WordPress.com recently announced a return to their old hosting plans. They basically force upgraded everyone with a paid account a while ago; imagine Netflix introduced 4K and then made everyone pay a little more for it, whether they wanted it or not. The WP.com upgrade “broke” a little bit of The Stop Button actually. The…

I just found out comments haven’t been working. Probably since I “upgraded” to the new WordPress plan. Quotation marks because comments not working is just the latest item on the list of fails related to the new Pro subscription. Besides being able to install plugins—I broke the site with one already, obviously—there’s nothing better to…

I’ve overextended myself on reading and writing projects this year. It was inevitable. The first change was to adjust my movie watchlist for 2022. It doesn’t account for screeners or blogathons, which are not scheduled (albeit with deadlines and embargoes), and are more fun. Even when an ancient watch list item is good, the run-up…

My initial impulse for this post was a lengthy history of my personal “let people like what they like” realization, but it’s a real downer. The point was going to be it’s better to write about things you like or talk about things you like and enjoy. It’s immaterial whether you’re standing on the “what…

Since the nineties, I’ve been a big fan of movie recommendation engines; my video store had a system called “Clair V.” It was a touchscreen interface; I think you logged in with your phone number. They got the initial data set from customers; I remember filling out worksheets with movie ratings. Lots of semi-colons in…

I’m thinking about headspace today. I rushed to write the last three posts for “Wayward Pines: Season One” so they’d be cleared out if we started “Season Two” tonight. We did. More on it soon, but it’s a marked, bewildering improvement. Though the lead acting is also better. And evil Wesley Crusher’s good. In addition…

I don’t know if I’m having a bad day, but I’m definitely having a disappointing and frustrating day, so I’m trying to relax. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to actually relax and still write this post, so I’m hoping the post manages to chill me out a bit. Because I should’ve written the post yesterday…

I just turned back on WordPress’s publicize posts feature for Twitter, which I turned off when I started working on all the catalog posts for podcasts and blog collections. That project took about a month. I intended to do it gradually but steadily, five posts a day, but I started doing them in bulk as…

I don't know how well I can touch type on this iPad keyboard. Not particularly well based on the number of red squigglies. I forgot to write a Selected Declarations earlier, and now I'm getting the word count in before going to bed, up much later than I ought to be but also… I mean,…

It doesn’t feel right to do a Stop Button Martin Luther King Jr. Day post, so the week’s Selected Declaration will be early. I don’t not have a relevant post; I just don’t have the confidence in it. I’d have to draft, consider, read, reread. I’d take it seriously. And it’s too late for The…

I’m having a “the only way is through” feeling about Selected Declarations, which isn’t fantastic given it’s only the second regular post. Whatever deep thoughts needing writing about I thought I would have every Monday, I do not really have them. It’s also been a very 2020-2022 week, very unexpectedly, and I don’t want to…

If The Stop Button has a theme, it’s killing your darlings. It’s a lot easier to shit on a childhood favorite than to expound on Fellini. At its best, it’s curated nostalgia. At its worst, it’s assassinated nostalgia. Except I haven’t been watching and reading about many old favorites. I made a 2022 watch list,…

I wasn’t planning on launching Selected Declarations until 2022 (I’ve even got a topic ready), but since I’ve been inbox-bombing Stop Button subscribers with archival posts all night, I thought I’d explain in a “preview. While I don’t have any significant plans for the blog in 2022, I did have a bunch of cleaning up…

Despite learning multiple times over the last eleven or so months I don’t like soft launches, I’ve been doing a bit of a soft launch on The Stop Button for the past few weeks. I don’t even remember how long… actually, it’s almost a month. Basically it’s two related posts a day, though the daily…

So, while I haven’t posted in two and a half months, I have been writing a post about once a week and letting them sit in the Ulysses inbox, waiting for when I have some time. I did not, as it turns out, have some time this weekend to move back to WordPress.com from self-hosting,…

It’s hard to imagine anyone fetishizing DVDs, though I’m sure some must. Someone out there knows each and every day he or she bought a different release of Army of Darkness. Someone out there sleeps with their Necronomicon case from The Evil Dead–didn’t it smell too? The initial Anchor Bay release (remember when Anchor Bay…