Mesozoic Mind: Thoughts on 2022

Well, it's been a long year full of eventful crap in real life and online, not all of it good, but I persevered through it and refused to let it affect me. All aided by a very good year for palaeo-media, including yes, the debut of the seminal Prehistoric Planet, probably the biggest thing in palaeo-media since the Trilogy of Life, as well as Jurassic Park ending its current chapter (no it's not ending - I highly doubt Universal will have that). And quite a few palaeo-documentaries have also been announced for next year, so things are looking up.

The most beutiful thing a content creator can see

I hit new highs, in views, output, and writing, with Mesozoic Mind seeing views into the 1000s in a month, a rarity here, while views for pages hsve also soared, including one of my proudest achievements this year, The Stratigraphy of Palaeo-Media. I started social accounts on Twitter and Mastodon and even my own Discord server to promote the blog and expand viewership, all without resorting to heinous stuff I wouldn't dare do like... ad revenue and clickbait (shudder). I'm quite proud of it all and all my accomplishments at Mesozoic Mind.

And now, the obligatory "favourite posts of the year" list.
However, I admit that things were not all good. Quite the opposite: I felt a lot of urges to top last month's output, only to end up exhuasting myself and struggle to write well enough for my own standards and notengaging in the more in depth analyses I want, resulting in incomplete-feeling posts (even this one). I also failed on many of my goals, like that book and Patreon, never set up, since I all but forgot about them in the flurry of other crap I had. Oh, and as the year went on I stopped reviewing the more obscure stuff I intend for. It didn't help I had the Alternate History project A Hippie in the House of Mouse/When You Wish Upon a Frog going on too as a co-writer, and having to do both at once really didn't help me. Oh well, there's always next year to do it and not procrastinate.

Next year, may see me posting less here, focusing more on my own mental health and putting quality over quantity. I know that pretty much no one knows about this online, and honestly I'm okay with it, I just want even a handful to know more about this place and help get previously-forgotten works of palaeo-media new time in the limelight, just as the entire discpline of palaeontology digs up creatures forgotten by the slow march of time and the forces of earth and give them new life as it were.

I'm not sure what projects I will be doing next year in thr long run... but I have a few in the pipeline or have been meaning to do for a while. Here are sneak peaks of them.





Goodbye, readers! Hopefully I'll see you soon and we'll have an even better year, but if not, I'm glad we all had a good time together!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mesozoic Mind's Walking with Dinosaurs fan remake: 2nd Anniversary Special

Image
Two years. Two years at Mesozoic Mind , through ups and downs and bringing you the best I could give you, and expanded my horizons in life, to go where I could only dream of. To celebrate, here's what I made for all of you readers as a gift: remaking Walking with Dinosaurs for the 21st century as I'd do it. Yeah, I know, people stopped doing this kind of thing years ago, but what the heck, I wanted to do it myself, and I only really do the big ones for special occasions like these. The episodes would be quite different from the origials in setting, but would stil have enough rocognisable creature archtypes and plot beats to show which corresponds to which. Although I still see fit to tell you which is which. Also, please forgive any anachronisms in the lineups I have created. I tried my best to avoid them. Also also, the pictures used here serve to get an idea of what things would feel or look like, not be direct representations. Episode One - Archosauria Art by Olmagon Set in
Read more

Dino Lab review - Part one

Image
(Note: video provided may have stuff missing from original cut) In 2005 and 2009, two specials aired on the Discovery Channel, back when it was actually about science and documentaries. These were both called called Dino Lab , and they had a rather novel premise: instead of simply being a doc of talking heads with occasional vignettes of prehistoric life or a nature documentary-style presentation with the occasional talking head, the show has a laboratory in which dinosaurs are brought into and put through experiments for scientists to study. Such a premise is pretty interesting, if an unusual one that invites more questions (where did the dinosaurs come from? Why is the T. rex first not at the lab?). The first special, from 2005,had a special place to me, as the first one was one of the first docs I saw as a kid on TV, when I was very young. I remember seeing both a T. rex on a treadmill and a plesiosaur splashing a guy with water. For simplicity’s sake, we’ll start off with it's
Read more

T. rex: The Ultimate Predator at the ROM - a review

Image
Ah, T. rex. It needs no introduction, and even the youngest nor laypeople not familiar with all but the basics of palaeontology know what it is. It has easily solidified itself as THE dinosaur by default, and has studied countlessly more then arguably any other fossil lifeform on Earth. Ironically, being so well known has meant it's been taken for granted, even called overrated versus other dinosaurs, and many, many misconceptions about it, from like merely a scavenger that couldn't even hunt live prey. This is a shame, as Tyrannosaurus is a pretty cool dino on its own, able to crush bone like no other theropods couldn't and had one of the more fascinating growth stages of any of them. T. rex: The Ultimate Predator , organised by NYC's renowned American Museum of Natural History, which came to the Royal Ontario Museum this month and intends to educate visitors on what is known about the dinosaur, from how it evolved from other dinosaurs to how it lived, and bust those m
Read more