I recently booked my 187th writing job last month as a contributor to COEDMagazine.com, a website that looks a lot like a cross between College Humor and Maxim.

Last week they published my first two articles, “5 Things Fallout 3 Taught Me About Life” and “How to Avoid Responsibilities After Graduation.”

Both of them are my first attempts at writing humor in a long time (and for the college male audience no less — don’t be shocked when you stumble across a masturbation joke), but all things considered I think they turned out pretty well.  Be kind.

I’m not sure how many articles I’ll be able to write for them per month, so I haven’t posted them in my list of RSS feeds in the sidebar yet, but I’ll let you know when I get more articles published.

For over a year, Twitter enjoyed the status of being that new social-networking tool that nobody you knew actually used.  But lately it’s kind of exploded, especially in the media: we hear about celebrities Twittering and Congressmen Twittering and yadda yadda yadda and suddenly you can’t escape it.  As a true validation of its success, Facebook’s homepage redesign basically copied Twitter’s.

If Twitter seems kind of lame to you, that’s because it is.  But we were sucked into e-mail, we were sucked into AIM, and we were sucked into Facebook, so there’s a certain amount of inevitability involved in it.

For my part, I’ve actually been managing a Twitter account for TheCinemaSource for a few months now.  It’s pretty great, actually, because it actually serves a purpose: I use a plugin on our site that automatically sends Twitter an update whenever we post a news story.  In other words, we get our brand out there with absolutely no work on my part.  As I write this, we have 313 followers with an average of about five more per day.

Before I set TheCinemaSource’s account up, I made my own account to see what the deal was and to see if it was a good way to keep in touch with a few friends I know from NYU who use it.  It lay stagnant for a few months, but lately I’ve gotten in the habit of “tweeting” (ugh) a few times a week, usually non sequitur comments about poop.  It’s completely pointless, but there’s also a side of me that sees it as some kind of bizarre creative writing challenge.

If you already use Twitter, follow me: @TheCinemaSource and @michaeldance.  If not, well, you’re missing out on the latest addition to the Zeitgeist, but I wouldn’t stress about that too much.

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been working on transferring a few sections of The Cinema Source over to a WordPress format. Last year I already switched the site’s news section to a blog run on WordPress (and I’m talking about the content management system — not the server), which came with benefits like a built-in comments section and an RSS feed.

Eventually, it became the most trafficked section on the site, so my boss gave me the go-ahead to more fully integrate it into the site: add contests to the format and revamp the code on the site’s homepage to link directly to the new section (as opposed to coding in dozens of redirects like I had been doing).  The design changes coincided with the implementation of a new video system that not only made it much easier to upload videos, but enabled our ad people, Crave Online, to run pre-roll advertisements on our videos and make us more money.

I finally enacted the switch-over late Monday night (it took me until 5:30 a.m. because of a glitch I couldn’t figure out that caused all of our old permalinks to break), and I encourage you to check it out.  I’m not done tweaking it yet, and the eventual plan is to switch the movie reviews and interviews to match the new design — but that’s phase two of a months-long project.  Below you can see the screencaps of the updated homepage and news section:

To all the Lost fans out there — and I think I’ve converted quite a few of you by now — I just posted a theory on DailyLost that I really like.  It’s really more of a history: I describe what Ben and Widmore’s motivations have been leading up to this point.  A lot of it is culled from what we already know but contains no spoilers.

Widmore’s plan involved an experience he had back on the island when he was seventeen, when a man named John Locke appeared and claimed that he was supposed to be the true leader of the Others. If Widmore could get Locke to the island, Locke could usurp Ben for him. So he sent his right hand man Abaddon to convince Locke to go on the walkabout…

I also tie in the video game Myst.  Remember that game?  Here’s the full article.

After one hundred and seventy posts and nearly three years, Stranded in Manhattan is closing down.  In its place: Screenlancer, the website you see here before you.

I imported every single post over, so everything you could read on Stranded in Manhattan is still alive and safely archived.  The most important changes are back-end stuff: I switched from Blogger to WordPress and I’m on a bigger server now.

The layout, of course, is different; it’s my design based, on a WordPress theme framework called Sandbox.  And my reviews archive — which I had a link to on Stranded in Manhattan but never actually created — is up and running (click the “Reviews” link in the upper-right) although I still have to add the actual links.

My big innovation is to post feeds to all the sites I write for in the sidebar.  That means I won’t just list all my new crap whenever I write a post on here (although I will mention whenever I write a review).

The overall goal is to write more posts and better posts.

Just don’t give me grief about the title.  StrandedinArlington.com sounded idiotic, and MichaelDance.com was taken.

As you may expect from somebody who writes for three different entertainment web networks, I’ve been writing Oscar articles virtually all day.

That means you’re not getting a brand-new one here, but don’t despair: for the type of post-Oscar roundup I usually write, check out my Complete Oscar Afterglow at awards.hell.ca.

For a more conventional article style, check out my article at The Cinema Source. I also include video highlights from the show at the bottom. (Actually, check out the “full Oscar coverage” hub I set up at The Cinema Source; among other items, it includes a link to my 2008 interview with Danny Boyle, who just won Best Director last night.)

To see the video of footage from upcoming films they played at the end of the show, check out this article at Clevver.com.

Of my predictions, I got 20 out of 24 right — my second-best year ever after Return of the King‘s 2004 sweep.

Best Picture
SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE

Best Director
Danny Boyle, SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE

Best Actor
Sean Penn, MILK

Best Actress
Kate Winslet, THE READER

Best Supporting Actor
Heath Ledger, THE DARK KNIGHT

Best Supporting Actress
Penelope Cruz, VICKY CRISTINA BARCELONA

Best Original Screenplay
Dustin Lance Black, MILK

Best Adapted Screenplay
Simon Beaufoy, SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE

Best Foreign Film
WALTZ WITH BASHIR

Best Animated Feature
WALL-E

Best Documentary
MAN ON WIRE

Best Film Editing
SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE

Best Art Direction
THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON

Best Cinematography
SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE

Best Costume Design
THE DUCHESS

Best Makeup
THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON

Best Visual Effects
THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON

Best Sound Mixing
SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE

Best Sound Editing
THE DARK KNIGHT

Best Score
SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE

Best Song
“Down to Earth”, WALL-E

Best Animated Short
PRESTO

Best Live-Action Short
TOYLAND

Best Documentary Short
THE CONSCIENCE OF NHEM EN

If I had any guts at all, I might predict that Amy Adams upsets Penelope Cruz, Melissa Leo upsets Kate Winslet, and Frozen River upsets Milk for Original Screenplay.

The ceremony starts at 8:30 p.m. on ABC. From 8:00 – 8:30 is a red carpet pre-show.