Buzz Blog

The old adage goes “the first year is always the hardest.” ...The hell you say.---

Somehow, someway, with nothing more than a recorder and a camera, sitting in the deepest and darkest corner of the website, with no promotion outside of my own yelling and public word-of-mouth and random linkage, no sponsorship to speak of, several individuals I can't name not liking it, and without earning a dime off it... this blog survived one whole year. And believe me, I'm not the only one who is shocked. Its not my intention to gloat over the idea or make this sound like a list of complaints, but after about a year of listening to specific people randomly tell you its a waste of time, it will never make you a “writer”, and even going so far as to say that allowing it to continue is a mistake and should be canceled ...to survive this long in that kind of climate is a victory unto itself.

I started this thing not knowing if it was going to make it past three months. I had a few individuals tell me that it was pointless to do and there wasn't an audience big enough for it to work. But at the same time I had others who encouraged the idea citing that no local station had tried this before and the only way we'd know if it would be a success if it we gave it a shot. In the process I got to talk to a lot of very awesome people, take some pictures of our scene in action, watched a lot of events unfold both culturally and politically, and with any luck helped make our local entertainment scene more predominant and influential upon the state.

I thought about doing a recap of everything I've done and seen over the past year, maybe a photo montage of the 6700 pictures I've taken this year, hit the highlights of it all and a playlist of my favorite bands, and wrap it all up in a nice little bow. But you know what... that isn't me. And I know you don't want to read all these stories when you yourself can go back and look over everything from the past twelve months. So instead, a look into what's hanging in my house. The majority of these photos you see are collages I've made of things I've collected. Postcards, miniposters, tickets, passes, stickers, business cards, booklets, program guides, and other random material I've gathered all through 2008. This isn't all of them, just a sampling of what's hanging up on my wall, a nice reminder of the fun I've had and will continue to have as long as I can.

I was going to type up a list of “Thank You” notices, but man, was that a long list off the top of my head. And I probably would have forgotten someone along the way, which would have started a “thing” which would have sucked. So a giant thank you to everyone whether you're a reader, a participant, a supporter, a stalker or a co-conspirator... thank you! And to those of you who got lost in the website and quickly became offended that this thing exists, I make no apologies and if you really want something more safe to read, Mike Headrick's blog can be found here.

As a present to those of you who have stuck around for a long while, I've started going back and revamping the photos to the interviews from the first five months of this blog. No, I'm not pulling a “Lucas” and cutting out material I don't like and adding in computer animated performances as I remember them, the first few months I had many issues with this server and one of those was posting pictures, you only had a couple sizes to pick from. But after an update I was able to make photos bigger! So now I'm able to go back and fix those pieces to appear more in the style I post now. Currently only January and February interviews have been fixed up, and I will be getting to the rest in weeks to come, so enjoy!

Normally I'd update you on what's ahead and other things, but not today. Today... I get to sit back and relax. I'll pick up where I left off on Monday. Thank you for your support, and as always, we'll see what happens next...