New Years Eve is upon me much faster than expected since life has been complicated of late. Of course, it has been for the entire year so I should have expected 2014 to end that way. To sum up the year it was a relentless grind.
Starting off with my father’s cancer battle, 2014 proved to be a bad year demonstrating 2013 was no fluke. Life got harder, so the blog didn’t get the attention planned for it, along with many other things.
Normally, I write a post with statistics for the blog, however this year I’m discontinuing the practice. Why? It is clear that growth is dead. Other than the front page and one post on spam, the top twenty pages viewed all were originally published in prior years.
Suffice it to say that visits decline by a quarter thanks to Google’s constant screwing around with their algorithms and my producing fewer posts. Having matured, the Web is now a pay to play business rather than the bold new frontier of the past.
Good thing the blog wasn’t created to garner wealth or fame!
Plans are for the reviews that I’ve promised to write or rewrite will get finally get done. We’ll see how 2015 treats the household and whether I’ll have the energy to do so. Loose plans to start writing some fiction were made for this year and are being bumped to the coming year. If that comes to any fruition, the blog will suffer as a consequence.
2014 is something of a blur as I sit at the keyboard, trying to remember anything worth typing about that hasn’t already been covered in posts before. I know I had something to write about when I fired up Live Writer…
Ah well.
Let’s see, I didn’t bother writing a lot about anime TV series that were put out this year. There’s a good reason for this, besides the obvious of my being lazy. There simply weren’t very many good ones. Oh there were superficial by the numbers high quality shows such as Aldnoah Zero and Fate/Stay Night Unlimited Blade Works that killed time without being awful to end the year. But in general, anime was not good this year, especially the highly touted hits.
2014 anime of note for me were Log Horizon season 2, Tonari no Seki-kun, and Wake Up Girls! which were all entertaining. Only two anime stood out as truly excellent in 2014: Knights of Sidonia and Rage of Bahumet: Genesis.
The latter was a shock since it was supposed to be just a promotion for an online fantasy card game. Instead it was a deft mix of action, comedy, and tragedy with a bittersweet ending to a very well written fantasy story. Great characters to care about, amazing animation, and a truly epic finale makes it a must buy when Funimation eventually puts the Blu-ray set out.
Movies I saw at the theater this past year were a mixed bag at best. Godzilla, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and Guardians of the Galaxy were all quite good in very different ways. The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies was fairly bad, with very little to recommend it. Even the effects were shoddy, which is inexcusable given what WETA is capable of. Worse yet, the final battle that makes up most of the movie lacked any kind of epic feel, managing to be dramatically lesser than Helm’s Deep or the Fields of Pelennor.
Rather disappointing as the last visit to Middle Earth, the movie somehow fit as an end to the year.
2015 is nearly here, so I should wrap this post up before 2016 arrives.
No comments:
Post a Comment