Getting Back into the Swing of Things | Meta Waffle

a tasty waffle

So I started blogging again. Yay! I think.

I've always had the knack for tearing people down, but I've never had to drive to consolidate that ability. 

I took the first step back when I began writing reviews for media in high school. I would post it to my Facebook at the time and get half a dozen Likes and a few comments from friends and family. Those posts fizzled out after a few years.

It would take a pandemic before I finally decided to grab some of my old writing and create this blog. Something where the souls unfortunate to stumble upon my chicken scratch could get a good laugh or two. I plucked a handful from my abundance of terrible takes (the vast majority of which I still haven't posted) to slap on this blog and call it a day. But then I got a swanky new job and the pandemic anxiety dwindled. Thus this blog fizzled out too.

Last year I made a New Years resolution to read more, and I did. I read 50 books and many more short stories. More than that, I put my writing skills to work writing ratings on my new Goodreads. I was proud of myself. It had taken the third step to finally gain proper commitment and not be afraid of my writing.

In 2026 I am making another step. In reviving this blog I hope to hone my skills further, consolidate all my writing nonsense, and maybe drag a few readers along the way.

Below I outline my tentative schedule moving forward with Wafflings of a Cozmonaught.

⭐ Book Waffles published every Monday

This can be reviews of novels, short stories, and anything in between. There are tons of stuff to explore here, and while I've only published book reviews on here thus far, I am an avid reader of online content too. Creepypastas. NoSleep tales. There is so much to delve into as far as critiquing and exploring goes. And, if you've seen my reddit, I post my own stuff over there every once in a while. I can't wait to experiment with breaking down this kind of stuff.

⭐ Film/Show Waffles published every Friday

While I originally dumped my movie critiques in here, I've been slacking on watching films recently. And don't get me started on TV Shows. Do not watch those hardly at all. The last one I kinda sorta kept up with was How to Get Away With Murder and my interest in that waned pretty dang fast after the 4th or 5th season. That was, what? A decade ago now? 

Christ! 

The pandemic messed up my brain, I'm tellin' ya.

In a similar vein to what I said with regard to indie internet stories, I want to also critique and review indie video content. Classics are great. New stuff at my local AMC is pretty cool too. But there are a plethora of short films and the like on places like Youtube, Vimeo, and Dailymotion. Small artists making small things. Some with a few dozen views or less. There's bound to be hidden gems within them waiting to be uncovered. 

Or you and I can just plop our asses on the floor and we can chat about what in the living hell happened to CryptTV or how MatPat stepping away from Game Theory had me crying like a baby. That shit was my childhood, man.

In any case, the first of the revived Movie/Show Waffles will appear next Friday, March 6th.

The point of having a two-post release schedule is that I don't want to be consuming only one type of media. There's so much fun to be had in both textual and video content these days, and I want to absorb as much as I can. For entertainment purposes, sure. But also to become a more discerning writer myself. What to do. And, especially, what not to do. Because, Lord Almighty, in the 50 books I read last year I found a hella lot of examples of what not to do.

⭐ Wild Card Waffles published on some Wednesdays

Maybe this isn't obvious by now, but I have a lot to say about media and the general media landscape. And, sometimes, my thoughts do not confine themselves to talking about one, singular piece of media per post. Thus, I leave Wednesdays open as a Wild Card for me.

A Wild Card to talk more meta stuff like this (pretend it's Wednesday today), give an overview or hype post for an entire series that's been gnawing at me, or to give my unsolicited opinions about media in general. Lots of stuff that I could talk about there.

⭐ General Blog Updates

I've moved some things around. Edited some wordings. Changed a few colors. Standardized tags and formatting. I also purchased a custom domain to get rid of that pesky .blogspot handle and look more professional-like. Hopefully I'll be switching out the links I've got so far to the new one soon. Gotta love it.

When I made a commitment to read more in 2025, I created a huge spreadsheet which categorized what I read and how I rated things (I plan to share this at some point in the future). I've taken a page out of my former self's book and added its more concrete rating system.

🟥 1 Garbage
🟥 2 Horrible
🟥 3 Bad
🟨 4 Meh
🟨 5 Average
🟨 6 Decent
🟨 7 Good
🟩 8 Great
🟩 9 Fantastic
🟩 10 Masterpiece

I do this to have an objective standard to trace back to rather than just saying "I didn't like it" or "it was pretty good". Such phrases are useful in isolation but are useless when trying to compare pieces of media to each other in a qualitative sense.

ALSO I really resent this feelgood era of everything getting a passing grade. You can turn in an essay you wiped your ass with and the teacher will stamp it with a C before handing it back saying "Not bad. But you can do better".

Bad work happens. Garbage work happens. We all do it. 

I've written some trash essays and stories in the past, and I will in the future. It's nothing to be ashamed of. It's how we learn and grow and find our voices. I firmly believe that. And, hell, I'm just some rando guy on the internet. It's not like anyone has to take my opinion seriously anyhow. I'm just here to make people laugh and have a good time. If I'm informative in that process, then that's awesome too.

As I look to apply my 2025 book standards to video, I am also considering adopting the genre categories that I sort my reading by.


My biggest hangup with adopting this model is the distinction between Comedies and Tragedies. They aren't big categories in written form, so I lumped them (mostly) together under General. Movies and TV Shows are much more unique and expressive in the differences between those two. 

I'm slightly leaning toward keeping the overarching genres the same at this point in time. Something to help organize my mess and keep things consistent across all of my media reviews. Maybe developing more robust subcategories or subgenres could be useful here to further buff out my stuff. It's not a huge problem now, but after a few months of two posts a week, I can see it becoming an organizational nightmare real fast. I be needing an SQL database to sort all this shit. Spreadsheets ain't cutting it.

And that's about it for now. If you are interested in my stuff or like my writings so far, do me a solid by bookmarking this blog or following me on the social media sites I have listed on the sidebar. I will post to there whenever I have a new waffle review to share. I'm planning to make this blog the hub for all of my content, but those are good second places to join me.

Thanks, friend! And wish me luck!

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