Hey, there! Welcome, gracious readers and bots, to the thirteenth 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. (Yes, I’ve had bad experiences.) 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.

Once again it wasn’t a boring year for us offline. Anne and I celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary, but my cousin passed away in March at age 50. We attended five conventions across three states, but skipped several with redundant guest lists or unfortunate schedule conflicts. We enjoyed our annual road trip, but haven’t posted about it yet because I’m ludicrously behind on our travelogues. I saw 39 films in theaters, ten of which were Oscar-nominated holdovers from 2023. We attended our nearest film festival again, as well as our very first short-film festival. We had holidays. We watched a total eclipse. We voted and grimaced a lot. We read. I wrote over 213,000 words and gave ’em away for free.

And I proudly shunned A.I. in my creative endeavor here. The entire point of this blog is its personal, experiential, DIY nature. An A.I. can simulate that pretty poorly and paint pictures of me with seventeen fingers and no soul, but it can’t really have experiences for me, can it? I can’t ask some Chatty Chassis to read Infinite Jest for me and then summarize my thoughts on it in comparison and contrast to my cumulative lifetime’s worth of oddly, specifically skewed reading matter. I can’t buy an army of search-engine crawlbots, program them to drive to the Grand Canyon, take pictures of us doing jazz hands atop groaning burros, ensure they add references to either MST3K or The Simpsons in the captions, report how many gallons I sweated in the southwestern-U.S. sun, and take a pic of our souvenirs arranged on the kitchen table we got years ago at Value City Furniture. I am disposable and I am irreplaceable. Simulate that paradox, ye misbegotten Daystrom Institute fugitives.

Anyway. Onward to the annual blogging stats! In 2024 I posted 138 new entries, about 9% more than last year, but site traffic was up a jaw-dropping 97.14% over 2023’s tally — a ten-year high for MCC, hearkening back to the days when I was still posting 4-5 days a week and could handle sleeping a mere 5-6 hours a night because I was slightly less old. I’ve witnessed social-media comments from journalism pros and organizations complaining that their inbound figures from Google and/or social media are cratering because of changing algorithms or manipulated results or other forms of digital ruination beyond their control. As for me and my blog, ’twas a banner year. Thanks, search engines!

We also broke the site’s all-time single-day traffic record, at long last dethroning the previous interminably reigning champion — that time terrorists bombed a major public event and preempted a TV show I was recapping. Yep, twelve years’ blogging here with that, of all things, as my hobby-job high was flummoxing and irritating. At last I can move on, thanks to the one subject that reeled in the visitors more than any other — a little thing we call “scenes after the end credits”.

As is the annual tradition, my inner stats junkie compels me to share the annual MCC charts and countdowns, plus a selection of random 2024 photos never before posted here until today. Enjoy!

2024 POSTS WITH THE MOST OVERALL CUMULATIVE HITS:

1. Yes, There’s a Scene After “The Wild Robot” End Credits
2. Yes, There’s a Scene After the “Inside Out 2” End Credits
3. Indiana Comic Convention 2024 Photos, Part 2 of 2: The Hayden Christensen Experience and Incident
4. “Poor Things”: Terry Gilliam’s Frankenhooker
5. Yes, There’s a Scene After the “Deadpool & Wolverine” End Credits

Movies! Movies! Movies! Several of this year’s hot 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 for this specific purpose now, and I’m sure their usage stats vastly dwarf mine, but I’m okay with feasting on the scraps falling off their tables.

Only one of our comic-con write-ups made the cut, and of course it’s the one with the seemingly lurid title. We regret the hours we wasted in lines that Saturday until well after closing time, allegedly caused by one allegedly misbehaving fan who allegedly made all fandom look like alleged pervs with alleged self-control issues who should allegedly be ashamed of themselves and allegedly be barred from approaching within 100 yards of alleged celebs ever allegedly again. Allegedly. So I wrote what we knew based on numerous conversations, off- and online.

I’m not sure why the Poor Things entry ranked at all. I hated the movie, was in the prudish minority on that front, had no end-credits scenes to describe, had no interactions with anyone about it, and otherwise don’t think I wrote anything memorable beyond the (arguably) clever simile in the title. But the hits kept coming for weeks. Maybe it’s because in a dozen years of MCC’s existence it’s the only entry that’s ever included “sex” in the tags. It’s not like I posted screen shots of Emma Stone’s nude scenes. Go figure.

(Please don’t tell me you clicked on this entry looking for Emma Stone nude scenes.)

A very special Honorable Mention should be made here for one (1) offsite occurrence: despite my occasional mentions of comics, almost no one cared when I posted a gallery of original Golden Age comics art from a fantastic museum exhibit back in December. After I shared it on Twitter (yeah, yeah, I know), the gracious ladies at Frazetta Girls noticed my invocation of Frank Frazetta’s name among the featured artists and retweeted the link to their followers. Last I checked, my tweet had 8200 impressions and counting, parsecs beyond what this li’l site sees in an average month. That entry doesn’t show up on any of these lists because not many actually clicked through and looked at it, but at least the one tweet showed some vital signs in and of itself. I’ll take it.

BACK-CATALOG POSTS WITH THE MOST HITS IN 2024:

1. The Resources After the “Spotlight” End Credits
2. Yes, There’s a Scene During the “Venom: Let There Be Carnage” End Credits
3. Advance Movie Screenings: Pros and Cons
4. Just watched all 103 episodes of “Person of Interest” in 30 days, AMA
5. “The Crown” Season 5: All Ten Episodes Ranked According to a Guy Who Was Never All That Attached to Princess Diana

Longtime MCC readers will remember a few of these titles. The Spotlight entry has become an internet resource unto itself because of the list I embedded, regardless of anything I actually wrote on a film that’s considered today a minor Oscars footnote at best.

I don’t write about my TV stories as much as I used to, but sometimes those oldies will resurface. The Crown was the last series I wrote about with any deep enthusiasm, but the final season’s release apparently created an appetite for arbitrary ranking listicles.

This marks the first time the essay about advanced screenings has ranked. Like, ever. I haven’t haven’t attended an advance screening since that was written back in 2013, so I don’t even know if my pre-2013 experiences still resemble today’s screenings. I’ve completely forgotten the film at hand for that particular occasion, the Mark Wahlberg vehicle Broken City, so I refuse to believe more than three people had nostalgia for it in 2024.

MOST “LIKED” POSTS IN 2024, INCLUDING BOTS AND SPAMMERS:

1. Midlife Crisis Crossover 2023 in Review: A Post-Pandemic Performance-Parsing Party
2. How We Spent This Blog’s 12th Anniversary: A C2E2 2024 Epilogue
3. [tie] Foods Beyond the Stephens Center: A Fan Expo Chicago 2024 Epilogue
3. [tie] Disney World! Part 10: Living with the Land
4. Disney World! Part 8: Welcome to EPCOT
5. Happy Free Comic Book Day and May the Fourth 2024!
6. [tie] C2E2 2024 Photos, Part 4 of 5: Artists Alley!
6. [tie] “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire”: Back to Basic Behemoth-Bashing
6. [tie] Disney World! Part 12: EPCOT’s World of Japan

…and we have a a 12-way tie for seventh place, so we’ll stop the list there.

I’m aware of the irony of last year’s “MCC Year in Review” being the most-Liked, so you needn’t point it out. It isn’t exactly surprising — posts tagged “writing” tend to draw extra eyes from other bloggers who only blog about blogging or write about writing. I’ve posted takes on writing in years past, but usually in pet-peeve venting form, not in any really nurturing way. If I thought I had sincere, useful writing wisdom to dispense, first I’d have to follow some.

(Who wants to read my latest manifesto, “These Six Crafty Cheats Will Crater Your Blog Traffic But Make You Happy Anyway”? Here, the first one’s free: “Have a day job so you don’t have to care about your internet performance!” Shocking but helpful!)

Reading is another popular subject with WordPress users, but one I’ve been procrastinating in terms of subject matter, as evidenced by the huge stacks of books next to this very computer that’re still waiting their turn for capsule reviews (which I’ve begun!), to say nothing of my last three years’ comics collecting that I never posted about. And yet, those subjects do get clicks whenever I dally…as do food pics, which factored into some of the above. I’m told it’s uncool to Instagram your meals, but a few folks will still show up for ’em.

Our very first-ever trip to Disney World in March 2023 was a mind-blowing experience for Anne and me (we fiftysomethings had never been there! Believe it or not!), but posting about it a year later did absolutely nothing for traffic. Nevertheless, I guess folks who could get the “Like” button to work thought the pics were cute, if not necessarily original given I was competing with sixteen million full-time Disney World Bloggers™ who’ll never ever shut up about it. To be fair, two or three of those superfans were helpful in our own planning. Heck if I can remember which ones, though.

HIGHEST ONE-DAY TRAFFIC SPIKES OF 2024:

…with redundancies weeded out for those subjects that sustained traffic across multiple days or weeks. I took each “event” and ranked their highest-performing day against each other’s. That statistical approach yielded a few shifts in the rankings:

1. 10/19: Thanks to an end-credits scene and its general awesomeness, Chris Sanders’ The Wild Robot was the subject responsible for The Busiest Day in MCC History. Two such days back-to-back, in fact. It won’t be the last time I mention the film this month.
2. 3/26: Our Indiana Comic Con recaps trend higher than our other con experiences because we’re local and therefore relevant, and this year’s was no exception thanks to high-demand Star Wars guest Hayden Christensen beginning to tour the con circuit, not to mention the show’s pretty strong lineup of other guests as well this time.
3. 6/30: Inside Out 2 sustained its own end-credits surge for a bit.
4. 8/4: Twisters had one pretty big day with its thirty-second epilogue during the end credits, but that interest was short-term.
5. 8/11: Everyone and their grandmother knows to stick around through Marvel end credits, so Deadpool and Wolverine had a milder response because clickbait sites cannot wait to crank out headlines about those as they happen. Other films? They couldn’t care less.
6. 10/5: Creation Entertainment held a handful of Trek-themed cons in a handful of cities to test the waters for such affairs. We attended all three days of “Star Trek to Chicago” from Friday opening to Sunday closing time, then shared those entries on two Trek fan groups on Facebook. I hate hate HATE self-promotion, but it does make a difference occasionally.
7. 3/11: My annual Oscars post-game entry, which I always write into the wee hours of the night after the telecast and refuse to go to bed till it’s done and posted, no matter how much sugar or caffeine abuse it takes. So that paid off for once.
8. 8/15: Usually no one cares about our annual trips to the Indiana State Fair except my coworkers, but the winner of this year’s Taste of the Fair competition also happened to be the very first fair-food pic we posted. People really wanted to see the grade-A sandwich they’d missed. Some spillover traffic from Deadpool and Wolverine also didn’t hurt that day’s tallies.
9. 8/20: That time we met the Mark Hamill at Fan Expo Chicago. Our household budget has been reeling ever since and I wasn’t even done posting all our State Fair pics yet, but still: MARK HAMILL.
10. 12/9: We did a pitiful job of taking cosplay pics at Galaxycon Columbus, but some responded to the part where we met “Weird Al” Yankovic. YES, THAT “WEIRD AL” YANKOVIC! YES, IN PERSON! WHY AM I THE ONLY ONE HERE SCREAMING WITH GLEE LIKE A 1964 BEATLES FAN?

2024 POSTS WITH COMMENTS BY AT LEAST TWO (2) LIVE HUMANS, COUNTING MY OWN WIFE:

• Disney World! Part 8: Welcome to EPCOT
• Disney World! Part 1: A Grand Prize Trip to Orlando
• “The Crown” Season 6: All Ten Episodes Ranked According to a Guy Who Learned UK History Along the Way
• Midlife Crisis Crossover 2023 in Review: A Post-Pandemic Performance-Parsing Party

Low-traffic sites are quiet sites, and I’m a quiet site owner, so we don’t get loud ’round here too often. That usual blogging wisdom of “End your entries with a question to spark the readers’ engagement!” never worked for me when I bothered. I’m not one for gouging folks with a letter opener in hopes they’ll finally crack and say something.

Honestly, I’d forgotten anyone commented on anything I wrote this year (apart from our loyal unpaid proofreader who never chimes in unless he notices at least one egregious typo) until I looked these up and was pleasantly surprised. Thanks to all who admitted to noticing me! In a public forum, even!

LEAST “LIKED” MCC POSTS OF 2024:

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 138 posts last year, two received absolutely zero Likes, not even from undiscerning bots who have one job, and that job is to Like everything. Even they turned up their nonexistent noses at this sad pair.

* “’Joker: Folie à Deux’: The Last Laugh Is the Best and Only Laugh”. We’d barely recovered from “Star Trek to Chicago” when it was released, had trouble fitting its bloated runtime into my schedule, ended up seeing it as a sort of anti-intermission right in the middle of my week-long Heartland Film Festival marathon, and didn’t bother writing about it till the end of the month because I correctly figured everyone was burned out on lambasting a movie so very hated by the majority, even including its antihero’s own scorned disciples.

* “Best CDs of 2023 According to an Old Guy Who Bought 7”. Another annual MCC tradition, but severely procrastinated for the second year in the row. The 2023 edition sat unfinished till September and suffered the consequences. The 2022 edition didn’t go up till November of 2023, but even that nudged a few passersby to toss me some hamster pellets. I guess that’s what I get for putting it off and for dissing Taylor Swift two albums in a row.

So we do have a valuable lesson to teach here after all, writers of the world: the timeliness of your content matters.

…

…and that’s the year that was, at least here on MCC. If you reached the end of this entry 2,950 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 2025, whether I’m on your radar or not. Cheers!