100 Shades of Grey + Site Discussion

Had to make a reference to 50 Shades of Grey at some point.

I couldn’t find anything suitable, so I just pulled the first image I could find.

Wow, 100 posts already. I was hoping I would reach this landmark before a year was up, and it turned out I had quite a bit of time to spare. Technically, my 100th post was the Toriko review, but I was never going to make this post the actual hundredth because I wanted to surprise myself with what it would turn out to be. Since my very first post was a review of a Shonen Jump manga, having Toriko be the hundredth feels appropriate. I’ve had some great posts in these last 10-11 months, but I was never one to go on and on about that stuff. The main reason I’m writing this is because there are a few other things I felt I should bring up.

I wanted to talk about the rather unfortunate hit to my update schedule as of late. I’ve been trying to get posts up a little more regularly since exams ended a few months ago, but somehow I haven’t been able to keep up the rate I used to. This is due to a combination of things, I think. First the tests took up most of my time, then the computer and monitor issues I was having. There’s also been a number of ongoing series that have had more and more sporadic updates, like Nisekoi switching to every two weeks for some reason, so finding stuff to write about has been trickier. I know One Piece, TWGOK and Toriko have had big stuff happening in the last chapters, but they’re all currently in the “big events that will be explained later” group, so it’s hard to write about them now. Maybe next week.

Mostly, though, I think a lot of this has to do with the current time of year. I don’t talk about this much, but I used to be part of a smaller group blog. It was around this time last year that I slowly stopped blogging there, and a big part of that was getting out of school and into work. You’re in a  different state of mind when you have much stricter hours and have to deal with family and stuff, so it just sort of collapsed.

What does this mean for the site? In the long run, I don’t think it will mean anything. The other reason I stopped blogging over there was the general lack of feedback, which is not a real issue now because I know there are people who like what I have to say here. Besides, before I stopped writing the first time I was down to one post every two weeks or so, and I’m still doing better than that right now. I just need to power through and get things finished, because I do still have a lot I want to write about. Things may be slower for the next little while, but they will get better, even if I need to wait until the end of August before that happens.

There’s also one other thing I wanted to bring up, which is how the reviews have been doing. As I mentioned a while ago on Twitter, I’m putting a stop to making videos for a while. Ever since the breakup of the Desu Des Brigade, one of the only big anime video review sites out there, I haven’t had the same desire to put out videos as I used to. They take a long time to make and I wasn’t all that confident in my ability to speak on camera as it was. What’s most important, though, is that I genuinely want to make reviews more than I want to make videos. At some point I realized that my style of writing was more suited to traditional blog posts than any sort of video format, and they come out faster this way as well. Even with my current slow update schedule, the reviews I released came out more often than the video ones (which had a month or more between each).

I suppose that’s everything I wanted to mention. I’ll most likely have another milestone post in just over a month, and I don’t want to run out of stuff to discuss before then. I’d really like things to get a little more back to normal soon, because I do have a lot of fun blogging. Currently I’m working on a rather different post for a series I finished, but for various reasons feel like I shouldn’t review in full just yet. Here’s a little preview: