I never like to blog about the specifics of what's going on in my personal life, so I'll just say it broadly - it's a lot. When I first started, I felt like this would be super fun and exciting for a long time. Listening to Hitbound and the countdown, reviewing music, being exactly on time with every single post I made. One time I posted the countdown on Saturday at 11AM literally just two hours after the countdown ended and I thought that was late. I cranked out album reviews like it was nothing, and I didn't realize the effects it was having on my enjoyment of music.
Now, it's not really fair to judge since I think it was mostly influenced by a major event in my personal life earlier this year that made life a lot easier for me, but around that same time was when I was switching to mostly posting AllTheHits personal charts (as opposed to my previous style of reviewing every song on Hits 1 or some random album I forced myself to analyze for a 3,000 views special) I found that I started really enjoying listening to music a lot more than I did in previous years.
On that topic, let's talk album reviews. I hate the 5-point system. I deleted my album reviews page because it is possibly the least accurate thing in this entire blog's history (other than my posting schedules). For Crying Out Loud feels like it would be super high up, but it's tied with The Secret Of Us and below Short N Sweet. That feels insane to me. Albums are less fun when I'm constantly looking for tiny negative qualities to bring a super high score down just so I don't seem like an obsessive fan or overly nice weakling. It made it harder for me to enjoy albums like a normal human would. Obviously not every album has to be a no-skip album, but not every song that had a single note that didn't hit right or slightly more generic production has to feel like a skip. Fortunately my brain was not permanently poisoned by this because all the big new albums this year have been naturally enjoyable to me. A Matter Of Time might not have been a no-skip album if I constantly had a 5-point album review analysis blog post in mind the whole time. I wasn't even thinking about numbers at all when I first listened to The Life Of A Showgirl, and then I later decided which songs I like more or less. (By the way in case you were curious, I do occasionally skip CANCELLED! but other than that no skips.)
This is also not to hate on music criticism in general. Some people find it fun to deeply analyze music, and I used to, but I was ruining the magic of a first listen for myself. In fact, time for a fun little confession: sometimes I was so caught up on reviewing as many albums as possible for pageviews that I posted some after one listen. The Secret Of Us review, just by the writing style, you can clearly tell I'm reacting to it for the first time. And I literally never listened to it again. That was the most pointless album review I ever made, and it scored a 92?!?!?!?! But it's not just album reviews. Eventually AllTheHits was never on time, and I don't feel like doing that anymore. I just don't think I can keep a schedule for that long if it's something I get tired of easily, and blogging just feels tiresome.
Music in 2025 has been absolutely amazing, but my life? I've honestly been very anxious, unmotivated, and tired of everything going on with me, family/friends, the world... Music has been the thing getting me through it, but blogging? That is low on my priorities. I almost didn't even want to post my Halloween playlist yesterday and that takes minimal effort. And I feel like I'm forcing myself to keep going just for some special closure like I'm Taylor Swift or something. Surprise surprise, I'm not. I'm not Taylor Swift, and this isn't something I'm doing for "the fans". I have like maybe three regular viewers, probably less now after August when I symbolically "left" the Hits 1 blogging community. So I don't even have the "reward" I used to have of knowing the few remaining members of the H1BC were viewing my posts. And as I'm sure you know by now, this isn't for school or work or money. It's for fun. There's no point of doing something for fun that isn't fun anymore, so I have no reason to keep blogging.
So is this the end of an era? Yes. Am I officially quitting blogging? Well, not just yet. I like to think of this as a half-hiatus. I'll post playlists for whatever remaining holidays I haven't made playlists for yet. I'll keep updating my rankings pages. If I really feel like it, I'll post more fluid (not 5-point-system) album reviews for A Matter Of Time and The Life Of A Showgirl, and probably something for the Eras Tour docuseries we're getting in a few weeks. Eventually I do want to have some bigger "finale posts" like a ranking of every Taylor Swift song or a top 100 favorite songs of all time list, but for now, I'm just going on a sort of half-hiatus. So no weekly AllTheHits and no monthly album reviews.
This is where I'll encourage anyone who's reading this to create a blog if you haven't already and if you're interested in doing it. A piece of advice I have is that you shouldn't get too hung up on posting if there aren't any concrete reasons for doing it. If it's not a required thing or something that you earn money for or something a lot of people will see, you shouldn't treat it as if it is. That's what happened to me and why I'm here today. I would also like to shoutout the wonderful bloggers who are still regularly posting content and to anyone who has viewed my blog over these chaotic on-and-off nearly three years of me being in the community.
I could say it was a difficult decision, but 100% transparency, it was not. I feel more satisfied knowing that I can get out of this endless cycle of unmotivation.
(Also interesting fact about this post, it's actually my first post in November. Like, ever. In November 2022 my blog was not created yet, in November 2023 it had been deactivated the second time, and in November 2024 I took a little silent hiatus.)
Well, that's all for now. And mostly forever. Byeeeeeeeeee...
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