Introduction, Or: Why Medium, Rocket?

Hello again, internet. I’d like to say it’s been a while but, come on, we know that’s not true. Yes, I shut down Geek Binge a good seven or so months ago now, but it’s not like I’ve been particularly quiet in the time since then — I’ve still been chatting it up all damn day on Twitter, and spewing out various comments in film communities all across the blogosphere. But when it comes to long form, substantial writing…well, yeah, I’ve been gone for a while.

But today that changes or, at the very least, I hope it does. Because I’m tired of not writing and, to be quite honest, I miss sharing my opinion about entertainment with you people (whether you like it or not.) So I’m doing just that, and thank god Medium is here to help me.

Because in addition to like a half dozen other factors, one of the reasons I stopped running Geek Binge is because, well, running a website is hard. I knew of the difficulties doing it going in, but you can’t really know how time consuming and stressful it is to manage a website, pay a writing staff, and handle standard operating fees until you’re actually doing it. So as much as I loved doing it, I knew the best thing for my own sanity would be to quit while I was still ahead. But with the desire to write forever stuck in my craw, I knew it wouldn’t be long until I started something else up — and Medium is the absolute perfect, err, medium to do such a thing.

I discovered Medium earlier this year, and almost instantly knew it would be the way to go for any independent blogging I would do in the future. With Medium the process is simplified: I don’t have to worry about paying hosting fees or hitting ad quotas or getting sponsorship deals — even if you aren’t writing in effort of a profit (which boy wasn’t I with Geek Binge), these all become important factors in simply keeping a website alive, and doing so without having to sell your soul (like 80% of all other “independent websites” out there) is a tough task indeed. For my new blogging home I easily could have created another website from scratch, and for a while there I actually did. But when I found Medium, I knew there was no going back — if your only desire in the world is to write about something (and to hopefully have people read it), Medium is simply the premiere place to do.

Now I write all that fully knowing that it sounds like an advertisement, and in hindsight I really should have contacted the fine folks at Medium to make that happen. Oh well, hindsight 20–20. In any case, Medium made creating a new publication easier — but it didn’t make it easy. I still spent months toiling away at this thing, primarily in one pesky category of website creation: finding a goddamn name.

Yes, if you thought that naming a website is the easy part, you’d be goddamn wrong. Simply put, the internet is overstuffed now — any “good” name for an entertainment blog seems to be pretty much taken. Honestly, I don’t know how I got so lucky with as catchy a title as Geek Binge; moving forward, I quickly released how little blog real estate there was left. I’m not going to list the dozen or so website titles I played around with before landing on Freshly Popped Culture, but boy was inputting a bunch of promising domain names into the internet only to find it being “used” by some stupid website its own unique circle of hell.

And look, I like the name Freshly Popped Culture: it’s catchy, punny, and I think you get exactly what I’m going for the moment you read it. Sure it’s the second website title of mine that can be directly linked to food (hey, stick with what you know) but, whatever, it works. And at the point I was in, the only criteria for a blog title was that A) someone else didn’t own the domain and B) it worked. And even based on those attributes, Freshly Popped Culture barely passed the test — while the domain name was available, there’s a Tumblr page from a 23 year old named Brittany that also uses the title. Sorry, Brittany (note: I am not Brittney. My name is Matthew. It’s, like, right up there on the top of the page.)

Anyways, I’m starting to ramble here, so let’s cut to the chase: I’m going to be writing articles about entertainment again, and hopefully by doing it through Medium, it won’t actually kill me this time. Right off the bat, this isn’t going to be Geek Binge 2.0: this is an opinion based blog first and foremost, which hopefully will give me time to delve into longer, more thought out pieces rather than spewing out 20 small news articles a week in a desperate bid to keep the lights on. I have no such demands here, so A) don’t expect as many articles and B) expect them to be better. Of course this is a sliding scale in which “better” merely equals “readable,” but c’mon — it’s better than nothing, right?

Whatever the case, check back tomorrow for my first new article about a thing called Game of Thrones. Because what kind of pop culture blog would I be if I didn’t post weekly about Game of Thrones? In any case, once again welcome to Freshly Popped Culture. Shut the door on your way out.

-Matthew