In the last installment of this series, I summarized many of 'the best posts' from the early period of this blog. Many of them are quite noteworthy – some are even almost excellent – but the truth of the matter is the best posts were yet to come. 2012, if my recollection is trusted, was the year of titanic posts in which the blog's appearance ceased to matter, I stopped worrying about everything but the words and content... it might've been the golden era.
Need proof? Early in the year I managed to conjure up a masterpiece that had even me convinced it would be a strong year in which sloppy blogging would be superceded by amazing work that would inspire only greater efforts in the future. It would become the most-viewed post I'd ever written, and has the least typos or fuckups of any article I've ever written. With it behind me, I was at least sure that good things were going to happen as long as I kept the faith.
Then I didn't post anything very noteworthy for months and kept pretty lax hours in addition to that. To be fair, on a personal level I was enjoying life and the crushing tedium of having a bottom-of-the-barrel blog was simply not something I wanted to engage too often. To be honest it was mostly a mess after that. There are probably decent posts but I don't feel like it's worth it. Essentially, that's the guiding principle behind lots of my forgettable posts – probably for the 8-23 people who read them for five minutes and move on – not worth it for me and they don't care. The... wait. List quotes again? Review of Publicato's 2012 most noteworthy posts inbound:
"The world's premiere first world country, hamstrung with voter apathy, political landslides, corruption, fraud, authoritarianism, paternalism, and every kind of stupid fucked up downright dangerous problem"
"This scathing, ignorant, and extremely stupid post basically reflects all the many things that are wrong"
"Pick your side and hold a fractious conflict against your opponents while the world withers."
I think it sounded a lot worse than it was. 2012 had a lot of User Comment Rodeos going on, which is okay with me. I somehow fooled myself into thinking it was the year of excessively good writing but my review didn't really bring up any nuggets of profundity. Seems pretty normal. It was a good year, honestly, and there were some gems, but the really fun or interesting things had gone out of it. My absolute favorite to write were the political junkie/Hunter S. Thompson style posts from 2011, they had a real sense of hustle and narrative to them that was as enjoying to craft as it is to look back on. 2012 did not provide a higher concept type of post and fell into a trend that you might be able to work out if you (and I don't expect anyone to) follow the thread of the posts of that year.
2013, however, is a different story entirely, I swear it. In 2013 I have gotten more hits than ever, even as the blog dies with a whimper in the background of the internet. I've posted things that I actually think are pretty good even if the style is mildly jokey (nothing will ever be as jokey as 2011, though: something must have aged me terribly between 2011 and 2012). Getting 500+ hits a month was unthinkable in 2010, unbelievable in 2011, and impossible in 2012, but then it happened, which surprised me and led me to think about shackling myself to this sinking medium... an idea I pursued every now and then when I was feeling too happy or confident.
2013 was surprising, all told. I expected that Publicato would be well and truly dead by this time but due to pure stubbornness it still exists, more popular (with mostly real people or not, I can't say) than ever. Possibly, by this time next year, a dying Publicato will be SEO optimized, AdSense activated, and making my suicidal ass nearly 50 cents a month! Anyways: here's the noteworthies of 2013:
"... the 'film' of the bubble, for anyone still following, and the gas filling it is imperfect nerds..." 1*
"It's cute, because the coming generations get to live in not only mental, but also economical, physical, and environmental squalor. No wonder they don't give a fuck."
"...a fury which the internet-related deaths of hundreds of others failed to awaken."
"What a fool I must be to keep at it..."
"I will never stop hoping that others can learn to stop being stupid fucks"
"...users and addicts that are indistinguishable from the real thing in their disgusting, annoying race to the bottom."
"...rich people can get down with rocks too..."
"Maybe... the concept of identity is permanently deformed and bureaucracized..."
"It's like the manifestation of a nightmare – but that's essentially what the world has been..."
"...those suggestions are made to finally kill the ailing souls of people..."
"...a gift from twisted space angels..."
"...even the least presumptuous and annoying among us can be inauthentic."2?
Ah, memories... that's really all there is in the past. I think I can trace a discouraging trend to hyperbole; sure the whole endeavor was pretty hyperbolic from the start, blogging about cans of soup, but existential angst has taken its toll. I missed a few of the big stories, even now I am missing a few, but then again it has been a very long time since a multi-topic post in the true sense. The overarching theme of 2013 seemed to be the conclusive victory of politics over everything except maybe the nebulous concept of economy – on a related note surveillance issues swept under the rug for at least a decade were aired, creating a sense of palpable suspicion and validating the worst fears of what society used to call paranoiacs.
The overarching theme of Publicato 2013 seemed to be the fucked-up-ness of everything triumphing over everything else (seriously, a RoboCop remake?), a theme that has its roots in 2012 and will likely only grow into the future unless I rediscover a lost gift for not taking things too seriously and having more fun in general. The post about Under the Dome, for instance, was quite a bit of fun. Nothing like ribbing bad TV for laughs... but the real question, one that may come to dominate my attempts at writing in the future, is the Vonnegut-eqsue problem of resolving a really beautiful world gone wrong and its flawed denizens with something other than huffy, alarmist disgust and diatribes. I hope I figure that one out, to be honest, because that promising line of writing cannot have ended with Vonnegut, though he was the master of it.
In this entire series of articles I only once pointed out (in passing) the seriously accurate call I made on the trend of 80's revivalism intensifying. In 2011 I couldn't have guessed that video games like Blood Dragon were going to show up and that the feckless herd of consumerists would love it so much. I would've already been too late at that point to speak to 80's influences in music (a fractious issue), or the hateful business of remaking 80s classic films for the wimpy, picky, fussy audiences of today. All they need is an Avatar-like remake of Blade Runner to seal the pact with Mephistopheles. Not even I, however jacked up on spice melange I could get, would've been able to foresee a quite extreme confluence of old and new - the kickstarter project for a very 1980's movie, probably the height of the 80's revivalism I predicted would be entirely dead before 2014. I must say that predictions and cultural analysis were always the most fun, and looking back, the most fruitful of all the work I did.
It didn't all work out, it didn't all get the attention I thought it deserved, but Publicato was not a worthless endeavor. The important thing is to try, and to never listen to the people who tell you what your purpose on earth is. There is always too much to say, and I tend to say it too poorly, and focus on the wrong things. Well, that's more or less why I have an anonymous blog - with internet anonymity under attack from concerned parents and sinister (but well-meaning) governments it will be seen how much longer this will be possible before I get arrested for the grand offense of not wanting to attach my potentially lucrative name to a blog, that dying medium. On that cheery note: Happy New Year to you, dear reader.
1* This was probably the best post of the year. Concept, execution, only mildly sensationalistic and generally free of typos and idiot mistakes. If I wasn't against rewriting old articles I would post a variation on it every month.
2? Honestly the idea behind this post was a lot better than the execution of it. The hints themselves aren't good enough to be honest and aren't funny or interesting enough to be good. That makes it either earnest or sincere, which I know it wasn't either. Almost a sign of doom.
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