Looking Back and Looking Forward

The turning of the calendar is always a great time to pause and reflect, to review what's gone on lately and to course correct when necessary for the year ahead. This is why we spend so much of December reflecting on the highlights and lowlights of the previous 11 months, and it's why we have New Year's Resolutions for the year ahead.

This blog is no different! At its core, it's a place where I want to share my thoughts on pop culture consumables - books, movies, shows, and games - with my friends, and where I want to read any thoughts they have to offer as well. Let's briefly review the history of the blog and its changing nature.

It began in 2009 (wow, eight years ago) primarily as a motivation for me to go through my shelves and finally get around to reading, watching, and playing everything I owned but had not yet read, watched, or played. The goal then was to eliminate or empty out my backlog. Early on, I even had quotas and thresholds like "beat two games for every new one I buy." I was joined by Sweeney, and back in those early days, we posted here constantly.

Backlog-elimination quickly became a secondary goal to simple pop culture discussion. With more and more people joining the blog over the years that followed, our "golden age" was probably 2011-2012 or so, with lots of people posting frequently, commenting frequently, and just discussing books, movies, and games in general.

And then, as things do, the blog began to fade. A lot of us got married, bought houses, had kids, began to treat our jobs as "career opportunities" rather than mere "means to paychecks." These things happen! We read less, played less, and watched less. Some of us stopped writing altogether, and the rest appeared infrequently enough for this to essentially become a solo effort once again for a while there. Meanwhile, Keith was motivated enough to launch a website and a series of podcasts where we all began writing about and discussing games, TV shows, and even movies. It was a stylish new way - and a more legitimate way - to do so much of what we'd been doing here for so long, books aside. And it was easy to include more people - people like J and Stevie and Mikey, who never had much interest in writing, and people like Kevin, who were far more games-oriented than any of us, and people like Trashcan and Kiki and Andrew and Lucia and, well, the list goes on and on and on.

At this point, I was posting things back here at the blog mostly out of habit, unsure if anyone would ever even read them aside form some future version of myself. Some of my posts here were just links to more formal reviews I'd made over at gametimebro.com, or to podcasts where they were discussed casually, but in detail. For a while I debated shutting this down entirely, or at least migrating it over to gametimebro.com in full, like our own sad little "merger" to have fun with. And who knows? I still might! Combining our efforts seems very reasonable, particularly as we all seem to have diminishing efforts in general. Oof. Aging! Am I right?

But lo! The blog lives. It doesn't necessarily thrive, but there's been an uptick in activity recently, thanks largely to Trevor, and even keith has expressed some interest in posting quick rapid-fire reviews on games here instead of more formally and professionally over on gametimebro. Marissa, one of the fastest readers I know, has started reading books again after not doing so for, essentially, the last two years. To all of this I say, yes! Mor econtent! Let's do this! Let's make the blog great again! (Goddammit.)

So in the spirit of reinvigorating the heart and soul of the blog - quick thoughts, actual discussions in the comments - I'm going to abandon my two-year practice of "TV Dumps" and "Movie Dumps." I barely ever, if at all, watch things on DVD or Blu-ray anymore anyway; those backlogs are tiny and also irrelevant. We're in full stream mode, baby! (Yes, I'm just recognizing something that was inevitable and alreayd a realit back in, oh, 2012. But still.)

Anyway, TL;DR, my goal this year (and going forward in general) is going to be to post more frequently, more rapidly, more casually. And part of that means "dumping" out my thoughts on shows and movies as I watch them, rather than working on drafts that just sit there for a month or two. I hope this invited more conversation and more casual discussion.

One day the blog will fade away for good, as all things do. But not yet. Not yet!