Oh hey there. Haven't seen you in a while -- through no fault of yours, of course. That's actually what I'm here to talk about today. It is with a proverbial heavy heart (and a literal heavy beard) that I follow in the footsteps of some of our favourite bands and announce that Loud Noises is going (or has already gone) on indefinite hiatus.
Any of you regular readers that I'm always jokingly referring to (if indeed there are any of you) will no doubt have noticed that the frequency of posts here at the blog has really dropped off, and indeed dried up completely, over the last several months. Fortunately for me, this hasn't been because of some huge, earthshaking event in my life (those tend to be a tad on the negative side) but rather just the steady accumulation of little stuff. My search for steady employment anywhere near my field (which is ancient history -- good luck with that, right?), my quest to get some of my other, non-metal-blog-related writing published, even my recovery from a couple of cold-and/or-flu-related mucus fests over the winter -- I could bore you with a laundry list of excuses, of shit that keeps pushing other things further and further back in the queue.
But the bottom line is that I feel like I'm perhaps spreading myself a little too thin, and as the saying goes, 'jack of all trades, master of none'. As much as I've tried to produce good content for any of you out there interested in reading it, the fact that this blog is just a hobby for me, more or less, has put a pretty hard cap on the amount of time I can dedicate to it. In the four years since I started Loud Noises that sliver of time has slowly and steadily eroded away, to the point that I have been struggling to muster the time and energy required to write the kind of stuff for Loud Noises that I want to write. That's not really fair to any of us, and it's a situation that's got to change. To paraphrase that "jack of all trades" things, I've been trying to half-ass a number of things for too long, and it's time to throw my whole ass into something.
So, what does this mean for you, dear reader? Well, in the short term, virtually nothing, as I've haven't been posting on here for a while now, and that's not going to change any time soon. The outlook long-term is a little murkier; in a perfect world, I'd love to come back to Loud Noises and pick up where I'm leaving off, and maybe even implement some of the ideas I've had over the years that I've just never had the time or momentum to try out. But that perfect world would have to include a good deal more financial and schedule stability, as well as a healthy dose of disposable free time, so the stars may unfortunately never quite align.
For the time being at least, then, this is a fond farewell. Thanks for stopping by once in a while to check out my two cents on the wide world of music, and the crazy corner of that world that we call metal. Now's your chance to catch up on all the reading you might have missed -- more than 1300 posts worth over the last four years. Better get started.
