Fifteen Years: A Retrospective

Well, I never thought I'd reach this milestone. Fifteen years of running this modest blog. (In fairness, I never thought I'd make it past five years of doing this. So to celebrate the very thing I've been sporadically working on for half my life now, I thought I'd go over the various highs and lows I endured. More after the jump.

2009

Started off simple enough. A month before my junior year of high school was to begin, I started this blog.

2010

With the end of high school looming, I took more of a focus on older titles to review. (Some of it had to do with the names of those works beginning to pass away.)

2011

I graduated high school!...and then proceeded to bungle my sole year at college. I also (perhaps unwisely) started a Tumblr during that time so that explains why my studies took a backseat.

2012

With me having flunked out of college, it was something of a tense time. Not having my driver's license yet also meant I was literally stuck in the house most of the time.

2013

The year started off in not a good way -- three days into the new year, my father passed away (unbeknownst to me, his health hadn't been great). But there were some good things that year; my siblings graduated (the older from college, the younger from high school), and I went abroad for the first time to attend the Toronto International Film Festival (where I celebrated my 20th birthday). The events from that day still lingered over the rest of the year, however.

2014

Aside from the blog turning five (and me briefly starting therapy sometime after Robin Williams' suicide), not a lot of notable things from this year.

2015

Towards the end of the year, my paternal grandmother passed away. Besides that, not much happened that year.

2016

Between the political anxieties in various countries and celebrities dropping like flies left and right, I took a few elective courses to pass the time. Also, it probably wasn't a good sign that the last movie I saw before the election was The Candidate...

Oh, and I attended FilmColumbia (a nearby film festival) for the first time.

2017

Ah, my brief foray into the movie industry -- my job at a movie theater for about five months. Moving past that, I attended the Provincetown International Film Festival, the Woodstock Film Festival, and FilmColumbia. My poor bank account has yet to recover.

2018

I had a brief stint as a contributor for Talk Film Society -- and by brief, I mean literally a few months. (I had bitten off more than I could chew in taking on new projects, I'll freely admit.)

2019

The blog turned ten, I attended the Woodstock Film Festival again, and...that's about it.

2020

Man, no one was getting anything done this year, were they? It marked the last time to date I've been in a movie theater (I saw The Irishman; when I got out, the news was breaking that Kirk Douglas had died).

2021

Health issues in the family caused me to get behind on my reviewing. (Also the addition of a new dog to the family.)

2022

The year started off strong then I hit a slump just as quickly. I tried to get more into writing fiction as I tried to do over the years with varied success.

2023

More health issues (in this case, mine; I had my wisdom teeth out) stopped my work. Like the previous year(s), I dawdled, not helped by having a crisis about turning thirty.

2024

And here we are to the present day. Younger sibling has graduated from med school, older sibling is thriving in their own right...and I'm still trying to figure out my own life.

I can't make promises that things will be different this time next year. But I do know that I'll keep on writing for this blog. After all, I'm not going to throw away fifteen years of work for nothing.