Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered the very first State of the Blog Address way back in 2002.

Hello to all 2.5 of my fans! Things are really blowing up around here, whoooooooaaa nelly! Well, thank you for joining me at any rate. It’s been a while since I meta-blogged, so I want to get some thoughts out there about how I feel, where I’m at mentally, how my blood pressure is doing, where I see myself in five years, where that rash came from, and all the jazz. Not really. But sort of! Ruining the magic by pulling back the curtain, that’s what I’m all about. And you can either sit down and zip the lip or you can scream your head off until you’re blue in the face. I don’t care! It’s a computer! I’m not in the room with you! Or am I?…

I’ve decided that I’m going to check in periodically with these State of the Blog Addresses, even though you don’t know me and who cares, right? OH WELL. My blog, my rules. Get used to it. Scream all you want, I can’t heeeeeaaaarrr you…

Comic Books
I initially took on the comic book blogging project as a goof, and I’m simply astounded at how much I’m indeed delighting in reading these nerd books. As of right now, at the pace I’m going, I’m literally ten weeks ahead of my current three-per-week comic book blogging schedule. That’s 30 comics ahead as I speak! That means if I get hit in the face and killed dead by a falling defunct Russian spy satellite TONIGHT, from beyond the grave this blog will STILL update with a new comic book three times a week until the end of November! How about that, huh? Let’s hope that doesn’t happen, though, there’s a lot more to read out there.

For me, writing the commentary along with reading these issues go completely hand-in-hand. I can’t imagine reading comic books otherwise now. The caveat, of course, is that it takes me about six times longer to get through a single issue this way. Since I have tens of thousands of comics to read, it’s unfortunately going to take me a great while to even adequately scratch the surface.

I am in it for the long haul though, and I’m having such a blast doing this that the momentum from the enjoyment alone means more to me than followers and readers. I can say that with honesty, and I’m grateful for it.

I’ve been sticking with Marvel and DC exclusively for now, and it may be a long while before I attempt to branch out a bit. Eventually, I’d like to tackle the Buffyverse comics, as well as Sin City. Others will obviously follow.

I’m steering completely clear of the Golden Age because most of the ~20 years of that time period consists entirely of boring trash, but I intend to spotlight an issue from that era every once in a while as a separate feature. Stay tuned.

Abraham Lincoln once dreamt about delivering a State of the Blog Address 150 years before it actually happened. He quickly forgot about it because, in the very same dream, he was also attacked by radioactive bees.

Newer Release Roundups
Focusing more on comic books has, in turn, reduced the amount of time I can focus on music blogging. I have a full-time job and two very young children, and while it kills me sometimes that I can’t devote more time than I already do to this blog, I have to make peace with the reality that (for now) I just can’t write as much I as I really want to. That being said, Album Reviews and Discography Deep Dives may trickle in less frequently, but I’m committed to providing a Newer Release Roundup every single Wednesday. Keeping up with new music is incredibly important to me, and staying disciplined with this particular feature has helped me tremendously. Other than that, my big Buckethead project lost steam from the moment it began, quite literally. I intend to relaunch this at some point, I just need to polish up my concept for it. We’ll see.

Other Stuff?
I have plenty of ideas for other projects, but absolutely no time to begin to execute them. So I’m kind of just chipping away at them. Some of these projects include: plane crash analyses, commentary on the bad seasons of the Simpsons (Season 9 and beyond), junk food reviews, random television episode rants, random movie rants, bringing back the Sucky Comics Sunday feature I had on my old blog, and plenty of other stuff that has nothing to do with my personal life. My personal life is dreadful and boring! You’re better off not having to read about any of it!

Website Maintenance
Keeping this thing going and looking “nice” is way harder than I thought. There are all sorts of considerations that I never really spent energy thinking about before, like desktop/mobile screen accessibility, hosting security, figuring out and mitigating page load times, and even a little bit of blog promotion (which I’m absolutely awful at). As it stands, the blog layout is almost nearly how I want it to look and I’m quite satisfied with it. Admittedly, there are still plenty of older pages with poor formatting from the Blogspot > WordPress transition that I still need to fix up. Eventually. And I want to figure out how to add WordPress Loops to my static pages for automated updating on new content for each category (in a way that’s more intuitive to navigate than literally 99.9% of the other blogs out there).

That’s it. I’m writing more than I ever have in my entire life and I couldn’t be happier with that, so lack of readership is far from discouraging. To anyone that is actually reading my words, thank you so very, very much. Really.

Cheers.