In June 2009, I wrote my first post for this blog.
It’s hard to believe that fifteen years have passed. When I started writing this blog there were a lot of anime bloggers out there. A few are still going, but most that I was familiar with have stopped blogging.
I’ve been writing this blog for so long that I’ve outlived some of Blogger’s features like Feedburner. If you were around then, you might remember the little counter in the right-hand column. At some point Feedburner glitched on my dashboard and disappeared and I figured they were out of business. (I just looked them up and actually they are still in business... but this blog now supposedly has a built-in feed so I probably won’t reactivate Feedburner, if I even could again for this blog.)
The industry and the people who write about it keep changing. This is normal. This blog had a slowdown in 2015-18 when I posted infrequently and thought about just stopping, until I decided otherwise and started posting regularly again.
My involvement in anime has been as a fan and also a translation rewriter and editor for a lot of years now. Like most interests, mine has waxed and waned and gone through many stages. It’s not the 110% obsession it once was, but it’s pretty strong once again.
I think when Boruto went on hiatus in early 2023, it threw me for a loop. For months I didn’t even log in to Crunchyroll to watch anything. It wasn’t that Boruto was such a gigantic favorite of mine; it was more that it continued the feel of the Naruto universe and my fandom was hooked into shounen story universes in general. So when it went on hiatus, I just took a little break from anime simulcasts altogether.
This year I really got back into watching simulcasts again, and now I look forward to each new anime season to see what there is to watch.
For me, watching the finale of Attack on Titan last year also felt like an ending of some kind. It was like the era of shounen series I used to watch such as AoT and Naruto/Boruto was over and now something new would have to show up.
Other shounen series I loved ended years ago. Gintama is a prime example. Something like Kaiju No. 8, as good and as fun as it is, can’t compare to a multi-layered complex story universe like Gintama’s universe.
One can’t expect a gem like Gintama to come along every day, of course. And I don’t keep up with all of the series that are out there. I could be missing something special.
Regardless, I’m still a happy anime fan these days. I don’t know that I have another 15 years of this blog left in me (lol) - but I’ll be here a while yet.
If you’re somewhat new to this blog, I’ve written a few posts about Neo-Shonen Fujoshi over the years. If you’re interested, here are some of them.
Nine Years Later
Ten Years Later
The Story of This Blog
