The State of the Blog - A Bit of the Old Ultra-Violence

"Enjoying that are you my darlin'? Bit cold and pointless isn't it my lovely?"

And now a recap of the past few months and where we are going in the future.

The caption I posted above, was posted before .. towards the end of January. I thought it was loads of fun and something that might spark a bit of chatter in the comments. Instead it lead to a zero-post, the start of two in a row, and what was in the middle of a huge turndown in views. That led me to a bit of a funk, where I was questioning just about everything I was doing with regards to captioning, the community, and what was ahead for the future .. especially after a few more posts of noting that there were a ton of people that used to be around that .. just sort of went POOF!

I HAD been in a good mood until that point. I was fast approaching 8 million views, 5k in comments, and my 10th year in captioning / attendance on the Haven .. all without much of a break, even after surgeries and other family issues, deaths, etc ..  Those were things to be celebrated.

But there doesn't seem to be much "there" there in the community. Simone hasn't posted in 6 months, Caitlyn was mostly doing RP, and occasionally an obscura, but those have slowed to a crawl. Courtney Captisa was gone for about 2 months. You can look in the left column at the blogs I follow, and see quite a few gaps of more than a month between posts. Even the ones that do post fairly regularly .. they have now set up their posts ahead of time, often weeks ahead, and catch comments whenever they pop on later .. which seems to make things much less intimate and "in the moment" to me .. but you do what you can to keep it going, so I can understand that .. not sure it's me though!

It's things like this that make me vacillate between coming back full force and stepping back.

For everything postitive, like Drew (Frombowtotoe) offering money to keep the Haven running AND Steffimarie returning to the Haven .. Then I see a "meh" vote on a cheerleader caption. REALLY? I cannot imagine that response for a caption involving a cheerleader, even if it was specifically targeted to an individual who gave the Haven either 3 or 10 bucks for said caption. Get a life people! That caption brought even more money to the Haven, as Elena Stars came out of semi-retirement to make a special caption for Drew .. which wouldn't have happened without my post. I guess that is something else for the positive column.

I am still making captions, playing around with the form slightly, and want to be a part of this community going forward. I'm just hoping that a community will be around to be a part of it.

We did hit 8 million views about 6 weeks ago I believe, in case you were actually wondering. A few posts away from 1200 even. Still need a plethora of comments to reach 5k. But 81k views for 6 posts in March? Honestly that isn't bad. I can live with that for the time being.

For those who were trying to decipher the musical choices .. I am on SABBATICAL hence playing Black Sabbath songs. I figured the closer I can to the present, the closer I was to coming back from the sabbatical. "Headless Cross" brings us to about 1988, before Dio rejoined, then left for Ozzy to return after another go around with Tony Martin.

Hmmm, that mean 2 a weeks at least through Easter, or until May rolls around. It's hard to believe how much I've gotten done around the house without fussing over the blog  That will continue, AND I've also finally snagged a X Box One S so lots of Battlefield 1 for me on my 4k monitor.

So, I ended up writing a bunch of paragraphs to say that things are remaining the same. Figures! Well, at least I set out to explain a bit more of where I was coming from. Whether that makes me feel better, or makes me sound like a whiny, pathetic bitch .. that is for you to decide. The comment section is down there. Let 'er rip if you wish, comment on the caption, or write whatever you want.