I return!

Whoa. Time to blow the dust off this thing. I admit I lost interest in this thing, mostly because Blogspot's update method is html-based and that's just a gigantic pain in the ass.

That said, I'm updating this thing because my next couple of posts will be a "Best of 52" series.

52 is a series of reviews of albums, mostly metal, that I wrote (and continue to write) under the name dethtoll for a couple of metal communities on Livejournal, the first being Metal_MP3 and the latter being Mandatory Metal. I won't go into details as to why I switched, but my switch and the creation of Mandatory Metal are related- there was a lot of drama at Metal_MP3 and when my good friend John Sierra (also known as NecroVMX) created Mandatory Metal as a response to said drama, I quickly jumped the Metal_MP3 ship.

52 was originally started by NecroVMX, taking the name from the DC Comics company-wide crossover series of the same name. The idea was that once a week for 52 weeks a review of an album would go up, and the months were often divided up into themes- for example, one month was dedicated to black metal, another to cover albums, so on and so forth. I quickly adopted the idea, under the title "52 Albums dethtoll Thinks You Need To Hear." I just wrapped up the 2nd year of this feature last week, and starting this Sunday will be starting the third (and final) year.

Part of the reason I'm dragging this thing out of the attic toybox to talk about 52 is that I need a bit of a portfolio. The original idea was to post the entirety of my 52 series- all 104 articles- but I decided that wasn't worth doing because A) there wouldn't be nearly enough time, in between classes and other obligations, to get all 104 articles edited for Blogspot; 2) some of my entries, especially the oldes ones, are really crappy, short little blurbs that don't go into much detail and I'd end up having to rewrite some of them entirely; and D) because I intend to collect all 156 entries into a book at some point, and what's the point of doing that if you're gonna put 'em all up on the internet?

But wait, you say, didn't you already post them to the internet? Yes, yes I did. But the communities on Livejournal were members-only. The original entries were for the members' enjoyment- the idea was originally concieved as educating a largely ignorant member base (we had some negative opinions about most of the people on Metal_MP3) about what they may be missing out on. Metal is a pretty big genre with lots of different styles, so it's not fair to point at one single band and say that band is the very definition of metal in its entirety. 52, and by extension Mandatory Metal, was started for the purpouse of intelligent discussion of metal, in the same manner as one would discuss jazz or classical.

Back to my original point. This is basically a "best of" collection- entries I'm particularly proud of. They stretch as far back as October 2007 when I first started; that said, these entries have been edited for content. I usually begin each post with an introductory paragraph; this has been excised for the Blogspot version as it's usually a "hey, welcome back" or some terrible joke or a reference to pop culture or a complaint about the weather, et cetera. Also gone are certain things inside the reviews themselves, such as external links, among other things. I've made some additions for clarity or extra detail, as well. I have also made corrections to minor errors as well as snipping out most of the naughtier language (I am a pottymouth and proud of it, but since this is meant to be a de facto portfolio I thought it prudent to at least tone down the four-letter words.)

The following post will be the first half of this two-part series. The second half will go up tomorrow.