Sooner or later all games must come to an end, as in the collapse of this adult-sized, hand-crafted Mega-Jenga collapse at a 2012 gathering with my wife’s cousins.
Over the past several years the good folks at WordPress.com, facilitators of this very website you now clutch in your device, have provided bonus services to users in the form of The Daily Post. A fine team of editors provided springboards for would-be bloggers who were interested in writing but needed ideas, offered networking opportunities between WordPress users like me who lack the skills to meet fellow entertainers, start conversations, find the right cliques, and expand both their online reach and their Friends lists. The Daily Post’s guidance came in the form of writing prompts every day, weekly mixers for new bloggers to ask questions and seek suggestions, and the regularly scheduled themed “challenges”, which invited our take on whatever particular word of phrase came to the editors’ minds. We were free to interpret and respond to their suggestions at our discretion, then seek out other respondents and compare their approaches to ours. It was a fun way for WordPress customers across the board to expand their horizons and bond as a community.
Alas, that era of fun corporate block parties has come to an end. As of May 31st The Daily Post has shuttered its services and will no longer offer new topics or assignments for our use. We writers, photographers, artists, poets, mommy-bloggers, retired wool-gatherers, lecturers, fireside storytellers, collegiate navel-gazers, marketer wannabes, spammers posing as humans, and all-around social typists are left to our own devices, to create our own ideas from whole cloth, and to figure out how to network without trained professionals lending us a hand. Frankly, some of us may be doomed.
Regardless! Over the past six years we’ve had our own stories to tell and opinions to express here on MCC, and are in no danger of running out anytime soon. Current projections show that I may be in for awkward times around late 2019, but for now we’re good. Throughout the long history of the Daily Post’s Weekly Photo Challenges and Weekly Writing Challenges, MCC participated roughly 95 times among our 1700+ entries to date. The Daily Post’s editors signed off their final programming week with a retrospective of their favorite results from years past. Now, it’s MCC’s turn. The following is a look back at our most popular Weekly [whatever] Challenge submissions — the all-time favorites as determined by You, The WordPress Viewers at Home.
Some photos saw higher traffic and consequently garnered more Likes because I responded to the Challenges more quickly, when bloggers were at their most eager for interaction. Some had the fortune of being posted on slow internet weeks when readers were starved for new entertainment. Some had solid stories to go along with their visuals. Some were simply better photos than our standard fare. Some were just lightning in a bottle. Some of them are my favorite photos, such as our Mega-Jenga lead photo. That lucky split-second (and it was me borrowing my wife’s camera, at that) previously appeared in our 2012 year-in-review, the only one of MCC’s 95 Weekly Challenge responses that ever earned a “Freshly Pressed” spotlight boost because an editor found it worthy. Audience attention is so rare for MCC that it’s not hard for that moment to stick out in my mind.
And now, we present our very special MCC clipfest and the prompts that inspired them or just so happened to encompass them at the right time. We bid a fond farewell to The Daily Post, wish them well in their next projects, and hope they won’t forget about us tinier legumes down here in the Peanut Gallery. Cheers!
2015: “Treat” — A Salted Caramel Pizookie from BJ’s Restaurant and Brewery, which proves often subject matter trumps technique.
2012: “Green” — This late-summer shot from Turkey Run State Park was one of several parts of an all-green gallery. Two other shots were actually sneak excerpts from Our 2009 Road Trip, which we’re now in the middle of remastering for MCC.
2016: “Anticipation” — That time my employers gave us the gift of Christmastime baking ingredients, among the best kinds of holiday fun.
2015: “Landscape” — Palmer Park was an unplanned but lovely stop on my mostly one-man tour of Colorado Springs in the fall during my wife’s one and only business trip to date.
2016: “Fun” — Rare appearance of a fondue set at a work pitch-in courtesy of a grandmotherly coworker who’s retiring later in 2018 and threatening to take her fondue set with her. I WILL FIGHT HER FOR IT.
2017: “Waiting” — Last year my mom had open-heart surgery. We arrived shortly after 5 a.m. and had to bide our time in the cavernous hospital hallway until the surgeons were ready to commence one of the most serious days in our lives.
2015: “Ornate” — St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans, as viewed through the widescreen lens of my Samsung Galaxy S6 that finally had to be retired in May 2018 because every feature in it went obsolete except the camera.
2013: “Lights” — The sun shining through the big metal globe on Manhattan’s Columbus Circle as we emerged from the subway station below.
2016: “Spare” — These unused mini-cupcakes were an epilogue to my mom’s retirement party. Either readers enjoyed my breezy anecdote that accompanied this nothing-special photo, or they just really, really love sugar.
2014: “Abandoned” — The former prison library at Ohio State Reformatory, where visitors can tour where hardened criminals once roamed and parts of The Shawshank Redemption were filmed.
2012: “Reflections” — We recently shared our first encounter with Chicago’s “Cloud Gate” sculpture — a.k.a. “the Bean” — on our 2009 foray into Chicago. This pic is from one of our many walks through the Windy City in the years since.
If you’re interested in seeing 80+ more offerings like this, you can follow along with either the “Weekly Photo Challenge” tag, or the “DPChallenge” tag that, if you travel far enough back in time, also includes some Weekly Writing Challenge essays, one (1) piece of short-story fiction, and a few photo challenges that I forgot to tag with “Weekly Photo Challenge”. Enjoy!
