The Many Rantings of John, Part 3

Do you ever find that your life becomes a bit on auto-pilot?  That everything you're doing, all of the progress you're making just sort of stops and you find that while you're clearly still living, paying the bills, working, and continuing on that you sort of have had a pause or a mild rewind back into bad habits and you just can't really excite yourself out of this funk?  If you have, you know what I've been going through for the past few months.  For a variety of factors, some I understand and some I'm not as able to comprehend (ahh, sweet mystery of life), I have been unable to really do much of anything to self-improve, self-motivate, and continue on with my goals, and that is very uncharacteristic of me.  I'm someone that loves the next big challenge, the next set of goals, the next mountain to climb (hence the photo...which for the record is not Mt. Everest but the third-tallest mountain in the world Kangchenjunga, which goes much better with our "Part 3" theme).

That ends, however, today.  I have been brainstorming at my dining room table with my bucket list, ideas for goals and where I want the next year of my life to head, and I feel ecstatic and ready to embrace a whole host of newness in my life.  This is going to include new exercise routines, new approaches to relationships, new finance plans (Suze Orman would be proud), new diet plans (my doctor would be proud), and a whole bunch of other new ideas.  And as you may expect, considering this post, that includes the blog.

As some of you may know, I re-started this blog after a long dormancy three years ago with the daunting title of "The Many Rantings of John, Part 2."   At the time I was wildly out-of-practice with daily writing, something I had done most of college (whether through history papers, blogging, or to paraphrase Stewie Griffin, "working on that novel of my mine") but had long abandoned.  I was admittedly a bit worried that I couldn't do the daily blogging thing, so I picked a topic that I love more than anything (the Oscars!) and figured I would add other posts if need be when I didn't have the Oscars to write about.  And I have to say I exceeded my wildest expectations in that regard-we've had over 100,000 hits on this blog since then, which may not be a bunch for some (TMZ probably had that in the last hour), but for me it is, and more importantly to my goal I've written over a thousand posts on this blog, which I'm ecstatic about.  I will admit, though, that I've lost my way, like I said above, with the blog over the past few months and there doesn't seem to be much structure in what is happening here.  Every day could be an old movie review or a random political think-piece or worst of all, sometimes even nothing, and while I like that looseness, it doesn't seem as fun to read and I think for people who want to only read political articles or movie articles, it doesn't seem fair.

So in this Part 3, we're going to have some structure to the blog, not just because it'll be fun to read but because it will be easier on my To Do list outside-of-the-blog.  We'll still have daily posts, and in reality we're actually going to be going back to more frequent posts on the blog: two-a-day on weekdays (one in the morning and one in the afternoon), one a day on the weekends, and on rare occasions (like the Olympics or Oscar week) we'll interrupt regularly scheduled programming with a change in the schedule, but by-and-large this will be the new format.  Each day will have some sort of theme as illustrated below:

• Mondays and Wednesday mornings we'll have an entertainment-themed thought piece. This could be anything from wondering what shows will get renewed to thoughts on the Box Office to my ponderings on the latest YouTube scandals.
• Tuesdays and Thursday mornings will be politically-themed articles, ranging from the State of the 2016 race pieces (which seem to be amongst the most popular) to thoughts on the latest political kerfuffle to my thoughts on a recent hot-button issue.
• Friday mornings will continue to be your weekly rant (hence the blog title), which could be on anything from front-page news to why my latest date was a disaster.
• Weekday afternoon posts will be movie reviews (ranging from something that you can see in your local theater to classics I recorded off of Turner Classic Movies) and recurring series (including the Oscar Viewing Project and the Bechdel Test posts, as well as another mini-series that I'm working on right now).
• Saturday we will have the return of "Everybody's Linking for the Weekend," a roundup of my favorite links from across the web and some commentary that stems from them!
• And finally Sunday we will have a GTKY or completely random thought piece.  In a perfect world I'd love to do something Q&A related with readers/commenters, but I don't think we're quite there yet in terms of participation (prove me wrong in the comments!), so it will probably be me tackling GTKY-style questions or doing a tag from around the web, or just piping in with something that seemed completely unrelated to the week but that I was highly passionate about for some reason.

In addition to these changes, The Many Rantings of John is expanding a bit!  Some of you may have clicked the Tumblr link on the sidebar of this post, and wondered why I don't post as often there, but as part of this reinvention, we'll also be revitalizing that link.  I'm a little bit technologically-handicapped at the moment with posting on Tumblr (thanks to my ancient computer I can only do it on my phone, which isn't as handy), but I am making a vow to post at least once, if not a few times, each day on that blog.  The focus there will be less on prose and more on photos, and you'll get a view through my iPhone camera lens of nature, as well as random gifs, photos, and videos that I'm loving this week (there will also be hot guys, if that's a selling point).

I'm also super excited to announce that the blog officially has a Twitter page!!!  Click over here and follow please (there will also be a link on the side if you are coming late to the Twitter game).  In addition to linking to articles on the blog (I would love a bit more traffic he admitted greedily), I'll also be bon motting throughout the day with a 140-character limit.  So make sure and check it out!!!

And that's really where we're at with the new chapter on the blog.  I'm really excited to see where we go, and am thrilled about the challenge of getting back into twelve-articles a week-share your thoughts on what else you'd like to see on the blog in the comments section!