Irresistibly Fish has moved…

All good things come to an end. Well, that’s not really true, but some of them sometimes have to change their address [like me and tbV for example- anyone know of a two to three bedroom place to rent in Cape Town in a somewhat diverse neighbourhood for not bank-killing amounts?]

But something i have been wanting to do for a LONG time and have eventually got round to doing is moving from a blog to a website to hopefully be able to do a whole bunch more stuff. And so from today, Irresistibly Fish will no longer hang out here but has moved to Brettfish.co.za and we very much hope that you will join it.

i am hoping the move and change of location will also give space and opportunity for the blog and site to be even better than it’s ever been so tell your friends and come along and sign up for blog updates and check it out and let me know what you think.

For all of you who have spent days, weeks and even years hanging out on here, commenting, challenging, sharing, celebrating and confounding, the hugest of THANK YOUS but i hope you will continue this adventure with us…

[For a look at the new Brettfish website and blog, click here]

Ten Great posts from 2015

The other day i posted the top 5 blogs of this past year in terms of the amount of eyes they got on them. This doesn’t necessarily mean they were the best five blog posts of the year, but they definitely resonated with more people. But i have some favourites outside of them as well and possibly the post i wrote about Deep Dive Conversations just the other day is one of my personal favourites.

But i decided to look back over the year and compile a list of my own

Happy 5 Year Anniversary

This is the picture of the exact mug i have.

KHANNNNNNNNNN!!!!!

Yes. A Boob cake.

So HAPPY 5 YEARS BLOG POSTING ANNIVERSARY…

To me… and more specifically, Irresistibly Fish…

For those of you who have journeyed with me for some or most of that time, thank you. As much as this is the online diary of my general musings, it has also been a place where i have hoped to challenge and wrestle and encourage and entertain others and every time you show up and read and especially when you engage through commenting or sharing pieces you particularly like it starts to feel like a community is growing.

The ultimate aim of having this blog is as stated in my tagline – Chewing the marrow out of life – you know the hard to reach but completely tasty bits – life to the absolute fullest in terms of God and Relationships and Humour and just general life and being people who Love well – i hope that you have experienced that over the years and will continue to.

LOOKING BACK

Without a doubt the two sections i enjoy most on this blog [and which have seemed to have the highest popularity again and again] are:

Taboo Topics – This has been a place to mostly invite people to share their stories on topics rarely spoken about both in church and often in general life. Particularly some harder experiences [like losing a baby, infertility, being a parent of a child when it’s not been that easy and even singleness for some people] but also areas such as Adoption and Race which are not bad things in themselves, but which may have painful aspects linked to them. So many incredible stories and it has been so great to see the encouragement this has often been to people who might be going through the same thing but have not had a safe place to share their stories.

Relationships – From Single to Dating to Married as well as other aspects of relationship such as Mixed Race or Culture and of course Sex, these have been posts that have obviously related to so many different people in a variety of different ways and again it has largely been through inviting people to share their stories and things they have learnt along the way that have tended to be the most helpful.

In the Fun section, it is the Pearls before Swine strips that i share from time to time [my favourite comic strip by Stephan Pastis] and the absolutely ridiculous Dangerous Things You Can Least Expect videos my alter ego, brad Fish, puts out from time to time, that deserve special mention, although hands down my absolute funnest [to me] picture that i possess is this one of Cloud Man which makes me literally outloud laugh [or at least nose-snort] every single time:

AND THE WINNER GOES TO…

Okay, so there is no winner – hopefully different posts resonate with different people and i really love it when people engage with posts and some great conversation happens in the comments section, which often leads to follow-up posts and inspiration for series and so on.

But there are posts which have proved popular than others and after 5 years of blogging, according to the WordPress stats, the Top 10 blogs in order of views are the following:

[1o] How much Sex in Marriage? [2500 views]

[9] Taboo Topics: Sex Before Marriage [Intro] [2673 views]

[8] Taboo Topics: Living with Disabilities – Meet Uel Maree [Spinal Cord Injury – Unfortunate diving accident] [2950 views]

[7] Taboo Topics: Sex in Marriage [Intro] [3143 views]

[6] Married People [and how to maybe do it even better] [3462 views]

[5] i kissed dating: the parts [4049 views]

[4]  Marriage through the years… part Intro [4424 views]

[3] How to raise your children as world changers: Meet Nigel and Trish Branken and their family [4770 views]

[2] How to save a marriage [before you need to] – the parts [4838 views]

So you guys are all about Sex and Marriage for the most part it seems?

Although in 5 years of blogging the absolute number one most visited, shared and popular post has been:

[1] Taboo Topics: Singleness [Intro] [5057 views]

i wonder what this list will look like five years from now as the blog continues to gain more traction and as our base of subscribers grows – i hope we will move to a time when this feels  a lot more like a community of friends and travellers trying to do the best thing with this life thing that we can.

i really do want to thank all of you who made it down this far and are a part of the community – every time you like and share and comment it ups the chances of an article or series being seen by more people and hopefully encouraging, challenging, humouring and more the people who you really care about.

MY FIVE YEAR ANNIVERSARY PRESENT

If there is something you can give me as a gift for this moment of celebrating five years, i would like to ask you for a SHARE. If there was a post on the top ten popular posts that particularly resonated with you then please stick it on your Facebook, Pinterest or Google + page or Twitterer it to all your followers. If there was a particular Taboo Topic that you found meaningful, then post that link and tag the people you think it will encourage. And if there was a relationship post or series, then stick a link on the page of three or four people you think might appreciate it. If you’re just here cos you’re a Brad Fish fan then choose your favourite ‘Dangerous Things You Can Least Expect’ video [which is probably this one!] and post it on your page and tag your friends who appreciate ridiculous to check it out.

Otherwise SUBSCRIBE to the blog and have each post link emailed to you directly, so you can choose which posts to check out and which to leave.

With 300 plus subscribers at the moment, if each one of you shared a post or series in your social media field, it would invite a lot of new people to come and check this out.

Finally… you might be wondering, why ‘Irresistibly Fish’?

Well FISH which has been my nickname since 1993 [i’m THAT old!] stands for Faithful In Serving Him [which is something i really do try to do with my life]

The ‘Him’ in there is Jesus. God. The One who gives my life meaning and fills me with the capacity to Love [which, yes, i can and need to do a whole lot better]

I try to live my life for Him and believe that it is the best way to really experience life to it’s absolute full. It is not always easy or straightforward. But it is always good. Even when it doesn’t seem to be.

That’s my experience anyways.

Happy 5 years to me. I hope you’ll be around for the next 5… and bring your friends! 

marvin the marshoes

If you send me one of these you will be much loved.

Make Mash, not Porn. [the end of a very short era]

This is most of my latest and last post on my second blog: The Weekly Mash [and Peace!] just FYI for readers of Irresistibly Fish…

I have decided to retire ‘The Weekly Mash [and Peace!] blog after 14 good weeks.

With the pace of life at the moment the pressure to produce 5 specifically themed blog posts as well as what I passionately want to write has at times felt a little overwhelming and I hate producing sub par stuff. So I am wanting to put more time, energy and focus into my main blog, Irresistibly Fish and so encourage you if you are a subscriber of the Mash to head across there and subscribe to that.

In the meantime, if you are looking for something to read today, in terms of looking back over the 14 weeks of ‘The Weekly Mash [and Peace!]’ the top blog that stands out for each day would be:

By far and away Cloud man for Monday – I am glad so many of you enjoyed this with me… gets me every time…

For Tuesdays it was surprisingly celebrity marriage advice [there you go again on the relationships!] with Ben Affleck and Will Smith.

No surprises that for Wednesday it was wife with nail in her head which sounds horrible but is just such a powerful thought-provoking piece that you have to watch and share if you have not seen it yet. Incredible and so hard to explain in a way that would make anyone want to watch it. But do it!

Thursday the top-rated post was the one I did titled John Piper and the three little pigs, but the one I want to put here is yesterday’s post ‘Time to let the church die’ as it hasn’t had the time to be read as much but no doubt will – an excellent article and an excellent video clip giving some strong prophetic voice to the church and the gospel message.

And lastly, Friday being my day, well interestingly enough ‘Blessed are the Geeks’ was the most viewed post for that day and it was all about the labels we put on people and so a really good read.

And then I also posted the three most popular posts on Irresistibly Fish that I would want you to read for people on The Weekly Mash [and Peace!] who may not have seen them:

For those of you who are single [but also those of you who are married – it is excellent for you to hear this stuff!] these stories by some good friends of mine on their journey as single people [desiring not to be] has been such powerful reading and very popular – read and share away cos this is encouraging stuff.

I also did a Taboo Topic [rarely spoken about topics, in church and elsewhere] on Parenting young children when it’s not particularly been easy and this post by my friend Candi for some reason just blew up – people resonated with it, it got a gazillion shares and she has been invited to write and speak in places because of it which has been so exciting for me to watch. Read this one and also the one by Steve Wiens which got a lot of airplay and share it if you haven’t because you have friends with young children who desperately need to read these.

Thirdly, largely due to a comment and link I posted on this excellent blog post, ‘How I know my wife married the wrong person’ by Tyler Mackenzie, which became a four part [and growing] series, there was the series I ran a while back called How to save a marriage [before you need to] in which I invited something like 18 of my friends who are in strong marriages to share one or two things that for them are the foundation for a strong marriage.

Seems like relationships are what a lot of my readers are interested in but one non-relationship one [well not people with people] that I would like to recommend is the series called ‘Aslan Jesus’ that I have just started which is looking at aspects of Jesus that show that He is good, but definitely not tame. I am very excited about writing [and seeing written – have some guest posts coming in] this series.

Thanks for being part of this experimental journey. And please come on over to Irresistibly Fish if you are not already there. There will continue to be humour and news-related posts, relationship advice and stories as well as spiritual hunger pieces and every day will in a sense be my day. As for this blog it is not going to be vaporised and so you can continue to catch up on old posts by using the day tabs at the top of the page which are archives for the whole journey.

And as a going away present, if you feel up to sharing this post, then it will give access to a lot of great blog posts to your friends and fellow ‘Farmville II’ players on Facebook.

Saturday Round Up: The week that was: Episode 6: of being Matrixed, bone marrow matches, heartfelt apologies and a boy with tape on his face.

so my new ‘The Weekly Mash [and Peace!]‘ blog is still in its early days but it’s been encouraging to see new people subscribing almost daily – as it is still quite new though not a lot of people are visiting each of these posts and there have been some amazing things there, so if you are someone who reads stuff on Irresistibly Fish [my main blog] all the time, then i encourage you to at the very least pick one of the five days here below that sounds the most interesting and check it out cos there was some good stuff in the week that was:

Monday had two clips of people i find quite funny – Nina Conti and her audience participation ventriloquism act and The Boy with Tape on His Face

Tuesday continued my quest to find positive upbuilding news and this story of a college athlete willing to give up his career to save a life, caught my attention big time.

A look at how a heart-felt apology needs to go way beyond just saying the word, ‘Sorry’.

Thursday took a look at how Jesus felt about a man who more than likely was not going to buy into His message. And our response.

Friday is a post I hope everyone will take a look at – the question of what positive difference are you making to the world, really?

[For Last Saturday’s Round-up of posts which included a box full of balls and a stranger, the importance of not glorifying ‘Busy’ and the chance to Ship Your pants, click here]

Saturday Round Up: The week that was: Episode 4: of Geeks & Wild Animals Eating Habits, a woman made of iron & a lot of mirrors

so recently i started another blog called ‘The Weekly Mash [and Peace!]’ which has a different theme for every day and i have decided that i am going to post the Saturday Round Up on my Irresistibly Fish blog so that subscribers can have access to the week that we have just vibed through… so if you missed any of these, pick the ones that look interesting, and enjoy… [the FRIDAY one feels like one of the most significant things i have written for a while so would love for you to at least check that one out if you haven’t and share it with your peoples]…

Monday saw us being enlightened as to the amusing eating habits of a variety of wild animals, performed by a rather silly man.

Tuesday took a look at the death of Margaret Thatcher and some of the unfortunate happenings related to that.

Wednesday asked the question of how your relationship with yourself is doing at the moment.

Thursday was some more self-reflection, but this time linked to the state of your heart, and God’s.

Friday took a rather cutting look at the labels we put on other people and what that might say to them, and to us. [MUST READ!]

[for Last Saturday’s Round Up featuring celebrity marriage tips, angry umbrellas and Cloud Man, click here]

2012 in review – the blog stats… some interesting fun facts…

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 34,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 8 Film Festivals

Click here to see the complete report.