will improve, and with it will the quality of the entries themselves. I think my real hope for the writing challenge is that I'll end up doing more entries like this, which aren't actually part of it, because perhaps I'm waiting for Leila to write on the topic herself, or perhaps I'm not quite ready to write THAT particular entry yet, but I'm back in the habit of writing enough to want to write about something else. I think, in the end, that I do just quite enjoy blogging in here, and somehow feel a little bit better about life when I keep things up to date a little more.

A couple of interesting things have happened this week. On Monday, Leila and I went to see the movie "Timecrimes". It's a Spanish film that was showing as part of the "Incredibly Strange Film Festival". I wouldn't say that it was necessarily incredibly strange, but it was certainly interesting. Briefly, it was about a guy who experiences a series of events that lead him to step into a time machine and he travels back a few hours. However, the "previous him" still exists, and in order to make sure the "previous him" can be reunited with the "current him", he realises that he was actually the one who precipitated the series of events. If that sounds confusing enough, eventually a third version of him comes into the movie, and it all ends up making an interesting point about how messing with time would really really fuck things up. I've not done a particularly good job explaining it all, although it's actually surprisingly easy to follow when you're watching the film. It fitted in very well with my post on time-travel the other day, and came from a reasonably similar philosophical perspective as where I would come from. Well worth a watch, if you get the chance. Apparently there's an American remake in the works, although I bet it won't be as good.

I've also managed to get myself suckered into another forum, which particularly focuses on Auckland's public transport system. As that's the part of Kiwiscrapers that I tend to be interested in the most, it's pretty cool having a whole forum dedicated to it. It's a bit quiet at the moment, but hopefully I can add some vitality to it and really get things going. My experience with forums is that just a few people can make a huge difference, turning a place that was dead into one that can hum along really well. I'll try to write my "day in the life" post tomorrow.