Common Sense

I’ve got some good news and some bad news.

The good news is that after much lobbying, cajoling, pleading and selling… I’ve finally gotten a blog from the Trib. In the next week, I’ll be starting it up, moving my Movie Blog archives over to it and writing my own little niche film blog where I can review horror movies all I want, cover a few television shows throughout the season, interact with my new readers and just generally do what I do here, only get paid.

The bad news is, where does that leave Common Sense? I already neglect this blog because of work, now I’m going to be doing even more work blogging for a paycheck, so there is no reason to keep this site up. Except to treat it as a personal blog. As for politics, I’m more or less done covering that. It’s gotten kind of tedious since it doesn’t seem like anything really changes and I’ve been doing it for so long that I really need a break from it.

I’ll still be involved in Democratic politics and I’ll still vote, but blogging about fools can only last so long.

The real dilemma now is coming up with a name for this new blog. I had a great name — Nateflix — but that got vetoed in the selling process because an editor was worried that it skirted trademark infringement. Then we were going to go with Movie Blog, what I use here, but another editor thought that sounded too official, like my blog would be the official entertainment blog of wacotrib.com.

The working title at the moment is Nate at the Drive-In, kind of an homage to Joe Bob Briggs, but I want something a little more clever that keeps my name in it. The same way we have a Joe who write the Joe Weather blog.

The shame is that I already bought up the Nateflix.com domain, so that would have been perfect.

If you’ve got any ideas, please, don’t hesitate to shoot ‘em my way. We can’t formally request the blog until I have a name for it.

First up on the list of reviews, though, is the new Transformers movie, along with all of its bonus material. And the original Transformers animated movie to compare it to. Niche blogging can be fun.
Saw IV is being released in the next week and if I can swing it, I’ll try and go to a midnight showing Thursday night and have a review on the new blog up by Friday morning, thus showing my bosses why it is we’re doing this whole thing. And don’t forget about Horrorfest 2007. Last year we didn’t even mention it was going on, this year I plan on seeing and reviewing every single movie.

I’ll keep you posted as this gets going, but this isn’t really a goodbye. I’m hoping that many of you regular readers will enjoy this new blog even more than Common Sense. Sure, I’m kind of selling out to the whole infotainment thing that most of us bloggers have been railing against for years, but I’m doing it with a blog at a mainstream community paper. So I feel like what I could accomplish on my own, I have. Now I want to go further and see how far down the rabbit hole I can go.