So there's this website, 366 Weird Movies, with a self-explanatory title. In my earliest of early blogging careers, your humble penguin chanced upon that site. WHOIS (yes I'm still a command-line Linux hardcore geek, dealio) says the site only originated in 2009, which still makes it eons old in website years. I ended up writing out movie reviews for the odd lark. Over the years, my main career compelled me to write about bland topics like tax law, photovoltaic solar panels, organic chemistry, digital marketing, and other sleepy business stuff. Reviewing a weird movie is fun!

This is part of my core writer's career philosophy, BTW, always have a side project where you can just blow off steam from after writing the rent-and-bills topics. This is the way of the Internet freelance writing cowboy.

Whilst toiling in the 366 Weird Movies fields, that's when Giles Edwards first ran across me in the wild. Between the two of us, I think we've reviewed roughly 400+ films there, though Giles' work outpaces mine at a 5x1 ratio. Now, I'm a busy beaver, and I'm so frequently teased about my workaholism that I can't resist ribbing somebody outpacing me. Granted, Mr. Edwards had the advantage of commuting to the Fantasia Film Fest every year like a migratory salmon returns to Canada, so he even got first crack at movies I'd barely have the viewing time budget to watch.

So we traded barbs in the comments there (really, weird cinemaphiles are the most fun company!). Mr. Edwards and I may have even tied each other briefly for "who can survive and review the worst horror movie without going insane." It's an occupational hazard.

Anyway - Giles' other creative efforts at the time included voice artist and sound editing work, such as a satiric work of music fandom I wrote up for my music blog gig. That bit of satiric - "filk" is perhaps the correct term? - work was In the Studio mit Markus und Peter.

Well! After I'd worked shoulder to shoulder with Giles and the rest of the team there so long, we got to chat on Twitter and cooked up a fun project for ourselves. That inspiration was the project that set us on the path to found 13 Nocturn Alley productions - but the rest of that story is for another day!