100th Post!

Holy horse euphemism, Batman! One hundred posts. It had to happen sometime and here it is. Much has evolved since I started this thing, but the intention still remains for the most part.

I originally started this blog with the intention of using it as the main platform on which to release content, and that hasn’t changed. It started with me winging it through stream-of-conscious writings, which have always been something I’ve loved doing. These posts would later become Mingled-up Musings. After a while, I got the idea to throw in something different for variety and wrote this little review of Stickin’ Around. It was fun, and it planted the idea of doing more reviews of nostalgic stuff from my childhood.

After that, I created a short series of posts where I talked about comedy writing as well as general writing thoughts. I’ve always loved talking about it, so it was neat exploring my thoughts and sharing things that I learned. And while I haven’t written new posts on the subject in a while, it makes sense to let time pass and just write stuff before I revisit the subject. My sensibilities have definitely grown, but it’ll be a while before I gather more recent thoughts on writing.

Then came Tales from the Media Shelf, a short-lived series in which I chose to review various movies from my DVD shelf. I liked doing that and had a good variety of movies, including childhood favourites, current/recent films, and some in between. After I wrote ten reviews, though, I noticed that I hadn’t done my stream-of-consciousness-inspired entries and I started to miss my beginnings. That and I also didn’t want to drive myself crazy feeling compelled to review stuff from my shelf. In short, watching movies has always been fun, but I didn’t want it to feel like work.

“Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.” – Aristotle

I stepped away to do a little introspection and began to dive into why I like the stream of consciousness stuff. Not only that, I started to look into why I like to do it, and why it’s important to me. I’ve touched on this a bit in “My Return,” but basically I went from taking apart my writings to taking apart my whole personality and love for being expressive & observational.

It became something much bigger than I expected. Not only did I look at my early blog posts, I thought back on everything I’ve ever done that has involved using my voice, discovering myself, and being me. I started to re-watch old videos that I made by myself and with a friend when I was in high school. I listened to old voice recordings I did for fun. I even looked at numerous notebook writings to figure out what it was that I was missing. To put it simply, I missed being me. And as I got more deep with this, the more I realized I had to do something about it. I wanted to feel alive and bursting with the same passion and liveliness I had when I first started out, but I also wanted to take it further.

In a way, I’m still trying to figure out what it is that drives me. But because of all that time spent exploring things, I created little notes and lists on my findings and have been turning some of it into various pieces of content on here. From little posts about me, to thought pieces, personal stories, daydream-centered writings, even doing more nostalgic reviews. I’ve been breathing more life into the blog with additional series and am having a blast with it.

Another thing I did recently was create my own featured images for those series. I’ve always loved playing around with graphic design, so it was fun sketching ideas and turning them into graphics. Some of them are fairly simplistic in places, but experimenting and letting them evolve is one of the exciting things about this. And, since I wanted to do different ones throughout October, I knew I wanted to do variations for Halloween/horror-themed entries. I listened to those hour-long videos of Halloween music on Youtube while creating them and loved the whole process. I’m very happy with how they turned out, especially the Mingled-up Musings and slasher movie daydream images.

And speaking of those Halloween entries, that was another big thing. Last year, I did one entry per week and shared my love for the holiday. This year, I wanted to challenge myself and do multiple entries for each week of October. It was nice doing a variety of things too, including tributes, personal pieces, and reviews of horror movies. There was definitely a good balance. It was a little crazy in hindsight, but I managed to pull it off and can’t wait to do it again next year.

Okay, another reason to do the multiple entries was to build up to this 100th post. Can you really blame me? I’ve been on a roll and can’t be stopped. Nothing can stop me! Mwahahahah! \o/

All joking aside, the challenge of doing multiple entries in a week has always been in the back of my mind, and yet I found that while looking back at my early blog posts, some of them actually were written a couple days after one another in the same week. The entries were a lot shorter, but still it’s neat that I was churning out blog posts without thinking of some sort of schedule. It’s as if I was only focused on creating while having that feeling of, “Hey that last one was fun, what else can I do?”

Come to think of it, I feel like that has always been a question for me in different mediums. Whenever I would finish drawing a cartoon strip as a kid, for instance, I would think of another one to draw. After I would film something on my parent’s camcorder, I would look at it and think, “That was cool, what else can I do?” And when I would finish doing a voice recording late at night, I would turn it off and think to myself, “This is awesome, wonder what I’ll talk about next?” And then I would do it all over again.

And now here I am, thinking about how things haven’t really changed all that much, even with the new additions I’ve added to the blog. The fun is still there and I’m glad that I’ve taken enough time to think about things while moving forward.

Every time I finish revising an entry, I look at it almost obsessively like anyone who feels that they drive their self crazy with editing and, after finally clicking “Publish,” I end up saying to myself, “That was insane. You’re insane. You spent too much time putting those finishing touches on this, it’s been over an hour since you tweeted that the entry is on the way, it’s after midnight, and you’re just going to end up changing the entry date later on to make it look like it was posted on time. DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT DOING THAT. Readers will catch on and they’ll say something about it in the comments below. Anyway, that was fun what’s next?”

How about more? There are a lot of things I’ve been eager to talk about and expand on for a while. And since I like to spend my time learning new things on content creation, it’ll especially be fun talking about what goes into all this in more behind-the-scenes entries.

I hope you had fun reading this! Maybe you found something to connect to, or maybe it reminds you of what it’s like to create something you’re passionate for. Either way, I hope you enjoyed my journey in blogging and discovering myself.

Thank you for reading my 100th blog post. Here’s to many more! 🙂