Monday, July 25, 2022

Blog Post #500!



Who would have thought when I started this blog over seven years ago, back on January 1st, 2015, that I'd make it to 500 posts? I sure didn't!

This blog started off as a way for me to discuss many different aspects of my life. I wanted to talk about sports, food, restaurants, travel, books, movies, all the fun stuff I was doing at the time - with a few video game reviews sprinkled in. Fast forward seven years to the present day, and 389 of my 500 posts have been video game reviews. Diving further into the numbers, 415 of my blog posts have been centered around video games in one way or another. That means only 85 of posts have been non-gaming related.

While I never intended for this blog to be so heavily based around my gaming habit, I've come to embrace it for what it is. But for my 500th post, I'm going turn the focus to my non-gaming related blog posts. Let's look at some highlights.


~The podcast ranking~


This has to be one of my favorite blog posts, simply because of the response it generated. In this entry, I ranked all 12 podcasts in my rotation from best to worst. It wasn't long after I made this post that a handful of these podcasters reached out to me to thank me for my honest opinions and critical feedback. The Survivor Historians, Arcade Attack, Worth it or Worthless, and The Retrograde were the ones to reach out - and I have to thank them for that. Not only are these podcasts excellent but when they show appreciation to the fans and reach out like that, it shows that they are great people too - and that makes me like them even more. I'm curious to see where these podcasts would rank if I were to redo this ranking (it's been over 4 months since my previous ranking). I'm thinking that on the one year anniversary of my post, I'll rank them over again, along with the new podcasts I am listening to, and make it a yearly tradition.




~My movie rankings~


At the start of each new year, I like to go back and rank all of the movies I watched in the previous year from worst to best. I started out very ambitiously with this task, when I went back and ranked all 118 movies I watched in 2014, and later on all 121 movies watched in 2015. As the years have gone by and my interest in this task has dwindled, I've attempted to change things up. My favorite format was in 2016 when I selected the five best movies I watched each month of the year, cut that number down to 50 at the end of the year, and then ranked my top 50. Every ranking since this has been extremely lazy, however. In 2017 I was going to keep a Power Ranking of all the movies I watched, and update it as the year went on. That didn't last long before I gave up on it. Probably the only thing I've given up on in regards to this blog. Not only have my rankings become lazier, the amount of movies I've watched each year has plummeted - mainly due to becoming a dad in 2020. Anyone with a little baby knows how hard it is to squeeze in some alone time - much less enough alone time to watch movies.  

My favorite part of all these movie ranking discussions is how I managed to squeeze in a whole post about the Human Centipede 3. It's at the bottom of these links if you're interested in checking it out. I myself haven't read it since I first published it, but I admit I'm a little curious as to why, of all movies, that one got its very own blog post.


2014 Rankings:

2015 Rankings:
2015 Movie Ranking: #50 to #36

2016 Monthly Rankings:

2020 Movie Rankings:

2021 Movie Rankings:

Random movie discussion:
My thoughts on the Human Centipede 3



~VHS Tape Archives~


I have a ton of VHS tapes in my house that I used to record random shit on. One of my pet projects was going through each of these tapes, writing down what was on them, and then transcribing them to this blog. While I have 40 plus tapes and I've only transcribed ten of them in the last seven years, I haven't given up on this task! It's really hard to do this with a toddler in tow, so I do plan to resume this task at some point in the future. In fact, I have several drafts in my main blog files that I just need to look over before I can publish them. Expect to see these archives updated... eventually.
~TV Show Discussion~


I haven't posted nearly as much about my favorite TV shows as I would have liked, particularly since TV is such a big part of my life. I'm someone who half-pays attention to what I'm watching, however, which doesn't make me the most reliable recapper or blogger out there. And I'm aware of that. So I just tend to post general thoughts regarding each show as a whole rather than a more in-depth analysis.

One of my favorite projects, which I haven't done in a long time, is when I worked on my "Trip through my TV rotation" series. Basically, I would watch one episode of each show I was watching at the time and post a little recap of it. I always had fun doing that.

But my FAVORITE project was Season 1, Episode 1 series where I watched the pilot episode of a handful of series and then decided which ones I wanted to keep watching and which ones I wanted to ditch. That was fun.

Before we move on, how could we forget about my failed attempt to recap every episode of the show 11.22.63? I was big into Stephen King at the time this Hulu series premiered, and I thought I'd try and gain some followers by recapping the episodes and posting them to Stephen King groups all over Facebook. While some of these posts do have the highest views in my blog's history, I gave up on this only three episodes into the show. Recapping is not my favorite thing to do.





~Last but not least...~


These posts have since been unpublished, but one of my most passionate projects was my Dear Channing series of posts. In these posts, I wrote a letter to my son Channing (who was a newborn at the time) talking about my life growing up, my family, and the experiences that made me the man I am today. I was really excited by this project and was having fun taking a trip down memory lane, but some of my family members read these posts and didn't like the way they were "portrayed" in them. They perceived the things as I was saying as being too negative and hurtful, which was never my intent. I was just trying to be honest and open.

Since I didn't want to cause a rift with my family, who I love dearly, I unpublished these posts for their sake. They are still sitting in my draft folder, however, so if I ever want to come back and edit, add to them, or continue the series - I just might do that. And I probably will someday.


***


It's well past time for bed and I think I've covered everything I wanted to cover. Happy 500 posts to me, and I can't wait to keep the ball rolling with my Mop Up Duty series of game reviews. Playing through two or three games from each year of my life has been an enlightening process. I've unearthed a ton of fun games I never would have thought to play before, while learning a lot about the history and evolution of gaming in the process.

As I move forward with this blog, I hope to return to my roots at some point and focus on my life and what is happening with me, my family, and the world around me - and not just focus on video game reviews. Here's to 500 more!




For a complete index of all my past posts and game reviews, click


Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)