Muschamp Rd

Out with 2022, In with 2023

January 1st, 2023
Art vs Artist 2022

I just heard on Hockey Night in Canada that we are two hours away from the new year here in Calgary. I’ve actually done a lot of blogging lately but you wouldn’t notice it from reading Muskblog because I’ve focussed my blogging efforts on my hobby blog. However I’ve also spent too much time online in general in 2022 and that included editing a lot of old blog posts as well as too much time on social media. So tradition dictates that you look back on your year and reflect, make plans for the coming year and be thankful for your continued existence.

Last year I wrote about music, social media, blogging, beer, books, Google Analytics, and even a little about video gaming on Steam. So this year I’ll probably go with those same topics in that same order. A lot has changed, but a lot has stayed the same. Same job basically, same condo, same hobbies, same lack of reaching my GoodReads goal, and the same old Google Analytics. In 2023 I really must update both WordPress and Google Analytics, but everything seems harder since my account and web hosting provider was sold.

Music

This year I worked from home a lot, that and making two mix CDs for my sister along with somewhat erratic gym attendance and miniature painting schedule resulted in the following Replay 2022 mix from Apple Music which I should be able to embed somehow so hopefully you can listen to it while reading this blog post.

Last.fm has clearly lost the music wars. Apple Music does not have as fancy of year summary as Spotify but I could embed my playlist above and you can listen to about 1.5 minutes of each song, unless of course you’re an Apple Music subscriber too which my mom and sister are now that I gifted them the family Apple One plan as part of their Christmas present.

Officially according to Apple Music in a late push at the end of 2022 Lucero was my favourite artist. I actually think if you look at songwriting credits Jason Isbell may have won, but other artists who did well were Czarface especially when paired off with Metalface. John Moreland did well and though I did buy his newest album, I prefer his older work. I’ll have to give it some more listens in 2023. Other albums I bought in 2023 on vinyl include Philadelphia Mississippi and the new Cory Branan. Often I preorder albums but I haven’t preordered the new Lucero yet, they are very much my find of 2022.

I could fill an entire post with YouTube embeds, it probably won’t help my search engine optimization. But honestly I just don’t care to be popular anymore. I think social media has had a negative impact on a lot of people’s lives and the latest poster boy for #smalldickenergy is of course Andrew Tate who I’d never heard of and I follow MMA closely. So I think I’ll ignore Joost and his plugin and best practices and embed a few more songs as I think that is the most popular part of my annual year in review blog post.

Damn why you gotta do me like that G. Love, I was just trying to embed a video, you know I got nothing but love. Here is a link to another animated rap video, it must have become a thing. Maybe I can only embed a couple videos or something and this is all YouTube’s fault. I will try one more time because Cory Branan deserves to be more famous, he is a talented fella. Memphis versus the world.

Social Media

I spend way too much time on YouTube and in 2023 I’ll spend less time. They don’t seem to do one of those yearly wrap ups showing how many times I watched one particular Lucero video. I don’t think I’ve posted anything to YouTube in a long time. Bill wants me to do miniature painting tutorials but I just don’t have the time. I did make miniature painting the focus of my Instagramming as I’m just not so fit anymore fam. Of course in 2023 I’ll work on that.

Twitter

My popularity on Twitter isn’t overwhelming. Like YouTube I spend way too much time on that app and now that Elon Musk is driving away people, maybe in 2023 I’ll spend less. I want to read more real books in 2023. I didn’t set out to be a reply guy, but my popularity often depends on who I reply to and whether they reply back. William Gibson, the science fiction writer, replies or retweets me sometimes much to the amazement of Emlyn, who has made his blog private.

Pinterest

In 2022 I basically stopped using Pinterest except when I wanted to buy furniture. Previously I had pinned some things I wanted to buy, but by the time I had the money and financial security they had stopped making some of those things. In 2023 I am seriously thinking about buying an electric guitar, no prize for guessing the brand. I briefly did pin some more new miniatures I painted so I imagine that is what is popular of my content on Pinterest but I should check. They’ve become more of a walled garden so I strongly prefer Flickr for photo sharing.

Pinterest seems to focus on the most recent 30 days, but I was able to generate the line graph above of my popularity. However as to my most popular pin, it may have been related to my trip to Palawan. Maybe I should have tried to become a travel blog, but the truth is I don’t travel much anymore and although I’ve lived abroad in three separate countries, I only really blogged about living in one. None the less on Pinterest it seems my travels may have become more popular than my miniatures.

So much for that theory, apparently I should pin some pictures from Palawan that I posted to this blog or Flickr. After relearning how to embed a board, in has become clear that there are no pictures from Palawan on my now most popular board, My Travels. Maybe all my images on this blog are too small for Pinterest now, I used to post long skinny images back when I cared about Pinterest or popularity, but small images load quicker and cost less to host, so I guess I could pin a picture from Flickr.

Flickr

Secluded Beach

Speaking of Flickr I prefer it to Instagram for hosting my images. I can post bigger images, sort them more, and although it costs me about 50 bucks a year that is cheap because I think I pay about twelve American dollars per month to host this website and it has limits on how many GBs of data I can post or how many people can look at my content in one month. I post miniatures I’ve painted to Flickr and have for years, Games Workshop used to use Flickr, but now they are all about Instagram, so I devoted that social media account to miniature painting in 2022. In theory I can post almost anything to Flickr but I tend to focus on miniatures, travel photos, and beertography. If I ever start going to more gigs maybe I’ll post photos from them, but honestly I prefer to listen rather than trying to stream or chat on my phone during a set.

One thing that did happen in 2022 is my most popular Flickr photo of all time changed. I suspect it is because it shows up in some search for some keyword. Instead of posting that, I’ll embed the photo I submitted as my best of 2022 in the Flickr contest.

In February Flickr sent me an email about #MyFlickrYear2022 but I already knew what my most popular photo was, they did let me know my most popular tags though:

  1. Warhammer 40,000
  2. Nurgle
  3. Philippines

Instagram

I never did #TopNine apparently now that I’m all miniature painting all the time I should do #ArtVSArtist in 2022. I even made it my featured image in this blog post as embedding from Instagram is not as good as embedding from Flickr and of course they don’t give you any analytics, unless you have a business or creator account. Pinterest actually let me be a business back in the day because of this blog/domain. I just don’t care about Instagram enough to jump through hoops on New Year’s Eve after drinking, so you’ll just have to take my word for it, I’m not very popular, but Bill thinks I have potential if I painted faster, better, and new Games Workshop models.

Blogging

Most people would put blogging in with social media, maybe I should change the title to online social networks. But honestly I was tired and I didn’t push on to try and finish this post at one minute to midnight. I barely posted on this blog all 2022, but I did do a lot behind the scenes including removing more old posts and telling some haters and trolls to piss off.

WordPress doesn’t seem to do one of those year in review posts, but I swear they did at one point, so maybe it hasn’t arrived yet. I’m not sure what my most popular post is anymore. I think I deleted a lot of popular ones, on my miniature painting blog I’m also not sure what is popular, popularity is really fleeting in the blogosphere these days, hence the rise in microblogging and live online video streams. I can probably figure out what is popular between Google Analytics and WordPress dot com’s own analytics. Obsessing about your online popularity is not healthy, checking it once a year for lols is OK I guess.

The most popular post I published may have been the one about the delay to the start of our Warhammer 40,000 narrative campaign, I guess people were really looking forward to it, despite the silly name Bill. The next most popular is about the many many hours I spent on a very few number of plague marine miniatures I painted in 2022. I also spent way too much time rebasing and improving old models especially Beasts of Nurgle which definitely was not among my hobby goals for 2022.

Beer

Game of Thrones Fire and Blood
My most popular photo ever on Flickr is a picture of a beer bottle.

Apparently I should have been a beer influencer. Who knew influencer would become a career choice or that professional video game player would. Clearly I should have stuck to beer and video games instead of pursuing the CFA® Charter. I actually did earn the charter in 2022 and I likely have drank a lot more beers since I wrote and passed the final exam.

Untappd is a small, niche social network, so it is kinda a shame they do a better year in review than Apple Music or WordPress. I thought half the Internet ran on WordPress, they probably know a lot about popular content, not as much as Google but a lot. I think Google Analytics used to do one of those year in reviews too. The Internet used to be smaller and better, now there are too many walled gardens.

The Untappd website seems to be swamped New Year’s Eve and I can’t get it to even load. I eventually got it to load again on the 2nd, people don’t realize that blogging is hard especially over the long term. The longer you keep blogging the more crap you have to deal with and the more content you have to maintain, this is probably why I no longer have 1000 posts.

I’m not sure you can even view my Year in Beer unless you join their website. If I had simply tweeted it you could have viewed a summary and I could probably include some sort of screenshot, but this is the third day I’m working on this blog post and I want to get on with the rest of my life. I encourage Apple Music, Untappd, Instagram, all the websites to make this easier or your social media marketing strategy will fail. I had to retweet my Apple Music again yesterday as there are two share buttons, one shares a link and one shares a screenshot. Maybe it is necessary to have both options but they had the exact same icon, just two different places on the screen.

Books

2022 was not a good year for me reading real books. I rallied a bit at the end reading on vacation and more frequently on the weekend, but I’m kinda ashamed I can’t read a book a month. I do spend too much time reading tweets and news, but I think that leads to a superficial understanding of shit that doesn’t even matter. So in 2023 I will try harder to read a dozen books, but I choose hard books sometimes or I agree to read something I don’t really want to for my career. See all the time I spent as a CFA Candidate. In 2023 I’ll probably read more novels and non-fiction books that I’m really interested in. But I also may attempt to finish two books that have sat half read for years beside my bed.

Looking ahead to 2023

I don’t have any radical changes planned. I want to drink less, read more, exercise more, even travel more. I doubt I’ll blog more and I definitely want to use social media less. I hope to do some miniature painting, I’ll probably paint tomorrow and go to the gym, then it is back to work on Tuesday. Steam was another website that did do a year in review but after winning at Civ VI at the highest difficulty level I basically retired from video games for 10-12 months only to be dragged back when they released more DLC. My MacBook Air doesn’t play this six year old video game worth a damn so in 2023 I may buy a new computer. In fact spending money on me and stuff I’ve long wanted like an electric guitar may become a theme for 2023 but I also think we’re probably headed for a recession, so perhaps no spending for a couple months. If you have big plans for 2023 you want to share you can leave a comment below.

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Posts on Muskblog © Andrew "Muskie" McKay.
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