Hello friends!  It’s now been 6 months since I started this whole thing and I wanted to take a quick second to talk about the ride so far and my plans going forward.

In the past half-year I’ve had a lot of fun talking about movies with all of you guys. I love the emails, Facebook comments, texts, etc that I’ve gotten. I love when I hear that you saw a movie I recommended and really enjoyed it.  I also love when you saw a movie I recommended and said it was horrible and I’m an idiot. At least you went and caught a film that you might not have seen before. That’s always a good thing.  Also, you’re wrong.

I’ve learned a whole lot about what you guys like to read (The Bachelorette, you all fucking love The Bachelorette) and what you really, really don’t (Nobody wants to hear about Speed Racer, apparently). I’ve learned about what I like to write and what I really don’t enjoy. While my Chappie review ended up pretty good I think, I really didn’t enjoy writing that thing at all. Turns out it’s much more fun to write about movies that you love.

All this being said, in April/May I hit a point where I got really bored with writing. I just wasn’t enjoying it anymore. You guys should see this incredible Age of Ultron review I started writing but never finished (Sidenote – Ultron is amazing and if you haven’t seen it by now you’re probably just a bad person). I wasn’t enjoying the process and therefore wasn’t really enjoying what was coming out of it, so I just stopped publishing anything. I saw so many great movies in that time frame that I really wanted to talk about but couldn’t get the motivation to do so.

So I had to take a step back and try to figure out what was wrong.

What I decided is that things around here had become really formulaic. It was: see a movie, write about it in the same basic format, push it out; rinse, repeat. When I started this thing I didn’t want to just churn out reviews.  I wanted to start discussions; to take a film and really analyze it and see if we could learn something from it. I also wanted to have some other pieces that were just fun, like absurd off-the-cuff stuff that is a lot easier to write but equally enjoyable. And what’s more, I wanted to expand my audience. You guys are great, but I’m a ridiculous attention fiend that wants as many people to read my stuff as possible.

I quickly realized that there was absolutely no way I could do any of this alone.  I needed help. I struggle to get one article out, on a good week. And those are just little 800 word reviews that don’t take too much time. There’s so much out there to talk about and I didn’t want to keep having these conversations alone. So I reached out to my friends enjoyed films (almost) as much as I did, asking them if they wanted to help me out and become a part of this thing. And they did!

So, I’d like to introduce the newest members of the Daly Planet staff:

Matt Freeman (@moridinamael) – Managing Editor/Writer
Matt lives in Colorado with his wife two little children. He watches a lot of kids movies, sometimes with the kids present. He also loves science fiction literature and films, and he demonstrates that love through his relentless, humorless acid criticism of every new entry into the genre.

James Gentry (@wenchtweet) – Associate Editor/Writer
James lives in Texas where he helps dissatisfied end users escape the clutches of menacing email hosting providers using the Underground Railroad for Email Migration or UREM. Actually he just helps the tech savvy and not-so-tech savvy migrate their mail data to the wonderful company of Rackspace Hosting. In his free time he enjoys reading, talking, listening to and thinking all things A Song of Ice and Fire series; yes he has a really healthy (unhealthy) obsession with George R.R. Martin’s well known literary masterpiece. He also enjoys watching Game of Thrones and other thought-provoking TV shows past and present, as well as making it his life goal to complete Scott’s recommended movie list, which unfortunately will never happen because he churns out movie suggestions faster than your favorite streaming pal, Netflix.

Michael Grubb (Michael doesn’t have twitter because he is a troglodyte) – Writer
Michael lives in Bristol, England, where he produces movies of chemical reactions filmed with ultrafast laser systems.  Sometimes he has the patience to sit through other movies lasting longer than 0.0000000001 seconds.  Michael enjoys analyzing how films communicate feelings and ideas through their use of cinematography, and especially likes movies with interesting tones.  But he also gets bored like…super fast.

Melissa Daly (@Melissa_AWWYEAH)- Writer
Melissa is Scott’s younger sister (yay, nepotism) who lives in Texas, currently known as one of the last states in the union to still ban gay marriage. She is a team lead at an insurance tracking company where she makes sure houses and businesses are properly insured. In her free time she studies anthropology and watches cultural documentaries in order to recover from the horrors of American capitalism. Her favorite films are The Fountain and Lord of the Rings and her favorite part of movies is the music.

Daniel Freeman (@bucketofkets) (ahahahaha I totally forgot about that twitter) – Writer
Daniel is Matt’s younger brother who lives in Berkeley, California.  He’s a graduate student studying Physics at UC Berkeley and Blog Editor at the Berkeley Science Review, which means that he writes a lot of unreadable code and develops extensive metaphors for describing entanglement to laypeople.  Daniel sincerely believes that there’s something redeeming about every work of art, and enjoys watching really terrible movies to discern what that thing is.

Within the next few weeks you’re going to see some changes over here at The Daly Planet.  You’re going to see new and different things pop up, all of which I’m very excited about. You’re going to see new series and a return to older abandoned ones (Yes, I’m gonna finally finish my Christopher Nolan thing). We’re going to start covering TV, Books, Video Games. Anything that is interesting and that we think we can bring some discussion to will be on here.  At first the goal will be to get three articles of some variety out a week. We’ll see how that goes over and adjust from there.  My goal is that no matter what your love for entertainment is, there will be something here for you to enjoy.

To make sure you’re always caught up with the latest here at The Daly Planet, like us on Facebook, follow us on twitter, subscribe here at WordPress, or send us an e-mail at dalyplanetfilms@gmail.com.

Thanks, as always, for all of your support.

-The Planeteers