A Decade of. . . Something

This blog started 10 years ago today. Which seems crazy. House of M had only wrapped up a little over a month earlier. So we've had enough time to go from mutants being nearly extinct, to being on the rebound for a couple of years, and now they're back to being on the brink.

It seems as though a lot of people whose blogs I read started around this time. Siskoid celebrated his ninth anniversary last week, Mike Sterling his 12th a week before that. Comics Should Be Good at CBR turned 11 recently, Sally's blog turned 9 earlier this fall. Kalinara doesn't post much at Pretty, Fizzy Paradise, but it turned 10 just a few days ago, too. Must be something about winter that drives people inside and sets them to talking about comics on the Internet. Which is why global warming would be a good thing, 'cause it gets rid of winter so us durn nerds get out of our moms' basements and get real jobs!

I was just curious how many clichés I could cram into one sentence. I considered calling us "milennials" rather than "nerds", but I don't think any of the people I mentioned are young enough, including me.

I'm sure I told this story when the first year ended, but Kalinara's blog was a big reason I started this one (so you know who to blame). I had been reading other comic blogs for a couple of months, but was reluctant to start my own (I was posting on another blog, but strictly about sports). I wasn't sure there would be anything I could say other people weren't already saying. But I saw Kalinara's blog had just started up a few days earlier, so I figured, "Why not me?" I can't remember having any concept of how long this would last. I probably expected I'd run out of steam eventually. That's how it goes with a lot of things, start out strong, gradually peter out. 

If that's happening here, it's a gentle downward slope. I don't rant as much as I used to. It seems easier and more sensible to largely ignore the things I find stupid than yell about them to you. One complaint post - or sporadic sniping in posts on other tangentially related topics - is enough. Especially since I'm not buying them anyway. I mostly gave up on trying to explain continuity errors, since it's clear Marvel and DC don't care, and I don't read enough of their titles to have a good sense of the broader arc of either universe any longer. I don't post every single day now - I've largely given Saturday up for dead - but I do pretty well. I'm averaging over 330 posts per year, still. The idea of this being a blog where I only talked about comics was abandoned in the first few months. I think book and movie posts are about a third of what goes up here now. I gave up on giving scores to comics years ago, because it did seem silly. What was the difference between a 3.5 and a 3.75 out of 5? What was I basing it on? Why did I give that first, stupid Avengers: Illuminati '06 one-shot Bendis and Maleev did a 3 out of 5? That thing was awful. Heck, the comic book store whose name I borrowed for the blog title doesn't even exist, and I stopped buying from its successor earlier this year, what with the lousy customer service. I still haven't ever gotten a scanner, but maybe some day I'll regularly do posts with cool images I like you can actually read, instead of my blurry photos of comic pages.

So what's in store for Year 11? Well, I hate to bust out the old standard, but *all together now* posting may become erratic after New Year's. The source of Internet where I'm staying went away with one of my housemates (which is why no post Monday), so it's a matter of what I can squeeze in around work. I think I can manage, but we'll see. I'm going to try and actually get the Year in Review posts up in mid-January, and sometime in the early part of 2016, I may try and get those addendums to my Favorite Character lists up and running. Depends on whether I can get the prep done over the holidays (meaning, taking lots of photos of relevant pages). Hopefully I'll feel inspired to write a few more stories. I actually have a couple in mind, but it's hard to commit. They'd be part of building to something, and I'm not sure whether I really want to build it. So maybe I'll come up with some one-off stories again. I need more random strange crap to happen at this job.

Thanks for reading, however long you've been doing that, and commenting, if you do. I don't have a lot of commenters these days, but I like the ones I have. You're all friendly and helpful, which makes it nice, since I don't have to dread anonymous jerks.