Midlife Crisis Crossover Celebrates 6 Years of Stubbornly Blogging All Wrong

Business Mirror!

New head shot taken at a recent business lunch, which is not a phrase that comes naturally to me. Neither do selfies.

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 I couldn’t just not type.

Six years and 1,772 entries later, here I remain, not permanently burnt out, not yet out of anecdotes, still finding new experiences to relay, and, once in a blue moon, pulling out a different Moral of the Story to share with the kids these days that I haven’t already hammered into the ground in twelve previous posts.

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Is There Room at the Table for the Fake Followers Among Us?

Buy Followers!

One of many robo-concierges polluting Twitter and willing to assist with your shallow self-image needs.

My favorite piece of journalism so far this year was just published January 27th over at the New York Times and struck a nerve in a number of places. In an epic-length article entitled “The Follower Factory”, the NYT plumbed the wobbly world of Twitter and those peculiar, insecure users who boost their Follower head count by paying a company actual money to bless them with hundreds of thousands of automated “bot” accounts that pretend they’re fans clinging on to their every tweet, for the purpose of making the paying customers look more popular. Some are piecemeal accounts, with profiles barely filled out. Quite a few are the product of surface-level identity theft, cribbing photos and usernames but with a character altered to make it unique (relatively speaking). They don’t praise you, go forth in your name, act as your “street team”, or interact with you or other humans in any meaningful way. They just Follow. They sit there, shut up, and act like you rule.

Companies such as Devumi cheerfully offer low-price options for ordinary web-surfing rabble like me, but they also bank some major cash selling bot followings by the hundreds of thousands to B-list celebrities, politicians, creators, reality TV dwellers, and others at varying levels of fame. The NYT named a few names I recognize — actor John Leguizamo, Chef Michael Symon, onetime MST3K guest star Kathy Ireland, and film critic Richard Roeper, whose Chicago Sun-Times reviews have been suspended pending their internal review. Of those who responded to requests for comment, a few buyers insisted it wasn’t them personally pushing the buttons, but an assistant or social media manager who bought a hollow audience on their behalf for PR strategy or whatever. Whether their deflections are true or not, boosts of fake fame are kind of sad. Granted, some personalities receive perks and bonuses from their corporate overlords based on the looks of their social media metrics, which means a return on their invidious investment is entirely possible. To them I imagine it’s all part of the Game.

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Midlife Crisis Crossover Celebrates 5 Years of Midlife, Crises, Crossovers

Official Crisis Crosssovers!

For those unfamiliar with the origin of this blog’s name, the clues lie in these DC Comics from 1985.

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. That’s more or less what MCC’s About page says, but with a different set of words because verbosity is my shtick.

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The View from Atop the Badlands (and 1,500 Entries)

Badlands!

Call it “South Dakota Gothic”. Photo taken by my son, age 14 at the time and too happy to stay off-camera whenever we’d let him.

Dateline: July 2009. Our road trip east across the length of South Dakota took us to Badlands National Park, which is end-to-end entirely made of geology and panoramas and tourist taking turns whispering, “Whoa.” The above photo from that particular road-trip collection is one of several I’ve never shared online before now. The wide, wondrous view from atop one of the Badlands’ many peaks has come to mind more than once today, least of which was a late showing of Logan in which Our Heroes take their own road trip up through the Dakotas and enjoy a scene in these familiar surroundings. To be honest, said scene was set in North Dakota, not South, but the coloration, texture, and height are identical. And in our case we saw a lot less bleeding. Otherwise, close enough.

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Partners! The Musical!

Goldens!

Maybe not really. Anne and I do have our sing-a-long moments, whether we’re busting out hymns in the same church service or indulging secret nostalgia on road trips passing through towns where ’80s Top-40 still lives, which describes nearly every small town today outside Footlooseburg. I’m not convinced we could carry our own Broadway show, off-Broadway vanity production, or community performance-art stunt, but if we tried, it would look like this except you could see our jazz hands better on stage. Also, it might be nice if we found a talented stylist to hide all that stately gray that’s overtaking my beard. Nagging aging defects like that can lead to bouts of vain grumpiness and haunting incidents like the time we went to a Red Lobster and the waitress asked me non-jokingly if my daughter would like a children’s menu. True, unfair story.

Right this way for a quick note on another MCC blogging milestone!

20 Lessons Learned from 4 Years of Blogging for Satisfaction Instead of Success

WordPress 4 Years!

Fun trivia: if you try to pay Facebook to “boost” one of your posts so more than five followers will see it, they’ll refuse your money and deny the request if the post has no images, or if its primary image contains more text than picture. I learned that one firsthand in August 2014. Y’know, for science.

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 and this fallen world’s degrading standards on my impressions of, reactions against, and general experiences with various works of art, commerce, wonder, majesty, and shamelessness. It’s my way of keeping the writing part of my brain alive and active, rather than let it atrophy and die. If you’ve read my “About” page, you know this part already.

With four years and 1,277 entries racked up, I’ve now spent more time and enthusiasm on this long-term project than I did in college, both attempts combined. I’ve learned a few things along the way. Sometimes I put one or more of those lessons to good use. Other days, I just gotta be me, and hope that’s good enough for anyone else outside my own head.

Right this way for What I Know Now That I Didn’t Back Then…

Blogarrythmia

Kings Island King!

Author file photo, taken at an uncertain theme park circa 2006-2008, the years I used the Kodak EasyShare you see dangling from my lanyard. I ultimately decided not to buy the crown.

Welcome to Midlife Crisis Crossover’s 1200th entry! In the grand tradition of 20th century comic books and sitcoms that ran five seasons too long, every 100 entries we mark the occasion as a sort of accomplishment and sometimes celebrate it. Not all those 1200 moments have been winners, but they’re integral components in the comprehensive mosaic of the last few years inside my head — the distractions, the fancies, the traumas, the endless parade of lists.

Before I launched MCC on April 28, 2012, I’d already been writing here and there online for years. My early efforts at self-expression and public entertainment comprise a couple thousand Usenet posts (a few longform pieces in the bunch, mostly irretrievable and irrelevant now), several thousand message-board posts (much easier to sort through, a few of them previously transferred and preserved here), and a LiveJournal I kept for a few years but can barely stand to skim now. In 2006 the longtime message board that Anne and I call home received a software upgrade that added blogging functionality for any member who wanted their own little playground contained within the site itself. Between April 2006 and March 2012 I penned 110 intermittent entries before I decided to stake my own separate claim here among the WordPress territories. That virtually invisible blog was good practice in a number of ways, most of them involving some balance of creativity and humility in the face of a mostly empty studio, so to speak.

As part of this MCC celebration that I just realized could technically double as a “Throwback Thursday” nod, we present the following flashback to an essay originally published May 16, 2006. This oddity, which I’ve lightly edited for a broader audience, represents my very first “meta” post about the odd act of blogging. It was written within and for the confines of the internet equivalent of a shed with a single skylight, but I’m a little surprised how much of my nascent impressions still ring a bell today. Please enjoy, and thanks for being here.

Right this way for a very special Throwback Thursday!

The Official MCC Guide to Finding Joy in Blogging All Wrong

Lucky!

If you’re pressed for time, please feel free to pretend this photo of our dog Lucky wearing a bandanna is today’s entire MCC entry, toss him a happy “Like”, and read no further. He’s used to that kind of fleeting attention from strangers.

Welcome to Midlife Crisis Crossover’s 1100th entry! In the grand tradition of comic books and The Simpsons, every 100 entries we mark the occasion as a sort of accomplishment and sometimes celebrate it. Those 1100 moments have been an interesting way to spend the last 3½ years of my internet time, but odds are it’ll take another two or three hundred years of consistent blogging before I stand a chance at becoming a household name. By then I’ll be more renowned for my refusal to die than for any paragraph I’ve ever written.

Every blogger who somehow makes a living off it has their official list of blogging tips that you’re supposed to follow in order to achieve fame, success, impact, and/or income. I’m happy for them and I wish them well as they make lasting contributions to the world at large and change the course of mighty rivers. Meanwhile at the other end of the spectrum, stubborn folks like me keep plugging away at their sites without regard for conventional wisdom, official procedures, or dime-a-dozen “Blogging for Dummies” articles. My approach to the game can be summed up in two words: “low-key” and “counterintuitive”.

Wanna blog like me? Here’s ten tips for how it works in my world, through happy times or blah:

Right this way for the official “Be Like MCC” list!

Midlife Crisis Crossover: 3 Years and 1000 Entries

Dick's Last Resort!

An outtake from our Awesome Con 2014 lunch at Dick’s Last Resort. Our waitress made us each a hat. The last words you can’t read are “BACK HAIR”. And that’s why Nikola Tesla (probably) invented the concept of the “outtake”.

April 28, 2015, marked Midlife Crisis Crossover’s third birthday. Our preceding nine-episode C2E2 miniseries comprised MCC entries #991-999. Here we are, two blogging milestones in a single week, and no celebrity endorsements or twelve-book contracts or “Participant” ribbons to show for it.

Three years of personal expression, idea-vetting, photo-sharing, “think” pieces, geek-outs, lists, outbursts, road trips, memories, punchlines, political eye-rolling, awestruck husbandry, pop-culture references, faith-based exploration attempts, movie trailers, movie “reviews”, MS Paint doodles, old man’s pains, middle-age tantrums, family gatherings, home improvement disasters, live-tweeting jags, oddly colored scans, Kickstarter grudges, late-night mood swings, holiday cheer, overlong miniseries, zeitgeist misdiagnoses, gratuitous mentions of The Wire, and more, more, more, more, more.

1,000 ways to be me.

To those I thanked at the previous MCC milestones, consider your thanks hereby extended — doubly so if you’re my saintly, patient wife and put up with a heck of a lot from me for such a questionable return on your investment.

To those I’ve never thanked before, or to those I already thanked but insist I owe them even more gratitude: if you’ve ever genuinely read and enjoyed an MCC entry, and provided sincere feedback in a detectable method, even if it was just the one time and you think I’ve been going downhill ever since…thank you from the bottom of my heart for being part of the solution.

As always, thanks for reading. Here’s to the next 1000 entries and all the goofy hats yet to come.

2014 Christmas Photos, Because Christmas

Mamaw's Tree!

Closeup of my wife’s grandmother’s Christmas tree. The family sees to it that it’s put up and decorated and standing tall for her every year.

Christmas! Christmas! Christmas! Just, y’know, for the record.

Lots of folks out there are busy, bustling, hustling, jostling, careening around their nearest shopping district and/or enduring work for just one more shift until that wonderful time arrives. So much to plan, so many gatherings to negotiate, so much food to hoard and craft into pleasant shapes before the stores shut down, so few moments to spare for reading or internet interaction or Liking stuff. It’s okay. I understand. We’re busy here, too, even though this is MCC’s 900th entry and I feel like I should be celebrating or something. But hey, Christmas and all that, right?

In that spirit of bouncy Christmas merriment and limited free time, we present Christmas pics of recent vintage never before shared on MCC, until now for your split-second perusal and positive Christmas reinforcement. Please enjoy, then go do whatever you gotta do, up to and including CHRISTMAS!

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