My 2012 In Review

[sub_divided]

I didn't write much this year - or not much fiction anyway. I wrote my masters thesis, and though it could have been much better I am content with the way it came out.  

In nonfiction land, I signed on as a contributor to The Hooded Utilitarian. Though I don't have access to the site stats, it's pretty clear my Homestuck article was the biggest hit - linked on reddit and tweeted by Bryan Lee O'Malley, who later interviewed Andrew Hussie! - followed by my Jojo overview, which was linked on 4chan. I think my Gangnam Style article makes a couple good points, too, although they are hard to pick out from the mess. Hatsephut, meanwhile, is the kind of bonkers manga that reviews itself.

Fiction-wise, my only work this year was first-flush-of-fandom stuff about Big Bang that I now kind of regret writing (or at least posting publically), although it helped me work out my thoughts at the time. I also got some pretty good responses/discussions/mileage out of Big Bang meta on tumblr and metafilter. Roz and I are currently keeping up an email exchange as well as camping out in this ILX thread.

Imaginary Beasts had a not-stellar year for which I take full responsibility as the zine's laziest editor. Some very solid issues and individual stories though - the music issue, spring issue and historical asia issue are my favorites, though I can't really take credit for them.

The main thing I did this year was make playlists. Since I *do* have access to number of plays on youtube, I can tell you which ones were the most popular: Summer Pop 2, a Kpop & dancehall mix, was the clear winner, followed by Desatured Kpop, an experimental-RnB with high-concept music videos mix, and then Kpop hearts the 80s, made up of equal parts disco and insanity. My other three summer playlists were played a decent number of times, but not a spectacular number considering the massive popularity of the individual songs they contain. I'm holding out hope for my Mainly-Jpop Indie 80s mix to eventually catch up, but can admit the "Christmas" playlist is not very good.  

I'm feeling a bit justified, actually, because the order of popularity for these Youtube playlists pretty much exactly mirrors the amount of work I put into them.  Although what this could mean is that the majority of plays are my own, haha. 

Happy 2013, everyone!