The start of a new year makes for a good time to evaluate what I want to do with this site.

On my recently updated About Me page, I wrote that “I primarily use this website to blog about my interests, both personal and professional.” That is still the guiding principle behind the site. It is a creative outlet for my writing, which has always been one of my favorite hobbies.

In 2025, I just about managed one post per month related to the movies I had watched. It wasn’t actually once per month—I didn’t do January—but once I got into the groove by February, I’m proud that I kept up that cadence through the end of the year.

However, I never intended to become a “movie blogger” or “film critic.” Truth be told, I think that a lot of my movie reviews are nothing special. To really embrace the persona of a “serious” writer on movies, I would need to write much longer and more thoughtful pieces to do these films justice. (Roger Ebert’s “Great Movies” essays are what I have in mind for what “real” film criticism ought to resemble.) That’s just not something that I’m aiming to do.

As I mentioned in my review of Cinemania in September, one of the driving forces behind my watching movies is that it gives me material to write about: “At the end of the day, I love writing more than I love movies. Movies are a means to that end.” Movies gave me easy prompts for keeping up a writing habit, but for the coming year, I want to direct that writing habit toward subjects that I find more personally meaningful. What I would actually prefer is to establish myself as a “serious writer” about topics related to my professional work: information architecture and content strategy. The post I made last July, “4 Games to Get You Thinking Like an Information Architect,” is indicative of the types of posts that I would rather create instead of monthly movie round-ups. I imagine I will still write about movies—and for now the plan is to continue the monthly cadence that I’ve established—but I want movies to become a minor subject on this site.

The point of my writing consistently about movies was more to do with keeping up the muscle of regular writing—not so much about establishing myself as some kind of authority on film. A great side effect of having written dozens of short film reviews is that I have now built a personal corpus of content that easily lends itself to categorization, structure, and analysis. Movie reviews are formulaic, and it’s no accident that I have established a consistent pattern for them, including metadata about runtime, languages, country of origin, etc. Because of this upfront work, I am now prepared to use my own content as material for writing about information architecture and content strategy. I can imagine writing a post in the coming year, for example, about performing content analysis on my movie posts, establishing methods for spotting inconsistencies (e.g., “Should I italicize titles at the end of the posts?” or “Should I include the release year in parenthesis?”) and normalizing them.

I want to be careful, though. I don’t want this website to turn into a source of stress or misplaced obligation. That’s why I’m not making any hard commitments about posting X times per week or anything like that. I don’t make any money from this site and I have no plans to monetize it any time soon. There’s been a trend for a while for writers to find a home on Substack (and before then, Medium) and charge money for subscriptions, hiding a portion of their content behind paywalls. In fact, I have considered whether I ought to migrate my writing to Substack rather than keep it here on a personal WordPress site. For starters, I think Substack would likely increase the visibility of my posts if I were to link to similarly themed blogs and cross-promote. There would probably be a greater chance of my posts being discovered by people who have never heard of me. But on the other hand, I like having my own site and feeling that I “own” my content. Sure, I’m still using WordPress to host my work, but I value owning my own domain and styling it my own way. Sacrificing a degree of visibility for personalization is worth it to me.

Speaking of visibility, I’m well aware that I could find a larger audience if only I returned to social media and promoted my work there. But I don’t want to do that. As I wrote, a couple of years ago now, in “This is a Successful Tweet,” Twitter became a “behavioral addiction” in my life. I could tell that Twitter, Facebook, and a number of other similar sites were actively making me miserable day after day—not to mention eating up far too much of my time. So I quit them. I still have LinkedIn and YouTube, but apart from that, I am social media-free. I don’t want to change that. This is another way that I’m sacrificing potential visibility for my writing, I recognize, but I’m okay with that.

So without maximizing for reach or impact, why do I write? My answer to that question for now, I feel, is to develop my thoughts and voice. If anyone is listening—reading my words—while I do that, all the better. But my biggest audience for now is myself. I write as a hobby; as a way to build and maintain the writing muscle. I do it because I get immense satisfaction out of it and because I’m convinced of the personal and professional benefits that have a way of emerging from such a practice. To write is to think. Having spent a good deal of time pondering how I should phrase myself in regards to this or that subject, I gain confidence—to pitch a conference talk, to speak up at work, or to write another, even more thoughtful piece.

I also believe that as AI tools grow in popularity, manual writing is increasingly going to become a rare and valuable skill that can only exist with deliberate time and effort expended in maintaining it. The ability to write, edit, and post something from scratch—without using AI to generate an outline or touch up a draft—is hard enough as it is. The temptation to take a shortcut and let AI do the bulk of the thinking is something that needs to be consciously and actively guarded against.

(It’s not that I’m a total AI luddite. I’m not bothered by the idea of using AI to generate images for decorating my posts, for example. Likely that speaks to my own biases—I don’t think of myself as a graphic designer or an artist, so I don’t mind using AI for creating visuals. But I do think of myself as a writer, so I feel like using AI to take over my writing would defeat the purpose of what I’m trying to achieve with this blog.)

I think about all the people who are currently going through school, whether that’s college, high school, or below, and wonder if some of them will literally never experience what it’s like to write something entirely on their own. I think about the frustration likely felt by those students who do spend the time and effort to write their essays without relying on AI, only to see themselves attain the same grades as their peers who take the easy way out. Or worse—to spend hours hand-crafting something truly well-written only for others to accuse it of being the work of AI. I’m thankful that I spent my school years before this uncomfortable period of upheaval and uncertainty. All of us, young and old, should write because writing is an end in itself. Our voices cannot be developed to their fullest by tweaking and trimming words that were generated for us by a machine. Our voices have to emerge from within, through great struggle.

This year, my main goal for this site is to maintain and build upon the regular writing habit that I kept alive last year. But in 2026, I will write about more than movies; I will expand my horizons and return to opining on subjects that are professionally relevant to me.

Thank you to anyone who reads this site. I hope that my efforts can provide you with knowledge and entertainment in 2026 and beyond.