Hey, there! Welcome, gracious readers and bots, to the twelfth 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.

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. Often it’s been a fulfilling platform to share galleries, memories, Grandpa Simpson-style rambling jags, and peculiar opinions that might otherwise either languish unwritten in my head or collect endless rejection emails from every professional website ever. At other times it’s been less satisfying, but when I’m awake and the mood permits, I’ll still make room for one of my most time-consuming hobbies anyway. When my head is in the right space, I can enjoy the process and the results, with or without feedback. On rarer occasions, I’m surprised and elated to enjoy any and every response from outside my own head.

As COVID-19 slightly retreated to its sinister lair and civilization resumed but with far worse manners than it’s had in centuries, in 2023 we attended six conventions, took two major vacations, enjoyed at least two weekend getaways to other states, saw 24 made-in-2023 films in theaters, attended an authentic film festival, celebrated our 19th wedding anniversary, binged more TV than ever, attended very special non-comic-con stage events for two different Englishmen over 80, and, for now, continued not to die. None of these occasions went even remotely micro-mini-viral, but they were real to us, which is what matters, whether I make time to write about them all or not.

In between doses of fresh air and grass-touching, I continued generally avoiding unproductive political debates, which means I was nearly invisible on social media because that’s all The Kids These Days want to talk, read, brag, or obsess about. I expanded what passes for “my reach” to Threads and to Bluesky, where I remain a clump of detached plankton drifting in oceans that are slightly less polluted than the diminished Twitter cesspool, but really they aren’t that much cleaner to someone like me who was already all about heavy curation of my input streams. (I also registered perfunctorily on Mastodon, but the app doesn’t work on my phone. Besides, I’m not sure my loner tendencies would be a good fit for a community where step one is Pick Your Clique.) Right now I use Bluesky the most because it has the smallest population and therefore is least demoralizing whenever I need to rationalize my ongoing irrelevance in the Grand Scheme. I still don’t know which service I’m supposed to treat as The One True Water-Cooler Discussion Club Everyone Has To Use Now Instead Of Twitter, but I’ll keep humoring all three of them anyway until I feel seen on one of them. Like, at all.

On a related note, if anyone I know is actually reading this and wants a Bluesky invite, I have a handful of those precious codes. You must be someone I already knew in some capacity before January 1, 2024; you must have read every word I just wrote up to this point; and you must promise not to embarrass me there.

Onward to the annual blogging stats! In 2023 I posted 127 new entries, a dip from last year and a precipitous drop from MCC’s early years when I was cranking them out 5-7 days a week, but still better than my pandemic-era near-sabbatical. Site traffic was down 11.19% from 2022, which isn’t the best news, but…well, this is a tiny blog in an influencer-hiveminded world. I don’t know what else I should’ve expected.

As is the annual tradition, my inner stats junkie compels me to share the annual MCC charts and countdowns, plus a selection of random 2023 photos never before posted here until today. Enjoy!

2023 POSTS WITH THE MOST OVERALL CUMULATIVE HITS:

1. Fan Expo Chicago 2023 Photos, Part 1 of 4: Cosplay!
2. Yes, There’s a Scene During the “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts” End Credits
3. Indiana Comic Convention 2023 Photos, Part 1 of 2: Cosplay!
4. C2E2 2023 Photos, Part 2 of 4: Actors!
5. GalaxyCon Columbus 2023 Photos, Part 1 of 3: A Very Special Cosplay Christmas

Everybody loves cosplay! And scenes after end credits! And photos of a smiling Chris Evans! Cosplay and end credits shall forevermore be an integral part of the MCC firmament. Mr. Evans is of course welcome to stop by anytime, though I’d appreciate it if none of you tell him how much I hated The Gray Man.

BACK-CATALOG POSTS WITH THE MOST HITS IN 2023:

1. “The Crown” Season 5: All Ten Episodes Ranked According to a Guy Who Was Never All That Attached to Princess Diana
2. Yes, There’s a Scene During the “Venom: Let There Be Carnage” End Credits
3. The Resources After the “Spotlight” End Credits
4. Our 2021 Road Trip #46: The Final Five Photos
5. “Tár”: Classical Gaslighting

A few of these evergreen posts are familiar names to longtime MCC readers. I didn’t even like the second Venom movie, but its end-credits scene recap is like a brightly lit bug-zapper. Results like this are why I spend too much time on movie entries, especially the ones with scenes after the end credits.

Tár is an even more baffling surprise. It has no scene after the end credits and it rarely showed up in any given day’s Top 3 posts, yet it somehow had a staying power I never noticed. It’s like that time Linkin Park’s Hybrid Theory hovered unnoticed in the charts for months only to add up to the bestselling album of 2001. Go figure.

Our listicles about The Crown have consistently drawn disproportionately high traffic above nearly all other comers, so the renewed interest wasn’t shocking in light of the final season’s release. Sadly, my entry for the first half of season 6 deviated from the ranking-listicle format and suffered tremendously for it. Rest assured the mandatory entry about the season’s back half will totally retreat to Listicle Land. (That one’s coming soon in the next week or so, I swear.)

Also, to my aggravation, all five of these older works outperformed all 127 of 2023’s new entries. Yay.

MOST “LIKED” POSTS IN 2023:

1. [TIE] Our 2022 Road Trip #31: Cuyahoga, Gone
1. [TIE] Our 2022 Road Trip #32: The Final Four Photos and the Outtakes
2. Our 2022 Road Trip #25: 10 Ben & Jerry’s Flavors That Deserved to Die (And 5 That Didn’t)
3. Milestones Behind and Millstones Ahead
4. [TIE] Our 2022 Road Trip #23: Moseying Around Montpelier
4. [TIE] C2E2 2023 Photos, Part 3 of 4: Comics!
5. [TIE] Our 2022 Road Trip #22: Little State, Big State House
5. [TIE] The Ex-Capital Birthday Weekend, Part 10 of 10: An Epilogue of Film, Fowl, and Facades

You don’t have to be a WordPress user to click the Like buttons, but it doesn’t hurt. That said, some folks do love the travelogues, which I failed to make much time for in the second half of ’23. (I still have dozens of these on my to-do list.) Food, reading matter, and blogging-about-blogging are perennial eye-catchers as well. If only I had more things to say about the blogging act itself, but I feel like I’ve strip-mined that subject over the past decade. Readers who crave more of this may have to wait till I’m in the mood to start repeating myself and burning any bridges I haven’t already torched behind me.

HIGHEST ONE-DAY TRAFFIC SPIKES OF 2023:

The following list has been edited to remove days when one visitor kept smashing the “Older Posts” button. Each comic/entertainment convention is also arbitrarily limited to one (1) listing apiece.

1. 12/4: GalaxyCon Columbus cosplay, which Anne shared to a Facebook group for fellow attendees.
2. 8/14: Fan Expo Chicago cosplay, which I’m pretty sure we shared to the applicable Facebook group.
3. 9/6: The Wednesday after Dragon Con, by which time I’d gotten some but not all our cosplay galleries posted.
4. 8/21: Our Indiana State Fair foodie pics, which I shared to my personal Facebook feed, which I never ever ever ever do because I hate self-promoting to people who know me even more intensely than I hate self-promoting to strangers.
5. 5/7: Indiana Comic Con cosplay. Usually ICC ranks near or at the top thanks to hometown SEO benefits, but we didn’t take many pics there this year.
6. 4/7: Persons unknown on Facebook shared my recount of a 2013 Soul Asylum/Fountains of Wayne/Evan Dando concert. To a lesser extent this day also saw a little leftover C2E2 2023 cosplay activity, which was negligible on its own.

You may notice patterns. People love MCC best whenever we post photos of the creative works of other, much cooler people than us. Maybe we should work that into MCC’s next tagline: “Midlife Crisis Crossover: Screw ME, Look at What THEY Did!”

This year’s data also indicates self-promotion apparently works. Did I mention I hate doing it, though?

2023 POSTS WITH COMMENTS BY AT LEAST TWO (2) LIVE HUMANS OR HUMAN-SHAPED BOTS THAT I CONSCIOUSLY RELEASED FROM THE SPAM FILTER FOR KICKS:

• Under the Colonoscope
• C2E2 2023 Photos, Part 1 of 4: Cosplay!
• Milestones Behind and Millstones Ahead
• Our 2022 Road Trip #25: 10 Ben & Jerry’s Flavors That Deserved to Die (And 5 That Didn’t)
• Yes, There’s a Scene During the “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts” End Credits
• Admiral Picard’s Personal Log: Star Trek Fans Welcome Patrick Stewart’s Memoir Tour to Cincinnati
• Dragon Con 2023 Photos #4: Saturday Cosplay (Non-Parade Edition)
• Dragon Con 2023 Photos #9: Cosplay Parade Animation and Gaming

Low-traffic sites are quiet sites. And I’m a quiet site owner, so we don’t get loud ’round here too often. This section has expanded dramatically from past years thanks to faux-thoughtful contributions from the spam-bots of the world. Their self-promotional simulated greetings are like talking to video game NPCs, which I’ve often found preferable to dead silence, so I’ve lifted the velvet rope for a select few whenever my self-esteem was at its most whimsically bottomed out.

LEAST “LIKED” MCC POSTS OF 2023:

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. All 127 posts last year received at least one Like apiece, but eleven sorry posts could only muster up that single hamster pellet for themselves:

• Twelve Angry “Women Talking”
• I for One Welcome Our New “Barbie” Overlords
• Dragon Con 2023 Photos #3: Friday Cosplay (The Other Half)
• Heartland International Film Festival 2023 Screening #3: “Fancy Dance”
• Heartland International Film Festival 2023 Screening #4: “Monster”
• Our Heartland International Film Festival 2023 Photos, Memories and Afterthoughts
• Yes, There Are Scenes During and After the “Blue Beetle” End Credits
• The October 2023 Birthday Trip, Part 3 of 6: The Hydrants of Oldenburg
• Halloween Stats 2023: Extra Helpings for the Brave and the Bold
• “The Crown” Season 6, Part 1: Who Killed Princess Diana the Most?
• “Die Hard” in a Dolby Cinema

Mind you, this summary doesn’t include social media interactions. Not that they’d move the needle overmuch. Places with populaces are like interstate bypasses detouring entire parsecs around geek-niche cul-de-sacs like mine. Even in middle age my heart still swells an extra size every time its existence is acknowledged.

Fun trivia: seven of these eleven losers are movie entries. One of them even starred the amazing Lily Gladstone! But no one cared. No. One. Not coincidentally, movie entries are the ones most likely to give me week-long fits of writer’s block and require the most hours to write. I refuse to cancel them altogether, but I get the impression it’d be in my best long-term self-interest to start chopping those down to, like, 100 fluffy words apiece if I’m ever to catch up on my travelogue backlog and stop wasting time that neither benefits nor entertains anyone in the known universe, not even bots.

…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”: thanks for reading! Here’s hoping you find great reasons for internet usage in 2024, whether I’m on your radar or not. Cheers!