NUTTERBLOG'S 20TH ANNIVERSARY: A Look Back At What I've Done
Welcome, one and all, at long last...to a celebration.
My name is Nick Nutter, and I've (somehow) been doing NutterBlog for 20 years. That's...too big to even contemplate, really. I don't feel anything yet, because something that large takes awhile to sink in. But holy crap, I did something consistently for two DECADES?!? Go me!
What this entry will be today is a retrospective exploring the different milestones of this thing I did. (Look, it's gonna be self-indulgent and long winded, but you don't get to do a Twentieth Anniversary retrospective on something you made everyday, so let me have this one.)
This humble blog started life on August 24th, 2006 on a little website called MySpace. For those that weren’t there, imagine Soundcloud, Facebook and Blogger were one website, and somehow it didn’t suck. Functionally, it was kinda like that.
My name is Nick Nutter, and I've (somehow) been doing NutterBlog for 20 years. That's...too big to even contemplate, really. I don't feel anything yet, because something that large takes awhile to sink in. But holy crap, I did something consistently for two DECADES?!? Go me!
What this entry will be today is a retrospective exploring the different milestones of this thing I did. (Look, it's gonna be self-indulgent and long winded, but you don't get to do a Twentieth Anniversary retrospective on something you made everyday, so let me have this one.)
This humble blog started life on August 24th, 2006 on a little website called MySpace. For those that weren’t there, imagine Soundcloud, Facebook and Blogger were one website, and somehow it didn’t suck. Functionally, it was kinda like that.
You would not believe how hard it is to find a good example of a band page. I had to settle for this crap.
Anyway, I posted a quick introduction and four songs (the maximum at the time for the built-in audio player on the site). 2006 wasn’t an active blog year for me, because I didn’t know what to do with it yet. But then year end list season came around and it hit me.
You see, I’d been writing a year end blog ranking for albums since 2001. I just never posted it anywhere because I didn’t know what a blog was, much less that I could make one. I didn’t really have my own connection to the internet until 2006, so when it came time to do the year end countdown, it was a no-brainer to post it. (It sucks I had to start on one of the bottom five years for music in the last 70 years, but hey whaddayagonnado?)
Oh yeah, the parentheticals. I used to nest parentheses sometimes five deep to the point where even I would lose track of how many closed parentheses I needed and where to put ‘em. I still love to use these things (), but I’m (believe it or not) much more disciplined now.
Once I posted the 2006 blog, it must’ve dawned on me I could write music reviews. But because A) I was pretty close-minded and flippant about music I didn’t like or understand, B) didn’t want a bunch of crap clogging up my hard drive (no streaming yet and only 40GB of space) and C) I figured attention spans were dying a death (twenty fucking years ago), I decided to write reviews based solely on the 30 second sound samples of tracks you got on iTunes.
[Didn’t know where to put this, but I didn’t want to leave it out: My “Old Man Yells At Cloud” tendencies are like Benjamin Button: they were much worse in my teens and twenties. Now, I genuinely try to understand what people see in new stuff rather than dismiss it outright; finding out is neat!]
I started writing reviews, and didn’t look back. The format has obviously changed, but I basically still do this from time to time. Wish I had more time to dedicate to this hobby, because it really is still fun, but man...y’know.
2007 was a much better year for music, thankfully (not a great year in the grand scheme of things, but anything looked like up after ‘06; I nearly quit listening to music altogether). Kenna went two for two in his Album Of The Year conquest. (And he remains perfect by virtue of never having put out another album. Land 2 Air Chronicles doesn’t count because it was four EPs and they don’t exist anymore except on a few hard drives somewhere. Physical releases for everything!)
There was a natural inclination after awhile to branch out with the subject matter, so I started farting around with the idea of doing a zine. It went mostly nowhere, but I did put out one issue (as a blog) called Nutterzine. It featured topics such as: "What would Elvis have been doing in the 80s if he'd lived?", "Who is running for president besides Obama & McCain?" and a couple of reviews in there (including a book review of The Bible, which I'd just finished reading after five years). There was also a post about the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Where No One Has Gone Before" where I tried (and failed because I got the math wrong) to calculate what Warp Factor the Enterprise was going when it was thrown to M33 or wherever in a few seconds.
You see, I’d been writing a year end blog ranking for albums since 2001. I just never posted it anywhere because I didn’t know what a blog was, much less that I could make one. I didn’t really have my own connection to the internet until 2006, so when it came time to do the year end countdown, it was a no-brainer to post it. (It sucks I had to start on one of the bottom five years for music in the last 70 years, but hey whaddayagonnado?)
Oh yeah, the parentheticals. I used to nest parentheses sometimes five deep to the point where even I would lose track of how many closed parentheses I needed and where to put ‘em. I still love to use these things (), but I’m (believe it or not) much more disciplined now.
Once I posted the 2006 blog, it must’ve dawned on me I could write music reviews. But because A) I was pretty close-minded and flippant about music I didn’t like or understand, B) didn’t want a bunch of crap clogging up my hard drive (no streaming yet and only 40GB of space) and C) I figured attention spans were dying a death (twenty fucking years ago), I decided to write reviews based solely on the 30 second sound samples of tracks you got on iTunes.
[Didn’t know where to put this, but I didn’t want to leave it out: My “Old Man Yells At Cloud” tendencies are like Benjamin Button: they were much worse in my teens and twenties. Now, I genuinely try to understand what people see in new stuff rather than dismiss it outright; finding out is neat!]
I started writing reviews, and didn’t look back. The format has obviously changed, but I basically still do this from time to time. Wish I had more time to dedicate to this hobby, because it really is still fun, but man...y’know.
2007 was a much better year for music, thankfully (not a great year in the grand scheme of things, but anything looked like up after ‘06; I nearly quit listening to music altogether). Kenna went two for two in his Album Of The Year conquest. (And he remains perfect by virtue of never having put out another album. Land 2 Air Chronicles doesn’t count because it was four EPs and they don’t exist anymore except on a few hard drives somewhere. Physical releases for everything!)
There was a natural inclination after awhile to branch out with the subject matter, so I started farting around with the idea of doing a zine. It went mostly nowhere, but I did put out one issue (as a blog) called Nutterzine. It featured topics such as: "What would Elvis have been doing in the 80s if he'd lived?", "Who is running for president besides Obama & McCain?" and a couple of reviews in there (including a book review of The Bible, which I'd just finished reading after five years). There was also a post about the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Where No One Has Gone Before" where I tried (and failed because I got the math wrong) to calculate what Warp Factor the Enterprise was going when it was thrown to M33 or wherever in a few seconds.
This one.
The non-music content has gone up and down over the years: A Most Disappointing Books blog here, a "Let's talk shit about pictures I took" there (it's been well over a decade since I did one of those; might be time to bring that one back), something about wrestling...I'm never really sure how much my audience is into those because my blog numbers have always been within the margin of error, to put it mildly. But every once in awhile, you gotsta stretch out and bump into different zones you weren't meaning to activate. Or something.
2009 saw me starting College in my late 20s. At the end of the year, it was time to hunker down and write not just my Best Albums Of The Year, but my first Best Of The Decade lists too.
Yes, I've been doing this so long, I've done two Decade retrospectives already.
And in three more years, it'll be time to do a THIRD.
Yikes!
[For those curious, "Les Fleur" by 4Hero was my #1 song, and New Sacred Cow by Kenna was my Album Of The Decade.]
As the years rolled on, Facebook began edging MySpace out for everybody's attention, so by the end of 2010 I had to up stakes and leave the digital ghost town that platform had become. Which is how I wound up here.
2009 saw me starting College in my late 20s. At the end of the year, it was time to hunker down and write not just my Best Albums Of The Year, but my first Best Of The Decade lists too.
Yes, I've been doing this so long, I've done two Decade retrospectives already.
And in three more years, it'll be time to do a THIRD.
Yikes!
[For those curious, "Les Fleur" by 4Hero was my #1 song, and New Sacred Cow by Kenna was my Album Of The Decade.]
As the years rolled on, Facebook began edging MySpace out for everybody's attention, so by the end of 2010 I had to up stakes and leave the digital ghost town that platform had become. Which is how I wound up here.
It'll do.
At first, I made two separate blogs, one for new stuff and one for an archive, but after a month realized that was kinda stupid, so I merged 'em together. Nutterblog, as it still exists today (minus a layout change or two), came into being.
At the time (and for years after) I felt like 2012 was the year I stopped being "productive" as a creator. I mean hell, I only put out two albums, started a band that would become The Night Howls, finished a draft of my poetry book, started an anime club (that lasted six whole weeks, but still counts), made my own entire Magic: The Gathering BLOCK of cards (three related expansion sets), and went to college full time. (On top of playing WAY too much XBox.)
Y'know. do-nothing, failure shit. [Shrug emoji]
So I went into 2013 determined to be more "productive" (foreshadowing for the former gifted kids who know where this is going). My friends and I started (then quickly abandoned for reasons that can be summed up as..."ehhh?") a new blog called Vitriol In Absentia. It was a political thought experiment thing, but I came at it from a contrarian "this idea is stupid; let's do something absurd" angle and eh. It was fun for the two times I wrote about it. Given what discourse has become I'm SO glad I dodged that bullet.
My resolution for 2013 was to write everyday, without fail. Unlike most resolutions, I was able to stick with it for six whole months! And what would get me to do that? MORE PROJECTS! Two in particular would end up occupying most of my time, those being:
At the time (and for years after) I felt like 2012 was the year I stopped being "productive" as a creator. I mean hell, I only put out two albums, started a band that would become The Night Howls, finished a draft of my poetry book, started an anime club (that lasted six whole weeks, but still counts), made my own entire Magic: The Gathering BLOCK of cards (three related expansion sets), and went to college full time. (On top of playing WAY too much XBox.)
Y'know. do-nothing, failure shit. [Shrug emoji]
So I went into 2013 determined to be more "productive" (foreshadowing for the former gifted kids who know where this is going). My friends and I started (then quickly abandoned for reasons that can be summed up as..."ehhh?") a new blog called Vitriol In Absentia. It was a political thought experiment thing, but I came at it from a contrarian "this idea is stupid; let's do something absurd" angle and eh. It was fun for the two times I wrote about it. Given what discourse has become I'm SO glad I dodged that bullet.
My resolution for 2013 was to write everyday, without fail. Unlike most resolutions, I was able to stick with it for six whole months! And what would get me to do that? MORE PROJECTS! Two in particular would end up occupying most of my time, those being:
The Big Four Song Challenge Series
and
The Tournament To End All Tournaments
The Big Four Song Challenge Series was a series of blogs where I took the first song from each of the Big Four thrash metal bands' debut albums and pitted them against each other. (Metallica's "Hit The Lights", Megadeth's "Last Rites / Loved To Death", Anthrax's "Deathrider" and Slayer's "Evil Has No Boundaries".) Winner got four points, second place got three, etc.
I then did this 170 times.
I ran each song these bands had put out up to that point (more or less), head to head to head to head, until they were all tallied up. In the end I only missed one day, and that was due to my first ever bout of vertigo after my first ever plane flight. 76,000 words and 171 blog entries later, and I was pretty proud of myself. For about five minutes.
The reason these blogs aren't available anymore is I was writing them in a more "react" style than actually reviewing them. They ended up not as good as a result. I've thought about redoing them all, especially since each band has put out more shit, but then I think about the amount of work and eh, maybe not. (Real talk: I started a Prog Four Song Challenge Series in 2024, but it got a little too daunting by 35 entries in (out of 153). Maybe someday...)
That's not why I stopped thinking of writing a book's worth of words was an accomplishment. No, that's because I was mad at myself for writing all that instead of writing a book. Whether it be my poetry book (which has been in a development hell of mostly my own making since 2010) or my novel (which I didn't even realize I'd abandoned in 2008 because that's when I stopped writing prose), I wanted to put a book out, goddamit! So when I basically did that via unconventional means, it still didn't feel like I did anything.
Then I went and started another "project".
The Tournament To End All Tournaments is a fictitious wrestling tournament where I put 720 wrestlers from past and present in a bracket and tried to fantasy book it all. All of the matchups were determined at random, so when match #2 was Chyna VS Bobo Brazil, I knew we were in for some fun.
The problem with booking such a tournament is you have around the same number of matches as you do participants. That's a LOT of shit to write about. And doing so in a particularly rough semester and right into an even rougher mental health period, it wound up taking two years to complete because everything came to a head.
Say it with me now, fellow formerly gifted kids:
BURNOUT.
I started feeling creative burnout at the beginning of 2012, but didn't really understand what was happening until the end of 2013. Everything coalesced when I was trying to write the year end list during finals and I just snapped. It was too much at once and as a result it all suffered (as did I). The grades were bad and I punted on the list. I even thought about folding the blog altogether. I made a half-assed pity post at the beginning of 2014 that actually got me one of my only comments from someone I didn't know personally. It got knida confrontational. What a time to realize you have an audience.
Through it all I just put my head down and carried on, and eventually I just got convinced that I was "better" (in a House, MD Season 5 finale way), and I kept making stuff and sure, whatever, we'll keep going. I plugged along until one day in the fall of 2015, a friend and I were having schwarma in Riverwest. I had too much and needed to take a walk around the block, and wound up stumbling upon a video store. One that rented VHS and DVDs. In 2015. Two years after Blockbuster folded.
But not just any video store: this one had microphones and mixers set up in the two bay windows. We went in and found out it was an independent radio station! (How do you "find" something like that on a walk?) We talked to Marty the station manager, and the next thing you know, I HAD MY OWN RADIO SHOW WHAT THE HELL IS MY LIFE?!?
Oh. Wait.
OH SHIT I ONLY HAVE FIVE DAYS TO COME UP WITH A RADIO SHOW FROM SCRATCH WHATTHEHELLAMIGONNADO?!?!?!?
I somehow managed it. The first dozen plus episodes were completely scripted because I was so nervous. But I was doing something I never thought I'd do, something I'd dreamed about: I WAS HOSTING A RADIO SHOW!!!
The first episode I did without a script was the Best Albums Of 2015 Show, which was because after having a bit of an emotional breakdown during finals, I hadn't managed to write any of it. Hell, I was gonna pre-record the entire thing and add sound effects and shit, but I only got one segment done out of 40. I did this hour off the cuff, unaccompanied by background noise nor music, without swearing once.
You're probably wondering what this has to do with the blog. Dear reader, this is where I put the shownotes! I've privated them all (being the show hasn't existed since 2017and the Soundcloud links are long dead), but this is where I'd put the track lists, talk about the vibes I was trying to hit, themes I was exploring, the very occasional guests I had, or topics of discussion if it was a more podcasty-type episode.
I mostly played music on there (whatever the hell I wanted, as long as I cleaned the songs up for swears). Once a month, I'd do a request show, and I played whatever people requested, regardless of whether I liked it or not. Because I have a lot of weird friends, there were a lot of weird requests, and I love that for us. (My friend Tim kept requesting songs with hard to pronounce artist names from central Asia and the like just to try and trip me up. After I looked up how to pronounce Tolaghan Coghulu correctly, he waved the white flag).
There were wrestling episodes. I covered Wrestlemania 32, Summerslam 2016 and Royal Rumble 2017 as full episodes and Survivor Series 2016 as a segment. I did other themed episodes, such as a Back To The Future themed one on the day after Back To The Future 2 is supposed to take place, a French music episode after the Isis attacks in Paris, National Poetry Day episodes in 2016 and 2017, my 25th episode based around the 25th tracks from albums, live broadcasts from the 2016 and 2017 Riverwest 24 Hr Bike Races, a scripted episode about being caught in a Groundhog Day time loop (which was apparently so convincing my buddy Matt thought I was actually in trouble and got in his car with the intent of coming to save my ass, but then he realized the running footsteps he heard were not only impossible for the mic to pick up, but were stock sounds I got from YouTube. Sorry to put you on blast here, dude, but everyone out there, get you a friend who would be *that* in your corner for you), an episode commemorating the tenth anniversary of my father's death, and interview episodes with The GV Crew and Spiral Trance, which are two of my favorites.
There was also a series of special episodes that I planned out a year in advance: A seven part series on audio formats, with an episode for Wax Cylinders, 78s & 45s, Vinyl, Tapes, CDs, MP3s and Streaming. I got to do a lot of research and fall down some fun rabbit holes making these happen (such as finding pictures like the first color photograph, shown here, from 1861):
Eventually, between dwindling numbers, longer and longer productions times, and a night shift job getting in the way of making the thing, I decided to call it a day at 101 Episodes. Staying up two days straight to make sure an episode met my quality standards for three SoundCloud plays was not sustainable. So somehow, my show ended under a bridge in Riverwest at 7 in the morning on a Saturday despite having a Tuesday night time slot (I was covering the bike race). I played, in reverse artist order, songs from the same artists I played on the first episode, and that was that.
Oh yeah, weren't we talking about a blog? Other notable entries around this time were a series of blogs about Royal Rumble stats called "It's Time To Rumble!" and a blog about how absolutely Earth Shaking the last third of 1991 was for music. But in the background, in secret, I was working on yet another project. One that would start releasing on April 2, 2017.
The Grunge Match.
It was The Big Four Song Challenge Series, but this time with the Big Four Grunge bands (Alice In Chains, Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden), and I wrote the whole thing out ahead of time so it was actually halfway decent. That one clocks in at 60,000 words, so yay me again for sticking to something! I did, like, research and shit into the music and gave more context to the songs. That one's still up if you still need something to read for later; I still like it, even if my opinions on a bunch of the songs have changed (they're ever changing).
2018 was the first year where I started streaming music, and as a result had to change how I did my Year End lists because of the increased volume. (It was also the year I got a review for Eminem's surprise album Kamikaze posted before there was a Wikipedia article for it, but that's neither here nor there [brushes off shoulder].) This was where I introduced tiers to the Year End rankings, but technically no it wasn't. In 2016, faced with a deadline to turn it into a radio episode and also because I just didn't feel like there was a true #1, I made a sort of tier list that year, just without a Top 20 or a Bottom 10. It inspired me when I realized I had exactly 100 albums in 2018 and was not about to write about or rank them all. (Because what's the difference between #82 and #83, really?)
Streaming music then got even more out of hand in 2019 when I had a whopping 218 albums to rank. And, of course, this was also the end of another decade. It took until mid March to roll out all the blogs I was doing, but I managed to get em done. I guess I was just distracted. What could have distracted me in March 2020 that...
You've heard this set up and punchline before.
A picture of homeless people forced into squares in a Las Vegas parking lot so they can sleep socially distanced.
Lockdown was already looming when I posted the Best Albums of the 2010s blog. By the next week, I was postin' like a muh fuka! A reading of one of my longest poems (22 minutes on YouTube), songs from my new album Unfinished Business (Music Mondays, Poetry Fridays, man), a post about Kanye and how I just can't separate art from artist, and even two new episodes of Expect The Unexpected! (Which are no longer available because I deleted my SoundCloud. Fuck A.I.) I figured it was now or never, so why not now?
I even started pivoting to video.
Drink The Fire Hose was a show I did five episodes of, basically taking my review blogs and expanding them from quippy little paragraphs into more in-depth reviews, adding slide show images (because I hate being on camera), voiceover and music beds to illustrate what I was talking about.
And the first one was done just in time for the George Floyd murder to happen.
Posting about that first episode just felt wrong. That was when Lockdown stopped being kinda fun and started getting real scary. (I was also basically out of money and had to go crawling back to my $10 temp job with an abusive boss and no benefits because I had no other options. What I'm trying to say is, my timing stunk).
It's fucked up how much of 2020 people forgot by 2021, willingly. I get why: it was a traumatic hellscape that we didn't know how long we'd be in, or even if we'd get out of. But we forgot so thoroughly that we gave the keys back to the architects of that nightmare and worse. That amnesia is part of why we're where we are.
What's that? Oh, right. I started doing video reviews. They were fun, but they were a LOT of work. I wrote the script, recorded the voiceover, edited the voiceover, sourced all the images, put everything on a timeline with open source software that chugged so bad it would take two minutes to place one picture after a certain point. It basically took eight times as long to make an episode of Drink The Fire Hose as it did to write a blog about the same subjects, so I just went back to that. I wanted to keep it going, doing short videos for the best and worst songs of 2020 (which I still watch from time to time; I think they both turned out pretty good for what they are), but I was just spent.
2021, I was DONE. With everything. Whatever was gonna happen was gonna happen and forces way bigger than me were throwing me around to the point where bracing for impact felt kinda stupid. But then I finally got out of that shit job (into one that paid $11 an hour!), got the vaccine, Trump was out of office, and it finally felt like I could breathe (no pun intended, because...y'know).
So I decided to stop writing.
I needed to. That Burnout was still going in the background the whole damn time (and would continue after this for awhile), and I just needed to stop. So I silently quit the blog. If I ever felt like going back to it, sure, whatever, but I needed to stop.
But you know how it is. Eventually, I started jotting down opinions on albums I was listening to, with no real intention. It wasn't until I heard Bruce Hornsby's Non-Secure Connection and how WEIRD it was that I decided "Okay, I have to post about this." But a funny thing happened when I went to upload it.
Much like when I went to stream some music to edit a blog and tripped over Kamikaze mere seconds after it released, this happened again with Billie Eilish's Happier Than Ever. To date it's my most viewed blog, and also another funny thing happened because since I'd quit the blog EVERYTHING I'D POSTED IN THE LAST 18 MONTHS HAD EXPLODED IN VIEWS.
I still don't know what quirk of the algorithm did this, but from April 1, 2020, every blog was in the four digit range. I'd never hit more than 300 for anything up until then, in fifteen years of blogging. What the fuck happened? So right place, right time, I stepped back in this shit with an S.E.O. friendly review and did almost 10k for one post. This continued unabated until, just as inexplicably, the algorithmic hose got turned off December of 2022 and I started getting 13 views for stuff again.
Ultimately, I never did it for the views. I mean, if I had, I'd've quit in shame a loooong time ago. I did it because I like to write and I wanted to share. The temporary crazy boost in clicks was a nice bonus. (There was one other time, ironically after I'd soft quit again, where I returned to post and there were 200,000 more blog views. This time I wasn't so stoked, because I could tell, by the uniformity of almost every blog I had available going up by 250 or so views, that I'd been crawled for A.I. training. I hope I made your robots choke, you fucks.)
In 2023, I finally rectified a wrong that'd been nagging me for years and did a proper 2016 Best Of Blog. It's the longest single entry I've ever done (9,930 words), and I took a thorough look at the best, worst, and inbetween of 2016. Felt good about that one.
The 2023 Year End Lists were more fraught, however. A coctail of working a bunch of overtime just to stay out of the red, trying to get The Night Howls album mastered and obsessing about tweaks to it before we locked it in, trying to play catch up with a bunch of albums I wanted to cover and not realizing until January 3rd that I had 225 (the most ever) and I NEEDED TO STOP, on top of losing my computer to a virus and having to cobble together a solution of Microsoft Edge on an XBox One and a keyboard plugged into same so I could type into Google Docs. (That's why the formatting on that blog is so fucky; Google Docs doesn't seem to play as well with Google's own blogging platform as other word processing solutions do.) And then after that, we had to organize promotion for the album, we had to start booking shows, I had committed to DOUBLE #MWE for some god-forsaken reason...
Then I got in a car crash.
I was gonna talk about this in the mythical You Never Know blog but fuck it, we'll put it here. On the way home from work on February 12, 2024, I got merged through like I didn't exist (they had to be going 90 in a 50), spun out, hit the median, bounced back across four lanes of traffic and landed in a ditch. I had to crawl out the passenger side backwards because the driver's side door wouldn't open anymore, and fuck, why does my knee hurt?
I am so goddam lucky. I didn't get hit again as I spun out in early rush hour traffic, I didn't even hit my head when the airbags popped out. The first person on the scene was even someone from that hell job I talked about earlier who I hadn't seen in three years (who had also got out since then, thank God). My luck has never been good or bad so much as it's been WILD.
The other driver fucked off on their off ramp, never to be seen again. DOT cameras couldn't make out the license plate (something they'd have no flocking trouble doing now (barf)), so we never found out who did it. Being this was my second car crash in the same spot (early 2019 I got spun out in a snowstorm trying to exit and got clipped by a semi going 15 mph), I don't drive through there anymore. Fuuuck that.
My knee, turns out, was fucked up. MCL, PCL and Menial Meniscus tears. Basically the same injury Seth Rollins had at the exact same time. (He's made of sterner stuff; he appeared three times at Wrestlemania 40 before I even got in for my surgery to fix it!) Being that I lived in a third story walk up, I couldn't go home until I could do stairs again. So I lived on my mom's couch for five and a half months, and holy shit that fixed me.
For the first time since...graduating high school? I had no obligations. I had no internal pressure to do more or be more. I could finally r e l a x. My only job was to get better. And I didn't just do that with the knee. I was able to process and let go a lot of baggage that I'd had no real time or ability to work through before. The hell of 2020 and 2021. The too much I'd had on my plate right before the accident. My dad's death. Depression. Burnout. Not living up to expectations. Going to college for basically nothing and racking up more debt than I could ever pay back. I let go of ALL of it. I could finally move on with my life.
These things (and more) obviously still affect me, but they're not weighing on me anymore. I felt free. Maybe felt like an adult for the first time in my life, and definitely felt like myself for the first time since my 20s.
Of course, I had all this time on my back, so I used my mom's laptop to start writing some shit. The only things I finished were the blogs I posted the first half of that year, but I started a few things. I made spreadsheets for a redux of The Big Four Song Challenge Series, a New Wave Of American Heavy Metal series (which I've decided to abandon because I just don't like Killswitch Engage enough to gun their whole discography), a Prog Four Song Challenge Series (Yes, King Crimson, Pink Floyd and Genesis) and even another Tournament To End All Tournaments, with WAY too many goddam wrestlers (that one failed because I realized I didn't know how I was gonna write it, and also I had become a casual/lapsed fan that was just starting to watch WWE again after six years; also, I didn't know who half the wrestlers I'd added were, so...I had an idea to maybe just fill in those slots with women, so we'll see; never say never).
By the end of 2024, I was in a weird place with writing. I just didn't feel as compelled to do it as I used to. Without the pressure that was probably killing me, there wasn't an actual reason to do it. If I don't feel like it...don't? So I took a break. 2025 was a very light year (which is where I came back to find the 200k views at the end of September), and 2026 hasn't had much to speak of either. Finally did Double #MWE, though (and might do it again next year; clearing that backlog is fun). But then I come through here with 5,400 words, and eh. Maybe I'm back? Time will tell.
And time has told, through statistics, that I can yap about stuff when given a platform. Adding up every blog I’ve done, that works out to about 701,278 words. I didn’t count the MySpace blogs where I gave updates on new songs on the page (because those are all lost to time), but yeah. This very post brings up over 700k lifetime.
701,278 words is over 200,000 more than the longest Stormlight Archive book, so I got that goin’ for me, I guess. It’s a lotta words. Your average novel is like 70 to 100k, and I did that with The Big Four Song Challenge Series alone. Part of me will feel like a failure because I never finished my novel (rational or not), that I “wasted my time” on this blog instead of writing that, but like, I came to the conclusion I don’t like writing prose over a decade ago, so eh, take a hike negative voice. I did all *this*.
And in writing a blog, I connected with people rather than made some sweeping creative gesture. Would a novel have lasted longer than the ephemeral music reviews I’ve done? Sure; there’s reviews I don’t even agree with by the end of the year. But if trying to express myself was the point, doesn’t this kind of do it better?
I think I don’t feel much right now thinking about Twenty Years of this, because I can’t really believe it happened. “Twenty? Nah, you must’ve miscounted.” It still hasn’t registered. But it’s starting to. I’m proud of myself to be able to keep something going for that long. No matter how many times I’ve kicked myself for lack of posts over the years, I can look back and go: “Damn. Guess I shouldn’t be so hard on myself.”
As far as my sabbatical regarding new music, I’ve already listened to more than 100 albums this year; it ain’t like I’m not paying attention. I just haven’t written many reviews. The last one I posted a few weeks ago I started in April. I been kinda busy with the day job, but it’s more just that job takes a lot outta me. I gotta really want it to make new content.
But, this being proof, I do. Here we still are. Here I still am. Twenty Years later, making blogs. And having fun doing it. The fun is in the doing, not in the finishing. Remember that.
And, as always, Don’t Give Up.
I even started pivoting to video.
Drink The Fire Hose was a show I did five episodes of, basically taking my review blogs and expanding them from quippy little paragraphs into more in-depth reviews, adding slide show images (because I hate being on camera), voiceover and music beds to illustrate what I was talking about.
And the first one was done just in time for the George Floyd murder to happen.
Posting about that first episode just felt wrong. That was when Lockdown stopped being kinda fun and started getting real scary. (I was also basically out of money and had to go crawling back to my $10 temp job with an abusive boss and no benefits because I had no other options. What I'm trying to say is, my timing stunk).
It's fucked up how much of 2020 people forgot by 2021, willingly. I get why: it was a traumatic hellscape that we didn't know how long we'd be in, or even if we'd get out of. But we forgot so thoroughly that we gave the keys back to the architects of that nightmare and worse. That amnesia is part of why we're where we are.
What's that? Oh, right. I started doing video reviews. They were fun, but they were a LOT of work. I wrote the script, recorded the voiceover, edited the voiceover, sourced all the images, put everything on a timeline with open source software that chugged so bad it would take two minutes to place one picture after a certain point. It basically took eight times as long to make an episode of Drink The Fire Hose as it did to write a blog about the same subjects, so I just went back to that. I wanted to keep it going, doing short videos for the best and worst songs of 2020 (which I still watch from time to time; I think they both turned out pretty good for what they are), but I was just spent.
2021, I was DONE. With everything. Whatever was gonna happen was gonna happen and forces way bigger than me were throwing me around to the point where bracing for impact felt kinda stupid. But then I finally got out of that shit job (into one that paid $11 an hour!), got the vaccine, Trump was out of office, and it finally felt like I could breathe (no pun intended, because...y'know).
So I decided to stop writing.
I needed to. That Burnout was still going in the background the whole damn time (and would continue after this for awhile), and I just needed to stop. So I silently quit the blog. If I ever felt like going back to it, sure, whatever, but I needed to stop.
But you know how it is. Eventually, I started jotting down opinions on albums I was listening to, with no real intention. It wasn't until I heard Bruce Hornsby's Non-Secure Connection and how WEIRD it was that I decided "Okay, I have to post about this." But a funny thing happened when I went to upload it.
Much like when I went to stream some music to edit a blog and tripped over Kamikaze mere seconds after it released, this happened again with Billie Eilish's Happier Than Ever. To date it's my most viewed blog, and also another funny thing happened because since I'd quit the blog EVERYTHING I'D POSTED IN THE LAST 18 MONTHS HAD EXPLODED IN VIEWS.
I still don't know what quirk of the algorithm did this, but from April 1, 2020, every blog was in the four digit range. I'd never hit more than 300 for anything up until then, in fifteen years of blogging. What the fuck happened? So right place, right time, I stepped back in this shit with an S.E.O. friendly review and did almost 10k for one post. This continued unabated until, just as inexplicably, the algorithmic hose got turned off December of 2022 and I started getting 13 views for stuff again.
Ultimately, I never did it for the views. I mean, if I had, I'd've quit in shame a loooong time ago. I did it because I like to write and I wanted to share. The temporary crazy boost in clicks was a nice bonus. (There was one other time, ironically after I'd soft quit again, where I returned to post and there were 200,000 more blog views. This time I wasn't so stoked, because I could tell, by the uniformity of almost every blog I had available going up by 250 or so views, that I'd been crawled for A.I. training. I hope I made your robots choke, you fucks.)
In 2023, I finally rectified a wrong that'd been nagging me for years and did a proper 2016 Best Of Blog. It's the longest single entry I've ever done (9,930 words), and I took a thorough look at the best, worst, and inbetween of 2016. Felt good about that one.
The 2023 Year End Lists were more fraught, however. A coctail of working a bunch of overtime just to stay out of the red, trying to get The Night Howls album mastered and obsessing about tweaks to it before we locked it in, trying to play catch up with a bunch of albums I wanted to cover and not realizing until January 3rd that I had 225 (the most ever) and I NEEDED TO STOP, on top of losing my computer to a virus and having to cobble together a solution of Microsoft Edge on an XBox One and a keyboard plugged into same so I could type into Google Docs. (That's why the formatting on that blog is so fucky; Google Docs doesn't seem to play as well with Google's own blogging platform as other word processing solutions do.) And then after that, we had to organize promotion for the album, we had to start booking shows, I had committed to DOUBLE #MWE for some god-forsaken reason...
Then I got in a car crash.
I was gonna talk about this in the mythical You Never Know blog but fuck it, we'll put it here. On the way home from work on February 12, 2024, I got merged through like I didn't exist (they had to be going 90 in a 50), spun out, hit the median, bounced back across four lanes of traffic and landed in a ditch. I had to crawl out the passenger side backwards because the driver's side door wouldn't open anymore, and fuck, why does my knee hurt?
I am so goddam lucky. I didn't get hit again as I spun out in early rush hour traffic, I didn't even hit my head when the airbags popped out. The first person on the scene was even someone from that hell job I talked about earlier who I hadn't seen in three years (who had also got out since then, thank God). My luck has never been good or bad so much as it's been WILD.
The other driver fucked off on their off ramp, never to be seen again. DOT cameras couldn't make out the license plate (something they'd have no flocking trouble doing now (barf)), so we never found out who did it. Being this was my second car crash in the same spot (early 2019 I got spun out in a snowstorm trying to exit and got clipped by a semi going 15 mph), I don't drive through there anymore. Fuuuck that.
My knee, turns out, was fucked up. MCL, PCL and Menial Meniscus tears. Basically the same injury Seth Rollins had at the exact same time. (He's made of sterner stuff; he appeared three times at Wrestlemania 40 before I even got in for my surgery to fix it!) Being that I lived in a third story walk up, I couldn't go home until I could do stairs again. So I lived on my mom's couch for five and a half months, and holy shit that fixed me.
For the first time since...graduating high school? I had no obligations. I had no internal pressure to do more or be more. I could finally r e l a x. My only job was to get better. And I didn't just do that with the knee. I was able to process and let go a lot of baggage that I'd had no real time or ability to work through before. The hell of 2020 and 2021. The too much I'd had on my plate right before the accident. My dad's death. Depression. Burnout. Not living up to expectations. Going to college for basically nothing and racking up more debt than I could ever pay back. I let go of ALL of it. I could finally move on with my life.
These things (and more) obviously still affect me, but they're not weighing on me anymore. I felt free. Maybe felt like an adult for the first time in my life, and definitely felt like myself for the first time since my 20s.
Of course, I had all this time on my back, so I used my mom's laptop to start writing some shit. The only things I finished were the blogs I posted the first half of that year, but I started a few things. I made spreadsheets for a redux of The Big Four Song Challenge Series, a New Wave Of American Heavy Metal series (which I've decided to abandon because I just don't like Killswitch Engage enough to gun their whole discography), a Prog Four Song Challenge Series (Yes, King Crimson, Pink Floyd and Genesis) and even another Tournament To End All Tournaments, with WAY too many goddam wrestlers (that one failed because I realized I didn't know how I was gonna write it, and also I had become a casual/lapsed fan that was just starting to watch WWE again after six years; also, I didn't know who half the wrestlers I'd added were, so...I had an idea to maybe just fill in those slots with women, so we'll see; never say never).
By the end of 2024, I was in a weird place with writing. I just didn't feel as compelled to do it as I used to. Without the pressure that was probably killing me, there wasn't an actual reason to do it. If I don't feel like it...don't? So I took a break. 2025 was a very light year (which is where I came back to find the 200k views at the end of September), and 2026 hasn't had much to speak of either. Finally did Double #MWE, though (and might do it again next year; clearing that backlog is fun). But then I come through here with 5,400 words, and eh. Maybe I'm back? Time will tell.
And time has told, through statistics, that I can yap about stuff when given a platform. Adding up every blog I’ve done, that works out to about 701,278 words. I didn’t count the MySpace blogs where I gave updates on new songs on the page (because those are all lost to time), but yeah. This very post brings up over 700k lifetime.
701,278 words is over 200,000 more than the longest Stormlight Archive book, so I got that goin’ for me, I guess. It’s a lotta words. Your average novel is like 70 to 100k, and I did that with The Big Four Song Challenge Series alone. Part of me will feel like a failure because I never finished my novel (rational or not), that I “wasted my time” on this blog instead of writing that, but like, I came to the conclusion I don’t like writing prose over a decade ago, so eh, take a hike negative voice. I did all *this*.
And in writing a blog, I connected with people rather than made some sweeping creative gesture. Would a novel have lasted longer than the ephemeral music reviews I’ve done? Sure; there’s reviews I don’t even agree with by the end of the year. But if trying to express myself was the point, doesn’t this kind of do it better?
I think I don’t feel much right now thinking about Twenty Years of this, because I can’t really believe it happened. “Twenty? Nah, you must’ve miscounted.” It still hasn’t registered. But it’s starting to. I’m proud of myself to be able to keep something going for that long. No matter how many times I’ve kicked myself for lack of posts over the years, I can look back and go: “Damn. Guess I shouldn’t be so hard on myself.”
As far as my sabbatical regarding new music, I’ve already listened to more than 100 albums this year; it ain’t like I’m not paying attention. I just haven’t written many reviews. The last one I posted a few weeks ago I started in April. I been kinda busy with the day job, but it’s more just that job takes a lot outta me. I gotta really want it to make new content.
But, this being proof, I do. Here we still are. Here I still am. Twenty Years later, making blogs. And having fun doing it. The fun is in the doing, not in the finishing. Remember that.
And, as always, Don’t Give Up.
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