Postavant sucks. I know it, and I know why. There’s a lot of things that don’t mesh together and never have from the start, but I settled and was quick to the punch, not really thinking practically and instead just trying to be the flashiest, the whoriest, the fastest. Readership couldn’t be better (actually, no, it could be a lot better), but I’m just not digging a lot of it. It seemed like I had so much to say, and as a rant machine that never stops chugging, I very much do. Yet, I seemed to fall into the trap of knowing which website I wanted to make and which I ended up making because it was the one I already had experience doing. I named the site blindly with the expectation that it would be with multiple writers and have a magazine like format, not really being a blog as much as being a fully functioning site. While we did/do have a few great writers, Deepayan, Cody, Nate, and Todd being the four other contributors to the site since it’s conception, a magazine format just doesn’t work here when there isn’t a huge clump of people constantly updating. It just doesn’t. So the name, sort of pretentious, sort of aimed at one kind of website while the result is a whole different one. That’s just one little peeve.

The second is the fact that at my own peril, my laziness got the best of me and I turned the site from the very beginning into a news-recirculating machine. Granted, there’s been mini-rants in between, but it became largely movie trailers, movie news, Sarah Palin, Twilight, and self-mockery. There’s not much of a personal touch here, except all the “OMG MY FACEBOOK AND MY TWITTER SLAP SLAP SLAP”, which hasn’t really worked all that much. The site’s gotten lots of visitors, 400-1000 daily, actually, and the good and bad news about this is that 75% of the time, they’re all people who’ve never been here before. The problem is, they don’t come back. The regular base of the site is people I know personally or have a close online relationship with. Haven’t won over the Rotten Tomatoes crowd at all (more on this later, seriously, wtf guys?) and haven’t really gained anyone new who haven’t found this site without me forcing it upon them through the wonderful world of Facebook. And the fact is, I just haven’t had anything interesting to rant about, while had a ton before making the site. Once you have it, then you don’t want it. It’s a great trait to compliment laziness and procrastination.

The third thing that I must fix in order to remain viable and not a stagnant waste-dump of uninteresting viewerbait is this damn layout. Yes, it’s pretty. It’s very pretty. But it does not encourage anything at all and isn’t user friendly in the least. Interesting, usable widgets can’t be implemented because the coding in the layout is so screwed up that everything interlaps. I can’t make any pages for the same problem exist, interlapping. There’s no previous page option and it’s so deeply rooted that I can’t really add one in the code without breaking everything else. It’s too narrow, to where it’s more about empty space and flash and serves more as an art project than something which someone would attempt reading. I can’t really tie the CSS to the forums either, so matching them up at any point in time would be quite the impossible and foolish feat.

Finally, these forums need activity. While the site on an analytical level is far more successful and viable in the long-term than the disaster formerly known as neoavant.com, that site had a community of people writing and posting, and while it was largely slow, it was still there, while here, it’s all me on the main site pushing people to view whatever I’m pushing and the forums are literally a dead zone where only spam bots sign up. The main base of Neoavant just isn’t biting for a number of reasons, mostly those damn yuppies at Rotten Onions (but I love all you yuppies regardless), and the reception just isn’t going over so well. There’s no connection between the main site to the viewer at all, which makes there no way for the forums to possibly continue to draw. 1.6 page views per visit is a bad thing.

So things I need to fix: layout (feel free to suggest), name (feel free to suggest too), content (stop being a lazy dickweed Zach and be the interesting hipster nihilist you are!). But two problems are present, and now I finally make some sort of connection to the title, which I promise, this post is sort of a review of, but not really because my narcissistic tendencies get the best of me: school starts on Monday, and yes, I do very much dread it, as I will get absolutely no sleep for 9 months and be a miserable dick as I stress and have not one ounce of enjoyment. Side note: people who are excited about school have a personality disorder, and I do too, because I want you all to die with fire. Secondly, with school comes an actual excuse for my lack of ability to write, because I won’t have all the time in the world. And without any time, I lack the ability to have something true and interesting to write about. The lack of comments on any articles show that there’s nothing drawing people here, nothing unique that’s worthwhile to the lurker. This is the main thing that struck me about Nora Ephron’s Julie and Julia, the growing popularity of Julie Powell’s (as portrayed by Amy Adams) blog on Salon.com in 2002. She wrote about something interesting, with people cared about and had the need to share with others. Regurgitating news and spooging over Captain Planet isn’t worth showing anyone, and in this Web 2.0 world we live in, I have to be compelling text and then some. It’s hard to be both. The standards are high now.

So, I don’t know what to do, but I know how to do it. Expect a transition period to occur where the content on this site changes, as does the look, the everything, as I will still hotlink to here as many places as I can (I haven’t done it anywhere really, and yet I’ve still gotten yelled at, who knew?), but I need to make this place advertise itself. I shouldn’t have to whore things out to get it out, but I don’t know how it’s going to get itself found by people in a way that works. But…yeah, enough about me, let’s talk about Meryl Streep.

Julie and Julia is a well directed, well acted film that has two stories that aren’t really interesting enough to make a whole film by itself, and yet, there we go. It’s half Amy Adams-blogging-about-stuff and half Julia Child biopic, and yet, the former is, for me anyway, much more interesting. The film seems to center on her because there’s something going on there with her “cook 527 recipes in 365 days” story, and how they correlate to her job, her husband, etc. etc. While the other half of the runtime, Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci both being great as usual, is just stale and doesn’t work. The Julie plot works because it’s scope is so limited, while the Julia Child plot has this grand production design but provides so little. It’s a very small script and focus in a large landscape, like taking a picture of a textureless, colorless rock in a field of lushly colored flowers. That said, Julia compliments Julie and this is really Julie’s movie, so it works well enough and the thing is definitely entertaining (not to mention partisanship, I mean, damn).

1300 words, 1200 are about me, and 100 are about an 8/10 film. At least I’ve got narcissism. Also, school Monday. Don’t expect much from me for a while. While the whole start of Julie’s plot in the film revolves around her procrastination, laziness, and inability to finish anything, and the blog being her answer to fixing it, I just don’t have that quality in me. I will throw it aside for self loathing and inaction. …dammit.

Also, I put this in the category of “Film”, but “Craving For Attention” as well. Probably should get rid of the film categorizing.