Personal Stuff

I’m not even going to acknowledge it.

No.

Well, okay, maybe I need to. This is the first time in the history of Everything is Oll Korrect! that I’ve gone an entire year without publishing anything. I have one draft that I was never happy with and a few ideas, but that’s it.

So, what happened? Ultimately, I suppose, it’s as simple as: I didn’t make time for it. Yes, I’ve been very busy and had other things going on, but I could probably have squeezed in a few posts over the course of twelve months. Instead, I prioritised other projects.

In 2023’s year in review post I predicted that “2024 is gonna be lit, boys.” It sure was, but mostly in good ways. My family has grown by one, my career change has proven to be a good decision, and Everything is Oll Korrect! has started showing a pulse again.

Let’s start with Everything. At the beginning of the year, I converted the site from a WordPress blog to a static site, using Hugo as my static site generator. You can read some details in these two posts, but in short, the transition went mostly smoothly. Hugo, and the nature of static sites generally, lack a few features that I did like about WP. For instance, I can’t quickly edit posts if needed, some of the themes I considered using required extra setup (that I wasn’t always able to do), and using images, especially with captions, is a bit of a nuisance. On the other hand, there’s less bloat, the site is more secure and has no plugins to update, I feel more in control of my own destiny, and most importanly, it actually works. In the twelve months before the migration, WordPress crashed five times; in the eleven months since, I’ve had 100% uptime. There are some more things I’d like to do to improve the site, like moving to a nicer theme, but they’re all very low priority. Once I get to posting more regularly, I’ll look into these other improvements.

So what’s happened on Everything is Oll Korrect! in 2023? Well, looks like I wrote four posts this year, three of them in the last few months. You can take the timing as a good sign - my schedule has lightened up a bit, meaning that, while this blog won’t be on, say, a weekly schedule any time soon, I should be able to manage somewhat regular updates, perhaps monthly or so. Two of those posts happened to be about children’s books, which gives some indication of what I’ve been mostly reading lately. One, which I think was the best of the year, on children’s books generally, and one on Dr. Seuss in particular.

Dead blog, lol.

Almost, anyway, but that’s fine. For the last couple years, and probably for a while to come, Everything is Oll Korrect! will primarily be a repository of old writing, updated very sporadically. I have a few ideas for future posts, but they’ll have to wait since I have more important projects.

I don’t even know what kind of traffic Everything received over the past year. Looking it up as I write, I’m at about 5,200 views, a bit up from last year’s 4,900 but under half of my peak in 2018, which was 12,800. The most viewed post of the year was, by a huge margin, “Which Translation of The Analects Should I Read?” The most popular from this year was my review of Henry Sumner Maines’ Popular Government, I suspect because publisher Imperium Press linked to it in a couple places. Coincidentally, all four posts this year looked like something from my more explicitly political days from about 2015-18. Popular Government, in fact, had been discussed by the old Neoreactionary bloggers Foseti and Radish Mag.

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.

Every once in a while, especially when I still had accounts on ask.fm and Curious Cat, someone has asked me what books I’ve read that have most influenced me. It’s a reasonable enough question and seems like one I should be able to answer. After all, I read a lot and come across as a thoughtful person, and many posts on this blog are essentially my public attempts at trying to better understand what I read. However, there really isn’t one good answer. For one thing, I believe I’ve been influenced far more by the sum of many books and experiences than just a handful that I could easily enumerate. Also, much depends on what exactly we mean by “influence.”

It’s the end of the year, and now that the reminiscing and navel-gazing is over it’s time for the most important year-end festivity, looking at how many books I read. In 2018 I read thirty-six, compared to 2017’s forty-two. This year, I have twenty-nine books recorded in LibraryThing, but this excludes eight volumes of Toriyama Akira’s DragonballZ because they’re part of a box set and so, from LibraryThing’s perspective, are only one book. There’s also The Bowl of Tears and Solace, which isn’t in their catalogue at all last I checked. That brings us up to a more typical thirty-eight, two more than last year.

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.

The biggest surprise I’ve ever given my parents was last year when I told them that I was getting into professional wrestling. My online presence here and on Twitter reflects my real-life interests and hobbies closely, and as you can tell from a scan of my article and review index most of what I read and watch leans toward high culture. I’ll dip into popular culture with things like Devilman now and then, but overall I’m more likely to be reading French poetry or something. I have little interest in sports generally, and most guys who are into wrestling started watching when they were young. I remember several friends in middle school talking about it, but I had little interest. So what happened?