Lifting Fog

The farewell tour continues!

One thing a blog does on its journey from birth to death is accumulate a buttload of pointless statistics, and on all kinds of stuff: daily hits, tags, post frequency. Most of the time these serve only to make you feel bad about how few people read your writing (and the weird extent to which you’ve written about furries). But as a “closing shop” exercise…it’s actually kind of interesting to look back on four years through the lens of facts and figures. Unlike DJ Steve and I in all our posts, ever, THEY DON’T LIE. Reading them, you begin to get a true sense of what you did and the kinds of patterns you fell into. Like:

1. Despite me being the Ivy banner-waving douchebag of the duo, it’s actually DJ Steve who bleeds Columbia Blue — he’s written two more posts on the CU-born group Vampire Weekend than I ever will.

2. Lifting Fog has cultivated and nurtured more than its share of enmity over the years, including rivalries with Will Edmondson, Tim Goessling and his ‘This LA Life,’ and Jeopardy! contestant/actual accomplished writer Daniel D’Addario. Not to mention ongoing bad blood with nostalgia freaks (especially human Quidditch players), and the actual Bloods. What fun is peace?

UPDATE: To all of you…we really do apologize. (Except the Quidditch kids. Never.)

3. But our greatest foe? TIMELINESS. We’ve struggled mightily to write to deadline, and the majority of the time have fallen woefully short. Or let’s edit that — I’ve fallen woefully short. In the movie review department, Steve holds the record for least time between release and review (‘X-Men Origins: Wolverine‘; 0 days) while I’ve managed to stretch that window farther than most find comfortable (‘Inglourious Basterds‘; 589 days). It’s that regular Odd Couple vibe that’s kept our parents coming back for more.

4. People have found their way to Lifting Fog by searching for, among other configurations, the following terms:

• april fools revenge pranks
• polar bear smoking cigarette
• children’s books about electing president
• happy birthday 2 u naked
• islamic happy birthday brother wishes
• destiny’s child cater 2 u a feminist movement
• monster joint
• how is the world going to end
• women shitting
• pumpkin baby
• skiwee
• prohibition in the united states
• iron man 2 dancers
• harry hermione and ron all together the front of the cover of the deathly hollows
• michael cera

We’ve catered  to a population that’s both broad yet hyper-specific in its interests!

5. “The Great NYC Burger Tour” was once supposed to play a major part on the site, so much so that it has piles of notes, a deep well of photos/links, and even design firmly in place. But at some point it just seemed stupid.

6. On my request to make it like “Lion King meets an evangelical church pamphlet,” DJ Steve used his Photoshop skills to create both iterations of the Lifting Fog banner. When asked by interviewers what Steve’s role in blog operations is, I always tell them — he’s the Zissou.

6. Barring one photo I included of him in a long-ago Blink-182 post and another in our retirement announcement, DJ Steve has never on his own posted an image of himself. Am I a narcissist, or is he a hyper-narcissist for so adamantly not posting anything? I’d say “you be the judge” if I felt like the response came out in my favor, but it won’t, so…

7. I wrote the very first post, “Third Time’s a Charm…“, on May 13th, 2008. A few hours later I followed that up with a quick copy-paste job, still high on the blog but clearly already out of ideas (as we have been ever since). Then I waited two months to get to #3. If you need an easier story to describe our output over four years, I don’t think it exists.

8. Comedian Sara Benincasa commented on our write-up of her Sarah Palin video blogs in September 2008, still our only celebrity check-in. She’s great, and everyone should BUY HER BOOK!

9. To this day, DJ Steve is responsible for generating our most-ever traffic with his post on fictional tattoos, “What Tattoo is More Badass: Death Eater’s Dark Mark Symbol vs. Symbol of the Galactic Empire.” That thing constitutes 1/5 of all visits to Lifting Fog ever. Two days earlier Steve wrote another post, “What if Apple Created a Social Networking Application?” that landed us for the first and only time in WordPress’ “Freshly Pressed” gallery. Meanwhile I have written about such topics as People Magazine’s Baby Blog, Shame, and mild circumstantial depression.

10. In November of 2008, DJ Steve and I wrote 30 posts. We have come nowhere close since.

Tags: Behind The Fog, Dark Mark, Fun Facts, Reflections, Sara Benincasa, Snapple, Vampire Weekend

This entry was posted on March 29, 2012 at 1:49 pm and is filed under Junk Drawer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.