The PopCulteer
November 13, 2020

We are a little more than halfway through The 2020 PopCult Gift Guide. It’s gratifying that PopCult has hit new records in daily readership this week, particularly because we were apparently forgotten in the new redesign of the Gazette-Mail website, and at the moment there are no links to our blog anywhere at the newspaper.

So that means that all our traffic is coming from social media and regular visiters who have us bookmarked, so that’s a bit of a nice feeling.

Nice feelings are much appreciated, since your PopCulteer spent about fifteen hours yesterday dealing with urgent technical issues on multiple fronts. It was sort of like I had Friday The 13th a day early, just to get it out of the way.

That means that today’s entries in The 2020 PopCult Gift Guide may be delayed a bit, but they will all go live by this afternoon. So don’t panic.

A reminder about the gift guide this year: I am doing my best to offer online ordering options for every gift suggestion. Normally I would urge everybody to go out and support your local brick-and-mortar store, but as an immuno-compromised person, I do not feel comfortable shopping in person, and I am loathe to suggest that my readers do something that I won’t do myself.

So, you won’t find any restaurant recommendations this year, and I won’t be telling you all to “shop local” as I have in previous years. Shopping and eating with locally-owned businesses is still a lofty and desirable goal, but not during a pandemic when the number of new cases nationwide is reaching new heights every day.

I am recommending some websites where you can find all sorts of cool things to order. Rather than single out one item, I decided to share some of my go-to places for great gift ideas with you folks. I’m also limiting my individual picks to things that cost under a hundred bucks. Things are tight for many of us in 2020, so I’m trying to be less extravagant with my choices for the gift guide.

That should explain why I’m not recommending the new 26 CD reissue of King Crimson’s first album.

Please remember that we have a sister internet station, The AIR. We’re bringing you independently produced music and talk programming (mostly music) and if you can produce a complete show on your own, and get it to us, we would like to expand our offerings in the new year, so leave a comment on this post and I will get in touch with you, or look me up on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.

You can check out our embedded player at the bottom of this post.

Check PopCult for three or four entries in The 2020 PopCult Gift Guide every day until Thanksgiving. We will post our master list on what would have been Black Friday, which should give you plenty of time to order presents for holiday gift giving.

I hope you’ll come back later today for some comics, book and website suggestions. You’ll see a tiny preview of today’s choices in this post.