Midlife Crisis Crossover is rather quiet and secluded as blogs go, but once every several months we’ll receive a nod from someone in a position of prominence and generosity who deems one of our entries useful and/or worth sharing with a larger audience — for positive reasons, I mean, not for accentuating my shortcomings. From down here in the back row of the internet Peanut Gallery, every such occurrence is humbling and deeply appreciated.

For fellow WordPress users seeking credentials or anyone asking for reading samples, the following posts were selected by the WordPress.com staff as “Freshly Pressed” features during MCC’s first eighteen months and shared with all bloggers who follow WordPress.com either via their proprietary blog reader or on their social media accounts:

• The Day an Empty Chair Ruled the Internet
• Midlife Crisis Crossover 2012 in Review, Assuming the Next Thirteen Days are a Complete Write-Off
• The Last Stand of the Drive-In Theater: Upgrade or Perish

Outside the WordPress world, MCC has rated mentions on a few other sites:

• The Comics Beat — Longtime ace comics journalist Heidi MacDonald quoted an excerpt from our coverage of Wizard World Chicago 2014.
• Comics Reporter – The late Tom Spurgeon (R.I.P.), not a fan of large-scale entertainment cons where comics are a secondary concern (or less), included our 7-chapter Wizard World Chicago 2015 miniseries in a daily news wrap-up, deeming it “really useful if you don’t go to that kind of show anymore to sort of see what one’s like.”
• Christian blogger Ann Voskamp referenced our review of the Academy Award-winning film Spotlight, particularly the inclusion of the end-credits list of cities where Catholic sex-abuse allegations have been reported worldwide. She deleted her thought-provoking entry months later, but my dashboard remembers the link and the traffic it brought.
• Kieron Gillen’s newsletter — The celebrated comics writer (The Wicked + the Divine, Phonogram, et al.) shared my longform personal essay about my childhood experiences running Dungeon & Dragons in our neighborhood, inspired by his Image Comics series Die (co-created with artist Stephanie Hans).

The photo atop this page is among our most seen and shared, both online and in person whenever we swap anecdotes with other fans in convention lines. Before the passing of The Carrie Fisher, once upon a time at Indiana Comic Con 2015 she rubbed glitter on the faces of thousands of Star Wars fans, including my wife Anne’s. And then I was summoned for what felt like a veritable glitter grenade detonation. When Fisher passed away, it’s a long story how I wound up being interviewed by ABC’s Indianapolis affiliate WRTV for their evening news segment on Fisher. In the days and years afterward, fans and news sites have paid tribute to Fisher and her glitter sessions — sometimes on her birthday, sometimes on the anniversary of her passing, sometimes on May The Fourth. The Mary Sue included me in their glitterati round-up.

And then there was one of the biggest fiascoes we ever witnessed, Fandom Fest 2017. Our day-by-day compilation of the dozens of guest cancellations and other mishaps, as well as our personal photos of a con held in an abandoned Macy’s, was featured at Comics Beat (thanks again, Heidi!), the historic but now-online-only Amazing Stories Magazine, and the long-running SF fanzine File 770.

To learn more about my mild Forrest Gump-ing through this odd geek life, I refer you to a previous MCC entry that cataloged my offline appearances and name-checks in other media, from “Special Thanks” appendices to video segments. One was for a French TV show. To this day, no one I know cares about that last one, but it was real to me.

To be continued? Someday?

[Last updated April 5, 2020.]