Tag Archives: blogging

Midlife Crisis Crossover 2025 in Review According to Our Bot Overlords

January 2, 2026 By in Meta Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
My wife Anne and I doing jazz hands next to a statue of the Buc-ee's gas station chain's titular mascot. Statue is labeled Smiths Grove, Kentucky.

Jazz hands at the Buc-ee’s in Smiths Grove, KY, on our way to Dragon Con 2025.

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.

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WordPress Blogger Weeps Upon Realizing Chinese Bot Swarms Don’t Count as “Found Family”

November 9, 2025 By in Meta Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
Kent Brockman from "The Simpson" on TV with caption in Matt Groening font, "I for one welcome our new robot overlords!" Next to him is photo of a real-life Chinese kung-fu robot. Yes, that's a thing now.

No, this entry isn’t about how Chinese scientists have made their very own versions of DC Comics’ Shaolin Robot. That part’s wild but incidental to the topic at hand.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: sometimes this site gets hits, which I chart at every year-end as self-reflection on what I’ve done over the previous twelve months — what worked, what didn’t, which entries got looked at most, which times did SEO seemingly help even though I never give it much thought, etc. By and large, as a stats junkie I get what I need from the WordPress dashboard, even though I’m confident the results are typically a more accurate measure of how many search engine crawlers acknowledge MCC’s existence, as opposed to gauging attention from real people. But same as in video games, a score is a score, and I’ll take whatever points I can get.

At least, that was my philosophy until a few days ago. Site traffic has been weirdly, consistently higher than usual ever since our Dragon Con 2025 cosplay galleries, though live human interaction remains as catatonic as ever. But a funny thing’s been happening since November 6th: that already-boosted activity inexplicably quintupled. None of those hits were referred here from social media or another site, either — they just materialized from nowhere and then disappeared into the night, like ghosts shouting “BOO!” just to amuse themselves.

I looked a little harder at the other dashboard sections that I usually take for granted and noticed a new anomaly: over 85% of my everyday traffic is suddenly, inexplicably coming from China.

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53rd and 13th

May 19, 2025 By in Meta Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
Me with jacket and gray beard, trying to smile while standing in cold winds on a platform four stories up.

This writer two days ago, buffeted by winds on the fourth floor of De Zwaan, the titular centerpiece of Windmill Island Gardens in Holland, Michigan — this year’s birthday outing!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: we have annual traditions ’round these parts! Two such occasions fall three weeks apart each year, often but not always receiving separate entries of incredulous self-congratulation. In this attention-deficit economy, though, we once again offer two for the bandwidth of one, a pretty sweet deal.

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Midlife Crisis Crossover 2024 in Review: Guaranteed 100% A.I.-Free

January 3, 2025 By in Meta Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Anne in our kitchen wearing eclipse glasses and an Indiana Total Solar Eclipse T-shirt, doing jazz hands.

4/8/2024: Anne dresses up for the Total Solar Eclipse extravaganza. Indianapolis was among the prime viewing spots.

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.

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How We Spent This Blog’s 12th Anniversary: A C2E2 2024 Epilogue

May 11, 2024 By in Meta, Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Nighttime view of a cross-section of Chicago's Magnificent Mile. Lit-up things include many windows, a Marriott logo with the second T obscured by a building corner, and the lightsaber atop Trump Tower.

The view from our Chicago hotel under cover of darkness, where none might find us among the millions in the big city. Kinda like loners on the internet.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: I launched this wee blog on April 28, 2012, three weeks before my 40th birthday as a means of charting the effects of the aging process on my opinions of, enthusiasm for, offense at, and/or detailed nitpicking of various works of art, expression, humanity, inhumanity, glory, love, idolatry, inspiration, hollowness, geek lifestyles, food, and Deep Thoughts. MCC has also served as a digital scrapbook for our annual road trips, comic cons, birthday expeditions, and other modest travels. It’s a general repository for any other content that comes to mind and feels worth the time and effort to type up, proofread, and release unto a world-at-large that rarely visits websites anymore unless social media points them there.

I commemorate MCC’s every anniversary here, but this year my wife Anne and I were busy that weekend, preoccupied by the geek gala that was C2E2 2024. We spent the site’s 12th anniversary not really thinking about it — much like the rest of the world, really. Rather than dwell on my dozen years of toiling in obscure hermitage on this tiny, mostly unpaid quasi-boutique hobby-job, we can instead center our closet-sized soiree on two of our favorite topics that come up whenever time and experience permit: travel and food.

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Midlife Crisis Crossover 2023 in Review: A Post-Pandemic Performance-Parsing Party

January 1, 2024 By in Meta Tags: , , , , , , , , , 9 Comments
A selfie taken in a bathroom. I'm rolling my eyes, holding my phone with both hands, and wearing a purple dress shirt and Grateful Dead tie even though I don't like the Grateful Dead. It was a gift.

The author out of his element, by which I mean attempting a selfie.

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.

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Milestones Behind and Millstones Ahead

May 21, 2023 By in Meta Tags: , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments
Me sitting at one end of a small table with two large slices of pizza on it, each on separate trays. One of them is closer to Anne the photographer.

Portrait of the author having brunch with his wife/photographer Anne at Pizza di Tito, an outtake from our Indiana Comic Con 2023 experience.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: we have annual traditions ’round these parts! Two of them recently came up for renewal and passed without mention. Let’s kill two birds with one stone here, or at least whiz a pebble past their beaks just to get their attention.

I launched this tiny personal blog on April 28, 2012, three weeks before my 40th birthday as a means of charting the effects of the aging process on my opinions of, enthusiasm for, offense at, and/or detailed nitpicking of various works of art, expression, humanity, inhumanity, glory, love, idolatry, inspiration, hollowness, geek lifestyles, food, and Deep Thoughts. MCC has also served as a digital scrapbook for our annual road trips, comic cons, birthday expeditions, and other modest travels. It’s a general repository for any other content that comes to mind and feels worth the time and effort to type up, proofread, and release unto a world-at-large that rarely visits websites anymore unless social media points them there. MCC entries are rarely shared with others in that manner; when it happens, it’s extremely noticeable in our dashboard stats and sincerely appreciated with all my heart.

Last month MCC reached its 11th birthday. As usual the WordPress software congratulated me as an auto-courtesy. Preprogrammed niceties aren’t quite the same as flesh-and-blood acknowledgment, but they help break the silence of what might otherwise have reminded me of that time Peter Brady overdosed on teenage smugness and was flabbergasted when no one attended his birthday party. I think about that episode a lot as I watch site traffic dwindle and wonder if I should bother mentioning my blog anniversaries anymore.

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Midlife Crisis Crossover 2022 in Review: A Report Card from the Pandemic’s Junior Year

January 1, 2023 By in Meta Tags: , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
Anne at the Indiana State Fair with a raspberry soft-serve ice cream cone, looking up at the camera like a gleeful toddler. Even she thought this photo came out goofy.

August 18th: Anne proudly wields a raspberry ice cream cone at the Indiana State Fair, looking like an ecstatic kindergartener.

Hey, there! Welcome, gracious readers and bots, to the eleventh annual Midlife Crisis Crossover year-in-review! Once again we run down the site’s highlights and nadirs among readers, skimmers, search engine gadabouts, and any other casual internet users who come within fifty years of this li’l flyover site. Over twelve months those fleeting glances add up to concrete stats that may or may not be reliable indicators of trends, fads, and successes ‘n’ sins on my part.

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Happy 10th Anniversary to a Website Worth Slightly Under $44 Billion

April 29, 2022 By in Meta Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
Bernie Sanders jazz hands!

I kept this in my files for over a year and let it simmer to just the right level of finely aged irrelevance.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: I launched this wee blog on April 28, 2012, three weeks before my 40th birthday as a means of charting the effects of the aging process on my opinions of, enthusiasm for, offense at, and/or detailed nitpicking of various works of art, expression, humanity, inhumanity, glory, love, idolatry, inspiration, hollowness, geek lifestyles, food, and Deep Thoughts. MCC has also served as a digital scrapbook for our annual road trips, comic cons, birthday expeditions, and other modest travels. It’s a general repository for any other content that comes to mind and feels worth the time and effort to type up, proofread, and release unto a world-at-large that rarely visits websites anymore unless social media points them there.

Basically it’s me me me me me, plus special appearances and other invaluable contributions from Anne, my wife of 17 years and #1 fan. This unpaid quasi-boutique hobby-job was built on a thin foundation with no claim to fame, virtually no preexisting fandom, no networking skills, no books to sell, no merch with my face on it to hawk, no funding from the Chubb Group, no patience for marketing (and pretty please never ever offer to provide me some for a price, because if you think I’m worth it, then by all means go share my works with your social pals for free, same as you do with anything else you genuinely like), and no educated grasp of “SEO” except to know that it rhymes with Vern Tessio, the Stand by Me kid played by Jerry O’Connell, who grew up to costar in Star Trek: Lower Decks, of which Anne and I have six episodes left to watch as of this writing, and watching those might be a more productive use of my time than registering my thoughts online for whomever to see, but it’s late and she’s asleep, which is the general household ambiance during my prime posting hours, so here I am.

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Midlife Crisis Crossover 2021 in Review: The Not-Great, Not-Terrible Sequel to 2020

January 1, 2022 By in Meta Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Welcome Back to the Office!

A fun pandemic moment from June 7th when my workplace held a “return to office” party for anyone ready to end work-from-home. Thanks to this premature jubilee our stalwart skeleton crew had free leftover snacks for days after.

Hey, there! Welcome, gracious non-bot readers, to the tenth annual Midlife Crisis Crossover year-in-review! Once again we run down the site’s highlights and lowlights among readers, search engine stragglers, and anyone else who trips over us on their way to other, more popular internet destinations. Over twelve months those fleeting glances add up to concrete stats that may or may not be reliable indicators of things!

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Happy 9th Anniversary to My Tiny Wordy Hideaway

April 30, 2021 By in Meta Tags: , , , , , , , , 5 Comments
Chocolate cupcake with a #9 candle.

“TREAT YO’SELF!” one of the voices in my head yelled as I threw myself a cupcake party.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: I launched this li’l site on April 28, 2012, three weeks before my 40th birthday as a means of charting the effects of the aging process on my opinions of, enthusiasm for, offense at, and/or detailed nitpicking of various works of art, expression, humanity, inhumanity, glory, love, idolatry, inspiration, hollowness, geek lifestyles, food, and Deep Thoughts. MCC has also served as a digital scrapbook for our annual road trips, entertainment conventions, and other modest travels. It’s a general repository for any other content that strikes my fancy and inspires thoughts more than one tweet long.

Basically it’s me me me me me, plus special appearances and other invaluable contributions from Anne, my wife of 16 years and #1 fan. When the most tedious entries yield the poorest traffic figures, she still thinks I’m cool.

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Midlife Crisis Crossover 2020 in Review Before We All Agree Never to Speak of 2020 Again

January 2, 2021 By in Meta Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 5 Comments
,e and Anne wavign hi on Zoom to ourselves

October 4th: Anne and me testing Zoom while waiting for her siblings to log on for our weekly group chat.

Hi-dee-ho, readers/survivors!

Welcome to the ninth annual Midlife Crisis Crossover year-in-review. This virtual cubicle was slapped together 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, as opposed to surfing social media and hoping all those wandering strangers might make for sufficiently provocative brain engagement. 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 I keep whiling away at one of my most time-consuming hobbies anyway. When my head is in the right space, I still enjoy the process in and of itself. Often I still enjoy the results. On rarer occasions, I’m also privileged and honored to enjoy any and every external response received from outside my own head.

But then there was 2020. That year just wasn’t right.

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Eight Stubborn Years Down the Blogging Road

April 29, 2020 By in Meta Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment
March 2020 sunrise!

The morning of Monday, March 9, 2020, in the early days of folks beginning to retreat from physical civilization.

I launched Midlife Crisis Crossover on April 28, 2012, three weeks before my 40th birthday as a means of charting the effects of the aging process on my opinions of, enthusiasm for, offense at, and/or detailed nitpicking of various works of art, expression, humanity, inhumanity, glory, love, idolatry, inspiration, hollowness, geek lifestyles, food, and Deep Thoughts.

Eight years later. 2,177 entries and over one million words later. Here I remain, still tending that same path.

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MCC Housekeeping Notes: The “Mentions” and “About” Pages

April 6, 2020 By in Meta Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

Randall A. Golden, Midlife Crisis Crossover

The previous outdated photo from my “About” page, taken at Starbase Indy 2011.

In this time of uncertainty and depression and aimless meandering around the house, sometimes it’s a good idea to pause, take a hard look at our surroundings, and change things up a bit, especially those things that haven’t been reevaluated in years. It’s not much of an overhaul, but with MCC’s forthcoming eighth anniversary, some mild effort seemed in order.

I’ve spent this evening tinkering with the reference pages linked at the top of every MCC entry. The mandatory “About” page, a common stop for fleeting passersby, has been half-rewritten with new material that clarifies the basics of MCC a little better, in a way that hopefully makes more sense to non-geeks while alienating anyone who works in online marketing. I’ve replaced the photo with a much better one from 2018 that longtime readers may recognize. Please don’t roll your eyes at me for sharing it again. It’s a treasured keepsake and we’re determined to get our money’s worth out of it.

I’ve created a new “Mentions” page that lists other, larger sites that have shared past entries to much larger audiences, with my utmost appreciation and incredulity. Comics news sites, creators, and historic SF fanzines are among those who nodded in our direction like Farmer Hoggett in Babe.

The old “100 Bullet Points” page has been deleted because no one had clicked on it in years. A link to the original entry has been preserved for historical safekeeping, but its value as a feature attraction has plunged to near-zilch.

Enjoy! Comments and questions welcome as always, even though I don’t always come out and say it because I thought it was implied by virtue of having a comments section.

The Best I Could Do on Twitter (So Far)

February 19, 2020 By in Meta Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Clueless Detective Pikachu!

The internet in microcosm: strangers in varying garb, a few of whom actually like being around each other.

I’ve been online for nearly twenty years. I’ve been on Twitter for 9½ years. MCC is nearly eight years old, though I blogged intermittently for six years before that in an even tinier space. I’ve scampered around the tunnels of Usenet, dallied in several message boards, volunteered as an unpaid moderator/admin on one site for nine years, tried the untamed DMZ that is comics discussion sites before running away screaming, and learned quickly that comments sections on major news sites were even larger sinkholes. My internet experience has been a rewarding, exhausting, surprising, discouraging, uplifting, heartbreaking search for the right environments and vehicles for my expressive impulses and my feeble attempts at what those who fit in with others call “networking”.

Luckily for me and my shifting moods, the internet offers a variety of writing formats that suit my ideas, topics, styles, visions, objectives, and wordiness vibe on any given evening. In recent years I’ve carved out comfort zones for myself in two primary outlets: Twitter and this very blog. Each option has its pros and cons. Each yields different rewards.

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Midlife Crisis Crossover 2019 in Review: The Hermit’s Hunt for Happiness in Hiding

January 1, 2020 By in Meta Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
CNN Tour 2!

8/26: An unused souvenir photo from our tour of CNN Studios in Atlanta. The rain is fake. The 2019 mood is real.

Hey-ho, reader! Welcome to the eighth annual Midlife Crisis Crossover year-in-review. This virtual cubicle was slapped together 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, as opposed to surfing social media and hoping all those wandering strangers might make for sufficiently provocative brain engagement. 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 I keep whiling away at one of my most time-consuming hobbies anyway. When my head is in the right space, I still enjoy the process in and of itself. Often I still enjoy the results. On rarer occasions, I’m also privileged and honored to enjoy any and every external response received from outside my own head.

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Memo from the MCC Errors & Omissions Department

August 6, 2019 By in Meta Tags: , , , , , , , 3 Comments
The Shirt!

File photo of a souvenir my wife picked up from Indy PopCon 2015, where the special guests included Charles Nelson Reilly, TV’s Charo, and Joan Embry from the San Diego Zoo along with her amazing thirty to fifty feral pigs.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: I wrote at length about a six-part miniseries that my wife and I watched on Crackle called The Final Tsars, in which I couldn’t be bothered to open an extra browser tab and verify the full name of the ruler at the heart of the story. The next morning, our first conversation after “Good morning” was a firm reminder that his official stage name was, in fact, “Czar Nicholas II”. MCC regrets the oversight and is sorry if any Russian historians were offended, but we don’t feel like editing the affected entry because it would undermine one of its underlying points and two of its jokes.

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Midlife Crisis Crossover Celebrates 2,000th Entry with Gratuitous Food Metaphors

May 30, 2019 By in Meta Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Indiana State Fair 2009!

Portrait of the author at the 2009 Indiana State Fair.

At times blogging can be like State Fair food science.

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Midlife Crisis Crossover vs. the 7-Year Itch

April 30, 2019 By in Meta Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Funko Pop me!

When you weren’t reading, we held a lottery to give away this Midlife Crisis Crossover exclusive anniversary edition Funko Pop, and my wife won that lottery, so hey, big thanks to everyone who forgot to enter!

I launched Midlife Crisis Crossover on April 28, 2012, three weeks before my 40th birthday as a means of charting the effects of the aging process on my opinions of, applause for, revulsion at, and/or confusion arising from various works of art, expression, humanity, inhumanity, glory, love, idolatry, inspiration, hollow marketing, geek life, and sometimes food. It was also my way of finding a way to give myself excuses to write during a time when joining other people’s conversations was becoming increasingly dissatisfying and rare. Nobody talked about what I wanted to talk about; when they did, my opinions usually got me sent to go stand in the corner or flat-out ignored. And just not typing my thoughts was killing me.

Here we are celebrating MCC’s seventh anniversary, still chugging away like the Little Engine That Could. No book ideas suggested or dreamed of, no writing gigs applied for or parlayed, and no danger of me ever describing myself unironically as an “influencer”, which sounds like an upper-class euphemism for “drug dealer”. But I keep writing anyway.

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Midlife Crisis Crossover 2018 in Review: The Good, the Bad, and the Blogly

January 3, 2019 By in Meta Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment
me at club!

4/23: Me at a business lunch, which are two words I haven’t strung together in over a decade.

Hey-ho, reader! Welcome to the seventh annual Midlife Crisis Crossover year-in-review. This tiny sandbox was formed 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, as opposed to surfing social media and waiting for excuses to reply to strangers who didn’t ask my opinion. Often it’s been a fulfilling use of galleries, memories, 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 fulfilling, but something I continue cobbling together anyway, as long as I can keep the fires of motivation stoked.

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