coffee

Overzealous Recycling 014: Hodor, we’re becoming a real newsletter!

/ Ian Casselberry / Leave a comment

Maybe it’s because I have extra time on my hands with the Easter holiday weekend and major rain here in Asheville, but it feels like time to put my mail where my mouth is.

— If you missed the last Overzealous Recycling, you can read it here —

I keep saying this isn’t a newsletter and have posted that content here instead. But the reasons I haven’t really followed through on trying to do a newsletter is a) not having anybody sign up would be kind of depressing and b) I’m not writing enough at other outlets to have anything to collect here.

Plus, I’m already asking people to subscribe to The Podcass, which friends and followers have been supporting nicely, and I’d really like that to do well. At some point, you all will just get sick of me tugging on your pant legs, right?

But here’s the thing: I miss the old days of blogging. With me writing less professionally, I need an outlet and I’m enjoying writing for fun again. The era of Blogger, LiveJournal and Tumblr has passed, but the spirit of blogging still seems to exist, if not the interactivity and sense of community. Maybe it’s just in newsletters and podcasts now.

So here we go. This is becoming a newsletter. I’ll try to get this out on Thursday or Friday, since a lot of newsletters go out on Sunday. Please subscribe to Overzealous Recycling at tinyletter.com/casselberry. And thank you in advance.

Continue reading →

Overzealous Recycling 012: We’re all fine here now, thank you

/ Ian Casselberry / Leave a comment

This past week’s routine was thrown out of whack by a hours-long wait in the emergency room. No worries. A bit of concern with my niece that would’ve been taken care of at the pediatrician or even urgent care had it happened during the day.

But everything’s perfectly all right now. She’s fine. We’re fine. We’re all fine here now, thank you. How are you?

— If you missed the last Overzealous Recycling, you can read it here —

This pass should say “10:10 PM.”

At some point during the third hour (of a total four; my sister was there for six hours), while my phone’s battery was sinking toward 10% charged, I began thinking about an obscure, nearly 25-year-old Saturday Night Live skit called “WR.”

Do you remember that one? George Clooney was hosting the show during his ER fame, so a parody of the medical drama was a natural (maybe lazy) idea. This was Season 20 — Feb. 25, 1995 — if you’re a diehard SNL fan and completist.

Unfortunately — and normally, this might be the thing to vex me the most in a particular week — there doesn’t appear to be an embed of the skit. But it is available on NBC’s Saturday Night Live website (though not the NBC app, as the site claims):

WR: Waiting Room

Continue reading →

Overzealous Recycling 002: Nothing really matters, anyone can see

/ Ian Casselberry / Leave a comment

malek_reading

This week’s cover photo alludes to Bohemian Rhapsody‘s surprising Golden Globe Awards win for Best Picture – Drama. The voters of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association thought the Queen biopic was better than Black Panther, BlacKkKlansman, A Star is Born and If Beale Street Could Talk. (I haven’t seen Beale Street yet, but hope to take care of that this weekend, now that it’s opened in Asheville.)

Obviously, this is all subjective and awards don’t matter that much, but come on. Bohemian Rhapsody was fun and a testament to the greatness of Queen’s music. But the narrative was a mess and the script played with the facts more than necessary. Yes, the re-enactment of Queen’s 1985 Live Aid performance was tremendous, even more so when you compare it to the real-life footage.

— Bohemian Rhapsody reminds us Queen was great, ignores too much about Freddie Mercury — 

This isn’t even a concession to popular tastes. If so, wouldn’t Black Panther have won that award? Maybe the voters just got caught up in the music and Freddie Mercury’s story (regardless of how the movie portrayed it). Or we just chalk this up to being the Golden Globes and winners don’t linger in the memory as they do with the Academy Awards.

But if the award got you to listen to “Bohemian Rhapsody,” “Fat Bottomed Girls,” “We Will Rock You” or “Radio Ga Ga” over the past week, that’s not a bad thing.

Continue reading →

Not a Newsletter 001: Don’t become some background noise

/ Ian Casselberry / 2 Comments

freddie_reading

Here we go again with a “I haven’t written anything for a while” post. But with the calendar turning to November, it seems like a good time to turn up the output here and provide some proof of (writing) life.

(I said the same thing to myself going into October, of course. Probably at the beginning of September too.)

I don’t get to write as much as I used to (though I almost took care of that with a job I was offered — but had to turn down — this past week), so I’d really like to take care of that with the blog and website that I put the effort in to set up. That includes the Amusement Park Podcast, where I intend to put most stuff on genre and geek subjects. I feel like writing holds me accountable somehow.

(Recently, I’ve written movie reviews for A Star is Born, Halloween and The Old Man and the Gun. Bohemian Rhapsody is soon to follow. I want to do a lot more of them now that we’re in movie awards season.)

And I want to do these Not a Newsletter posts regularly. Newsletters are kind of the new blogs these days (actually, podcasts probably are) and if I thought I could assemble a decent subscriber base, I might do one. (Did I sound really old right there?)

Continue reading →