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| Scene from The Jerk (1979) |
It is with great sorrow that I report on the demise of this website. Effective immediately, Optigrab will cease operation. This isn't a factor made based on any failure of the website's own. It's just that after 11 years, I feel that things have run their course. On an annual basis over the past three years, there has been consistently less coverage with areas of 2019 and 2020 missing weeks at a time. This isn't from a lack of interest, but that my direction for this website has become obsolete. As much as this was always a haven for me to write opinions on pop culture my way, it became limiting in ways that should seem obvious. What started as a place to write about film became a place for TV, music, and podcast coverage. The issue was that in later years it felt awkwardly shaped, and Optigrab never felt like one consistent whole, especially in comparison to my other websites The Oscar Buzz and Willett Reads, which centralized my interests in satisfying ways.
I'll begin by saying that there have been times in the past that I have felt like the end was approaching. I would start the week by trying to outline ideas and come up blank. When you're writing about pop culture, it shouldn't be that way. Instead, I felt limited by only ever covering contemporary subjects or retrospectives that were time specific. While my favorite subjects are always expanding and growing, it felt inappropriate to escape a more formal structure that I was trying to build.
This was my first major blog that I started during my first year in college, and it is responsible for so much that has come since. Without it, most of my current writing career would not exist. I wouldn't have had it as a portfolio of sorts that landed me jobs at the now defunct Cinema Beach and Readwave, and even gained me access to great local theater, such as Long Beach's Landmark Theater's production of Little Shop of Horrors from last year. I am grateful for every opportunity that has been granted because of this blog, and for a while, it hosted some of my best work. I sought to share everything that interested me, and I did so with various columns that started strong but became tedious after a point. For instance, I realized that I wasn't cut out for TV criticism and yet proceeded to cover the pilot episodes of new shows. I don't know why, but it felt important to a website losing its identity.
In what may be one of the more amusing origin stories, this blog didn't start out as a pop culture hub. I was actually part of a writers group where we were assigned a prompt every week and the most creative selection won. This was sometimes about word association, such as using certain nouns appropriately in a text. To the best of my knowledge, that group has disbanded and some of them don't even write anymore. Still, I found myself encouraged to explore things that excited me. With 2009 being the end of a decade, my first prominent project was a Top 100 Movies of the Decade list. From there I would explore different filmmakers I admired and even temporarily titled my reviews "The True Blue ____ Review" as a play on the recent release of James Cameron's Avatar. I also promoted my podcast Nerd's Eye View on there for a hundred or so episodes, though I fear the links may be broken. Also, if you look at my early S.E.O. labels, I clearly had no sense of how to look professional until it became overbearing.
There was so much that went into this blog and it gave me the motivation to explore and grow. However, I am reaching a limit with what I think it can help me achieve. As much as I could happily keep on writing about anything to my heart's content, I need to move on and find a new project. This isn't to say that you're losing me for good. Besides, I still have The Oscar Buzz and Willett Reads still operating regularly. After all, I still have ongoing columns that I want to keep, but I need to navigate them into something more "coherent." This means that I will be starting a new website from scratch very soon that will incorporate everything, but in a way more reflective of my writing and interests in 2020. It will be more relevant and less rooted in a style that I feel that I've outgrown.
For everyone who has supported Optigrab over the years, I want to personally say thank you. It accidentally became a labor of love about a decade ago and in some ways defined me as a writer for that entire time. However, I just don't feel that I have what it takes to make it into what I feel it could be. It will always be a part of me and this archive will still be available for whoever wants to read how I've grown as a writer. It's just that sometimes it's best to start fresh, find a new way to move forward. I hope that this isn't seen as ending, but a transition for me. Maybe I will have better things come along with it. Who knows. I just need to have that fulfillment again as a writer that I feel I have been lacking here for some time. Thank you to all, and take care. I should have something noteworthy to share by 3/20/2020. Besides that, this is my parting thoughts with you. I love you, and take care of yourselves.
And yes, I get the irony of closing up shop on Friday the 13th. This was purely coincidental.
Love,
Thomas Willett
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