Highlights of 2013, a NerdLush year in review

13 Jan

Many thanks to Emily for starting the year off with a drunk year in review. Made me laugh. But I’m poking my head in now with a slightly more serious look back at 2013 and where it took NerdLush. As well as some of the favorites, as voted on by fans.

The technical stuff- 2013 was the first full calendar year for NerdLush. We celebrated our first birthday in March. In 2013-

186 posts made
556 photos uploaded

Additionally, the crew grew to include Catie and Lee. Which sadly, takes the token male title away from Stewart, but he’ll always be my Minion #1.

top referrers

twitter

facebook

The Bloggess

google plus

I am quite amused by The Bloggess’ site being one of our top referrers. I adore her and her posts and her book. So when I saw this little factoid… I squee’d.

172 countries were recorded as visiting the site. The United States and Canada as #1, with France and Germany right behind.

One of my favorite things to do is look at the little map of visitors and see where everyone is from. Pretty cool to see our little site making it’s way around the world.

So that’s the boring technical stuff from 2013, now on to the more fun stuff!

In 2013, NerdLush had the great fun of building relationships with several awesome nerd gods & goddesses. We chatted again with Tara Platt & Yuri Lowenthal in regards to Shelf Life (which sadly announced the end of its run later in the year), which led to growth in the relationship- got to help on a short film! We even reviewed their mockumentary, Con Artists. Additionally, we were able to help out the lovely Kirsten Vangsness, which has led to several encounters (not to mention getting back into theatre attendance!). And though it’s been in progress since NerdLush began, we finally got to interview Marian Call! Been trying to do that for a year!

Stewart completed recaps of the final season of Fringe and mini-capping Farscape. This led to mini-capping the entire series of Smallville. Which has honestly gone by a lot faster than I thought as he just started the new year with the beginning of season 6. And in the fall of 2013, he began weekly recaps of the second season of Arrow (which was one of my guilty pleasure shows the season before but is now on the must-watch list).

Went to see Bon Jovi and wrote a post about it.

I became addicted to dinosaurs. Well not quite, but I did binge watch the UK Primeval series in order to then watch the Canadian version, Primeval: New World. Sadly, PNW did not get picked up for a second series, meaning I binge watched both shows multiple times throughout the year in order to get my fix. The questions remains, however, whether my fix was related to the dinosaurs or Andrew Lee Potts/Ben Mansfield/Niall Matter… could go either way. Ha!

I “reviewed” some albums in 2013. Mostly things that I’d been meaning to listen to or that randomly came my way. This is an area I would like to do more of in 2014. Music is such a huge part of my life, but I forget to share it or don’t have the means. I was very glad for those albums that I reviewed as each has been in regular rotation on my mp3 player since. It’s a beautiful thing to find music that you still enjoy a year later- so often, you can easily overdo it with a song/artist and burn out on them. Glad to say this has not happened.

In February, an awesome thing happened. Following my binge watching of PNW, I queried one of the guest actors via twitter in regards to something related to his character. I didn’t expect a reply but I got one and it inspired me to reach out to other actors, directors, writers, etc about the same topic, to hear their thoughts. The responses helped me write a post that combined NerdLush/nerdery with my real life in psychology.

In 2013 we learned that the crew has an obsession with Mass Effect; and I have one for Karl Urban.

I contributed to a charity cookbook (I’m still contemplating my next contribution to the next volume! Eep!)

And I shared, over a few posts, my fears related to the uber fan and how dang scary they are.

We attended a few conventions– San Diego Comic-con, Wondercon, Long Beach Comic-con, ScareLA, Stan Lee’s Comikaze Expo, as well as Chevron, an annual Stargate convention in the UK. We also updated the rules for cosplaying as well as presented do’s and don’ts for attending conventions.