After 3 years with the same basic blog design, we’ve decided to make a change. It’s pretty much the same layout as before, just a different look. I think it looks a little cleaner than before.  The theme is a lot easier to work with, so I may still tinker here and there in the future to get things where we want them.

That being said, Two-Headed Blog is officially over 4 years old (and that was after 2 years of sporadic blogging under a different name). Who knows how much life is left in this thing…

At any rate, I’m going to pop back into this blog and contribute whenever inspiration strikes. Sarah’s been holding down the fort quite well as I took a hiatus from this blog. I’ll still be throwing down some brief thoughts on movies over at The Filmcake, but I’ll be joining the fray here as well.

For the past few years, Dwight and I have enthusiastically attended (and blogged about) what is one of the highlights of our year – the deadCENTER film festival. This year, we’ll be doing the same thing, only in a “semi-official” capacity.

To our surprise and great joy, Two-Headed Blog was asked to serve as festival bloggers. So, in addition to finding festival-related posts here and at Filmcake, you’ll be able to find us on the deadCENTER site. (We’ll also try to include a Twitter-style feed on our sidebar for the duration of the festival.) Other festival bloggers include the crew from The Lost Ogle, and Hypeful.

Last night, we received our press passes, and I’ve been bouncing around like a kid on Adderall ever since. I wonder if my pass will get me into crime scenes and Brad Henry press conferences…

Well, it’s happened. After years of swearing that I would never, ever do the whole My Space / Facebook thing, I finally broke down and crossed over to the dark side.

It started a few weeks ago when I was over at the in-laws’ house. They were all talking about Facebook, and about how helpful it was for staying in touch. Since Dwight and I live a couple hours away from the clan, we occasionally feel a little left out of the loop. So after we returned back home, Dwight created a page of his own.

After watching him happily cavort his way around Facebook Land for a few days, I resigned myself to the fact that now I, too, was going to have to have a page – and, ever the narcissist, promptly spent the better part of a weekend filling it up with photos and information about myself. I sent out a handful of friend requests, to my brother and some friends I knew were already on Facebook.

Then I was found by my cousins in New York. And some more friends. I figured out how to add music to my profile, and how to share cool videos I might run across. People started commenting on my photos, and seemingly overnight, I was addicted.

However, I’m still not completely sold. I understand Facebook recently underwent a redesign, one that many people are less than thrilled with. I don’t know what it looked like before, but I’m not terribly fond of its current incarnation. The homepage set-up leaves me staggering under sensory overload every time I look at it. I’m not sure I want to be updated every time someone I barely know takes a “Which Simpsons Character Are You?” quiz.

I prefer the blog format. I like writing a post, and then having people comment on it. It’s neat and orderly and structured. The Facebook home page, on the other hand, is chaotic. There’s stuff I posted, and stuff other people posted, and a whole lot of sifting is involved. Plus, it seems less conducive to meaningful discussion. I feel like anything I post has to be short, snappy, and relatively trivial. More Twitter-esque, less Manifesto. Perhaps that’s not necessarily a bad thing, though. You don’t always have to have “meaningful discussion.”

I just wonder now about the implications for Two-Headed Blog. My level of posting has dropped off significantly lately, even before embarking upon my Facebook adventure. So what happens now? Am I to be consumed by Facebook? Will this be the new recipient of my extra energy and attention? Is this the end of Two-Headed Blog? Or is this Facebook thing just a fad? I guess I’ll find out.

Stupid Facebook.

I assume we’ve all heard of the Bucket List concept by now – a list of things you want to do before you die. Travel to every continent, ride a mechanical bull, write a novel, blah, blah, blah. You get the idea.

Now, for the entertaining flipside (via both Shapely Prose and my buddy Jessika).  Let’s talk about ”Fuck It Lists,” the latest phenomenon to take the Blogowebs by storm.

In other words, the question is this: when you’re on your deathbed, which things will you be okay not having done?

My Fuck-It List might include the following:

Finding God. I spent the better part of a decade struggling with this, and each passing year only seemed to further confirm my predisposition towards a total lack of belief. And I’m cool with that.

Being a size eight…or six…or four…or two…or whatever the hell is considered the “perfect size” these days. It’s not worth the suffering it takes to get there, and once you are there, I suspect you simply find a whole slew of other things to be unhappy about. On a somewhat related note…

Wearing a bikini. I’ve never worn one (even as a relatively thin teenager) and I think I’ll be able to live my life quite happily without ever wearing one in the future.

Trying all those bizarre and exotic foods you see Anthony Bourdain or Andrew Zimmerman eating on the Travel Channel. While I enthusiastically admire a sense of adventure, my gastronomic thrill-seeking ends at duck terrine.

Skydiving/bungee jumping. This seems to be a standard presence on many Bucket Lists, but I confess to never having had much of a desire to do either.

And while this answer may seriously piss off some of my friends, I think I’ll be okay if I never see Watchmen. While I certainly wouldn’t mind seeing it (I’m mildly-to-moderately curious), I can’t say I’ll be devastated if I never find the time. Sacrilege, I know.

 So, pray tell. What’s on your Fuck It List?

It’s not very often that I’m so intrigued by a blog that upon discovering it for the first time, I feel compelled to comb through page after page of old posts. Sociological Images made me do just that. It’s written by a group of sociologists who deconstruct images in the popular media, and needless to say, they’re quite good at pointing out a lot of the misogyny that continues to run rampant throughout.

Sociologists are cool.

This post, in particular, got my blood boiling. Apparently, some folks at the Thorvaldsen Museum in Copenhagen got together and decided that classics like The Birth of Venus or Venus with the Apple just weren’t good enough the way they were - nope, that Venus bitch needed to lose some of the weight.

On a related note, I’ve also been loving Progress on the Prairie. I discovered it among this year’s crop of Okie Blog Award nominees, and with its mixture of art and feminism, it’s definitely a blog after my own heart.