Movies by Theater

I wanted to see how the places I go to see movies has changed since I moved here and how much influence having a DVD player has had on where I go to see movies, so the chart below I think shows that to some extent. Cheap older films can now be rented, so I have fewer reasons to go see such films at the Tate Student Center. Art films, which were hard to find in town but usually showed at Beechwood, are now shown regularly at Cine. (I was surprised to see how many films I likely used to go to see at Beechwood.)

However several other factors influence where I see movies as well. Some entities have stopped showing films, such as the Georgia Theater, which does only music now. Other cheap venues have also opened up, such as the second-run theater at the mall. Finally, the price of films went up to a level that I no longer felt like I could justify attending them at full price unless I was really intent on the movie.

Looking at my list, I realized that some films I just don't remember at all--and often I wasn't quite certain where I saw the film, so I had to make an educated guess. Hence, these charts are to an extent based on estimate from memory rather than cold hard stats. They are broken down between 2001-4 and 2005-11 because 2005 is when DVD became available to me.

2001-4

2005-11

My U.S. Map by Decade

I wanted to see how much where I live affects how much time I spend in various states. It's interesting how the trajectory changes as I moved from the West Coast to the East Coast. The 1990s, where I lived in three different states and did significant in-state travel represent the time when I was present for a time in the most states. The 2000s, where I've spent most of the decade in Georgia fill in a few of the eastern and midwestern states, but the West Coast now has started to look anemic, as the East Coast did when I was younger. One difference: I have family on the West Coast, so there's still an excuse to go back.

In the maps below, the black states are those I lived in during the decade. The dark gray states are those I spent at least one contiguous week in, and the light states are those I at least "touched."

1970s

1980s

1990s

2000s

So far the 2010s are shaping up to look similar to the 2000s.

IM Chats by Year

When I first got online at home, around 1999, I became an e-mail fanatic. Probably, about six months later or so, I discovered instant messaging, and that became a constant for many an evening for probably a year or so. But the IM usage dropped off precipitously once I moved here. There are likely multiple reasons for that: I have more friends here. I have less interest in trying to get dates online. Chatting online is no longer "new" to me, so its novelty has worn off. And finally, chatting online no longer seems as easy to accomplish as it once did.

By the latter, what I mean is that Yahoo! Messenger, AIM, MSN Messenger--these services all no longer seem as prolifically used as they once were. Many folks text rather than IM, or they IM straight from the phone, or they chat via a social network like Facebook, and since one of the main reasons I chatted was to meet new people and Facebook seems more structured around helping you stay in contact with people you already know, I'm not as motivated to chat on it (but see above also: there are a lot of things these days I'd rather do than chat online).

Nevertheless, I present what few statistics I have in this regard, which only takes into account chat from 2005 on, when I got this particular computer. The chat stats for 1999 to 2005, unfortunately, were lost in a crash. By 2005, chat in my life was already in decline; nevertheless, if you can imagine the trajectory shown here going backward, you'll probably see a pattern you could plot out to years before.

The blue line on top represents chats along with chat attempts (often people don't answer an opening line on IM); the red line on bottom represent actual chats. Where the blue disappears, all attemps to chat were successful.
The 2011 chat is the reason for my blog entry. I had a wonderful online chat one evening with a gal I'd e-mailed back and forth with a few times. But to note how my feelings about chat have changed, I really felt more like talking on the phone with her, but more than that, I felt like being out on an actual date. It was loneliness after the cancellation of a date with another gal that caused me to check into Facebook in the first place. A chat, as wonderful as it was, was a poor substitute.

Single versus Married Classmates

I went to a small high school and, as such, knew everyone in my graduating class. For a while after graduation, I even continued to know what was going on in most of their lives. But time passes, and people move away, and then I myself moved away. My knowledge of people faded.

And yet . . . Well, there's Facebook, and there are people who e-mail me out of nowhere, and some of them know what happened to some of the others, and somehow that keeps me somewhat in tune with what's happened the last twentysomething years.

Most of us have married, and lot of us have kids. I'm neither of those. I'm unusual, I guess, but just how much? Let's see:
I'm unusual, but apparently I'm not that unusual. There's a chunk of us who have never married, not once (the guys are a slight majority here). Of course, some of us might have live-in significant others, but I don't know anything about that in most cases. And some of us may have divorced, though I can only think of one I know for certain. And I can only list off a few who I know for certain have children, though I suspect many others do also.

Somehow, I suppose, I should take solace in the fact that there are other never marrieds still out there, but mostly I just think, Why didn't those folks ever marry? Some of them were/are certainly good prospects.

Percentage of Acceptances versus Number of Pieces Submitted

My friend Al has stopped submitting to journals because he finds it a waste of time, given that an acceptance comes to him so rarely--he says it's about 1 percent. So I decided to look at my own rates to see if they were comparable. I was thinking they were about 2 percent, at least in recent years.

So first, let's look at the percentages, with and without poetry (it used to be stories were harder for me to find publication for, whereas in the most recent year it has become just the opposite):
I had a long dry spell in the early 2000s. But I also didn't submit much until about 2008, when I decided no longer to limit myself to my best seven pieces--instead, I would send out the best forty pieces or so (I don't do simultaneous submissions). So the percentages have gone up, I suppose, because I'm doing more submitting, but they've also gone down from times when I actually did receive the rare acceptances. Overall, Al turns out to be correct, however: the general acceptance rate is one in one hundred.