Tag Archives: Midlife Crisis Crossover

WordPress.com Magic Elves Offer Colorful Second Opinion of My 2014

December 31, 2014 By in Meta Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Happy New Year, internet! Here’s hoping 2015 personally comes to your house, pushes 2014 down a staircase, pushes a piano down the stairs after it, blames it on 2013, and works double overtime to be a vastly better year for you. I won’t tell on 2015 if you won’t.

As in years past, those all-knowing stats overseers at WordPress.com have compiled an automated 2014 Annual Report for each and every blogger on their roster, complete with New Year’s fireworks that you can pretend is a handy screensaver by leaving your computer on and your browser open 24/7.

Right this way for the link to the report, and a rundown of unique MCC entries you may have missed!

Midlife Crisis Crossover 2014 in Review: Our 3rd Annual Stats Party!

December 31, 2014 By in Meta Tags: , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments
Indy Pop Con!

This outtake from Indy Pop Con captures some of the brighter parts of my 2014: LEGO, conventions, new T-shirts, Star Wars, and my wife. Not in that order.

Hey there, supporters and strangers! Welcome to the third annual Midlife Crisis Crossover year-in-review. This modest site was launched on April 28, 2012, as a nervous experiment in writing whatever came to mind in a space to call my own, and so far it’s been a much more fulfilling pastime than lurking around message boards and tapping my foot impatiently while waiting for other fun people to discuss things I wanted to discuss. Last week saw the release of MCC’s 900th post, and so far I’m at a loss to explain exactly how that happened. I dreaded 2014 would be the year I ran out of anecdotes and opinions and jokes, but in hindsight I can’t think of a reason to let that stop me now. If this happened months ago, everybody do me a favor and don’t tell me, because the longer you let me ramble on like this, the funnier it’ll be to watch my eventual horrified epiphany.

MCC’s 2012 was a slow rise from nothingness to quantifiable somethingness. Our 2013 was about steady upward trending as I kept exploring my limitations and horizons. 2014, on the other hand, saw largely flatlined traffic except around a few key events. This peaceful plateau may be in part because 2014 was MCC’s first year without a single entry achieving the much-vaunted WordPress.com “Freshly Pressed” status, that prized occasion in which the WordPress staff shares a well-regarded work of yours with a much wider audience of fellow WordPress users. Without such a generous boost to accelerate audience growth this year, it meant trying to hold your attention with old-school methods — by keeping the content coming, by appreciating the greatest audience of all times, by digging into topics that might interest other humans besides myself, by trying not to suck, and by wishing really hard that magic search-engine genies would do all my marketing for me.

Continue here for MCC’s own best and worst of 2014!

Top 10 Ways I’ll Be Celebrating MCC’s 800th Entry

August 28, 2014 By in Meta Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Sundae in Salem!

I had no idea how to illustrate this entry. After 28 months I still have no site branding to showcase. I’m not in the mood for anything prideful. Please randomly enjoy this outtake from our 2013 road trip — me eating a sundae at the Witch’s Brew Cafe in Salem, MA. Why not.

We interrupt our Wizard World Chicago 2014 galleries to bring you this brief intermission noting the occasion of Midlife Crisis Crossover’s 800th post!

Neither writer’s block nor Hollywood’s siren call nor reckless abandon nor typing-finger tumors have stayed me from my appointed fixation yet. If and when MCC crashes and burns someday, I hope I can think of reasons to blame anyone and everything except myself.

From the Home Office in Indianapolis, IN: Top 10 Ways I’ll Be Celebrating MCC’s 800th Entry:

10. 10,000-word all-star salute to me, myself, and I

9. Have a WordPress “Freshly Pressed” banner tattooed across my chest

8. Reprint a past entry no one else liked except me; grovel for pity-Likes

7. Eight-hour scenes-after-end-credits marathon

6. Saccharine love letter to my wife that makes all other readers nauseous

5. Write epic fanfic crossover “Bunheads Go to Sleepy Hollow”

4. Buy a PS4 and one game; play until my gamer-cred upticks; then go settle every Quinn/Sarkeesian rage-war single-handedly

3. Prize drawing to get rid of all my unwanted DC New 52 comics

2. Live-tweet a Dog with a Blog rerun

And the number one Way I’ll Be Celebrating MCC’s 800th Entry:

1. Family road trip to Ferguson!

Midlife Crisis Crossover #0: the One-Man Dramatis Personae

June 12, 2014 By in Meta Tags: , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

Welcome! Turn Back!

Welcome! Turn back! Welcome back! Hie thee hence! Join us! Shoo! Whichever!

Welcome to entry #733 here at Midlife Crisis Crossover! If this were a mainstream comic book, I would’ve already stopped and relaunched a new site with a new at least thirty-seven times by now. Fortunately, I have no marketing department giving me marching orders. Unfortunately, I have no marketing department spreading word of me to the four corners of the planet. The compromise is so aggravating.

If you’re just joining us or recently discovered the site, you may be a bit disoriented, even after reading the “About” page I wrote two years ago and have amended a few times since then. That version contains the “in-story” reasoning behind the site name without confessing that it was contrived using the Wheel of Fortune “Before and After” method. I’m sure it sounds like rubbish if you’re not a comics fan who knows what a “Crisis Crossover” was. The bottom-line truth is I needed a name that no other writer, blogger, or sensible creative type would want. That’s one objective met, then.

In the days of yore, comics writers followed a helpful rule of thumb: “Every issue is someone’s first.” New readers appreciate accessibility. Most sites use the “About” Page to catch visitors up to speed and don’t look back. (I offered baseline advice on this one time.) While mine does its job to a certain extent, it doesn’t summarize every version of me that readers have seen in these pages. Sometimes each me can act as though they exist on a different Earth apart from my other selves. Sometimes those worlds drift apart. Sometimes the me of two worlds vibrates in harmony as one. Sometimes worlds collide.

Right this way for the Unofficial Handbook of the Midlife Crisis Crossover Universe!…

Midlife Crisis Crossover Celebrates Two Years, 700 Entries, Countless Stories Yet Untold

May 7, 2014 By in Meta Tags: , , , , , 2 Comments

WordPress 2nd anniversary!

Your official 2nd-anniversary notification from WordPress looks like this. Printing, framing, embossing, and/or enlarging to poster size are optional at the writer’s expense.

It’s that time again! Through the grace of God and the stubbornness of me, Midlife Crisis Crossover reached and surpassed its second anniversary on April 28, 2014. I postponed the party because I didn’t want to interrupt my annual C2E2 photo journal marathon at its height, and I fancied the idea of coinciding with this, MCC’s 700th entry. That’s two milestones nailed at one time, both highlighted without passing on the extra costs to You, the Viewers at Home!

For those interested in reliving the creation of MCC and/or time-traveling to key points in its distant past, the following moments are recommended for historical purposes:

* The first official MCC entry, basically a satire of the Indianapolis majority’s unseemly, senseless hatred of mass transit. I spent a full week writing and refining this launch post, researching blogging platforms, and experimenting with the control panel once I’d made my decision. After going live on April 28th, it had maybe seven whole views in its first week of existence. With almost no promotion and nothing in mind resembling a quote-unquote “marketing strategy”, I like to think that’s seven more views than I had any right to expect.

This way for more topics, answers to forgotten questions, ruminations on possible futures, and possibly more!

WordPress.com Magic Elves Offer Colorful Second Opinion of My 2013

December 31, 2013 By in Meta Tags: , , , , , , , , , 11 Comments

Happy New Year, readers and skimmers alike! Here’s hoping 2014 proves to be the Greatest Year of All Time. At the very least, maybe it’ll help us forget the parts where 2013 let us down and still has a lot to answer for.

For MCC’s second New Year, the happy-go-lucky stats wranglers at WordPress.com have compiled an automated 2013 Annual Report for each and every blogger on their roster, complete with fireworks and eye-popping design work and a world map in case you prefer practical gifts. In addition to the facts and figures I already reported yesterday with my own manually culled year-end review, this report also helpfully confirms which WordPress bloggers left me the most comments last year and therefore deserve innumerable treasures in Heaven and possibly also baked goods. You should subscribe to all of them so they can rise to fame and I can write entries about how I’m one of the Little People who knew them way back when.

For the intensely curious, WordPress’ report also reveals which of my 2012 entries absolutely refuses to die. It didn’t exactly go viral or receive attention from any major online sources I’m aware of, but passersby just keep clicking it and clicking it and clicking it and now the report thinks I ought to consider churning out more daily posts exactly like it, despite how impractical this would be on multiple levels.

Have some sample artwork as an additional incentive. Ya like colors? It has colors.

The weirdest statistic it reveals:

The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 80,000 times in 2013. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 3 days for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the report in all its scintillating wonder!

That most important part, once more with emphasis:

Happy New Year!

Midlife Crisis Crossover 2013 in Review, Including Last-Minute Posts Seen Only in NYC and LA

December 30, 2013 By in Meta Tags: , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Hi-dee-hoo, fans and visitors! Welcome to the second annual Midlife Crisis Crossover year-in-review for this humble site, launched on April 28, 2012, as an excuse for one guy to do things, try stuff, and think whatever aloud. Next week will mark MCC’s 600th post, but that’ll be in an entirely different year and is therefore ineligible for celebration at the moment, so forget I mentioned it till next week.

This occasionally purposeful experiment has lasted a full twenty months without crashing and burning yet, though we’ve seen some excitement, some tears, some discomfort, some joy, some serious stress, and some much-needed days off. And that was all just over Christmas break. 2013 was a year of successes and failures, of triumphs and tragedies, of records and horrors. MCC’s own fortunes have ebbed and flowed depending on which subjects caught my attention at the right time, which times I was utterly out of step with the rest of the world, and what moments of synchronicity were the most unexpected of all.

Of all the nouns to frequent the site this year, none had a deeper effect than Boston.

Boston Public Garden, Boston vacation

Continue here for MCC’s own best and worst of 2013!

Obligatory “Freshly Pressed” Follow-Up Thank-You Ramble

September 22, 2013 By in Meta Tags: , , , , , 5 Comments

WordPress "Freshly Pressed" badgeIs it okay if I feel proud and sheepish at the same time?

The gracious editors at WordPress liked a post of mine from last week well enough to showcase it as “Freshly Pressed”, meaning a temporary spotlight in the WordPress commons area where thousands of other writers might give it and other folks’ recent “Freshly Pressed” posts a look. It’s extremely kind of them and thoroughly unexpected.

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The Curse of the “Follow” Button

September 21, 2013 By in Meta Tags: , , , , , , , 24 Comments

Follow Button Nightmare

Just so we’re clear, this haunting illustration is not intended as a superliminal message.

The Followers list of the average WordPress user is comprised largely of other WordPress users. The community is extremely supportive that way. On occasion I’ve even dug a little deeper into those notifications and discovered usernames popping in from Blogger, Tumblr, DeviantArt, YouTube, and other creative sites. If readers are attracted from outside the blogosphere altogether, that’s worth an elaborate victory dance in my book.

Some of that support is provisional, though — offered in hopeful accordance with the implied adage of “I’ll follow you if you follow me!” I’m not sure how many online communities this largely unspoken expectation pervades. When MCC first launched, I kept this guideline in mind, especially in the early era of single-digit daily traffic when any sort of response, human or otherwise, was a welcome change of pace from spending quality time with the Void.

The longer my resulting reading list grew from everyone I Followed in turn, the less I wanted to keep observing that adage. And yes, I mean “reading list”. I tried keeping up with all of them/you, even if the subject matter didn’t interest me in the slightest. It seemed the most honest response. I still read many, many blogs in any given day, but I’ve had to perform some serious triage for the sake of my free time and sanity. I’m unclear on when the “Follow” button became less a simple, literal statement for some users and more of a token to be swapped with passing strangers like marbles or pogs.

For some of my oldest followers…I think using the “Follow” button jinxed them.

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2013 Road Trip Photo #10: Counting the Blessings While the World Races Past

September 10, 2013 By in Meta, Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

I-93 South, Boston

Not every moment of the average vacation will lend itself to an attractive headline, a cheery anecdote, or a photogenic souvenir. Even the world’s greatest professional travelers have their share of failures, their horror stories, their occasional awkward faux pas, their incidental doldrums, their best laid plans gone awry. All of those not-shining moments are yadda-yadda’d from the eventual professional article, to the approval and applause of a hundred Likes, a dozen Follows, and a few cents’ worth of ad revenue generated by their hits. Selective anecdotal recounts can turn anyone with a travel budget into Hero of the Beach.

Full disclosure from this humbled amateur with complicated aspirations: Day Four of our road trip began not with entertaining travel heroism, but with ninety minutes of sitting off to the side of I-93 South during Boston’s mid-morning rush hour.

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