Tag Archives: Midlife Crisis Crossover

An MCC Reader Survey for Every Man, Woman, and Spammer

June 25, 2013 By in Meta Tags: , , , , , 1 Comment

Once again I’m reporting live from the Department of Trying Something Completely Different and extending this opportunity to YOU, the Viewers at Home, to share your feedback about your Midlife Crisis Crossover reading experience. This may be an imperfect structure (I’ve already encountered one unresolved bug), but I beg your forgiveness and your willingness to humor me in this flighty endeavor.

Assuming I didn’t break anything, embedded in this entry should be a simple survey — two pages, five questions in all — providing statistical info on the MCC readership at large to satisfy my curiosity, to help me think a little harder about what subjects to incorporate here in future entries, to show me whether or not the PollDaddy survey function is worth reusing, and to determine once and for all how many of you are real and how many of you are Matrix holo-henchmen.

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Midlife Crisis Crossover Celebrates 1st Birthday, Threatens to Begin Repeating Itself

May 8, 2013 By in Meta Tags: , , , , , 6 Comments

Midlife Crisis CrossoverOn April 28, 2013, the blog you’re presently skimming celebrated its very first birthday. Strange but true! I would’ve marked the occasion sooner and in a timelier fashion, but longtime readers might’ve noticed I had a hard time shutting up about that blasted C2E2 event for a few minutes. Even though our official six-part photo gallery is completed, I still have at least three posts’ worth of C2E2-related material in store from a different angle. Out of respect to my readers who might not be as enthralled as I am by local comics conventions, a broader, general-audience digression seemed in order. Also, I’d like to mark the occasion sometime before next New Year’s.

It was a singular event that inspired me to launch this humble site out of a combination of frustration and curiosity. (Expect the story behind said event in an upcoming entry. Enough time has passed, I think, that I can share it with fewer sour grapes.) I set forth on this strange journey to discover the answers to a long list of questions for myself, including but not limited to:

1. How many consecutive evenings in a row can I find a reason/excuse to write about something before I stumble and fail?
2. How much am I willing to sacrifice for the sake of writing?
3. Can I start such a project without a preexisting audience?
4. Is it possible to build an audience from the ground up? Not counting spammers?
5. What sorts of writing will I like best? And what kinds might become a dreary chore?
6. Is there a question #6?
7. Can I enjoy myself without being jealous of those who do this regularly for money?
8. Will anyone I know even care?
9. Am I alone in this?
10. Do I really like writing? If not, what am I supposed to be doing with my life?

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Today is Brought to You by the Number 300

February 16, 2013 By in Comics/Lit, Meta Tags: , , , , , , 2 Comments

Todd McFarlane, Amazing Spider-Man 300If my entire comic book collection were in mint condition, one of the more valuable modern-age collectibles would be Amazing Spider-Man . Not only was it part of the run that cemented Todd McFarlane as a bankable superstar, it also introduced Venom, who in my teenage eyes became one of Spidey’s scariest adversaries, up until Marvel later saturated the market with tons of Venom miniseries and crossovers. Though he wore out his welcome, I still hold a few fond memories of that era in the field.

300 isn’t the most popular number around — not nearly as well regarded as 2, 7, 42, 500, or one billion. 300 is modest in comparison, but serves a purpose and makes an appearance wherever it’s needed.

The 300th episode of The Simpsons revealed Bart’s secret life as a child star, and guest-starred Tony Hawk and Blink-182. That’s 300 in production order, anyway — in airdate order, it was #302.

The 300th episode of Law & Order: SVU aired October 24th, 2012. Two days later, the 300th episode of DeGrassi aired on TeenNick. If only each production had known the other shared their milestone, they could’ve orchestrated the greatest TV crossover of all time, though it might’ve guaranteed the violent death of a beloved DeGrassi character.

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The Joys of List-Making, Outlined and Enumerated

January 26, 2013 By in Meta, Mundane Tags: , , , , , , 3 Comments

to-do listLongtime MCC readers are surely aware of my addiction to writing lists. I confess before you now that my lifelong listaholism extends beyond what you’ve seen here in the past. In our household I appointed myself Chief Grocery List Officer. I keep track of all the comic books I own on Excel sheets. From 2000 to the present I’ve kept Notepad files of every single movie I’ve seen in theaters. Many a Post-It has died in service to my never-ending attempts to remember what chores and repairs need to be done around the house. All the odd sights we see on vacation each year have been made possible by lists, though those are always collaborative efforts with my wife the list-enabler.

It’s no surprise to myself that my list fixation is a frequent motif in my writing. At one point several months ago, I wondered if perhaps the MCC blog concept should have been built upon a rigid list-based foundation from the get-go. Fortunately for the sake of format flexibility, I bypassed that option and instead dreamed up a premise more convoluted and impossible to justify in a single sentence.

Why are lists my thing? The reasons are many and varied:

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WordPress.com Magic Elves Offer Colorful Second Opinion of My 2012

January 1, 2013 By in Meta Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , 11 Comments

Important part first: Happy New Year’s to one and all!

Here’s hoping 2013 will be Best Year Ever for all of you, whether you’re planning to expand on your 2012 achievements and victories, secretly wishing for a complete do-over, or were born within the past hour and have no basis for comparison.

Since most readers are either partying or recovering (depending on how soon this is being read), I’ve allowed myself to relax a little more than usual tonight, spending more time with family than with keyboard. It’s my understanding that correcting this imbalance at least three or four days per year is strongly recommended by most of my relatives, biased though they are. That meant less time for writing and more for board games, but in my mind it’s an exchange more than fair, even though my wife and son refused to let me unleash our Scrabble set and trounce them both just once.

In lieu of an overlong piece about New Year’s resolutions (expect something along those lines tomorrow, because of worldwide mandatory blogging bylaws), the following Very Special Report is provided as a treat for my fellow blog stat junkies, or for fans of cute animated fireworks.

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“Freshly Pressed” Post Saves Earth, Foils Millennia-Old Mayan Armageddon Scheme

December 21, 2012 By in Meta Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

Tomazooma

If there were a Mayan Galactus, he would dress exactly like Tomazooma.

One of the first things I noticed when I woke up December 21, 2012, is that I woke up December 21, 2012, a day that The Powerless Who Wish They Were The Powers That Be duly notified us years in advance would not exist. In direct defiance of this premonition, there I was, groggy, breathing, existent, and hearing my wife out in the living room yelling at our dog. None of these things could possibly be happening. Pundits had told me so.

Clearly someone had meddled in the long-term machinations of those pesky Mayans. Who could have saved the day, and all the days after it? Did God smite them? Was their forbidden stronghold located and smashed to pieces by a South American super-hero team? Did a suspicious policeman stumble upon their ringleaders and call in reinforcements? Did their primitive doomsday device slip a cog? Or did their sleeper agents forget to set their alarm clocks for the right time to rise up and decimate?

I was clueless. My mostly ordinary work day failed to shed any light or unearth new evidence to this mystery…for the first half of the day, anyway. At lunchtime I found my answer.

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Midlife Crisis Crossover 2012 in Review, Assuming the Next Thirteen Days are a Complete Write-Off

December 18, 2012 By in Meta Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , 34 Comments

Midlife Crisis Crossover was launched April 28, 2012, as a creative attempt to do something different with my spare time, my ostensible talents, and four decades of accumulated monumental mistakes and mental minutiae. Though it wasn’t my first blog, it was my first time attempting a blog without an immediate support system or preexisting audience. The MCC experience has been eight curious months of dedication, persistence, failures, sleep deprivation, loneliness, stubbornness, prayer, and occasional wild luck. Over the course of the first 240 posts I’ve discovered new peers, made new friends, learned new things about myself and HTML, improved 2% at photography, and remembered one or two stylistic rules I’d forgotten since college, with several more still repressed and yet to be rediscovered.

Empty Obama Chair, Clint Eastwood's arch-enemy

The infamous empty chair, a.k.a. “Obamachair”

The WordPress.com Weekly Writing Challenge has encouraged us to look back at our year and remember where we’ve been. Even before I began assembling my MCC year-end lists, I already knew which post would top most of them: “The Day an Empty Chair Ruled the Internet” was the watershed event that drew the most Likes, Comments, and Shares (and nearly the most traffic) of anything else I’ve written this year, arguably even in my full thirteen years of Internet participation, thanks in large part to its “Freshly Pressed” status that saw it spotlighted for all WordPress users to see over Labor Day weekend.

For its outstanding achievement of Attracting an Audience, “Empty Chair” is the first and only entry in the MCC Hall of Fame, even though it was about political events and my incredulous disdain for same. If we set it aside in a class by itself, my memories of 2012 look like so:

* * * * *

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NaBloPoMo Success Celebrated with New URL, Facebook Page, Self-High-Five

December 3, 2012 By in Meta Tags: , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

NaBloPoMo 2012 Badge

My NaBloPoMo 2012 Merit Badge

Congratulations to any and all bloggers of the universe who succeeded in their thirty-day posting spree for NaBloPoMo 2012. I’m two days late commemorating the completion of my own marathon because I wanted to use the final day to move one step closer to the end of our long, drawn-out vacation saga, which a lot of people abandoned as soon as Kansas returned to the forefront like a much-dreaded super-villain. As for yesterday, NaBloPoMo went likewise unmentioned because I was too partied out to celebrate anymore. I’m feeling much better now.

For the record, NaBloPoMo on Midlife Crisis Crossover remained on target and on schedule, with 31 posts in 30 days that broke down as follows:

vacation photos: 7
things about movies: 6
Things containing Thanksgiving or Black Friday: 4
Revolution recaps: 4
convention photos: 3
random photo collections: 1
Geek Demerits: 1
MCC Request Line: 1
family anecdote: 1
fiction: 1
political griping: 1
NaBloPoMo iambic pentameter: 1

When I began November, I somehow thought the results would be more random by the end. Too late to diversify now, I suppose.

About that bonus 31st post: I usually limit myself to one post per day, but two converging events demanded equal time within the same narrow time frame. I was glad to finish them both for the sake of the readers interested in each respective piece, but it was not the most pleasant experience of my November.

In addition to “Yay NaBloPoMo!”, we have two more MCC announcements:

1. I’ve taken the plunge and officially purchased the domain name, just to see what happens. https://midlifecrisiscrossover.wordpress.com and all contents should now redirect to http://midlifecrisiscrossover.com. The speed of DNS propagation to other ISPs as a result of the URL update may vary, so the site may act uncooperative for some readers for a short time. I’m told this should pass in a few days.

2. MCC now has its very own Facebook page! Readers who Like MCC on Facebook will enjoy numerous benefits, including but not limited to:

* Instant notice whenever new entries are published! (Twitter already does this for me, but my Facebook involvement trumps my Twitter use by a wide margin.)

* The ability to Like and/or comment on each MCC entry without using the Web-based WordPress Like button or comments section! (For those who prefer one set of tools over the other, now you have more options for validating or refuting me.)

* Access to exclusive MCC Facebook content! (Whatever form that may take. Stay tuned!)

* Another “Like” to throw on your Facebook “Like” pile! Who doesn’t need dozens more of those?

As always, thanks for reading and supporting. Questions and requests always welcome.

Area Man Marks Six Months of Consecutive Daily Blogging with Self-Promotional Solipsism

October 29, 2012 By in Meta Tags: , , , , , , , , , 5 Comments

Midlife Crisis Crossover magical happening placeAfter long deliberation and some preparation, I launched Midlife Crisis Crossover on April 28, 2012, with “The Train Job“, my satirical plan to unite all the incongruous neighborhoods of Indianapolis with a haphazard subway plan that would still be more functional than the marginal mass-transit options of our reality. With that entry serving as my ribbon-cutting ceremony, I committed myself to creating one new piece every day for as long I could keep finding reasons to write and ways to test myself. If I were ever to be serious about finding a purpose for this alleged writing talent, then I needed to knuckle down and see if I could activate it on a regular basis without waiting for other Internet users to provoke or co-opt it.

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Grateful for “Freshly Pressed” Status, Hoping Not to Turn into Egomaniacal One-Hit Wonder

September 3, 2012 By in Meta Tags: , , , , , 11 Comments

WordPress "Freshly Pressed" badgeFirst things first: I owe a truckload of gratitude to the WordPress staffer who selected last Friday evening’s entry, “The Day an Empty Chair Ruled the Internet” as a feature selection for the WordPress.com Freshly Pressed page. Before that happened, I honestly thought the page was automated and random. Based on the gracious emails I received that offered me some proofreading and specific content input before the FP slotting went live, I’ve confidently shelved that theory.

I also owe many sincere thanks to you, the Viewers at Home, who were kind enough to give it a look-see and leave feedback. The response has overwhelmed me more with its kindness and generosity than with its appreciable volume. My Labor Day weekend took a vastly different direction than the quiet doldrums I’d anticipated. Keeping up with the replies has been a fun ‘n’ lively time, and I’ve also found myself with a plethora of new blogs and writers to check out.

For anyone who’s returned here and sampled any fare beyond the Empty Chair Blues, it’s my sincere hope that other future entries will be of some use or entertainment value to you as well. I aim for one entry per day, based on whatever’s preoccupying my mind at any given moment. The inconsistent MCC experience is fairly consistent with the scattershot nature of my aging mindset. Nine times out of ten it’s entertainment (comics, movies, TV, whatever) because of my lifelong unapologetic nerdist tendencies and my never-ending curiosity about the arts and assorted acts of creation from a variety of perspectives. Every so often I open up about my faith, though not nearly as often as I should. As special events have been occurring of late, I’ve shared experiences with fan conventions and our family’s annual road trips. Once in a blue moon I’ll write something about Indiana, even though no one ever reads those, not even other Hoosiers.

I assume “Empty Chair” will be escorted off the FP page in due time, and my daily experience here will remain on track. I’ll do my best to hold onto my sense of proportion and not print up thousands of business cards bearing the FP stamp and the obnoxious, self-anointed title of CERTIFIED WRITER. If I do, please shoot me down…and feel free to take a card.

Thanks for reading, and a round of hugs for everyone.