Disclaimer: This month’s free association space is going to be filled with an excess of extraneous drivel that you may or may not be interested in, so if you’re just here for the usual goods, use the [CTRL+F] on your tidy browser and search “JULY” so you can skip past the ensuing wall of text.

For those of you who have already made the intrinsic observation that this month’s header image is not really all that different from last month, I firstly have to point out that I’m terrible at Photoshop. Photo-editing is a trade I picked up solely to spruce up these journals, so my expertise doesn’t extend much farther than having preset image dimensions and slapping on text wherever it’s convenient. If anyone out there who is more adept at this sort of thing wants to volunteer their talents for future endeavors, then by all means. Also, I apologize for featuring quite possibly the ugliest freak-folk band ever in this month's header image, but I can't help it if I'm really lookin' forward to some new Espers material.

Anyway – Ryan, one of my three roommates, has recently developed an interest in writing reviews and approached me a couple of weeks ago with the idea of a collaborative blog. It’s an entertaining notion for a number of reasons – the most prevalent would have to be that out of everyone I’ve ever lived with at college, Ryan superficially seems like he resembles me the least in terms of personality and lifestyle. Regardless, I’ve had the opportunity to spend these last 5 years to really approximate the depth of the overlap of our interests and tastes (especially with music and comic books), and the results have been pretty astonishing. That’s not to imply that we necessarily like all the same things. On the contrary – it seems like we butt heads more often than not when we start dissecting the minutiae of certain segments of the arts. What’s important, though, is that we both tend to approach art criticism with a similar, analytical (although some of our friends might accuse of being overly so) frame of reference.

Currently, we have chosen to tentatively title the blog Best of Both Worlds for our first few trial entries. It’s an inside joke referencing a particularly terrible superstar collaboration between Jay-Z and R. Kelly from a few years ago, but we’re hoping to cultivate some sort of readership by playing off any inherent difference in opinion we might have. I suspect Ryan and I will be dealing with film, music and comic books primarily; I don’t dedicate blocs of my spare time toward non-fiction like I used to, so Ryan will probably take up the bulk of any existing book commentary. We’ll see how this plays out in the coming months. There’s not much to look at right now, but if any of you are interested in checking it out, you can take a look at Ryan’s first entry here.

This blog opportunity also doubles as an outlet to get my writing out to more people. Until I see exactly what this new revamp of Last.FM spells for the future of journal connectivity between users, spending on average 3-5 hours on an entry only to have 2 or 3 people read it just isn’t cutting it for me anymore. Plus, I’ve discovered that dedicating this space to free-associating with various other things knockin’ around in my head goes a long way with keeping my fluctuating interest in music invigorated – even if no one here is particularly interested in what I have to say about politics or the latest box-office powerhouses.

My last few Upcoming Attractions installments have featured recurring meanderings regarding things like movies and politics, so I’m going to see what splitting up these thoughts into distinct categories does. There’s definitely a double-edged sword aspect to this: while it might help me to organize my thoughts more coherently, it also eliminates all free association elements by assigning specific groupings to thoughts that I might not even necessarily have r