Blog Post 500

Celebrating 500 posts on my blog!!

So here's some largely pointless reminiscing and such.

500 posts feels like a whole lot to me but it really isn't compared to a lot of other blogs. And it isn't really a lot when you consider I've been using this blog since January 2008. That's uhh, 2721 days ago, so I make a blog post on average once every 5.442 days. Hey, that's not bad! That number and the total number of posts are both greatly boosted by my "song of the day" feature, which is, as far as I can tell, my least popular regular feature lol. I'm still gonna keep doing it, though, hahaha. It's fun and I like that I have an ever-growing playlist of songs that I, for at least one day, felt obsessed enough with to write about.

Btw I'm 8853 days old atm. I'll probably make a post for 8888 like I did 7500 and 8000 if I remember.

Oh also here the breakdown of posts by year:
2008 - 13 posts
2009 - 56 posts
2010 - 43 posts
2011 - 66 posts
2012 - 56 posts
2013 - 53 posts
2014 - 146 posts
2015 - 66 posts (so far)

OK hopefully that adds up to 500. If it didn't I must have miscounted somewhere.

A brief overview of the history of my blog and the contents

I started the blog because of a brief comment my older cousin made about the importance of writing every day and suggesting that I try it out. At the beginning, I really had no idea what to put there. I started reposting stuff I had written for forums I was on - top album lists and such. This was supplemented by pretty random content, just things that I thought people might find useful based on other blogs. Like I was really big into music sharing blogs at the time (this was their "era", before Google wised up and started taking them down, and I didn't have the ratio buffer on what.cd to just get everything there yet) so I thought maybe I could do that too? This was buffered by a bunch of pretty random stuff that I figured might fit a blog like recipes???

Then I started features like One Piece chapter reviews which I'm pretty happy with but took so long that I had to stop them. It took a lot of tries to come up with a format I enjoyed for discussing manga that also didn't take too long (like weekly manga roundup and page by page live commentary) I'm pretty happy with the "let's read" manga video idea though, I'll probably just keep doing that for the foreseeable future. I made a lot of lists early on, there was a lot of posts where I just dumped ratings and rankings for various things... I think I disagree with almost all of them now, and my reasoning, having never been recorded, is lost for good. Even more painful is rereading the fiction I wrote around this time (like 2009-2010)...

Anyways the blog was in a sort of nebulous state for these first few years where I would, when I had the opportunity and motivation, make a blog post, and then sorta just ramble about whatever had happened that I felt suited the blog since my last blog post. I kinda miss doing this in some ways? I'll probably still try to do things like this from time to time. I think most of that stuff has different outlets now though. At any rate, I kept looking for things that I could regularly put on the blog to guarantee some sort of content flow. I chronicled my first trip to Japan, attempted and quickly abandoned a song of the day feature, did playlist reports, reviewed Magic cards, reported on Saimoe...

None of them really stuck besides Song of the Day, which I revived to much greater success in 2014, and Live Reviews of Albums, which is by far the most "successful" aspect of my blog. I made a post explaining the appeal of live reviews awhile back that I should update and "pin" somewhere but I largely still agree with it. If live reviews are the "trademark" of the blog I'd be happy with that.

So now prolly something like 70% of new posts are Song of the Day and 20% are album reviews and 10% are other stuff (I could pretty easily get the actual numbers for this but I'm too lazy). I think I'm pretty happy with this. The album reviews are fun to write and people generally seem to enjoy them. I think everyone just ignores Song of the Day but I find it fun and easy and it's really satisfying to see the number keep going up. And if there's something else going on in my life that I want to talk about, it gives a good opportunity for that sort of quick update, which usually is somehow related to the music I'm thinking about on that day.

Going forward

I think I'll just keep doing the same stuff? I talk a lot about starting doing non-live album reviews, something that I really dearly want to do, but I dunno when I'll have the time to do that. Really I think more I just have some sort of desire to write about music and as long as I feel like that desire is always being appeased it doesn't really matter how much music I'm not writing about.

At the same time, there's some stuff that I feel really strongly about that I feel especially satisfied when I feel I'm able to get those feelings down into writing. So I want to keep being able to spend the necessary time to produce a project like that when I have the inclination. Last year I did my top 15 anime. Right now I'm working on something that might be even longer and is already even crazier. It will be the true masterpiece.

Why do you put so much (?) work (?) into this blog?

Yeah like... I know better than anyone exactly how few people read this blog. I mean, I don't really advertise it very much, so I could blame myself, but I also don't really make any content "for" other people in any way, so I don't really feel comfortable pushing too hard for other people to read it. At the same time, I do post things that I'm interested in, and thus other people with similar tastes - the people I'd be most interested in appealing to - might be interested too, and I'd want to facilitate that however possible (as long as it didn't feel "tryhard" or "annoying"). Plus it is nice to see that people are reading my work, even if it is just a few. I think the ideal I've always dreamed off is that this amount of promotion would eventually be enough to hit the tier of popularity where other people would share my work "automatically", but it hasn't really happened within 500 posts so idk.

But really I think I'd still continue updating this blog even if literally no one was reading it. It just feels very satisfying to make it exist, to make it even bigger, with more posts, more things to read and discover. Like some sort of ever-growing obelisk on the internet of content, that might someday become tangentially relevant to something else I do. It isn't about people actually seeing it, just that they could, that there is something to see. That's what really makes me happy.

Anyways idk where this is going anymore so here's some random statistics about my blog

-I'm up to 64,238 total views, which isn't that many
-That's an average of 128 views per post, which seems like way too much
-My most viewed posts are my top 15 Das Racist songs, my review of Tha Tour Pt 1, this article about "hipsters" that I might disagree with if I bothered to reread it, my review of Truant/Rough Sleeper, and, entirely inexplicably, this one.
-The most popular Google terms that lead to my blog were "best das racist songs", "keatsta coldwater", "centipede hz leak", "burial truant review", and "das racist best songs"
-My most viewed month was November 2014, where I received 2873 views
-The longest post I wrote was hands-down part 3 of the anime list (although I'm gonna try to beat that "soon")
-I dunno what the shortest post was, prolly one of the early ones
-In total, all the blog posts are 1803 pages long, and 691518 words long
-These numbers seem gigantic to me and make me happy but I have no idea if they should
-Someday I can say "yup I put a million words on this website that used to have 0 words"
-And that seems good