Milestones are important to mark in life. They help give meaning to all the time we’ve invested and all the work we’ve done. This is a big one for me.
ARIK DEVENS
10 Years
Something pretty incredible happened over the weekend. It’s a bit hard, at this point, for me to pinpoint exactly when this site “started”. That’s because the early days were unsurprisingly chaotic, and this wasn’t what it’s become for quite a while. Also, I rewrote a majority of the early posts, which were maybe a sentence or two at most.
But, the official start date, if for no other reason than it’s the date on the first post, is February 24, 2014. Which means that Saturday was the ten year anniversary of Cinema Gadfly. That’s hard for me to fathom. When this site started I had only been dating my wife for about a month. We’ve now been married for five years and have two kids together who are four and two.
This is one of the longest commitments, along with said wife relationship, that I’ve ever made. The silly dream that guy had all those years ago, to watch and write about all these incredible films, is still going strong. Ok, slowly, so very slowly, but still. As of this writing I’m at 38% of the mainline films and 51% of the Eclipse Series. That’s insane.
What’s even crazier is that I’m not stopping. I know I write so infrequently now that it can maybe seem like I’ve given up, but I assure you I haven’t. This is still a form of meditation and immense satisfaction for me. I don’t know that I’ll ever finish this project, especially given that Criterion is growing the collection way faster than I’m consuming it. But that’s never really been the point. This is about doing it, and I’m still very much doing it. Thanks to whoever has read anything I’ve written over the past ten years. Now let’s see if we can get this thing to twenty!