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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Up until fairly recently, if someone had asked me what the best year of my life has been so far, my answer would probably have been my senior year of college. It was covered with an air of beautiful melancholy due my own aimlessness and non-starter romance, but though I felt I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas, it was mixed with friendships, opening new hobbies, and learning new things.
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.