I wasn’t planning on launching Selected Declarations until 2022 (I’ve even got a topic ready), but since I’ve been inbox-bombing Stop Button subscribers with archival posts all night, I thought I’d explain in a “preview.
While I don’t have any significant plans for the blog in 2022, I did have a bunch of cleaning up to do after a misguided return to self-hosting a couple years ago. And then combining Stop Button and Comics Fondle. So there’s housekeeping from that one too. One of the things I wanted to get done was setting up better hosting for podcasts, which I did. Unfortunately, I didn’t think it through and removed all the original posts from when the episodes went live. If I’d kept them, I could’ve just edited those posts and not created a bunch of “new” posts, which WordPress.com then sent to subscribers.
My bad. I’m not going to do more than five a day now I’ve got the formatting finalized. Rough estimate, it’ll be a month of the extra (old) posts. I’d love to figure a way around it, but it’s also a bit of work to get each post done with the new Gutenberg blogging system, so I don’t really want to do more than five a day. I can make templates for embedding the podcast episodes no problem. The header art is another story; I’ve decided to give everything its own header image. Not a problem for the Best of An Alan Smithee Podcast because Matt did a bunch of nice new headers back when we posted that project; probably not a problem for Podcast 60 because they cover single subjects (i.e., episodes), but it’s a pain for the old Comics Fondle episodes. We never thought of doing individual episode art. I’ve found an all-right template. Nothing earth-shattering, but visually distinct. Actually, I’m going to work on it a little more.
Otherwise, 2022 blogging plans are getting through some catalog films and a read-through of more Love and Rockets. Through volume two. I’ve got a nice schedule worked out for both, which should also allow for a return to prose reading. I’ve had Little Women sitting waiting for a read (to be fair, the still exceptionally difficult to talk about even in internal monologue book project derailed that read), but 2022’s got a couple memoirs dropping I’ve been wanting for years—Jamilah Lemieux and Raquel Willis’s—so time to get back to reading.
Reading without thinking about writing. What a concept.
Selected Declarations will be at least weekly posts. The name is a Harry Mathews nod, though I never grokked him as much as I thought I would. There’s also a wink-wink constraint; if someone guesses the what and why, there’s a No Prize with your name on it.
Anyway.
Buckle up; we’re in for another unimaginably stupid year.
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