Ten years ago today, I wrote and published a post that said “Hello, World!” My life and my blog have changed so much in that time. I’m taking a bit of a hiatus right now but I didn’t want to let this milestone pass unremarked. I’m still here and I still feel like I have things to share.

So right now, I’m going to share ten of my favorite posts I’ve written for this blog over the past decade! I should probably do one per year or something but let’s not get too caught up in rules haha. Here they are in chronological order. Happy reading!

1. How NOT to Photoshop
2. Bad Biology in Marie Lu’s Champion
3. Revisiting KOTOR II: (#1) A Fresh Start (this whole series was so fun to write)
4. My Star Wars pilgrimage: Skellig Michael
5. Bookshelf Battle
6. How our new Star Wars trio is a reimagining of the old one
7. Black History Month: Henrietta Lacks, HeLa cells, and informed consent
8. My Top 5 Versions of Beauty and the Beast
9. In which I re-write the Justice League movie
10. Engineering a squirrel obstacle course: Practical deterrent, entertainment, or science?

Photo by Miguel u00c1. Padriu00f1u00e1n on Pexels.com

Photo by Stas Knop on Pexels.com

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

This month marks my eighth blogiversary!  Crazy to think I’ve been doing this so long.  Let’s take a look at my most popular posts from the past eight years.  It’s an interesting and varied list.

1. There is no hot air balloon in Around the World in Eighty Days

2. Famous Introvert-Extrovert Pairs

3. We all got a chicken-duck-woman-thing waiting for us: Star Wars Bad Lip Reading

4. Who’s that Pokémon…girl?

5. Revisiting KOTOR II: (#2) Get me off Telos!

And here is my least popular post, with only 24 views ever; it’s a song a wrote while I was studying abroad in Spain. Give it some love, too!

Lit Mag Poetry: Mi Salamanca

Unfortunately, I find myself very busy this year and I’m probably going to be scaling back my posting here.  I hope to keep up at least one post a week, including some photos of course.  Here’s to more years of nerdy girl blogging!

It’s hard to believe I’ve been blogging for six years this month.  I don’t plan on stopping any time soon!  My blog is never going to be huge and famous, but it is exactly what I intended: a way to practice my writing and express my thoughts on various nerdy topics.  Along the way, it also turned into a way to connect with other nerdy people and have great nerdy discussions.

I thought it would be fun to look back over what I’ve written in six years, so I went through all my blog post and pick my favorite from each year.  These aren’t necessarily the best or most popular posts, just the ones I had the most fun writing or were the most meaningful to me.

Year One

Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon

Honestly, most of what I wrote on this blog in my first year was crap.  I didn’t really know what I was doing, and I didn’t really care about attracting readers; I was just putting words to screen.  And that’s fine, it just doesn’t make for compelling reading.

This is one of the first posts I did that’s actually interesting to read: it gives a bit of original analysis on the manga of Sailor Moon and Cardcaptor Sakura, but with a personal touch.  Plus, it has some images, which immediately makes it more readable.

Year Two

Fall leaf identification

I love sharing “everyday” science, and what is more everyday than leaves?  If I had unlimited time and coding skills, I would write an app to let people identify trees by answering simple questions about its characteristics.  As with most of my favorite posts, I learned some new stuff I hadn’t known before while writing this.  I also really enjoyed taking pictures of the leaves.

Year Three

Birthday Jungle

Here is a post that combines two of my favorite things: zoology and baked goods.  My mom made adorable jungle animal cupcakes for my birthday, so of course I had to go and analyze how similar the cupcake animals were to the real things.  I had fun doing the research, and also eating the cupcakes.

Year Four

My Star Wars pilgrimage: Skellig Michael

After seeing the title of my blog, you will not be surprised that I frequently write about Star Wars topics.  In 2015 I took a trip to Ireland with my mother, and one of the highlights was visiting Skellig Michael, which is the setting for Ahch-to, the rugged island where Luke is hiding out in The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi.  I even got to meet the real-life porgs (the puffins that inhabit the island by the hundreds).

But the journey to Skellig Michael was not easy; this post chronicles my personal experience of the visit.  It was special to me in many ways, and hence the post is special to me, too.

Year Five

Ok, I couldn’t pick just one favorite from this year, so we have two:

Fan Art Friday: More Star Wars Coloring Book!

This post has one of my favorite coloring book pictures I’ve done, a kind of art nouveau Leia on Tattooine.  But even more importantly, this is also the post that gave birth to the monthly Fan Art Friday that I share with Kiri at Star Wars Anonymous.  Every month we color the same picture in our Star Wars coloring book and compare our results.  Over a year and half later and we’re still going; it’s so much fun!

The Lunar Chronicles/Sailor Senshi team

This post occupied my brain at work for days while I was writing it.  It combines two wonderful franchises: The Lunar Chronicles (beginning with Cinder) by Marissa Meyer, and the anime/manga Sailor Moon that helped inspire it.  I had started to see some similarities in the cast of characters, and once my brain got a hold of that it wouldn’t let go until I had matched all the Lunar girls up with their anime counterparts.  I also really like the look of this post, with all the fun images of the Sailor Senshi.

Year Six

My Top 5 Versions of Cinderella

Fairy tale retellings are another of my obsessions, and this year I did posts with my favorite versions of Beauty and the Beast and Cinderella.  These posts were super fun to write because I got to talk about some of my favorite books and movies, both popular and lesser known.  I also got great interaction from the blogging community with some likes and comments which is always great.  To me, that’s definitely one sign of a great post!

Which year’s is your favorite?  Here’s to more years of fun blog posts!

Another fun year of blogging is behind us!  And I just hit 25,000 total views 🙂

Hard to believe it’s been four whole years since I started this blog.  I’m definitely still having fun with it.  And I’m still learning how to make it better!  I think my content is good, but I’m still working to improve the blog visually to make it more appealing to readers.  So hopefully you’ll see some changes in the header, etc. soon.

And as boring as it sounds, I need to update my category and tagging systems to make it easier to find things using the menus at the top.

This year I’ll be doing my Ireland photos on Mondays as part of the Weekly Photo Challenge, as well as occasionally sharing my various fan art on Fridays.  I’ll also be participating in the GeekyNerdy Book Club every other month.

Anything else you’d like to see more of?

ETA: I’m still fighting with the header dimensions.  It appears differently, yet equally badly, on different screens.  Anyone care to comment on whether it cuts off the top or the sides of the header when you view it?