Smashed & Bombed

Regular visitors (the concept is coherent even if I’m not sure it applies to any actual people) may have noticed a few changes about the place in the last week or so. Perhaps the most significant was our first ever guest review, from the lovely Olinka, which turned up just the other day. Who knows whether this is the start of a new and more collegiate approach to the blog? That will probably depend on how often Olinka decides she wants to write about something and my own bribe level, which has yet to be determined.

Apart from that it’s been mostly superficial. There has been the usual change to the photo at the top which follows any of my trips away from home, but especially attentive readers will have noticed a couple of new buttony icony things on the right hand side. The swirly fishbowl thing near the top will take you to h2g2, a venerable proto-wiki and social networking site which I will always think of as the spiritual home of my online film reviewing: it was there I got into the reviewing habit, and had there not been a temporary difference of outlook between some of the site’s editors and myself ten years ago there is a very good chance this blog would not exist.

The other button is for Smashbomb, another site which I’ve been contributing to for the last year or so. I say ‘contributing’ like there’s some kind of editorial standard to meet, but this is a review site where anyone can unleash their opinion on the world: it’s very egalitarian in that regard. Not just movies, either: TV shows, books, music, lots of other things too, I expect: this is a very big mill and they are open-minded about grist.

Here’s how it works: you don’t actually have to contribute, of course, you can just turn up and enjoy that sense of outrage when it turns out that nobody enjoys the new film or book you just loved (or when it seems that everyone else loved the thing you nearly walked out of – I’ve come to think of this as the Peter Rabbit moment). This is, of course, the moment when you will be gripped by righteous purpose and find yourself logging in to make your own views known to the world.

Now, here you are tied to a 1 to 10 rating, something I kind of avoid hereabouts as I suspect people will just read the number and then clear off before bothering to look at the rest of the review. Then again, I use Smashbomb because it is a different type of experience. In addition to the number you can add bullet points and so on, and then express yourself at fuller length if you want to.

Now, I don’t really see the point in repeating myself by reposting stuff from here on Smashbomb (some of my reviews already turn up on h2g2 as it is, and I don’t think the internet really needs my words of wisdom in triplicate), and part of the reason I like the site is it’s a different kind of discipline – I think of this place as the home of my middle-distance reviews, while Smashbomb hosts the sprints, as it were (the really ultra-short ones end up somewhere else again). I also suspect that the reviews on Smashbomb are going to quickly get skimmed through en masse rather than being savoured individually. So personally I just try to come up with a pithy couple of paragraphs, which is an interesting challenge – and, truth be told, I often find that writing a two-paragraph capsule review is very useful in terms of helping me get my ideas together for the long version here.

This being a modern website, there is an element of gamification going on, and users do score points and earn badges for contributing, adding to, and generally helping to improve the site. Personally, this is not that big a deal for me, but some people do seem very keen on racking up their totals. And that’s fair enough. The community on the site is generally a friendly, good-natured one of people who seem to know what they’re talking about – some of the spelling and punctuation isn’t quite up to the standard I aim for here, but that’s the nature of the beast with this kind of site. More importantly, I’ve never come across a single instance of a difference of opinion turning nasty on Smashbomb, which I think counts for a lot these days.

So – that’s why I carry a link to this particular site here on the blog. It’s fun and easy to contribute to, interesting to browse, and is generally populated by nice people. There is less me on it than there is here, which many people will doubtless consider a downside, but then again there is also less me on it – so why not check it out? After hanging around here for a bit, it could provide much needed novelty value.