I am back from the holidays. It was a good trip but I am always glad to be home. Since it is New Year’s Eve I thought it would be fun to do a little year-end State of the Blog type post.

It has been a year of changes. Of course last year I decided to start writing movie reviews and such-like on here again after a very long absence. I kept that up this year and then some. I added some new themes to go with the old ones.

And then of course in August I created the new Midnight Cafe Music site and moved all my music posts over there. That was a huge transition. One thing it did for this old site was to make me realize how little non-music posting I was doing.

When I was posting shows several times a day that really padded out everything else. Suddenly the shows were on a different site and I needed something to post to this site everyday. That was a real challenge. That remains a challenge.

In my mind, I was going to write movie reviews several times a week and write essays on film and music. I was going to do news type posts about my favorite artists going on tour, or interesting new Blu-ray releases. Etc., Etc., Etc. But in reality between work, family, life, and the music blog, I found I didn’t have the time or the energy to keep up with all of that.

I also realized that this is okay. Both of my sites should always be fun for me. If they stop being fun then I might as well shut it down. So far it remains fun. I like writing about movies. I like running this blog. I do have some more ideas for this coming year, and I’ll share them with you soon, but I’m also gonna take it easy. I’ll do all that at a leisurely pace – when I want to do them. Some of those ideas will never get done at all. And that’s okay too.

I did manage to write 310 non-show posts this year. I continued writing my Friday Night Horror pieces and I mostly kept up with the Picks of the Week. I continued my themes for Foreign Fim February, Westerns in March, the Totally Awesome ’80s in April, 31 Days of Horror, and Noirvember. New themes I explored were Frozen in January, Animation in August, Mysteries in May, and Sci-Fi in July. Some were more successful than others. I’ll keep a lot of those in 2025, probably drop one or two of them and then I’ll likely add in another one or two.

I know most of you were fans of The Midnight Cafe because I was sharing shows. I appreciate that many of you have stuck around for the movie chatter. So, yeah, cheers to 2024 and many happy returns for 2025.