Yesterday marked the 1st birthday of my blog, so I decided to do what I avoided doing for the 100th post, and take stock of my first year as one of those internet blogger type people, with some lists! Doesn’t everyone love a list?
My ten most popular posts of the year:
10. Some people love a parade, I love a broken Dell PC. And a few weeks on it’s still lying semi-rebuilt. Boy when someone bricks a computer they really make a masterwork of it.
9. Have a comic – No real post today. I was really surprised by the number of views this received. Perhaps I should work even harder on my drawing for the future?
8. A students guide to cooking – Detonated Potato. I recently received an email from a guy in London, apparently this is now genuinely his favourite way to cook the humble spud. I feel like Nigella Lawson, but even hotter.
7. BDSM How it could/should be – The Good Mistress I wrote this post, the first of my BDSM themed ones, expecting a shitstorm to come hurtling my way. The storm never arrived, but some nice comments, and emails did.
6. My Top 5 Alternative Christmas Songs. Hey I still maintain that it isn’t X-Mas without the Sohodolls.
5. Top Ten Signs of an Irish Summer weirdly this year most of this post actually applies to January so far. Just goes to show that you simply can’t trust the Irish weather.
4. What do you really need from a gaming console emulator? Another surprise for me, I thought that this would be a throw away piece that one or two people would find useful. It turned out to be a hell of a lot more than one or two.
3. “…as the bishop said to the actress!” Hey when you’re already going to hell, you might as well exit with a giggle.
2. BDSM how it could/should be – The Good Slavegirl. I’m delighted that this post was so popular this year. It was written from a position of absolute adoration and awe for the submissives of this world. So I’m taking the complete lack of trollish comments that needed to be deleted as a sign that it’s a shared adoration.
1: Ever get the feeling that someone, or something is watching you? Because you know sometimes being a dog owner is a truly disturbing experience.
My nine of my ten personal favourites, and why:
10: Any break up is hard to live with, for more than just the loss of love. Writing this marked the beginning of a period of intense growth for me. After this post went up I started a long process, which is still on going, of assessing myself in the hopes of understanding why I make the same mistakes, and suffer the same hurts over, and over. To say the least the conclusions to date have been eye-opening, and life changing.
9: Straight out of the mouths of babes, while you’re trying to be good. This won’t be the last entry for the Force of Nature, but it is one of my favourites.
8. Screw the future, I want to go back to the past. A short one but oh my how I adore my emulators.
7. The ten most awesome things about being – a ukulele player. I love my ukulele, I love playing music, and I love the phrase “ukulele badass”. What more needs saying?
6. The oddest experience. It’s probably a little self-serving to prefer diary type posts written by yourself. But they’re the ones that poured out after a moment of self-revelation. They mean a lot to me, and being able to share them in this way makes me extremely happy.
5. My daily newspaper, and the four-year old girl. The Force of Natures 2nd and last entry on this list, this post still makes me giggle when I think about it. And she still loves killing sheep and chickens in Minecraft.
4. Oh joy, it’s the Eurovision Song Contest. Crap the next one is getting closer again. Time to start dreaming of Composition 4, and radio detonators.
3. Top 10 “Fuck Yeah” songs of the 80’s. I wrote this as a giggle, I do after all have some very odd tastes in music. But it’s become my go to page for a housework playlist. Nothing quite takes away the sting of hoovering like singing “You’re the BEST around, nothing’s ever gonna keep you down!”
2. I’ve been thinking about PostSecret. Quite aside from simply loving PostSecret, this post led to my being on the receiving end of my first ever fangirl-gasm, at the hands of my very own Velma Dinkley. And now I’ll just have to wait for the second one.
Writing this blog for the past year has been on of the best learning experiences of my life. Not only has it forced me to improve my grammar, and punctuation, but because I have a tendency to research anything I’m not 100% certain of, it’s also been a catalyst for my ever-expanding list of random facts. Writing Random Ruminations has also led me to find fellow bloggers I hugely admire. (Ones who aren’t adopted little sisters, they already know I think that both they, and their writing rocks.)
Though none more so than the,
wonderous Miss Kana Tyler,
and
the divine Miss Victoria Oldham.
So I am off now to enjoy a day of celebratory not writing at all, and I leave you all with my personal favourite blog for the past year. I chose this one because despite being written for laughs it actually means a huge amount to me. Not least because it seems that Satan Claws read it, and decided that I deserved at least some of what I asked for. But mostly because I think the moment I wrote it I started to truly accept all the aspects of who I am. That’s right my favourite post from the last 12 months are
1. A Transgirls letters to Satan Claws. 2011.
So to all my readers, thank you for sticking with me over the past 12 months. And I hope that you’ll continue to find me entertaining enough to stick with for another 12.
My Random Ruminations. 
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