Update Time
Hey, all.
So, 2017 is gone and done with. Thank the Gods. Which means it's time for the annual "look back on the year and contemplate life itself." For the most part... 2017 sucked. Like, wow, stop trying to compete with vacuums, 2017, you won. 2017 was a literal black hole for give-a-fucks.
That said, despite being god-awful on a grand scale, I somehow managed to have one of the most productive, informative years of my life in 2017. I started and completed many a-project and achieved a lot of goals I set at the beginning of the year. Somehow.
One of those goals was to get serious about this here review blog. I wanted to have at least one review/post every month on some sort of consistent schedule. I got... real close. I was only one post off. February was a dead month. For everything. I don't know why. It was just a month of "I don't give a shit", apparently. That said, I didn't actually start setting goals until March, anyway. I was planning to make up for it in October, being the month for horror and all, but I ended up buried in a ton of other projects and didn't have time for a second post.
But I managed 11/12.
That's still pretty damn good, if I do say so myself, and I do. I set a goal, I worked towards it, I (mostly) achieved it, and I'm proud of what I did manage. All in all, not too shabby, especially for someone who has a hard time sticking to literally anything. I'm good at starting projects. I'm awful at finishing them. But 2017 was a surprising turn-around and I intend to push that even further in 2018. I'm gonna take the 'barely managing' struggling momentum from 2017 (because quite frankly, it was a slog) and spring it forward into 2018.
2018 is gonna be better. It has to be.
It's gonna be different.
Which brings me to my next point: this blog and it's future.
2017 was a lot of test projects. Seeing if I can stick to something through the end of the year, see if I liked doing certain things, see what all I could finish in a month, see if Trello was better than Splendo (btw I use them both for different things). There was a lot of testing the waters in last year's goals and, naturally, I learned quite a bit from it and will be taking these tests and applying the info from them to rewire my goals for 2018.
For example, and this should sound familiar to many people, I am god awful at sticking to a workout. Especially a vague, generalized one. Not only did I not achieve the general weightloss goal of getting my ideal 32in. stomach(lol), but I almost never reached the end of the month goal for 19 hours of vague workout. It just didn't matter enough to me. So this year, I'm focusing it down into a very specific goal... of 50 push-ups by the end of the year. And that's it. I realized last year's plan didn't work (at all) and I'm reworking it.
To that same degree, while I did manage to mostly achieve my review goal... it was agonizing. I didn't really have fun with any of the reviews I wrote, it was always posted at the end of the month because I always put it off until the last minute, and I honestly hated every moment of writing the review. The most fun I had was with the DDLC review because I knew it was the last one and I filled it with references and finally just let myself have fun with it.
Here was the problem: I held my reviews up to these legitimately unrealistical (read: unfun) high standards that I, a shit-talking, sarcastic, casual asshole, couldn't really attain or even associate with. I thought, if I'm gonna be writing reviews, I need to make them... well, basically an English Essay. Because, you know, those are so much fun. I couldn't really just let myself have fun with the review because I put too much weight on it. But I set the goal and I wanted to see it through to the end. As annoying and stressful as it was.
But, by the end of the year, I think I've come to realize that I am not really a reviewer. I can commentate, sure, I'd probably be hilarious on a podcast or something like that, but for well-thought-out, written reviews? Nah, bruh. Shit's boring. The important thing, however, is that I stuck to it and learned something from it. I know for definite sure that I am not a reviewer, opinionated as I may be, and I can move on. Which I intend to do.
I have a lot of other projects lined up, and I've realized what is important to me and what isn't, and I'm gonna be moving into 2018 with a better idea of what I'd like to accomplish. The main thing, which may be a surprise to literally no one, is my writing. I'm not a reviewer of stories, I am a teller of stories. So I'm going to be heavily shifting my focus to TELLING my own stories.
That said, I plan to leave the blog up because, while it won't be on any goal list ever again, I do still have a passion for horror and I am forever opinionated. So if I come across something of particular note that I've got an essay's worth of opinions about, (and some free time) you may see another post or two pop up here and there. (Well, if the internet continues to exist, anyway. All of this is completely pointless if Net Neutrality goes out the window. Call your senators, ya'll.)
But. I think that about sums it all up.
Tl;dr - it wasn't fun while it lasted, but I got those goals, yo. Time to move on to bigger and better things.
Little Horror Blogger,
Out.
