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| NOPE. NO MORE OF THIS. BYE. |
Hey guys. Bren here.
So here it is. I'm really actually, adult-time going to close the doors on Metal Snob / That's Not Metal. I'm going to ramble about this. I'm sorry for all this rambling.
To say this is a long time coming would be the understatement of a lifetime. I hate to disappoint anybody out there left who could be disappointed, but I'm making it official: That's Not Metal, Metal Snob, whatever this still is: It's over. Truth be told the ship has been sunk for years, and the time in that state easily outnumbers the days where this blog was growing, making progress and had potential. I've been sitting in the depths with my sunken, rusted pile for way longer than I should have. It's high time I swim back to shore and get on with my life.
Right now it would be so easy for me to point fingers; especially to make this easier for myself to deal with. I could tell you my full-time job or new marriage didn't give me time. I could put blame on my former, short-lived podcast-that-never-was cohost for his sudden, manic meltdown that ended a decade-long friendship. I could say it was the result of the callous lack of research on the part of certain big-name UK metal journalists who thought my original name was free to be taken, used, and trademarked, which resulted in my huffy, sudden, sloppy name change. I could say it was due to several former contributers ghosting me harder than a pretty OKCupid date. (Not including my most recent contributers, they were a really great bunch for the time they stuck around.) I could say it was all you guys and your shit fucking ad-block plugins making it so that I could make 10 times the amount of revenue in 6 minutes of roadside panhandling than in 6 months of writing. I could say it was the changing climate of internet-based entertainment favoring quick, easy laughs in the forms of clickbait lists, paragraph-long articles, Vines, YouTube videos and memes rather than TLDR editorials about how much I don't like a metalcore band. It could be because Manowar is breaking up. It's definitely because Manowar is breaking up.
I could say I'm doing this for a multitude of reasons that could somehow be skewed by my own dumb head as outside of my control. Out of the very many nails that have been deeply embedded in this coffin, I could readily choose each one to call the "final". But whether they were put there or not, we need to finally bury this motherfucker in the ground.
At the end of the day, completely, totally, all blame lands on me. I was the captain of this ship. I was the one that carelessly let it drift into the proverbial iceberg. I'm the one who's writing all these stupid analogies as a result. Real talk: my heart simply wasn't in it anymore dudes. I wasn't having any fun anymore. You saw me go months at a time without saying or doing a fucking thing, regardless of the many empty, unfulfilled, time-framed promises of content I made. I would cringe at the thought of sitting down and producing anything for this site. It always felt like an obligation I was putting off. It would hang over me and stress me out. I can't begin to tell you how many article drafts are sitting there unpublished, totally abandoned due to to their lack of quality and my lack of caring. I wrote the "meme" violation 4 times over before I finally, silently, just gave up on it altogether. I recorded those solo podcasts. I did. I then deleted those solo podcasts. I shouted out to the bands I told them I would give shout outs to. I included their music. I listened to the podcasts and they were not interesting or funny or worth listening to. I tried and I failed.
Simply put, I'd rather give you guys no content than bad content, and it's just time to admit to you all out loud that all I have left in me anymore in terms of this site is a lot of bad content.
For a successful metal publication of any sort, you need to have a lasting love and passion for discussing the genre in exactly that form. It takes time, it takes dedication, it takes effort. I wasn't and I'm not willing to give any of that anymore. I can't remember the last post I enjoyed writing, I felt it really showed in my work that I just didn't give a fuck anymore. I watched with child-like envy as many a metal blog that started well under me in exposure started to exceed me greatly in viewership over the years. The reasons for this were simple: these guys cared about what they were doing, they never stopped doing it, and they got returns for all the hard work they put into their respective sites. I was stubborn with my content, I was inconsistent, I never really knew where to take the blog. I didn't know when to kid around and when to be serious. I fucking HATED reviewing albums and I didn't like talking to musicians or care about them as people enough to interview them. Writing blurbs about heavy metal news is honestly, a fate worse than death to me. I seriously never really had a fucking metal blog here to begin with. That's Not Metal was always such a strange, misshapen, suffering mutant of a creature. So let's just take this deep breath together and finally put it out of its misery.
I'll be the first to admit that some of you might remember a post like this a couple years ago. I called it quits on TNM once before. I said all this same stuff, I said I was over it and I was ending it. Then, for whatever fucking reason, I strangely, silently started posting again. I deleted the goodbye post and I kept on like nothing happened. The milk was spoiled and tossed out but I was suddenly compelled to go digging in the trash so I could keep on drinking it. Seriously, I have plenty of analogies about ending my metal nerd rage blog.
How is this time going to be any different? For starters, when I hung it up last, I renewed the domain one more year just so people could read the stuff I previously wrote a little while longer. I'm not going to do that this time. Come December, this will all be reverted to a blogpsot.something.com html, and then potentially just deleted. My brenocide@thatsnotmetal.com email will be gone and no longer accessible, thatsnotmetal.com,metalsnob.net, those sites will simply vanish into the ether. I'm not gonna leave myself the temptation of a platform when the mood strikes for me to shit talk some band I don't like. At least not my own platform. I may eventually reach out to some other metal blogs to do some one-off contributions; (if I haven't completely alienated everybody with my asshattery) but this website and all we have done here will float away into the silent orbit of digital space trash like so many before it. It feels tragic given how much effort I've put into it over the years, but it was always inevitable, and I didn't feel right just silently taking things down for the handful of folks out there left who gave a shit.
TNM was my passion when I started this thing, it wouldn't have been fair to carry on with it now that it's definitely not. My creative aspirations lie elsewhere. I'm writing and producing music again with a new group of guys from my area. Something I haven't tried since I was much younger, and I'm having the time of my life. We're just an underground black metal band trying to have fun with it, and we will likely dwell in the land of necro-sound obscurity along with the number of daily pop-up USBM bands that came before us, but how little that matters to us makes it all the better. It's cool to be on the other side of things for a change; to create and produce and develop a real artform rather than create and produce and a develop an artform of just shit-talking or picking apart that other said artform. I'm also getting more into stuff like stand-up comedy and MCing open mics. I'm a creative person to my core, and I'm sure I'll carve a new place out on the internet somewhere at some point with a different form of content, be it musical, comedy or metal writing elsewhere or all of these things at once or maybe none of these things at all.
I will tell you right now you won't find out about it on Facebook. Fuck Facebook. That site is fucking over. If you have any interest in me and my future as a person, you can Follow me on Twitter. No creator, large or small should have to pay to get their content out to people that already made the decision to follow them. Facebook is becoming too big and greedy for its own fucking britches and that's another sinking ship I'm GLAD to jump. You all know that your timelines have become nothing but click-bait that paid to be there and your dumb aunt sharing dead memes. Seriously, delete your account if you know whats' good for you and use the other social media sites that cool people use.
For every single person who spent the time listening to me carry on these years, I can't thank you enough. It's been a fucking blast, whether you loved me or hated me. Before it's all said and done, share TNM with those unfamiliar. Let the people know of all the atrocities that occured here before our grand empire of nerd rage fizzles out into the inevitable oblivion. I love everyone of my contributors, thank you guys so much for your time. I'm sorry we didn't take this to the places we talked about, but I had a shit ton of fun trying with you guys. I'm sorry I didn't lead by example and make this place the soap box that you all truly deserved, but I hope the experience meant something, even if it was small. I want to thank The Angry Black Metal Elitist, for his contributions, it was a fucking shame to see him quit writing. The guys from Heavy Blog is Heavy, Angry Metal Guy, No Clean Singing, Metal Sucks, and Toilet Ov Hell for showing me great examples of genuine metal blogging that I could use as an example in those moments I felt like doing something quality. I want to thank my soul-sucking ex-girlfriend for making me miserable enough to take out all my anger and frustration on the metal community with a kind of funny blog; you can all blame her current absence for how much less angry/funny I am now. I'd like to thank my wife for her support through the sleepless nights of flamewarring and the hair-pulling edits of all my too-fucking-long posts. I'd like to thank RockstarBass100 for being such a great sport. I didn't feel bad about bullying you until Metal Sucks published your videos. Sorry about that, guy.
I'd also like to point that after all is said and done, Metalcore as a genre is essentially over. So, we did it. Mission accomplished boys. It's time to head home.
Stay true my friends,
- Brenocide \,,/
