So, as you can see, Everything is Oll Korrect! got a makeover. In short, I got tired of WordPress’s nonsense, and converted the blog to a static site using the Hugo framework. There’s still work to do, primarily in editing and republishing about 60% of my old posts, and the styling could also use some touching up. However, WordPress has become so unstable that I decided it’s best to get off that software as soon as I had something halfway presentable.
This blog isn’t abandoned, though it’s only barely qualifies as active. At the very least, it’s not so dead that I’m not writing my annual year-end post, even if it is 5:08pm on December 31. That lack of activity is due almost entirely to a lack of time; other things are, ultimately, more important, and my free time lately has been spent mostly on family history.
What have I written this year? Let’s just go through post-by-post; it won’t take long.
Uh… I wrote five posts this year. I’m not even going to compare it to previous years. What in tarnation? What was I doing this year?
Well, let’s talk about Everything is Oll Korrect! first; not like that will take very long anyway. Then we’ll talk about personal matters, i.e., why there were so few posts this year.
I got an early start to the year, with the first post going up in March, “What Books Have Most Influenced Me?” This is largely a reflection on what it means to say a book has influenced someone.
Oh yeah, I have a blog, don’t I? As I recall, I typically write annual year-in-review posts so maybe I should do that. There hasn’t been much action on Everything is Oll Korrect! in 2019, especially in the latter half, due to school, work, and other commitments (which we’ll get to shortly), and for the last couple weeks illness. As I write, my eyes itch and I can’t breathe through my right nostril, but such is my dedication to the millions and millions of the Ocelot’s fans that I’m going to write at least this one post. I’ll run through the articles I did publish this year, then spend the bulk of this article talking about one of my favourite subjects, me.
Once again, it’s time for me to look at the past year in bibliophilia. In 2018 I read thirty-six books, down from 2017’s forty-two, though considering this was also the year I started graduate school I’m actually pretty happy with that number.
Of those thirty-six, eight were poetry. Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses, Guido Cavalcanti: Complete Poems (trans. Cirigliano), Dante’s Rime (trans. Nichols and Mortimer), Virgil’s Aeneid (trans. Fitzgerald), Homer’s Iliad (trans. Lombardo) and Odyssey (trans. Mandelbaum), Greek Lyric Poetry (trans. West), and Martial’s Epigrams (trans. Michie). Of these, the Iliad was the best and my favourite, but I’ve read it before in Fitzgerald’s translation. The best new-to-me of these was Cavalcanti’s poems.
Every year I like to take a look back on what I’ve read and size up my literary diet for the past twelve months. Normally I do this on Twitter, but I’m going to start doing it here instead so it’s more permanent. Self-indulgent? Yes, but I don’t care. I’m the absolute monarch of my web log.
According to LibraryThing I’ve read forty books this year, but that’s not quite accurate because it doesn’t include Frankenstein, which I got via Project Gutenberg, nor does it count any of Plato’s dialogues. Few of those are book-length anyway, though, so I’ll set them aside. There were also Edgar Allan Poe’s poems, which may not quite add up to a book anyway, and the Book of Documents, which was too old for LT to have. So, we’ll say forty-two books for 2017.
What shall I render to the Lord, for all the things that he hath rendered to me? Things continue to improve here at Everything is Oll Korrect! This is the third year in a row that views have been up, and quality, if I may say so myself, has held up pretty well. I wrote forty-six posts this year, which is the most since 2012, when I had a weekly schedule. There’s also a major change up ahead for me personally, but we’ll get to that.
The first really successful year for Everything is Oll Korrect! was back in 2012, and going into 2013 I had a lot of momentum built up with the weekly posting schedule and generally improving post quality. I had high hopes, but that year turned out to be the Agincourt of web logging (from the French perspective), and in 2014 it really came tumbling down. So even though 2015 was Everything’s best year, I was only cautiously optimistic about how 2016 would turn out.
So, if 2013 was the Agincourt of weblogging, 2014 was The Battle of Little Bighorn.
Not that I feel too sorry for myself - I had thought early in the year that I’d rather spend time on other things than web logging, though I did expect to get up more than ten posts. At least most of them turned out fairly well, including a couple retrospectives, one on serial experiments lain and another on Neon Genesis Evangelion. Speaking of Evangelion, I also wrote about the January theatrical release of Evangelion 3.0, which still hasn’t come out on glorious blu-rei. I also shared my thoughts on the other big anime theatrical release this year, The Wind Rises, which has come out on home video; based on my re-watch of the film on blu-ray, I think these early impressions still stand.
That’s Agincourt from the French perspective, as last year’s success turned out to be shorter-lived than I expected.
Well, maybe “Agincourt” is an exaggeration, but it’s been a lousy year for me on all fronts. Leaving aside personal stuff, post quality was less even than I’d like, and update consistency fell apart in the second half of the year. I do seem to have gotten back on track now, though, and there were some good points throughout the year, so here’s the highlight reel for Everything Is Oll Korrect! in 2013.