I've been meaning to blog more.
I like blogging. I like writing about shit. People seem to enjoy reading it. My friends keep telling me I should start blogging again (hi Friday!).
And I've been reading Nathan Rabin's Happy Place and really enjoying what Rabin has to say, and his enthusiasm about just being able to write about whatever he feels like.
But the kicker? Oh man.
The other day, I was checking replies to my Disqus posts.
And -- in response to a post I had written in the AV Club comments section five months ago, concerning the Black Panther: World of Wakanda comic -- some nice young fellow had written this:
Your blog sucks. Go back to sucking Ken Penders' dick.
Sonic the Hedgehog fandom is weird, you guys.
So okay, dude's obviously a troll; a quick gander at his posting history shows basically everything else he's ever written on Disqus has been arguing with atheists.
But the Penders thing? That's not random. It's far too specific.
My most recent Penders post was in 2015. At the time of this writing, it is on page 4 of this blog. So this is not a guy who decided, at random, to troll me, clicked on my name, and picked one of the posts on my blog to talk shit about.
And neither is this a guy who just now saw my Penders posts -- saw a link to them, found them on Google, whatever --, got incensed by them, and decided to write me a nastygram. Even assuming the gentlemen in question failed to notice the "Contact" link at the top of the page and instead, inexplicably, decided to look up my Disqus profile, he would have replied to one of my recent Disqus posts, not one that was five months old.
No. This is a dude who saw my posts about Ken Penders at some earlier date. Maybe as far back as 2013. And remembered them. And remembered my name. And, when he was randomly reading the comments section of an AV Club article, saw my name and felt the need to tell me off because, four years ago, I wrote some blog posts explaining that Ken Penders had a valid legal case against Archie Comics and Sega (or, as it's known in Sonic Fanboy-ese, "sucked Ken Penders' dick").
You know what? That is weirdly fucking flattering. I made an impact on this guy. People read my blog, and it matters to them.
I mean, sure, this guy is a troll and, clearly, a Sonic the Hedgehog fanboy -- those dudes are intense. I am sure he is not a representative member of my audience.
But the thing about writing whatever the hell I feel like is, I never know what's going to resonate with people.
The most attention I've ever gotten was when the online comic book press picked up on my posts about the never-finished-or-published 1990s Final Fantasy comic -- which, at that point, were already more than two years old.
And, in that same vein, my Final Fantasy 7 retrospective series continues to be popular. (Or at least did the last time I looked at my site stats. I've removed Google Analytics from this site -- that's a subject for another post -- but I'd like to get a new stats tool set up, because I like seeing what people are reading, where they're coming from, and what search terms they're using to get here.)
But these creators' rights pieces seem to get a pretty good amount of attention, too. People used to link my post on Marvel v Kirby all the time. And I once got a very nice E-Mail from Marc Tyler Nobleman for my Not My Batman post and its recognition of Bill Finger. (By the way: Batman & Bill is good; you should watch it.)
And so I'd like to get on back to yammering on about just whatever the hell it is I feel like yammering on about at the moment. Because what the hell; if I don't yammer here, I'm just going to yammer somewhere else, and frankly I spend far more time responding to trolls in the Techdirt comments section than a healthy person should.
I don't know if I'll manage 5-day-a-week posting like I used to. Maybe I will, maybe I won't. (Today I am posting on a Saturday. Whee!)
Course, if I do start blogging regularly again now, there's probably something to psychoanalyze in my doing it in response to our good friend Mr. "Your blog sucks" up there. I think humans are wired to notice criticism more than praise, and I suppose I'm no exception.
But what the hell; like I said, I've been planning to get back to blogging for awhile now anyway. And as criticism goes, I'm pretty sure this is the most fun hate mail I've ever gotten. Even better than the last unsolicited hate mail I got from a disgruntled Sonic fan, which was over 20 years ago and, in keeping with the whole "casual homophobia" theme, contained the phrase "You hump Robotnik's ugly butt!"
Sonic the Hedgehog fandom is weird, you guys.