Here’s a great bit about the anxieties of being a new, lone blogger from Jason Snell on The Talk Show with John Gruber, time stamp 1:18:50 - 1:32:45:

Being a one person operation, if you’re busy writing a deep-think-piece about something that’s going to go on for a thousand words, you’re not writing things to post to the site today. I feel like, with a less established site like mine, I definitely feel pressure to keep the lights on every day and try to balance those things. You have a different pace. You can post some links and then you put out a bigger piece every so often.

I like your pace but I don’t feel like I can do that right now. I feel like I need to keep the heartbeat a little stronger because I’m trying to establish myself and pick up an audience I may not have captured yet.

The review of the Retina iMac was an example. It took me two or three days to write that. One of my challenges was always should I keep writing this now, or should I stop and find something short to write and post to the site just to let people know I’m still alive while I’m also writing this longer piece. Trying to find that balance is tricky.

Again, not being on a team anymore, and being just myself, I’ve learned the powerful lesson of how little one person is capable of producing versus a staff.

Snell, formerly of Macworld, launched the fantastic Six Colors blog in 2014.

In April 2014, I realized my blog TheStarrList had taken a hard turn into gaming. It was time to start something new. I gathered up those gaming-centric posts from TheStarrList along with several lengthy comments I had made on Polygon and IGN articles and stuffed them into a blog formatted after John Gruber’s Daring Fireball. In May 2014, I launched The State of Gaming with the intention to focus on business, controversy, culture, education, history, health, and other topics in the gaming industry. After a link on Daring Fireball, I decided to cool-down the blog’s pretentious title into something more personal. I recalled a childhood debate: When considering “lives” in video games, does “x1” mean you are on your last, or does zero count?

Writing about games has long been a dream of mine, but there has always been insecurity in indulging in entertainment critique and commentary. For lack of better terms, Zero Counts has tapped into a rich well of inspiration, passion, and creativity. By surrendering my inhibitions about games writing, I have written more frequently and published more on varied topics than ever before.

Without further adéu, here are the most popular posts from launch year, 2014:

1. Hail Mario (linked by Daring Fireball)
2. Humanity in Hearthstone
3. Club Nintendo stuck in Mario Kart traffic
4. Old School Hip Hop is the new Golden Oldies (retweeted by Ben Thompson)
5. Save developers and you will save your soul

Looking forward to even more writing in 2015.

Rolling Stone:

While radio stations have seen their audience decrease as tech-savvy consumers flock to satellite radio and streaming audio, broadcasters might have finally found a format that can lure listeners back to FM: Classic hip-hop. Playlists that shine the spotlight back on artists like the Notorious B.I.G., Naughty By Nature and Missy Elliott are currently sweeping the nation, with major broadcasters like Radio One, iHeartMedia and Cumulus Media frantically changing the format of underperforming stations to the sounds of classic hip-hop, the New York Times reports.

This makes perfect sense. Hip hop debuted around 1979 — 35-ish years ago — now dubbed “Old School”. “New School” hip hop began around 1983 and carried through to the early ‘90s — 22-ish years ago. The broader era of “Golden Age” hip hop spans mid-80s to early-90s — call it 25-35+ years go. In 2015, this is a 25-35+ years old genre.

So, what are “oldies”?

Oldies, Wikipedia:

In the 1980s and 1990s, “oldies” meant the 15 years from the birth of rock n roll to the beginning of the singer-songwriter era of the early 1970s, or about 1955 to 1972, although this varied and some stations chose 1950-1969.

Doing the math, in the 1980s and 1990s, “oldies” encompassed a format including music from 25-35+ years ago. I may be mistaken but Golden Oldies have always seemed like a tried and true radio station format.

Charles Yu, writing for The Wall Street Journal:

It’s at this point, while having my second dialogue with St. George, that I come to a formulation of a new worldview. If writing about music is like dancing about architecture, then writing about alcohol is like dancing about alcohol, especially if you write about it while drinking it. Or something like that; I don’t know. I think my analogy went fuzzy halfway through. That’s the thing about rum criticism. It is the most honest art form, in that it allows you to demonstrate the effects of the product directly on the comprehensibility of your prose. Case in point: the previous sentence. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some rum to eat.

Fun read. Sounds great.

Excellent piece by Ian Bogost:

Myopia is the worst side effect of a hypothetical century ruled by games — or by any medium, for that matter. Whether or not the 20th century was the century of film, its proponents were never so brazen about dreams of its dominion. You don’t see filmmakers and filmgoers deriding other media for their lack of indexicality or visual sensuousness, penning manifesti for the forthcoming reign of the cinematic century, or inundating Twitter with hatred for anyone who squints at the idea that the medium of film might also bear some flaws. To dream of an age ruled by a singular medium is to dream a dream of isolation, for the comfort and sufficiency of the familiar. Myopia starts as affinity, but it ends as fascism.