New Years Special: Reflecting on a Year of Your Blogs Part 7 Final

Welcome to a special week-long New Year’s celebration dedicated to YOU! This week, I’m sharing a year of my favorite blog posts written by the WordPress community in order to recognize your contributions to the wonderful blogosphere that we are all part of. If you missed Day 1, be sure to check it out (Day 1 contains a more thorough explanation of this festive special)! You can also check out days 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 for more of these amazing blog posts.

Today, in the final post of the New Year’s Special, we’re taking a look at blogs from December. I hope that you enjoy reading these as much as I did!

 

December

Now, I must qualify December’s choices by saying that I feel like December isn’t a completely fair representation of the works you’ve all put out there. I haven’t actually caught up on December blogs yet, meaning that there are many amazing posts from December 2017 that I haven’t read yet. Of the ones that I have read so far, however, these are my top favorites.

 

1. As part of the Charming and Open blogging event, Robert Ian Shepard of Adventure Rules has a great post musing over the life of an NPC.  The post, I Just Wanna Live While I’m Alive: It’s My (NPC) Life, offers a charming retelling of one of Robert’s childhood games in which he and a group of friends constructed elaborate imagination games casting themselves as the NPCs from game worlds. (Another great piece from Adventure Rules is I Need Some Support: Healers in Gaming)

 

2. Sometimes, we find a series that dazzles us in ways that others just haven’t. Once we’ve found a story like this, we tend to want to write about it. For Takuto’s Anime Cafe host Takuto, Yuri on Ice is one such series. In Celebrating Yuri!!! On ICE’s First Anniversary! | Blogmas 2017 Day 4 (a piece that I also shared out as part of my December OWLS blog tour post), Takuto shares 10 favorite moments from the anime, describing each one with such passion that it is easy to see how he feels about Yuri on Ice. (Check out Takuto’s For the Team – Free! & My Swim Story | OWLS “Team” for another excellent read).

 

3. If you’ve ever found yourself noticing small details or patterns in the world around you after you’ve been playing an open world game, you’ve experienced what Jonathan at Cantrip refers to as the Tetris Effect. In Tetris Effect in Open World Games, Jonathan talks about the things he has caught himself noticing after playing titles like Grand Theft Auto, Metal Gear Solid, and Horizon Zero Dawn. (Another post that I enjoyed on Cantrip is My Favorite Pokemon Game: Pokemon Snap)

 

In July’s featured blogs, I talked about a blogging event that I followed and participated in from The Well-Red Mage. December was another month in which I was able to actively participate in a fun blogging event, this one hosted by Kim from Later Levels (I cheated a little to participate, as I’m not a gaming blogger!). The event, Gamers Blog Patry Winter 2017 Invitation, was a festive Christmas-themed party in which commenters shared their favorite Christmas songs, their favorite Christmas party refreshments, and their favorite blog post, followed by “mingling” with other blogger guests in the comments. It was quite a lot of fun!

 

 

We’ve reached the end of the New Year’s Special here on Pop Culture Literary. It was a lot of fun revisiting these 2017 posts as we turn the corner to 2018. I do wish that I could have shared all of my favorites, but it wasn’t as practical as I would have liked. Despite this, I’ve shared a number of great blogs put out by the WordPress community in 2017, and look forward to even more in 2018!

Do you have a favorite blog that you’ve written or read from December? I invite you to share it in the comments! And as always, if you have a literary device you want to know more about, or a game, comic, show, or movie that you want to see make an appearance on the blog, leave a shout-out in the comments!

 

 

 

*Featured Image retrieved from https://www.pinterest.com/pin/222435669071932996/?autologin=true. I wanted to share an image of the fireworks shot off of the summit of Pikes Peak by the AdAmAn club. They’re an iconic part of my childhood, and something I often think about at New Year’s time. Sadly, I’ve never had the equipment to capture a good shot myself.