Ken Levine, the former Cheers and Frasier writer who was also an announcer for the Mariners and the Padres, once wrote that he does a blog about comedy writing, showbiz, the radio industry and baseball because he thinks of his blog as the writing equivalent of a stretching exercise. He added, "I don't want to write all day and you sure don't want to read all day. But it keeps my mind active... Still, it is time consuming, and I'll be honest, there are times it's a burden. Coming up with interesting enough topics is sometimes very difficult. I can''t [sic] tee off on 2 BROKE GIRLS every day."
Levine wrote those sentences in 2014, when his still-active blog reached the nine-year mark. I've been doing this blog for nine years now (mainly as a way to tell the world, "I'm unemployed and I may not be active on social media because it has all the pleasantness of a Springfield tire yard, but I still fucking exist, dammit"), and I, like Levine, used to view the blog as the writing equivalent of a stretching exercise, but, well, now it has become a burden. It's not as enjoyable as it used to be. The stretching is starting to make me sore. The blog is taking too much time away from a book I'm trying to write (while constantly suffering from writer's block). There have been a lot of "AFOS Blog Rewind" reposts this year because I wanted to adhere to a weekly posting schedule during 2016, but there are weeks where I simply don't have jack shit to say.
Sure, I could easily rattle off in one day a bunch of posts that simply say "Look at this funny video!" or "Peep this link," but I'm not going to do that shit. This blog stopped doing click-bait ages ago. So I've decided that in 2017, the blog will switch to a monthly schedule and then come to a close at the end of the year.
Too many blogs I've liked have been abandoned by their authors, and those blogs never leave a farewell message or tell their readers, "Yo, I'm doing this other thing over at this other link now," or "I have this new project now. You might have heard of it. It's called parenting." Whenever I leave a project behind, whether it's a YouTube channel that never became as popular as I would have liked, my first Tumblr or an Internet radio station, I always leave some sort of farewell message.
So this blog will have a final post, and all the previous posts will stay up. I'd rather be like the defunct Grantland, whose articles are still online for former Grantland readers to revisit, than the late Keon Enoy Munedouang, who set his Minority Militant blog to private (an action that basically deleted it from existence), as if he were a Laotian Yeezy (someone, by the way, should explain to Ye that deleting something you tweeted or recorded never works because the Internet, like the North, remembers, and it has found a few ways to save your deleted tweet or that piece of new music you immediately deaded). Semi-deleting it made it kind of difficult for former Minority Militant readers to access Keon's earlier writing.
Lack of readership has also been a factor in cutting back on this blog. Earlier this year, I started a second Tumblr, even though I hated Tumblr because its coding interface was terrible and clunky (it still is) and my first Tumblr failed to attract readers to the radio station. For a while, I thought about dabbling into the world of fashion blogs, but instead of becoming another typical Asian American fashion blogger, I wanted to do a parody of fashion blogs. Accidental Star Trek Cosplay grew from that parody concept. I didn't expect Accidental Star Trek Cosplay to gain as much followers as it did (it has twice the followers my first Tumblr has). So that has made me like Tumblr a little more (also, unlike Twitter and Facebook, Tumblr hasn't been ruined by white supremacists). And because the Accidental Star Trek Cosplay readers are more responsive than the readers over here (as well as because ASTC isn't as time-consuming as this blog has been), Tumblr is where I've spent more of my time blogging.
I constantly worry about running out of photos to post over at ASTC, but as long as meteorologists continue to dress like any of the yeomen from the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, I won't run low on content to post. Because ASTC isn't the primary blog on my Tumblr account, any new ASTC posts aren't automatically reposted on my Twitter feed or my primary Facebook timeline, and I've become cool with that. In fact, excluding ASTC from my Twitter feed and my two Facebook timelines has resulted in me feeling a little liberated, because trying to get people on Twitter and Facebook to read the stuff I've written for this Blogspot blog can be exhausting. I've never really had the stomach for self-promotion. When I'm starting to worry about not getting any likes for a lengthy article that took me weeks to write, that's my cue to simply bounce and shut down my MacBook. I don't need to seek the approval of social media anymore. Social media can go fuck itself.
Heavily trimming the amount of Blogspot posts next year to one post per month will do a lot to ease the burden of self-promotion. Best of all, it will take the pressure off trying to post something substantial every week. I believe I have footage of myself trying to come up with new material for this blog on most weeks.
I was originally going to do a farewell-to-Blogspot post at the start of 2017, but I decided to move it to the end of 2017 because I actually have a few more posts I want to write for this blog, even though I constantly suffer from writer's block. There's an article about Electric Boogaloo, the 2015 documentary about the craziness of Cannon Films, that I started writing last January, and only 20 percent of it is finished, but I want to post it here some time next year. I also want to write about the way that Atlanta is like 30 Rock in slo-mo (it's easy to forget that one of Donald Glover's earlier jobs was writing for 30 Rock) and why it's disappointing that E! never built a Soup archive that's equivalent to the way that viewers can easily stream an entire old episode of The Daily Show from 2002 or 2008 over at Comedy Central's archives.
The frequency of activity over here may be massively downsized next year, but unlike the late, great Alan Rickman, I'm not all out of ideas. In the meantime, move, snitch. Get out the way. I'm trying to write a book.
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