The Nicsperiment Has Changed

This past December marked the 20th anniversary of The Nicsperiment. The Nicsperiment has featured nearly 2500 posts, over 1900 comments, over 8800K in traffic since 2011 (when Blogger started tracking traffic), so I am assuming over 1M in traffic since it's inception. Sure, there are 20-minute old YouTube videos about Minecraft maps that have received more views than my entire blog has in 20 years, but I appreciate that so many people have read my work here.
Over that 20 years, it would be ridiculous to claim that I haven't changed. I have. I started this blog during what I'd call a liberal valley in between the center right plateaus of my life thus far. In late 2004, I had just graduated from a fine college brainwashing and was quite full of piss and vinegar and quite stupid in many ways. I did not understand what George W Bush represented, just that I did not like George W Bush. I still do not like George W Bush. I did not have all the answers then and I certainly do not have the answers now. Politically, I'm probably closest to myself at 17 (hence the center right plateau), believing only what I see, and skeptical of everyone. However, I also was very afraid to lose back then, so I didn't take many risks. If I started out something well, be it any sport or competition, I'd often quit early, stating that I'd done what I wanted to do already and I was finished...like I was an old man who'd already lived my life. Throughout the next few decades and dozens of kicks in the ass later, I decided I didn't like feeling that way anymore, and the stubborn vein that had always been running under the surface eventually became fed by so many different floodwaters that it turned into a rushing monsoon of a river. I started athletic training again. I boxed. I ran eight marathons. I started playing music in front of larger crowds. I couldn't DJ anymore so I started podcasting. I started asserting myself at work and I moved up and far above where I originally envisioned myself when I realized I'd invested enough time in office life that I might as well do something with it. And at same point during all that I just stopped caring what anybody thought about anything I thought or did. 

I've often liked to think that this is the place where I am real, where I do not couch my opinions, but if I'm honest, I've sometimes handled things on The Nicsperiment with kid gloves. 

For instance, I don't like the musician Derek Webb. I've never liked his THIS IS A SERIOUS ISSUE AND YOU SHOULD CONCERN YOURSELF ABOUT IT! persona, which I felt began to overtake his music early in his career (it's a salesman's persona). I felt like, though he was in the Christian music industry, whatever political issue he was pushing was more important to him than his faith. He icked me out. If you want to do that, just be a political musician and leave your faith out of it. If you say your faith is informing your views, but your views are more important than your faith, than you are full of shit. But when I reviewed Webb's discography for my "Every Album I Own" series back in 2012, his website picked it up and started reposting them...because I gave his earlier work positive reviews (I genuinely like the first two Caedmon's Call albums in particular.) This influenced my reviews of his later work--which I hated! I totally compromised my review for his album Mockingbird, not giving it a score because I didn't want to offend his group. The fact that I did this bothered me so much over the years that before that decade ended, I went back and put a postscript on that review. I'm glad I did! Also, Derek Webb is still a political musician. He is no longer a Christian, though. No one that gave me that ick feeling back then still claims to be--and I'm not saying non-Christians give me an ick-feeling. I'm saying Christians who push issues above their faith to the degree that I feel they are eventually going to lose their faith do. Just admit your politics are your faith.

But, like Webb, lets drop faith entirely from this conversation. If you go back and look at my review of Alien: Covenant from 2017, I am clearly describing a movie that I loathe. I go on to give it a 7/10. A 7/10! What?! I should have given it a 3! Did I not want to offend the multinational conglomerate who made it?! Now I would give it a 3! I went through such a heavy phase of doing this in the late 2010's that I actually went back to a few reviews and adjusted the scores to fit the actual review. A small handful could not even be salvaged and I reverted them to drafts because of the lack of keeping it real. When keeping it real goes wrong, you revert the post into draft status.

Anyway, the veil of death brushed my face earlier this year. I had a stroke and nearly met the grave. At this point, what does it benefit me not to keep it real? Now that I know that I could die with just a sneeze, why not keep it real? No matter who I've been for the last 20 years, I've mostly kept it real. But for the times that I haven't, I deeply apologize, deeper than the arterial dissection still healing in my brain stem. Blogger is still around, 20 years after I started The Nicsperiment here. I am somehow receiving as many pageviews as ever (thanks, SEO optimization), maybe because people are getting tired of the AI slop-articles other publications are pushing, or watching people jabber on YouTube. Whatever the case...let's keep it real! Speaking of YouTube...