throwback this blog

These are rough figures, done very quickly and unscientifically by hand.

Just under 50% of the posts on this blog in 2016 carried the Film label. This compares to Music (about 1/3 of the posts), Television (1/7 of the posts), and Current Affairs (less than 1% of the posts).

I may be compulsive, but I am not going to look prior to 2016. But I think I can say a few things about the above numbers.

I write more about film than anything else.

I write a lot about music, but this is primarily because it’s the one category with a built-in schedule (Music Fridays).

I write less about television than I used to.

I hardly ever write about current affairs, which used to be one of my most frequently-used tags (108 posts in 2003, the first full year of this blog, compared to 7 this year).

I think the main reason for this is that I have no confidence any longer in my ability to bring something new to the table regarding current affairs. My opinions haven’t changed very much over the years, so if anyone wants to know what I think, they can just look into the archives. But more importantly, there are so many excellent writers and thinkers about current affairs that I don’t think I can match them. My approach to writing in general is extremely subjective, but I’d like my approach to writing about politics to be grounded in reality, and again, others do this better than I do.

When it comes to the arts, I am even more subjective than usual, but I believe that is the best approach, and so I have something new to say with every movie or TV show or concert or book. And since the only reason this blog still exists is so I have an outlet for the writing that I am apparently incapable of quitting, the blog gets more arts oriented and less real-life oriented.

Here’s a link to the very first “current affairs” post on this blog, from January 24, 2002:

http://begonias.typepad.com/srubio/2002/01/_the_apotheosis.html

Perhaps it’s a sign of things to come that it also carries a “Sleater-Kinney” tag. Another sign of its age (15 years): I had to remove two dead links from the original post.