This is just a quick announcement that the reviews for series 11 of Doctor Who will be on hiatus until the new year. Obviously December is a very busy time for a lot of us, I’m no exception to that, so I’m going to try and post the second half of series 11 on here at some point in January. That month is also likely to have a lot of posts of other stuff from 2018 I didn’t get round to posting on here earlier.
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Random thoughts on The World Cup
Yes, I know this is very much old news now. I don’t know if its to do with the British weather yo-yoing even more wildly than usual. We had the snow with the Beast from
The East earlier in the year, then we had a heatwave, now we’ve had thunderstorms and downpour, with another heatwave due. But I haven’t been feeling too well in the second half of July, and I want to keep my record of posting something on here every month, so this is one of those posts.
(Now 100 will be up soon.)
Five Years Of Blogging
So I’ve been doing this blog for five years now! It’s flown by. I didn’t expect I would be doing it this long.
I’m going to be a bit self-indulgent and talk about what led me to do it in the first place. I was at uni and I wanted to do a music trivia website, but I never thought I would, I didn’t know how for a start. Around the same time I read a book called The Rough Guide To Cult TV, and that mentioned a website called The Custard TV. A bit later I emailed them a review of the website in the style of the reviews that were on the website. I contributed some reviews to the website, which are still on there I think, it’s had a few redesigns since I was a contributer. I got a couple of emails from people who made a documentary called Animation Nation saying they liked my review of it, which I was far too shy to reply to, and I regret it now, but hey. I think The Custard TV has a different editor now, but I did get to meet the editor at the time and we went to see Avenue Q!
I learned about a website called lowculture on there, and a bit later I joined the forums after their support of Aisleyne from Big Brother 7. That forum changed the way I watched television, possibly forever. Anyway, I became a fan of a lot of posters on there who had blogs, namely Monkseal, Rad, guyliner, and Steven Perkins. I admired them a lot, and it inspired me to create my own. lowculture also introduced me to TV Tropes, which in turn introduced me to Channel Awesome and Chez Apocalypse which had some great reviewers on, especially Lindsay Ellis and Todd In The Shadows.
I wanted the blog to evolve more or less naturally, I wanted to see how it would turn out rather than having any real plan for it. I ended up doing a lot more natural history documentaries than I thought I would, but they turned out to be very popular, and with hindsight I think I was more into nature documentaries before I was a pop music geek. You can learn some random stuff about yourself from blogging. One thing, I never noticed it before, but I seem to do alliteration a lot! Also, a lot of people aren’t keen on their blog names, and honestly I’ve never liked mine much, I’ve always thought it sounds so fey and airy, but I am very much the sort of person who drifts off listening to music with my earphones in, so it fits well I guess.
I’ve talked to so many interesting people from doing this. Nature documentary fans from India, Doctor Who fans from Canada, a New York art student, a blogger whose interests are fashion and history. There was also another fan of the ’90s gameshow version of Cluedo, and part of me thinks it’s so weird to think we watched that as children at the same time in different parts of the country and over 20 years later we would be talking about it online.
Top Ten Most Viewed Posts
This is by a long way my most viewed post. 5 years is a long time in pop music, it was a different pop landscape then. Miley Cyrus was a big deal at the time, but not so much now. OneRepublic were trying to sound like Imagine Dragons. Rizzle Kicks, it’s strange they haven’t had a hit in a while. ‘What Does The Fox Say’ by Ylvis! Oddly enough, I heard my favourite track on this album, ‘Burn’ by Ellie Goulding the other day which I hadn’t for a while, and it was nice to hear it again.
2) The Snowman And The Snowdog
The rather sweet sequel to the classic cartoon The Snowman has become something of a Christmas tradition itself. Every year since I posted this from November to February I get lots of views and Google search terms for it.
This always gets a lot of views and search terms all year round! This was a very popular sitcom and Peter Kay’s best work in a very long time. His co-star Sian Gibson deserves credit too, she has been a revelation.
4) The Royle Family Christmas Special 2012
Surprisingly, this also gets a lot of views and search terms all year round despite it being a Christmas special. People like their sitcoms I guess. This will almost certainly be the final ever episode of one Britain’s best sitcoms. It’s all the more poignant now, after the deaths of Caroline Aherne and Liz Smith in 2016.
5) Top Ten Best Big Brother Eviction Moments
As you might expect, this post is my top ten favourite Big Brother eviction moments.
6) My Mad Fat Diary (Series One)
It is weird to think while doing this blog a series has came along, been a big hit and finished. I’m glad the first series review is still the most viewed, as I think it’s still the best of the My Mad Fat Diary reviews I did.
7) My Top 6 Underrated Doctor Who Episodes
This was the second ever blogpost I did, and it was a bit of a slowburner, it gradually built up views. I’ve long considered updating it to be a full top ten or doing another 4 in a separate list, but perhaps its fine as it is.
Gordon Buchanan filming a Polar Bear family, mother Lyra and her two cubs Miki and Luca. The polar family certainly seem to have struck a chord with people, as I got a LOT of Google search hits about them. Sadly the global warming situation only looks to be getting worse and worse, especially after recent political events.
The big revamp series which was supposed to get The X Factor back to its glory days, turned out to be the series which they more or less airbrushed from history. But it honestly wasn’t that bad really. Lauren Murray was one of my favourite contestants.
This post was temporarily used as a reference source on Wikipedia. I mentioned that George Ezra’s ‘Budapest’ used a Vox Continetal organ. That has to be the most surreal moment of blogging so far, I never would have expected that.
Special mention for this one:
Popstars – 15 Memories 15 Years On
Former contestant Claire Freeland read and commented!
I’m more eager to do this blog than ever, so if you have read, commented, followed over the years, thank you so much!
100th Post
100 Posts in 2 and a half years! Shows how rare it is I update this blog then.
I could have written “I will not celebrate meaningless milestones” over and over again like Bart Simpson had to do in the opening credits blackboard joke on The Simpsons 100th episode (which was Sweet Seymour Skinner’s Baadasssss Song if you’re wondering), but instead I’ll talk about the blog a bit.
I’d long wanted to do a music trivia website, and I intended this blog to be more music focused at the beginning, and it still is, but there has been more focus on some of my other interests. I’ve loved animals and natural history documentaries for longer than I’ve been an obsessive music fan, but I have to admit I was surprised that they’ve proven to be one of the most viewed posts on this blog. But I like that they have, as it encouraged me to blog more about them, and I think it’s made the blog more interesting. I’ve more recently began to cover animation as well.
If there’s one thing I have learned about blogging it’s that it is very Trial and Error. The blog has seen a lot of changes in appearance. I think I have got better at is as I have gone along, or I hope so at least. You do learn a lot about yourself and your own interests, and they are good to keep remind you of stuff that you would otherwise have forgotten.
Anyway, here’s to be next 100!
headphonedaydreams 