The PopCulteer
June 23 , 2017

This week’s PopCulteer is about PopCult. Earlier this week, PopCult’s streak of having a fresh post every day came to an end at 1,401 days. Your PopCulteer was about seven weeks shy of four years of consecutive daily posting. And breaking the streak was pretty much all my fault.

See, the blogs here at the Gazette-Mail have had some routine glitches lately, and the IT team managed to get everything under control. I thought that my streak might have been broken two weeks earlier, but it didn’t happen and we very quickly got back to our normal routine.

But Monday I went to update PopCult, and…I couldn’t log in.

Before I go any further, let me explain my relationship with the Gazette-Mail. They are perfectly happy to have me as a community blogger and I am perfectly happy to have PopCult hosted on their site. Much of the reason for their happiness is that I am low-maintainance. I don’t cause any trouble and I pretty much operate autonomously within the parameters of what they want PopCult to be. In fact, I go above and beyond what the other community bloggers do, mainly because of what some would characterize as a personality disorder. I get pretty obsessive about any project I work on, and PopCult has been my most visible work for nearly twelve years now.

I’m happy because I have plenty of freedom, and I benefit from being associated with a major media presence here in Charleston. Since 2005 I have only been asked to remove one two-part story, and I completely understand and agree with the reasons for that. While that story was completely true and accurate, it’s not a good idea to get into a conflict with somebody who buys lawyers by the barrel, especially over something laughably trivial. I’m really happy to be part of the Gazette-Mail, and I’d like that to continue for some time.

Because of this, I hate to complain when there’s a technical issue because I know that fixing these things can be a major headache and the last thing you need when trying to sort out a computer problem is someone leaning over your shoulder going “Is it fixed yet?”

In this case, I called the Gazette-Mail Monday and got a voice mailbox and did not leave a message because I figured they were working on the problem, like they did a couple of weeks ago, and would get it fixed soon enough. Tuesday was West Virginia Day and the only post I wanted to run would have plugged the Radio Free Charleston marathon on our companion radio station, The AIR.

So Tuesday I didn’t even try to contact anyone. It was the first day since August 17, 2013 with no fresh post in PopCult.

The world did not come to an end. There were no major catastrophes as a result, and I went out for a pleasant drive with Mrs. PopCulteer. To be honest, ending the streak was a bit liberating.

Wednesday, however, I was starting to feel blogger withdrawal, and called and spoke to Glen Flanagan, who was completely unaware of my technical issues. It was a simple matter of fixing a problem with my log-in to the system. If I’d left a voicemail on Monday, it would’ve been fixed Monday. This one is all on me for being too sheepish to speak up sooner.

Many thanks to Glen for his prompt action. Glen’s even going to try and update our cover image to the collage that I created for that purpose a couple of years ago. You see bits of it illustrating this post.

Wednesday evening I was able to post a quick note plugging the marathons we’ll have on The AIR for the next few days and I was able to get ahead on my PopCult posts because I’m heading to Wheeling this weekend for The Marx Toy Convention that I told you about last week.

Now I just need to decide if I’m going to start a new streak, or allow myself to take a day off once in a while. It’s a safe bet that I’m going to try to post every day. I mean, I got lots of stuff to cover, and lots of video and photos that I haven’t brought to my readers yet. And that’s just how I do.

Anyway, that’s why we didn’t have a post for you on Tuesday.

That is our PopCulteer for this week. Please get out and enjoy something this weekend, whether it’s FestivAll, Riverfest, or if you’re one of those brave souls making the drive to Wheeling to gather in tribute to The Marx Toy Company. All our regular features will still be here. I’m writing them as I write…I guess.