Obama would deliver his State of the Union Addresses over the phone seventeen months ahead of schedule. He demanded the recordings of the addresses to be played in ice cream trucks, sound cranked full blast, and driven around every neighborhood in the country at 4:15 am.

Greetings, fellow Internet button-pusher types. It’s me again, Tom. I’m Tom, the guy behind the Tom Writes About Stuff blog , aka the TWAS blog, aka the Worst Blog on the Internet since 1897! You may not know this (since it’s hard to believe ONE PERSON could be so damn creative and so prolific and charming), but I am the sole owner, maintainer, writer, contributor, designer, marketer, janitor, lobbyist, prostitute, and all-around Smiley Boy Extraordinaire of Tom Writes About Stuff Dot Com. As such, I refuse to do anything I don’t want to do, and I refuse to pander to the Google Machine or the nefarious SEO Gods when it comes to how I want to write and present my content. This means that you are most likely not reading this since you don’t even know that this website exists! I’m a terrible promotor!

It’s been a good 4.5 months since my last State of the Blog Address, and in that time I’ve really gone nuts behind the scenes on this waste of invaluable Internet real estate. Big things are happening! Big, big, big, big, BIG things! You remember David Byrne’s big suit! Think bigger!

So let’s get you all up to speed.

Comic Book Stuff

There are no signs whatsoever of this slowing down. Not to delve too deeply into the process, but I’m writing these up faster than I’m preparing them for posting. As of today I am roughly 15 weeks ahead of my current three-per-week posting schedule, and not only that, but I’m preparing another side-feature AS WE SPEAK where I will tackle Image, Dark Horse, Vertigo, and possibly some other publishers that are somewhat off the beaten path; completely separate in nature from my main Loneliness & Cheeseburgers project. This hitherto unnamed feature will be dropped weekly, upping my output to a four-per-week schedule on comic book commentary. Ambitious, but I’m pretty motivated in the respect. Comic books are fun. I can’t believe it took me 33 years to realize this. I feel like I have a lifetime of catching up to do.

I have a few other ideas for comic-related content in the works: features that spotlight awful comic books from the Golden and Silver ages, features that focus on long-form graphic novels, and even, if I become brave enough, features focusing on manga series. I already got the ball rolling on a reboot of an ancient feature from a previous incarnation of my blog, Sucky Funnies Sunday, which cherry-picks a few Sunday strips from the newspaper that very day and I rant and vent about it.  A feature like this demands same-day turnaround, so it may not drop weekly like I’d like it to, but I plan on keeping up with it on as regular of a basis as I can muster. Don’t forget, I’m Mr. Full-Time Job with Two Young Children. With all I’ve got going on, I can’t believe that I’m able to even to spell 5% of all these words corrcelty wihtuot scewring it all up coasntanatntly.

Music Stuff

An early version of the State of the Union Address, delivered by Martin Van Buren, would involve goat sacrifices and “ketchup parties”.

I’ve been slacking hardcore on the music stuff. I’ve realized recently that this is because my grand, elaborate visions for the Album Reviews and Discography Deep Dive projects far exceeded the limitations of my blog and, as a result, my motivation had waned. BUT, since I’m learning how increase the limitations of my blog through PHP magic, I’m slowly finding out that I can better tailor my pages to present this content how I actually WANT to present it. More on that later. My desire to pick this back up again has increased fifty-fold since the beginning of the year, so once I get all the crazy mumbo-jumbo code and taxonomic organization correct on the back-end, I’ll be ready to continue these projects with the enthusiasm I’ve been wanting for. Also, since list-season is over and I’m not fervently absorbing only new releases anymore, I have more time to listen to old stuff again. I imagine at this point that I’m pretty close to getting things where I want them to be, the reviews and discography pages should start dropping again pretty soon.

Other Stuff

Other stuff is always in process. I come up with ideas faster than I can execute them. I keep a little notepad file to collect ideas so that I don’t forget them later. Some of them are small, like one-off posts ideas. Some of them are large, like entire featured sections that I plan on contributing to with some semblance of regularity. Some are very ambitious, like an idea I have with respect to a new twist on Let’s Plays, but I just can’t see something like that coming into fruition at all in the near future. Again, I’d love to just work on this website as a full-time job, or even be able to dedicate as much time as I’d like to with it during my off-time…I just don’t have that much off-time in this period of my life. Once my kids grow up and they’re banging around in college, snorting coke and not studying for their midterms, I’ll have all the time in the world! But that’s 15 years from now! I’m a great dad, I swear it on a stack of Hustler magazines that I leave laying around the house.

Website Maintenance

More than half my time lately has been dedicated to tinkering with files and layouts under the hood than to writing, which I have conflicting feels about. On one hand, writing has dropped to the point where I’m struggling to keep ahead on comic book articles within the last couple of months (especially during the holidays). On the other hand, I’m making this amateur bush league website look more and more how I want it to, and need it to, with every passing day.

My whole family got mild, nearly negligible, cases of Covid in the first week of November. Being forced to stay home for nine work days, I had ample amounts of free time that I hadn’t had since before children! And when I get a lot of free time, I get a lot of ideas, and I decided that I was getting increasingly annoyed with how little control I had over my own website. I gained the GUMPTION to buckle-down, pop the hood, and start messing a little bit with the .php files.

Things took a turn for the obsessive during Christmastime, when I took the week off and found myself with another abundance of that sweet, sweet free time. Here’s where I learned about pagination and querying posts. Here’s where I started going absolutely nutso with it. Here’s where I finally realized that I had the power to create the dynamic website of my dreams.

Category archive pages now have posts automatically catalogued by year. Comic series pages now auto-create and auto-populate with a grids of individual issue links. Every comic series now has its own Comic Storylines section that will automatically slot issues into their individual story pages, with the parent pages automatically creating lists of stories for that series. Eventually, my album reviews will all get auto-populated individual artist/band landing pages that list their discographies in release order, allowing me more freedom to review albums out of release order and still keep them easily organized. Eventually, the final form of my vision, discographies will be able to be sorted by era, genre, rating, and even more. I’m not even close to that point yet.

So yes, big things are happening. Big things continue to happen. When I was a little pre-teen/teenage sprat, websites like this one were profoundly influential to me. Even though it’s not 2002 anymore, and as Web 3.0 spirals out of control and people are normalizing buying MetaBucks with Monkey NFTs, hope to someday be similarly influential to some other punks like me.