2024 is in the books, and almost everybody is off work today.

And that means hardly anybody will be reading this blog.

So…while nobody’s looking, I think I’ll indulge in a little self-horn-tootery.

In 2024, PopCult had 397 posts.

There were 52 new episodes of Radio Free Charleston on our sister internet radio station, The AIR.. Plus we had one video episode and a “non-canon” edition of “Radio Free Chicago.”

The AIR also featured over 120 new episodes of our other original internet radio programs.

PopCult posts were viewed millions of times by hundreds of thousands of unique visitors.

Tens of thousands of listeners tuned it for over a quarter-million hours of The AIR.

Since Optimum’s internet has been excrutiatingly inconsistent today, I’m going to stop writing about numbers and just bring you some pictures.

By way of explanation: Over four years ago when I took this blog independent and left the confines of The Charleston Gazette-Mail, I had to choose a new template. That’s the page design and format. The template I chose gives me a “feature image” that runs above the headline of each post, and which…if they are working correctly…shows up as a thumbnail when links to the blog are posted on social media.

Sometimes I put way too much effort into my feature images. So here, are two small collections of my favorite feature images, first up, my five favorite Radio Free Charleston feature images…

NUMBER 5…This one is just me super-imposing my logos over a shot of Times Square in New York, but I liked the way it came out. From January…

Number 4…From February, another RFC logo slapped over top of a photo from NYC, this time covering the side of One Penn Plaza…

Number 3…For this one I just repurposed some vintage advertising art, which I have been known to do from time to time. I really liked this one from August…

Number 2…With this October feature image, I just outright swiped The Great Wave. It worked. We featured an hour of surf music that week…

Number 1…My favorite RFC graphic of the year comes from back in April, when high winds wreaked havoc across West Virginia. A mere two blocks from my house, a massive billboard fell to the winds, nearly taking out a Tudor’s/Gino’s and crushing a car belonging to one employee.  While it was a shockingly violent bit of weather, I coudn’t resist the lure of altering one of the photos taken by a WCHS-TV drone camera…

For reference, here’s a different photo from the WCHS drone…

I don’t think Bobby Warner would mind that I covered up his fallen billboard with my RFC logos.

For a feature image that took all of fifteen minutes to create, I have to say this one amused the heck out of me, and still does, actually.

Our feature image today is actually a recycled feature image from August. It was for a post marking my 19th anniversary of writing this blog. It’s a photo of a baseball jersey I had made cheap by a company that makes cheap baseball jerseys in China. Then you wait a few weeks to get them, and realize that you dropped so much weight since you ordered it that it hangs off of you now.

I’m including it here, one, so I have a feature image for this post, and two, because I had several people compliment me on how realistic the image looked, because they assumed I just digitally inserted a PopCult logo on a photo of a blank shirt.

In truth, it’s a real shirt.

I also use a lot of found, repurposed, or just bizarre images for STUFF TO DO.  If Optimum cooperates, I will also bring you my five favorite feature images from that regular feature in this blog…

Number 5…All I can say is…Buc-ee’s, dude…

Number 4…This feature image from February just repurposed an image posted by a fun account called “Bad Spit” on Twitter (I will not call it by any other names)…

Number 3…In May, I found this image of a theater entrance that was showing the 1940s movie, “Cat People,” and recycled it…

Number 2…Back in March I altered a photograph I took from the Amtrak Cardinal while passing through Washington DC on the way to New York…

Number 1…I dont know why, but this simple image was my favorite STUFF TO DO feature image this year.  It’s a photo I took somewhere in Virginia when Mel and I were making a roundabout return from a comic con in Harrisburg, PA back in August. I just stuck the logo in, then digitally painted in a shadow…

And with that, we wrap up this inconsequential post to start off what I really hope is a boring and uneventful year.