Hey, there! Welcome, gracious readers and bots, to the fourteenth annual Midlife Crisis Crossover year-in-review! Once again we self-analyze the site’s pinnacles and nadirs among readers, skimmers, search engine gadabouts, and any other casual internet users who come within fifty light-years of this li’l boutique site. Over a twelve-month period those fleeting glances add up to concrete stats that may or may not be reliable indicators of trends, fads, and wins ‘n’ sins on my part. (Well, they used to add up usefully, anyway. More on that in a sec.)

This virtual hermit cabin opened its creaky wooden door on April 28, 2012, as a place where I could entertain myself by making essay-shaped things out of whatever words and pictures I had at hand, and placing them somewhere I personally owned rather than someplace a capricious third-party moderator or owner could delete on a whim, such as Amazon, Goodreads, or Star Wars message boards. Often it’s been a satisfying platform to share galleries, memories, hugs, screeds, and pop-culture opinions that might otherwise have dissolved unwritten in my head or collected rejection emails from every professional website ever. Sometimes it’s disappointing, maybe even depressing, but whenever the encouragement comes or an impetus spurs me, I’ll make an effort for my most labor-intensive hobby anyway. When my head is in the right space, I can enjoy the process and the results, with or without feedback.

Not many folks would call 2025 Best Year Ever. We celebrated the little victories and milestones on the blog where appropriate — our 21st wedding anniversary, my 53rd birthday, MCC’s 13th anniversary, Anne’s 55th, a friend’s Halloween wedding, a real film festival (again!), my first concert in seven years, my latest (unsuccessful) Oscar Quest, and the occasional travels here and there. Meanwhile behind the scenes, things were falling apart — our cars, major appliances, our house, our aging bodies, our state, our country, our grocery budget, and onward the list continues down to the most unimportant minutiae. This week while Anne was taking down her all-star Christmas-IP diorama, the Nativity set’s sheep fell on the floor and all four of its cute li’l paws snapped off. Nothing is safe anymore! Nothing! WHY DID OUR TINY BABY JESUS ALLOW THAT POOR SHEEP’S QUADRUPLE AMPUTATION?

Speaking of major malfunctions, we move on to our annual blogging stats. In 2025 I posted 118 new entries, about 14% less than last year, but comprising 199,900 words, some of which were read by YOU, the Viewers at Home. Site traffic was up an improbable 103.39% over 2024, though it’s too bad that number’s inflated, and not by my own talents or lies. Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: our hits had been trending curiously upward ever since Dragon Con, more than double what they used to be. Then beginning November 6th, my WordPress dashboard began telling a new story: MCC began seeing an unexplained, utterly ludicrous influx of visitors from China that quintupled my numbers. That supposed audience didn’t Like or comment on anything; they just showed up in silent droves and boosted our counts to the point where I couldn’t tell whether anyone flesh-and-blood was clicking on my latest entries. My blog wasn’t alone in suffering this pestilence: other users reported the problem to The Powers That Be, who confirmed such intrusions were usually swarms of mostly harmless bots.

I emphasize again that I didn’t ask for them, pay for them, or feel grateful for their ghostly presence. They were mostly flocking around old posts, especially those with the most comments, as if those contained the virtual morsels upon which their insatiable appetites might feast. Eventually the joke was on them: longtime MCC readers know our comments sections are emptier than a theater showing the live-action Snow White remake dubbed into Hebrew with Arabic subtitles. It took seven weeks of patience to wait for all those Chinese bots to starve to death. Their bizarre plot to keep stoking my ego upward finally tumbled like the cardboard yodeler in The Price Is Right‘s “Cliff Hangers” game, and traffic plummeted hard the weekend after Christmas, back to (still oddly high) post-Dragon Con levels. I’ve never been so happy to have so many beings looking away from me at the same time.

Regardless, some damage has been done: those bots ruined my year-end dashbboard maths. As is the annual tradition, my inner stats junkie compels me to share the annual MCC charts and countdowns, plus a selection of random 2025 photos never before posted online before now. Enjoy!

2025 POSTS WITH THE MOST OVERALL CUMULATIVE HITS:

1. Yes, There’s a Scene During the “Tron: Ares” End Credits
2. Yes, There’s a Tribute After the “One Battle After Another” End Credits
3. So You’re Going to a Comic Con: Our Convention Survival Tips for Beginner Geeks
4. Yes, There’s a Scene After the “Captain America: Brave New World” End Credits
5. Fan Expo Chicago 2025 Photos, Part 1 of 3: Cosplay!

Movies! Movies! Movies! Some of this year’s bid-budget releases brought end-credits extras to those of us stubborn enough to insist we paid for a whole movie and we were therefore watching the whole movie. I understand there’re apps that serve this specific purpose now, and I’m sure their usage stats vastly dwarf mine, but I welcome anyone who doesn’t use them and is dying to know if they missed anything by walking out early.

Cap 4‘s ranking is absolutely bot-inflated. Months earlier, a passing commenter who was either a neurodivergent Marvel superfan or a caffeinated spambot (which forgot to plug anything) turned that entry’s comment section into their own personal micro-blog. I just let ’em ride, but eventually their relentless casting suggestions — some of which actually weren’t bad — were like magnets to the late autumn bot-frenzy.

Our comic-con guide is the one I’m happiest to see on there. It began as a compilation of tips that Anne routinely posts in our various Facebook groups to encourage comic-con rookies as they enter that whole weird world of ours. I expended on it with her permission in hopes of something we could more easily pass on, rather than her having to retype the same advice over and over all the time. Hopefully it’s helped someone out there. (That same demo likewise flocked to our Fan Expo pics when we shared them on FB. Cosplayers are wonderful people.)

BACK-CATALOG POSTS WITH THE MOST HITS IN 2025:

1. The Last Stand of the Drive-In Theater: Upgrade or Perish
2. The Day an Empty Chair Ruled the Internet
3. Midlife Crisis Crossover 2012 in Review, Assuming the Next Thirteen Days are a Complete Write-Off
4. Our 2022 Road Trip #25: 10 Ben & Jerry’s Flavors That Deserved to Die (And 5 That Didn’t)
5. The Resources After the “Spotlight” End Credits

Spotlight perennially ranks in this section, even ten years later — more for the subject matter than for the film itself, I think. The Ben & Jerry’s entry was written as a gratuitous listicle after I realized an overview of their factory tour’s whimsical flavor “graveyard” fit the format, and I thought it’d be fun to see if it made a difference in long-term stats. That experiment had proven successful well before the bots arrived. Yay for me, but also this exact sort of reader behavior is helping kill the internet, you guys.

The others are MCC Year-1 classics unearthed entirely by those darn comment-craving bots. Those were the first three times MCC ever earned measurable attention from more than 100 readers at the same time. My favorite was one part memoir and one part Journalism, a rarity for me. One was a tossed-off late-night rant that folks mistook for political commentary. And one was a year-in-review just like this very entry, but with one really cool photo that I think was its real draw.

MOST “LIKED” POSTS IN 2025:

1. Our 2023 Road Trip #6: Far from Hoth
2. 53rd and 13th
3. Our 2023 Road Trip #5: Columbia Records
4. Dragon Con 2025 Photos, Part 10: The Cosplay Parade Is COMING TO GET YOU
5. Our 2023 Road Trip #2: Ernest Meets Henry Clay

The Like buttons are largely used by other WordPress bloggers, who stopped turning up in droves after the company effectively ditched its most effective community outreach programs years ago. Two subjects seem among their brightest Bat-signals: travel photos and writing-about-writing. I got most of my thoughts on the latter out of my system in MCC’s early years, but I know plenty of bloggers have found their version of success by writing-about-writing while literally never writing about anything else ever again. It’s pretty cool to find one’s niche, but a tad more challenging out there for nicheless topic-nomads like me.

HIGHEST ONE-DAY TRAFFIC SPIKES OF 2025:

1. 12/27: The Chinese bots’ last stand broke MCC’s all-time single-day traffic record. Next day, they all burned to ash like they were on the wrong side of Helm’s Deep.
2. 12/26: The bots’ penultimate stand.
3. 12/25: The bots’ antepenultimate stand.
4. 12/12: Bots, maybe observing Gingerbread House Day by trying to devour mine?
5. 12/13: Bots got mad about their cyber-gingerbread indigestion? idk

HIGHEST TRAFFIC SPIKES OF 2025 BEFORE THE STUPID BOTS SHOWED UP:

1. 10/19: Tron: Ares‘ credits-fueled high, with backup boost from One Battle After Another
2. 10/9: OBAA‘s solo high. Millions of moviegoers super-loved that movie more than I did. (I didn’t hate it, but still.)
3. 4/14: The year’s highest-reaching event not driven by movies or bot-nostalgia was C2E2 2025, the two cosplay galleries in particular.
4. 9/15: Eleven consecutive Dragon Con cosplay galleries finally added up.
5. 3/17: Indiana Comic Con, albeit a rare feat of its cosplay gallery being topped by the “here’s the celebs we saw” chapter. I guess folks at home were dying to see pics of Rainn Wilson, Sean Gunn, and Pablo Hidalgo.

2025 POSTS WITH COMMENTS BY AT LEAST TWO (2) LIVE HUMANS OR CREDIBLE SIMULATIONS THEREOF:

These aren’t ranked, but I have to celebrate whenever anyone wants to talk to me online! Even when it’s just Anne correcting a mistake I made the night before! Sure, those could’ve just been an email to me at work, but nope!

• Fan Expo Chicago 2025 Photos, Part 1 of 3: Cosplay!
• Here We Go Crazy: Alt-Rock Hero Bob Mould Returns to Indianapolis
• So You’re Going to a Comic Con: Our Convention Survival Tips for Beginner Geeks
• Yes, There’s a Scene After the “Captain America: Brave New World” End Credits
• Oscar Quest 2025 Final Scorecard: 47/50

…yes, that’s five (5) entries out of the 118 that had much talking at the end of them. We don’t get many chatterboxes ’round these parts. I guess I could employ that tired blogger trick of ending every entry with a prompt for readers to answer, but that always looks like begging.

LEAST “LIKED” MCC POSTS OF 2025:

It’s not always illuminating to examine my failures as judged by You, The Viewers at Home, but it’s a thing I do anyway. Of those 118 posts last year, only one received absolutely zero Likes, nary a hamster pellet chucked at my forehead by a bot from any nation. Congrats and condolences to the entry about the harrowing Iranian drama The Seed of the Sacred Fig, one of last year’s Academy Award nominees for Best International Feature that I saw during Oscar Quest.

Fun trivia: my annual Oscar Quest and my recent forays into the Heartland Film Festival have two things in common: (1) they’re the two times every year when I go to the movies the most often; and (2) nobody who follows MCC in any manner whatsoever actually cares about either of them, and certainly not enough to endure me rambling about the things I’ve seen.

Food for thought, I suppose.

…and that’s the year that was, at least here on MCC. If you reached the end of this entry 2100+ words later without thinking of it as “doomscrolling” or wishing an A.I. had written it in half the verbiage and with zero jokes: thanks for reading! Here’s hoping you find great reasons for internet usage in 2026, especially if you’re a real, live reader!

(If nothing else…hey, I used Gorilla Glue on the Nativity sheep’s legs, and they seem to have healed. Tune in next December to find out if he’s standing on his own again. Same goes for me and you.)