Being a book and movie geek there are a lot of stories that you read and watch, some are good, others plain suck. Which movies are good enough to watch them after you read the book?

1. The Godfather - Even though the book had to be shortend and a few aspects of the whole Mario Puzzo story are lost in translation this is one of the best book adaptions ever, it has depth, style and formed the image of the american mafia. It does not matter that you can see every shade of the wonderfully drawn characters that you can read about in the book.

2. Fight Club - One of the best(very subjective) and more importantly highly influencing movie’s directed in the 90’s delivers every punch line and is as politically incorrect as the book. Watch the movie and read all the books by Chuck Palanihuk, those really mess with the society like literature should do.

3. Mystic River - Dennis Lehane always writes books with some nasty little twist. This movie is one of the best adaptions you can watch and you should make sure you watch and read this epic about trust, betrayel and horrible events. Clint Eastwood did the best job possible.

4. Sin City - It’s one of those movies that does not get better the more you watch it, still it’s one of the best (comic-)book to movie adaptions. It’s actually not an adaption, it’s a comic on a screen with all the cheesy dialoges and overdrawn characters involved. Thumbs up Robert Rodriguez, let’s see if Sin City 2 will work as well.

5. The Hunt for Red October - An allstar cast and the good’ol fear of the cold war make this movie worthwhile. You can hate or love Clancy, his books are read by many and this has to be the strongest adaption of one of his books.

6. High Fidelity - John Cusack drives this film. A great book about love and the hardships life throws at you put into one compelling movie. As if the book was written for John to perform it.

Sidenote: Everyone must have high expactations for the upcoming shutter island. Scorcese usually does a great job, even though Leo does not fit into that leading role. Nevertheless it will be hard to mess this up as the Lehane book was brilliantly twisted and the Departed was a great adaption as well, even though it was a simple copy from another movie. Go & get the book before you watch the movie, there is still plenty of time to finish it.

This has been a quiet month here at smashill, but nevertheless a lot of stuff got done. Outside the blog at least. I finally have 9 files approved at istock, which is one short of the amount I want to have there, I even made my first whooping 29 cent there, which just underlines how stupid stock photography is. It’s a numbers game nothing more, but it’s something that I had to test out. Otherwise I had a pretty good opportunity of ordering a few posters and photos for free through my old blog and I have been creating loads of stuff offline, as I have been pretty sick of the online world this month. The sensor of my camera was dusted, so I had to give it away and I am still waiting for it from last week Monday… annoying to go to the shop when they say they would have it ready by Saturday and they don’t have it when you drop by. Guess I will try to harvest a discount for that, but I guess they won’t do that for me. *shrugs*

Project Stats & Earnings

Istock
9 files up and running, which is more than double to last month. 29 cents earned!

Zazzle
I started to delete a few of my zazzle items and will restructure my gallery the upcoming months.

mygall.de
Deleted a few images and upped the price for my images quite a lot. As I don’t make any sales there yet, it does not matter at all. I just don’t want to underprice myself there.

flickr
Repeating last month’s words: Wonder if I will use that service more often in the future. It sure looks like a great community, but I have not been taking part in it too much.

twitter
As with everything related to the online world, my twitter usage has been very low. Less conversations, less traffic, more quality offline time.

Site Stats

Since February 11. 79 Posts and 61 comments were written, this month I’ve hit the publish button every other day if I believe my stats, but it’s been a lot writing early and a lot of nothing later, I skipped my main traffic generation tool of textures for 2 weeks, as my camera was dusted and I did not bother fixing the textures for this.

Traffic wise it’s been a great ride thinking of how little time I put into the blog, as there came more than 850 visitors ending up on over 1000 visits! I know what drives the traffic for my niche and I will work on this once I get my camera back. I’ll probably upload textures twice per week, as those are the engine of my blog.

There has been another pagerank update, but this blog has neither dropped nor increased and stands at a steady pagerank of 2. Here you can have a look at the stats for this month. A little increase compared to last month, and I will work on this the upcoming month. It’s not about time put into this, it’s about using the time spend effective.

Outlook for June

It’s been tough to update as regular as I did when I started this blog, the weather is so great I actually don’t want to waste as much time in front of the computer as I’d do when the weather sucks. I have to work on my timing and get at least 3 regular updates per week. I count I stock as done this month, and will work on my photography portfolio and try to get some more sales there. Traffic wise I will push this blog and try to find a bigger blog to share my textures with, maybe someone reading this would be interested in that. Just drop me a line.