So far this has been an incred­i­ble year. After get­ting my full-time gig at Com­cast, I’ve been very excit­ed and ambi­tious about what my job can mean to me. In just a few short months I’ve been able to do things I nev­er thought I’d be doing as a job, like cov­er­ing SXSW for work [wait ’til you seen me On Demand] and get­ting things like Radio­head­’s New Year’s Eve con­cert for the site. It’s hard to know what’s next, but in a way I nev­er have before, I’m real­ly think­ing about how to make my job inter­est­ing to my audi­ence and myself.

Shock­ing­ly, this was all brought about by work­ing with Chris Wein­garten and Bran­don Sto­suy on Paper Thin Walls in its for­ma­tive stages about a year ago. It all began when I first learned about the site, and like a lot of strug­gling crit­ics, con­tact­ed Chris about con­tribut­ing. Before I knew it, I was fact-check­ing sub­mis­sions for ’06’s year-end mix­tape and sub­mit­ting bull­horns for their hilar­i­ous news­feed. I did a lit­tle research for a PLUG Awards sketch and sud­den­ly found myself being pulled into Comcast.net for my work at PTW.

2007 was pret­ty great too, con­sid­er­ing I got hired in April as a free­lancer and start­ed full­time in Sep­tem­ber. On the oth­er hand, 2007 brought trag­ic news, as my father broke his hip in a fall and was lat­er diag­nosed with late stage Parkin­son’s dis­ease. This has been a learn­ing expe­ri­ence for me, and has for­tu­nate­ly helped me have a clos­er rela­tion­ship with my dad, some­thing I nev­er expect­ed would hap­pen after suf­fer­ing some pret­ty seri­ous set­backs ear­li­er in the year.

But this is a new year, and I’m look­ing for­ward to Black­mail Is My Life being an out­let for me, free of the pulpy, blur­by copy I write day in and day out. That’s fun, but not quite as reward­ing as chew­ing up cul­tur­al arti­facts and digest­ing them in longer form. I’m real­iz­ing now how self-indul­gent this is; as blogs declared their mas­tery over web mag­a­zines, there was a fun­da­men­tal shift in the way read­ers snuck a lit­tle time to ‘dis­cov­er’ music, movies, books or any­thing on the web. In spite of that, I’m going to be bet­ter about writ­ing here this year and real­ly try to com­mit. I’m not alone in mak­ing these res­o­lu­tions, and it’ll be tough to keep, but I’m going to give it a shot.

Radio­head in about ten min­utes. Be ready.

If you’re still send­ing cds [this was almost full stop], they should at least be playable on the com­put­er, iPod, whathavey­ou. As much as I love inde­pen­dent artists and the music they make, I can’t spend time I don’t have lis­ten­ing to it at home when I could just as eas­i­ly lis­ten and enjoy on the train, or on a walk to the train.

More impor­tant­ly, think about the envi­ron­ment and just send a zip file, okay? Your music isn’t so impor­tant that it’s worth destroy­ing the plan­et, even if your breath­less prose pro­claims it so.

After a brief con­ver­sa­tion with a Dylan­ite yes­ter­day, I need­ed to imme­di­ate­ly re-read Andy Beta’s excel­lent review of Todd Hay­nes’s new hagiog­ra­phy, I’m Not There. Will peo­ple ever stop Tom Brokaw-ing Six­ties music?

[PS: There’s a part of me that would love to do a recur­ring fea­ture called Nev­er For­get in which I dis­cuss rehashed artists and albums that were nev­er for­got­ten in the first place. It’s Ur-text could be David Brook­s’s recent arti­cle about pop music,‘The Seg­ment­ed Soci­ety.’]

So much is still going on. My main man is still work­ing up a redesign. I still can’t wait, but in the mean­time, just so you know that I still care about music and stuff, I’m going to be writ­ing snip­pets about my favorite albums/artists of ’07 at my work blog, Blind­ed by the Hype! Be sure to stop by and if you hap­pen to have a Com­cast email account, feel free to log-in and comment.

• the Phillies
• Gary Shteyn­gart’s Absur­dis­tan
• King of Kong: A Fist­ful of Quarters
• Heavy Winged
• Halo 3
• Mad­den ’08
• The Death of Mr. Lazarescu
• Bioshock
• PJ Har­vey
• Mad Men
• Iraq in Fragments
• Jay Reatard
• Patrick Cock­burn’s The Occu­pa­tion
• Before the Dev­il Knows You’re Dead
• The Sav­age Detectives
• Assas­s­in’s Creed

I’m real­ly psy­ched. I sus­pect that I’ll be writ­ing much more often and pay­ing much more atten­tion to the blo­gos­phere in the win­ter months.