Five Years.(My Brain Hurts a Lot.)

So you know what the date was, when I hit that “create new weblog” button and made my first post here?

February 9th 2009.

Yes, to save you counting on your fingers, that's FIVE YEARS, as of last week.



I'll try to keep the self-indulgent self-reflection to a minimum, but basically I think things have developed pretty well since then. Certainly my knowledge and appreciation of cinema and pulp culture has increased massively since I first started trying to write about it, if nothing else. (I'm none too proud of some of the earlier posts on this blog, and there are some more recent ones that are full of inaccuracies and mistaken assumptions that are slightly embarrassing too, but hey, it’s all a learning process, right?)

Early in this site’s life, we were lucky enough to be picked out for a mention on Blogger's daily 'blogs of note' index, which caused a pretty huge spike in interest and seemed to put us on the map, readership-wise. Since then, ‘Breakfast in the Ruins’ has accumulated over 500 blogger 'followers', at least some of whom hopefully aren’t dead accounts or robots of some kind, and nearly half a million individual page-views, only about two thirds of which have been people searching for "nude vampires" or "[name of actress] + naked".

So, basically: I’m incredibly happy that at least some people seem to read this thing and appreciate what I’m doing with it. Thank you readers.

Anyway, by way of celebrating this chronological landmark, here’s something everyone’s sure to enjoy: a COMPETITION!

Yes, that’s right, a competition! Here’s how things are going to work:

Below are eight mysterious screengrabs, all culled from the vast collection of images I’ve amassed whilst working on this blog over the years, each of them taken from a film listed in the side-bar to your right.

If you think you can figure out where at least some of these images originated, you can email your entry to me at breakfastintheruins ( at ) googlemail.com, and if you do good, I will put some slightly shabby prizes in the post to you.

Yes, that’s right, I will actually put some things in an envelope, take it down to the post office and pay for the stamps, even if you live far away in a foreign country! That’s how much I love you all.

Details of prizes, deadline etc. are to be found below, but first let’s get on with the guessing. Here are images 1 to 8:

01:

02:

03:

04:

05:

06:

07:

08:

So there ya go. Best guesses please!

Not-so-glittering prizes potentially up for grabs are as follows:

1. A copy of Anchor Bay’s 2004 Jess Franco Collection box set (8 Discs, PAL Region 2, details here.)

2. A copy of the UK version of Anchor Bay’s 2007 Mario Bava Collection Volume # 1 box set (5 discs, PAL Region 2, details here.)

3. A random grab-bag of ‘70s pulp sci-fi paperbacks (exact contents yet to be confirmed, but there’ll definitely be some Moorcock, E.R. Burroughs and Robert E. Howard in there!)

4. A random grab-bag of DVDs (again, contents yet to be confirmed, but I can guarantee some plenty weird stuff that sticks within the kinda remit covered here, with quality ranging from recently released Blu-ray/DVD combos through to ancient, grungy bootlegs… can also throw in some VHS too if you want some.)

To be honest, I’m not sure whether the task I have set above will prove to be infernally difficult or foolishly simple, or whether anyone will even care enough to enter, so how’s this for a prize distribution scheme:

If I only receive one decent entry, the winner can take their pick or have the lot. If I get two decent entries, winners can choose two each with the highest scorer picking first. If I get three or four good entries, you get one each, with winners picking in order of highest score, and so on. I hope that sounds fair.

Judge’s discretion applies with regards to what constitutes a “decent entry”, but definitely don’t be discouraged from entering if you don’t have an answer for all eight images, because I’m guessing very few people will get them all right.

Deadline for entries will be… oh, I dunno – how does Monday 17th March strike you? Alright with everyone? Good.

(Oh, and one final note: please be a sport and DON’T enter if you happen to be under 18 years of age. No offense intended you understand, and I'm sure you possess perfectly grown up sensibilities, but some of the DVDs offered as prizes contain strong adult content, and getting busted for posting dirty movies to minors is something I can probably live without, y’know what I mean?)

Right! So good luck, and let the best man win. Or best woman, or whatever. Um… I’ve never done one of these before, can you tell?

Anyway, even if you don’t give a damn, thanks again for sticking with me readers, and I hope I will continue to meet whatever twisted expectations bring you to this weblog long into the future.