On 1 October 2016, we launched Atomic Junk Shop, so that makes this our tenth anniversary/birthday. Yay to us!
I always like marking anniversaries, and here at the blog it’s no different. It’s been a strange decade — we launched right before the beginning of what we might call “The Trump Decade,” which is not a high-water mark of ‘Murican history, I think you’ll agree, and it’s been tough for most of us. But we’ve been here, doing our thing, checking out some of the weirder corners of pop culture, and it’s been fun.
It feels like we’ve reached an inflection point with the blog over the past couple of years, as you might have noticed. Many of our writers don’t post much (if at all) here anymore, and it continues to bum me out. If you go to the sidebar and click on the writers’ names, you can see when their most recent posts are, and it’s kind of depressing. I get that we all get older and have more things to take us away from writing, but it’s still a bummer. Fraser and I are holding down the fort, but I do miss the variety we used to have here. I wonder how Travis is doing. I hope some people who used to comment here are doing ok. I really like this community, and I like discussing things with people in the comments, and it bums me out that we don’t have a bigger readership. Consider these anniversary posts, which I do every year. In 2017, we got 44 comments. In 2018, 34 comments. By 2019, it was down to 16. 22 in 2020, 18 in 2021, 16 in 2022, 20 in 2023, 20 in 2024, and 12 last year. I know that comments aren’t necessarily the best indicator of who’s reading, but they’re not the worst way, either, and I wish more people would say hello. I know we’ve had some issues with signing up for the blog, and I don’t know how to fix it. None of us here are, as far as I can tell, that technically minded, so when something goes wrong with the blog (which it does every so often), I don’t know how to make it better. I do apologize for that.
So, an inflection point. Which means, will the blog continue? Well, as I say every year, as long as I’m around and have a little bit of time, it will, because I really do like writing for the blog. I think Fraser enjoys it, too, and I still have a few years of Greg’s columns to repost, so you’re stuck with us a bit longer unless AI finally reaches out of my computer and kills me. I still think we have interesting people reading the blog, and I like hearing from them. Of course, I wish we had more diversity in our posting, but such is life, and we will always welcome it if one of the absent writers pops up and posts something. Life is hard, and life in the past decade has been even harder, and I do not blame people in the least if they can’t write something about a weird 1980s movie or a great comic they read recently or how Traylor Howard is the stealth MVP of Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place, and I do not blame people in the least if they simply don’t have time to check in and read our ramblings. We do hope we can continue to entertain you with all our weirdness, and if you have a few free minutes during the day, you’re more than welcome to spend them with us. Fraser still has a lot of Silver Age/Bronze Age stuff to read, after all! I took September off from writing about Wizard and my old favorites, but that should be starting up again soon, plus I just read a comic from my bookshelf that I’m going to have to do a new Comics You Should Own about. I have a lot of things to write about, but — you guessed it — time is never abundant. So I get it. Still, we hope that there will always be someone out there reading.
As always, thanks to everyone for making this a fun corner of the internet. As I always do, I encourage you to comment, even if you usually lurk, just to say hi and tell us how you’re doing. I never have any idea what the future will bring, of course, but I know we’ll be here for a little while, at least. Let’s rush headlong into the future together!
