New Year memo

Happy new year to all etc. etc., hope everyone is doing well. This is your annual chatty update. That's my new cat Sam in the picture. Charlie, who holds the record for appearances in New Year memo pictures (four: 2012, 2014, 2017, and 2019) passed away last January 28. He was a great cat. More milestones for me this past year included reaching over 2,000 posts on this blog. In 10 more days, on January 11, I can mark 10 years of more or less continual blogging about music, books, movies, and this and that. Happy anniversary to me! The blog itself formally had its 13th anniversary in August, but for the first couple of years it was a notorious outlaw mp3 blog followed by a two-year break. I can't explain why I stayed with it after shifting emphases, but here we are just about 10 years and a few cats later, slogging and blogging on. I seriously doubt any of my original readers are still with me. I admit I had high hopes professionally when I buckled down to steady writing in January 2010. I have always been prone to the baseball novel fallacy of "if you build it they will come." Then I was a little disappointed to see blogging itself fade as merely a fad (about when I started in fact, which is typical) and then the wider chase for audience across such platforms as Tumblr, Pinterest, Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Medium, Patreon, and so forth. Now we are living in this brave new narrow constricted world of social media and I'm still on Google Blogger. Well, OK. Blogging always was weird with its forever falling backwards in time structures. It's not really possible to do linear excerpts of anything in multiple posts, for example, and series are awkward. But I settled on it and stayed with it because it was accommodating enough for the discontinuities of writing reviews of old things, which is all I've ever wanted to do. Speaking of shifting expectations, this past year probably saw the fewest album reviews ever from a blog once devoted exclusively to them. The blog was also down by overall number of posts, but I suspect the word count would be about the same. I've stretched on some of the pieces about horror stories. But I don't want to lose track of albums, so I'm committing to one a month this year, possibly making them longer pieces as I've played with previously (see the Great Albums tab). The other place I slipped in the past year was new movie releases. To be honest, there is just less I want to see all the time in the multiplexes that are convenient to me. Because it’s now officially the 2020s I'm going to let TV productions and series seasons stand in there as well (even though I still think of it as the "movie out" category). I still intend to get to The Irishman and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, for example, two movies I missed this year (among a multitude) for good reasons and bad. But I'm also going to peek in at some of these ongoing greatest-ever TV series forever cropping up in our hallowed golden age of peak TV. Reviews of books, horror stories, and classic movies will keep coming as usual. My blue sky goals here include 4,257 posts and all 1,000 movies on the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? So I'm letting you in on the fact I'm not even halfway there yet. Here's to the next decade come what may.