2017 in Review: Top Five Posts
I like having an online place to hang my hat, to write about the things I want to write about, to show my readers what I’m up to. Some posts are more popular than others, and it’s always a surprise to look at the statistics: my favorite articles rarely get the traffic I think they should, and the more throwaway pieces often see more hits than the serious ones. Go figure. In ascending order of hits, these are the five most popular posts of 2017.
5: My Triumphant Return to Facebook : Despite that the title was a lie, it’s still a good piece that reiterates why I left Facebook and why the decision is still a good one. Author David Angsten has called Facebook (and I’m paraphrasing here; he said it better himself, as he always does) “the cocktail party with all your friends right outside your door”, and he’s right. There’s always the temptation to dip in. Anyway, everyone likes to go meta and talk about the nature of social media, hence this post’s popularity.
4: Book Review: The Space Vampires : This was a real surprise. To commemorate film director Tobe Hooper’s passing, I watched his movie Lifeforce again and re-read the book it had been based on, Colin Wilson’s The Space Vampires. As it was an older book and worth discussing, I reviewed it for the site and it got plenty of hits. A fun, pulpy read, positing some very bizarre theories on human energy.
3: Book Review: Red Room #1 : This post’s popularity was also a surprise. Who knew people wanted to know what I thought about this new magazine? Even though the interview gets kind of social justice-y, it’s a great magazine of crime and horror stories, something you should be reading if you’re not already. Looking forward to issue #2!
2: The Problem Isn’t Hollywood. The Problem Is You. : In this post I made the unwelcome connection between your buying decisions and your buying choices. As long as you keep spending your money on empty, unimaginative franchise pieces, Hollywood will continue to produce empty, unimaginative franchise pieces. And don’t get me started on indie content creators singing the praises of these bloated wastes of attention: it’s like knowingly eating rat poison and wondering why you feel so sick.
1: Twitter Is the Worst Thing Ever Devised : Like I said, everyone likes to read about social media almost as much as they like to be on it, hence this post’s popularity. I raked the value of Twitter over the rhetorical coals and explained how awful it is even while using it. I think the reason why people like the social media posts so much is because we all know that social media is bad for us, like smoking cigarettes or skin-popping heroin, but we do it anyway. (What?) Everyone’s always trying to quit something, but people serious about it actually quit. They don’t try to.
Last year’s top five included more political material, but a social media analysis article ranked up there too, proving my point about its interest to the general public. Also, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the site’s most popular article of all time: Red Flags and Ginger Nuts of Horror. I love linking to the piece because it always gets a rise out of Jim Mcleod, the drama queen it describes, and illustrates that the things I write about, like ethics, morals, and culture, have real-world consequences. The ill-educated, half-witted Philistines don’t all work in publishing; some have arrogated themselves the role of gatekeepers of media, and it’s important to show the world how worthless they are.
