When an old man dies, a library is burned with him.

I occasionally worry about what will happen to this blog when I'm no longer alive or otherwise capable of maintaining it. No one owns anything in the virtual realm, and all sites (and all the knowledge they contain) evaporate like mist as soon as they are no longer profitable enough to maintain the energy cost of their digital existence. Since I have selfishly chosen not to have any children of my own that I can emotionally manipulate into keeping Wriphe.com alive in perpetuity, I probably need to accept the fact that once I'm gone, any evidence that I wasted so much time at a computer keyboard will be gone, too.

Which makes me wonder, what will the world really miss? Is the minutia evidence of my life really worth preserving? To answer that question, I climbed a mountain and asked a wizened sage... no, just kidding. I wrote a script that sorted and counted all 550,000 words I've recorded in the past 21 years to see if they gave me any indication of the site's value. (Note that my quick-and-dirty script returned many character strings you won't find in a dictionary, like movie titles, odd proper names, web addresses, and "g-g-ghost.")

The most common word at Wriphe.com: the

No great insight there. The is the most common word in the English language, which is no big surprise considering that it is the only definite article in the whole darn language. According to Wikipedia, it accounts for "seven percent of all printed English-language words." For comparison, it currently accounts for only about 5% of Wriphe.com. Heck, all first person singular pronouns (I, me, mine, my) combined make up only 3% of Wriphe.com! I guess I don't talk about myself enough.

After stripping out the top 50 most common English words (according to the same Wikipedia source), I get the following list:

1. my (3,110 occurrences)
2. it's (2,045)
3. about (1,847)
4. like (1,840)
5. me (1,769)

Ok, fine. Maybe I do talk about myself enough. Yeah, nobody in the future is going to need all of that.

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Has it really been three weeks since I last mentioned movies? Let's fix that!

25/2034. Aurora Teagarden Mysteries: Haunted by Murder (2022)
Oh, no, is the murderer a... g-g-ghost? No, Shaggy. No it is not. Mom solved this one in the first thirty minutes by simply identifying the least likely suspect. I'm thinking maybe this series is running out of steam.

26/2035. Viva Knievel! (1977)
Have I really not reviewed this movie yet? I feel like I have. And if I haven't, shame on me. It's everything you could want in a Dukes of Hazzard episode plus Gene Kelly in his single worst on-screen performance ever. (When you are being out-acted by a motorcycle stuntman, it's time to hang it up.) The perfect example of a movie so bad it comes out the other side.

27/2036. Free Guy (2021)
I liked it. The script and the director (and Ryan Reynolds) were aware enough of the hows and whys video games are made to maintain their strong satirical point amid the excesses and oversimplifications necessary in crafting a "blockbuster" comedy-actioner for mass market audiences. Kudos.

Gaming goes better with Coke!

28/2037. Mortal Kombat (2021)
This, on the other hand. I mean, it doesn't have an exemplary plot or action sequences, there's no significant characterization, the actors are made of wood, and the dialogue couldn't be worse. On the up side, it was helpful to be reminded why I don't play the Mortal Kombat games anymore.

More to come.

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