About Asteroid G

This site has gone through many incarnations over the years. Decades ago (gods, it really has been that long), this site was named "Darkmoon's Domain" (as the site creator, Mike Finkelstein, goes by "Darkmoon" Online) and it was a dumping ground for various thoughts and ideas, and media reviews. Over time the name of the site changed, to "The Domain", before eventually dying off from lack of use.

As you will see, this has happened repeatedly over the years.

After a couple of years of disuse, the site was revived by Darkmoon and a few other editors and renamed "Asteroid G". The name came from the asteroid in X-Men comics, Asteroid M (as in the asteroid home for Mutants). The site was designed to be a repository for all things geeky, thus the "G", and it served as a collection of articles, thoughts, ideas, and media reviews. Essentially the same kind of content that was on it before.

But then, after about a year of work, many of the editors fell away, and the site eventually ran out of steam. And so it lay still once again.

Jump forward five years from there, and the original site creator, Darkmoon, elected to revive the concept again, this time on Tumblr as "Musings of the Jewpacabra" (this time based on his current Twitter handle). The site/blog was, you guessed it, a repository for ideas, thoughts, and media reviews. And, like the previous incarnations, it eventually ran out of steam.

Now, however, we're going strong once again with the site (largely because we have movies we love to watch and we want to write about them -- this is totally a self-serving website). It is, of course, a repository for ideas, thoughts, and media reviews. New articles will be posted as we feel like it, but you can also check out previous postings from the previous incarnations of the site (yes, including much of the truly, terribly written content from the original Domain era).

So yeah, there ya go. Hope that answered your question. You did have a question, right?

Hey, what does this site cover?

Ideas, thoughts, and media reviews, naturally. Mostly movie reviews, but we'll also cover video games, anime, TV, books, plays, comedy specials, and whatever other pop-culture happens our way. Along the way we'll occasionally talk about random thoughts and ideas that come to us, although we rarely get political.

The reason we (generally, sometimes poorly) avoid politics is mostly because there's no point. The site contributors are all quite opinionated and (by and large) very liberal. While we have thoughts on politics that we'll rant about to each other all the time, posting things like that Online doesn't tend to do much good. Healthy debate is great but the Internet very rarely has healthy debate. Instead you get trolls yelling at other trolls and no one really paying attention to what the other person is saying.

We've been in enough of these arguments to know, first hand, how pointless it can be.

Thus while we might touch upon topics that could get political (we talked about global warming at one point and, more recently, gender politics in superhero media) we try to do it from a perspective to actually explore the ideas behind it, not just rail about our ideology. We find the discussions work better that way.

Most of the time, though, we just wanna talk about whatever stupid crap we just watched.

If you want healthy debate, why don't you allow readers to comment on your articles?

It's not that we don't allow it, it's just that when we had a comment feature on the articles (via Disqus) no one used them. We had comment sections up for about a year and they never got comments in them, so there seemed to be little point in keeping them around.

Now, in fairness, the site's viewership was much lower then than it is now, so maybe we could bring them back and they'd be used but... eh. We've gotten used to just screaming into the void. No reason to change that now without a lot of people demanding on social media or something for us to change things.

Besides politics, is there anything else this site doesn't cover?

Not really. Although we don't have anyone on staff interested in sports (American Gladiators notwithstanding) or cars, that doesn't mean we're opposed to hosting articles about those (or other seemingly non-geek) topics. While sports isn't currently our thing, we do recognize that it's pretty easy to get nerdy about sports stats, with runs and hits and balls and puck-slaps and inverse slide grapples or whatever it is those big, burly dudes do. Similarly, cars can get pretty geeky with tuning and engine stats, wheel load-outs and carburetor grunts.

Essentially, if you have topics you like to get geeky about, either ones we already cover or something new, feel free to submit your articles. We're always happy to host new content and, in the process, let your geek flag fly.

What's your editorial process?

Right now it's very minimal. Most of the time it's just one person (Mike) writing everything for this site, making it, essentially, a pop-culture blog. His process is to write everything in Notepad, stream-of-consciousness, and then post it up. All articles are run through a spell checker, but those programs don't catch everything. Inevitably, some typos will still get through.

That said, if regular contributors do join the fold again (like we used to have back in the old days of Asteroid G) then a formal editing process, with workshop, will be implemented at that juncture.

Why do you only post two articles, at most, a day?

Self-imposed limit. It would be easy for us to post more articles on any given day, but we'd very quickly start running out of topics to discuss, which would, in turn, lead to a drought of content. By limiting the flow of content to two articles a day (and one podcast a week), we control the flow of content and ensure regular updates for the foreseeable future.

That said, if we ever get more contributors for the site with a nice diversity of content they're interested in, we'll certainly look at upping the number of articles per day. It all boils down to how many writers and editors we have and who wants to discuss what.

You have a number of movies you've reviewed more than once. Why do you keep the old articles up?

Because we think it's helpful to see how our opinions evolve on movies over time. Some films we really like the first time they come out, only to go back later with fresh eyes and realize, "wait, this isn't anywhere near as good as I remember." Other times we'll absolutely hate a film, spend some time away, watch it again and have warmer feelings for it (because the second time around we didn't have anywhere near as high expectations about the film). Getting both sides of that perspective represented on the site is important which is why we keep a running archive of everything, no matter how much our opinion of something might have changed.

The "Browse By Topic" links in the archive seem to change regularly. Why is that?

We make an attempt to feature the topics with the most articles about them in our archive. We actually have a spreadsheet with running totals of the various topics and how many articles we've written about them (all of it maintained by hand -- if ever we upgrade this site with a database and tagging, that will be the first thing to be upgraded) and as we write more we tick the numbers up and reorganize. Only the top 23 topics are featured so, once one topic has more articles than another, the features will change.

To head off the next question of, "you've written about X topic more than Y topic, but Y is featured and X isn't", we do have a few rules for our tracking. Firstly, only main topics count, things like reviews of a movie, a book, or a TV show. Any time we talk about one thing compared to another, or a vast overview of an entire universe, we consider that a supplemental article and it doesn't count for our archive totals. Similarly, seasons of a TV show are considered supplemental to the main topic of that show, so they don't tick the numbers up either (thus why we've written about eight seasons of Game of Thrones, and a few more for House of the Dragon, but the overarching topic, "A Song of Ice and Fire", still is sitting at "2" in our tracking sheet).

Finally, not every topic is currently tracked in our archive. For example, both Spider-man and the X-Men are tracked topics but other superheroes that show up throughout the MCU aren't currently tracked. That's because Spider-man has movies outside the MCU while the X-Men have yet to show up in that series (yet). We only recently began reviewing Marvel movies outside the MCU, and until a Marvel hero shows up in something we've watched outside that cinematic universe, they're all MCU in our books. By contrast, a number of DC heroes have shown up in multiple media franchises, and their own media as well, and we've covered a bunch of it. That means each DC hero gets tracked so we can see where they show up, how, and with whom. Just a way to stay organized and efficient.

So yes, all you Kingpin fans, we'll eventually review one of his products outside the MCU and then suddenly his number will start to tick up.

I was going through the Weekly Feature archives and noticed articles were missing. What happened?

The archives of weekly features aren't meant to replace the regular archives by topic or the main full archives. They simply exist to track the last year (or so) of updates on a specific topic (like Superheroes or Slasher Flicks). If there's a specific article you want, we recommend hitting the features by topic, or take a dive into the deeper archives (and maybe find something new in there in the process).