State Of the TicketVerse Address 2022

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. The Ticketmaster

2022 was both a relapse year and a comeback year for myself and for this blog.

Starting with myself, I am still paying off a large amount of gambling debt, to which I added a sizable ambulance bill for my stay at Wenatchee Valley Medical Center to remove my gall bladder and deflame my pancreatitis (you can read all about it in Back From the Hospital). The fallout of 2021, which you can read about at the beginning of Back From Burnout? (MCU Edition), did not have me starting out 2022 on a coherent or ambitious note. But with some academic pivoting (and the pancreatitis scare putting my life into perspective), I slowly made a comeback, did my best to keep on a routine with both my academics (now in Marketing, rather than Accounting) and my posting, such that I reached heights that I had not experienced since 2015. Even in the face of a less-than-impactful Halloween effort, I did not let the "Now What? Blues" get the worst of me, and set myself an even more ambitious goal for December. This year also marked the potential career downfall of Bill Murray and the passing of several icons of my youth and pop-culture awareness, including Kevin Conroy, Twitch, and Jason David Frank.

I had planned to share my thoughts and feelings on JDF's passing, but as he left us a mere week after Kevin Conroy, I was so much in the mood that I wasn't in the mood to do so, if you understand my meaning. So, I'll do it now.

Unbeknownst to me at the time of writing my Kevin Conroy tribute, I had included some bits about Jason David Frank in that article prior to his passing (specifically how I thought Kat was a better Ranger ship for Tommy than Kimberly was). But that's merely superficial. Jason David Frank was an amazing martial artist with a sprawling career that included an undefeated MMA run, several Super Power Beatdown appearances, and numerous surprise return appearances in Power Rangers. His fighting style was unique, his ki'ai shouts were iconic, his character introduced and defined the Sixth Ranger trope for Western audiences, he had the first (and to my knowledge, the only) five-part story in franchise history, where he was brought in to play a villain, and only grew as Jason David Frank the actor (and Tommy Oliver, the character, a.k.a. "the best Power Ranger ever") from there. He has a sci-fi film titled Legend Of the White Dragon releasing posthumously next year, which I will definitely be on the lookout for because, yeah, just like Kevin Conroy, Jason David Frank was one of the pillars of my childhood, and he will be missed.

Returning to the State Of the TicketVerse, let's talk about the blog. This year marked the return of several old titles in my portfolio, such as the newly formatted Ticket Stubs (formerly TicketVerse Throwbacks, a retro-review column that now compares old reviews of mine with their more portfolio-friendly revisions), NPO (formerly New Piece Offerings, formerly just Piece Offferings), Stay Tuned (which went through numerous, algorithm-chasing title changes last year, and is a review column for television and streaming content), TicketVerse Trades (basically a link collection of things with similar content), and Bring Back the Soundtrack (originally titled SW@ Soundtrack in my Yahoo! Groups days, it's where I reviewed music). I also continued some of last year's new additions, such as the Anime Spotlight (a franchise or series review of various anime titles), and began new review series and other content, like Zenescope - Omnibusted (mostly just a way to re-compile my old Grimm Fairy Tales reviews in a long-form format and refresh myself for when I get back to re-reading and reviewing titles that I haven't touched in a long time--that's a lot of re-prefixing, isn't it?), Dragon Blog Z (which began as AniMonday Filler and transitioned into its current state of What If? writing after NP-BAW #2: Hair-em Ball Z Fan Casting thanks to a video by Lawrence "MasakoX" Simpson). I will be releasing a compilation of the first four parts of that in the new year, before I start writing Part Five.

I also hit several milestones this year, thanks to Tumblr, BlogPros, and all you Ticketholders out there. In October alone, I surpassed 75,000 pageviews all-time, and a thousand for the month in a single day (I ended that day twelve views short of also hitting a hundred in 24 hours). Christmas Eve also marked my four-hundredth post on Blogger, titled TixMas Eve Is Here! 2022: Violent Night (Just the Ticket #119)

I started posting on Tumblr again this year, and I've already hit my twenty-five- and fifty-post badges on there. At the time of this writing, I am at 78 Tumblr posts. 

Thanks to careful planning and willpower, I capped off the year by blogging a record fourteen days in a row (thirteen of which were part of my Countdown to TixMas special).

As for my plans for 2023, I have some Ticket Stubs in mind for February and July, and some franchise specials for Halloween and Christmas.

Off-page optimization will include weekly Throwback Thursday reposting to Tumblr of everything I put on Blogger from the beginning, and I will return to posting new content links on Facebook and Reddit, as well as Tumblr.

By the end of 2023, I also plan to have a landing page/website where you can easily search and access my various columns and posts by category tags.

However you got here, remember to like and comment in as many places as possible, actually read what you click on, and have a Happy New Year!

Ticketmaster,

Out.