It’s Alive!

Okay, so (1) this page hasn’t been updated since last summer, (2) there were only seven entries for all of 2017 and (3) over half of those were related to obituaries.  I get it, I’m bad at blogging.

The irony is that I’m always miffed at the state of blogs in general, or at least the ones I used to enjoy visiting.  Basically, they’re either neglected, shut down or vanished.  For instance, I used to enjoy visiting Bat-Blog for a daily dose of all things Batman, but it was abandoned two years ago in favor of the author’s Facebook page.   I get that it’s easier to post to Facebook than a blog and you’ll reach many, many more readers that way, but I’ve been off Facebook since December 2013 and Batman news isn’t nearly enough to entice me back.

After my pals and I shut down the old “Mr KissKiss BangBang” James Bond fansite, I frequented our former rival, CommanderBond.net, where content slowed to a trickle, then stopped altogether, leaving only a message board.  I guess it doesn’t help that almost nothing’s happening in the world of Bond (how many different spins on “is Craig coming back” are even possible?), but still…

It’s anyone’s guess what happened to Silver Age Comics or Blog Into Mystery, neither of which has had content posted since May 2016 (the same month as Bat-Blog: maybe they all made a pact to move to Facebook together?)  Some blogmasters make a conscious decision to pack it in, posting a goodbye message as a coda to the enterprise, but other sites end unceremoniously and mysteriously in mid-mission, leaving us to wonder if the owners just lost interest, were hit by a truck, won the lottery, or what.  Hanging out on these sites can get spooky, like one of those movies where someone finds an abandoned ship drifting at sea, with food still out on the table, the crew’s clothes packed neatly away and no sign of a struggle.

Garfield Minus Garfield may have joined that cyber-Sargasso; at this writing, it’s four months dormant.  Letters of Note hasn’t posted anything in six months, though in this particular case I’m guessing the huge success of the spin-off books and celebrity live readings have made the blogmaster too busy or too rich to bother anymore, or maybe he just doesn’t see the sense of posting content for free when it could be worked into a format people will pay for.

There are a few bright spots, though.  MAD cartoonist Tom Richmond seems to post at least weekly with new art or anecdotes.  Several years into his Wild About Harry blog, John Cox keeps miraculously producing fascinating tidbits of Houdini history like a never ending chain of handkerchiefs from a magician’s pocket. And incredibly, Ross Pearsall’s “Super-Team Family” site has been churning out fun and wonderful faux comic book covers on a daily basis (even weekends!) for over 2,100 days and counting.

So who am I going to throw in with, these champions of consistent content or the quitters and Facebook defectors?  Well… I’m going to at least TRY to produce more content this year, not so much because I think the world is dying to read it, or I’ll ever have the following the other sites do, but if nothing else because generating some content makes it easier to complain about the folks who don’t.  And I love to complain.  Also, this site started as a way to document all the cool and funny and charming things my kids do, and though they’re no longer rugrats, they’re still as fascinating and fun (to me, anyway) as they ever were.  And if I don’t document their shenanigans somewhere, it’ll be lost for good.  Just a perusal of past posts proves that: there’s lots of stuff on this site I wouldn’t remember at all if it were left up to my tired brain.

So anyway, this site is back in business.  Wish me luck.