Originally posted on August 15, 2006. Almost everything I talk about in this post no longer exists – Blogcritics is a shell of its former self, The Mondo Project only lasted a few months, I deleted Bootleg Nation, and all of my old writing buddies no longer write or have a blog. For a brief time, I also did some gossipy news-type writing about celebrities misbehaving. I mention that here, but I couldn’t stomach that work for very long and I’ve decided to never make it public again – Mat
The few of you who regularly read Brewster’s Millions (This blog used to be called Brewster’s Millions – I can’t remember when I changed it to The Midnight Cafe). have probably noticed a few changes. I’ll now explain why.
Some Bblogcritic writing buddies of mine and I have created a brand new super-cool blog, The Mondo Project. We were all lamenting the fact that our own personal blogs get very little in the way of hits, and that a big part of this is our inability to create regular content.
This has always been my number one problem with my own blog. I think I do a very good job of writing interesting pieces, but I am only able to once or twice a week – a very small amount for your average blog. Blog readers are used to daily updates, with brand-spanking new information all the time. Time constraints have always kept me from being able to do this.
So me and the boys, plus one gurl, decided that with the eight of us, we should be able to do regular updates if we pulled our resources. Thus we created the Mondo Project.
A little history on the name. My good friend, and writer extraordinaire, The Duke de Mondo created a little Yahoo group ages ago. This was a place designed for him to be able to let his fans know when he had published a new piece. It was also a cool place to hang out and talk pop culture.
The group, like the Dukes site, was called “Mondo Irlando” having something to do with the pseudo-documentary style gore flicks of the seventies and the Dukes homestead in Northern Ireland.
I joined about a year and a half ago and have immensely enjoyed hanging out with a diverse group of folks able to discuss everything under the sun. We dubbed ourselves the Mondo Gentlemen’s Club, that is until a girl was introduced into our midst, one Mary K. Williams.
The group has changed over the last many months, with only me, the Duke, his UK compatriot and NME writer Greg Smith, and Sir Eric Berlin lasting through it all. To balance out the UK side of things the Duke invited his friend, Aaron Fleming to the game.
Keeping up with the Americas, our long lost lover, Bennett Dawson invited Mark Saleski who in turn brought with him fellow music lover DJRadiohead. Together we brought total coolness and a mutual cultural extravaganza called The Hot Topic.
Amongst our many discussions was this concept of creating a single site where we could both write extraordinarily awesome essays on pop culture, but also banter about whatever crosses our mind. See, the cool thing about Blogcritics is that we can fine-tune our excellent writing and get a big stinking audience. But at the Yahoo group we often had a conversational thing going about on all sorts of gnarly subjects, but ones that wouldn’t quite fit into your typical professional blog type deallie. Thus with the Mondo Project, we have created a place where we can both display the most professional of pieces and righteous convos and what pleases us most.
The Mondo Project is now my place to hang out, write, and wax poetic. It is also an opportunity to write a little more personal stuff, like my recent escapades with the iPod.
Not to be outdone, I have also started a new blog called Bootleg Nation. In my research, I have come to realize that to have a successful blog you need a pretty narrow niche. Being diverse is actually a sure way to drive people away unless you are super prolific. So I started a niche blog all about my obsessions of live music. It has just started going, but it should be a very cool place for bootleggers to hang out.
Also, with my recent unemployment (Oh I haven’t mentioned here that I was recently laid off) I realize I now have more writing time on my hands. One of the producers of Blogcritics has asked that I write some fresh news stories with a fun bloggy bent. I’ve started writing a few (as you can see from my recent postings here) and am finding it a fun thing to do, and it brings a lot of traffic to Blogcritics. It’s the least I can do for a site that has helped me so much.
All of these things are now also converging here at Brewster’s Millions. I’ve decided to make this blog kind of a melting pot of all the things I write. That will make it a little mismatched, but you’ll learn to love it.
themidnightcafe.org 