Update 4: The End of 2022 and Beyond

It's been a long time once again! It's been a wild year, and a lot has happened since my last article eight months ago. First of all, I want to thank everyone who enjoyed and shared the Di Gi Charat and Otaku Encyclopedia posts over this past year. They are both approaching being the most read posts on the site, over the previous reigning champions, the Late Night Anime post and the Doujinshi history post! With those two posts, I've felt I've taken a massive leap towards finding my authorial voice. I'd like to think that my writing style has gotten more readable and interesting, but the much bigger improvement has been in styling. Back in 2021, I had a friend tell me that my posts were well-written but hard to read due to text density. I decided I would try to style my posts to fix that problem, and I feel like the result has been more visually interesting and less bulky scripts. So I'd like to continue working on improving my actual writing ability from here on out. That of course means finding better word choices, improving sentence structure, and exploring different structural techniques, but I'd also like to work on my typing skills. In spite of how long I've been blogging on the internet, I never learned to touch-type. If nothing else, learning touch-typing would help me cut down the time I spend fixing typos in the editing stage.

As for upcoming posts, originally i wanted to finish all four of the original Universal Century Gundam anime this year. That's First Gundam (which I did, yay!), Zeta Gundam, Gundam ZZ, and Char's Counterattack. And while I'd love to say that I have the hustle and muscle to finish Zeta, ZZ, and CC in a month and a half, the reality is that the way my life and workflow goes means that its just not going to happen. So right now the plan is to publish my Zeta Gundam retrospective in December as the final post of the year, and then do a Gundam ZZ and Char's Counterattack double-header in January to wring in the new year. The last time I did a double header was for my Cardcaptor Sakura Movie 1 and 2 retrospective, and my writing has gotten a lot more dense since then. So it'll more than likely be a double-header in spirit rather than in actuality.

So once the original UC Gundam retrospectives are done, I'll start rolling out on other retrospectives and research projects. For February I'll be starting another mini-marathon, this time for the original Futari wa PreCure anime. This'll cover four entries, similar to the UC Gundam marathon; Futari wa PreCure, PreCure Max Heart, and the two PreCure Max Heart movies. Unlike UC Gundam and Cardcaptor Sakura, I won't be doing these all one after another. In-between Futari wa and Max Heart, I will be doing a book retrospective for Fandom Unbound: Otaku Culture in a Connected World edited by Mizuko Ito, Daisuke Okabe, and Izumi Tsuji. This will be a follow-up in the same style as the Otaku Encyclopedia retrospective. Then, between Max Heart and the (inevitable) Max Heart movie 1 and 2 double-header, I'll finally be doing my maid cafe history report. I actually talked about this on Twitter not that long after the doujinshi report two (almost three) years ago. That's as far as I have planned right now, so in June or July I'll setup my next series of posts.

In August 2023 I'll be going to back to school, so my free time to write about otaku history will be in flux. I guess it's not too big of a deal considering that, at the time of this writing, I've maxed out at five posts per year. But whenever that new life schedule is finalized, I'll post here about how that will affect my (hopefully at that point) monthly blogging adventures. In between the big long projects, I've been thinking about what I could do for smaller bit-sized articles. Lately I've been enjoying reading Kayo Kyoku Plus here on Blogger, a fascinating resource to have alongside my descent into showa idol hell. Now obviously I wouldn't want to step on his turf, and my blog is more focused on 2000s+ otaku culture than 70s/80s showa culture anyways. But writing about the fun music I get from doujin events, second-hand stores, and YouTube recommendations could be a fun exercise! Additionally, I could write small opinion pieces on different mecha and ships that have been designed in anime over the years. I dabbled with this a little bit when I included a section on mechanical design in the First Gundam article, but this could go further (and shorter) into its own little corner. There are other possibilities, but music and mechanical design are the two that I have the most interest and knowledge on. These might get posted every other week or so, but I haven't finalized a schedule or concept yet. The most important thing really is giving myself more opportunities to write, improving my skills and keeping my mental pen sharp.

And on writing, I do have an interesting announcement to make. So I've been a blogger user for about 7 years now when all of my little spots are added up. And while this place has been a home and a convenience, I'm starting to develop needs and wants that are outgrowing the scope of the platform. At least for someone like me who can't code and doesn't really want to go down that rabbit hole right now. Ultimately the biggest thing is the site design. I love the way the Soho theme looks, but there are parts of it that are breaking or just don't work. The side menu isn't stickied to the page. The recommended posts at the bottom of the articles aren't properly scaled for desktop. And customizing things like menu and layout are not easy for the tech-unsavvy. Ultimately these things are fixable, but they require time, money, and effort. But I'm impatient, broke, and lazy, so instead of learning to fix these problems, I'm thinking it might be time to move on to something bigger, better, and shinier!

On the right is my current blog site hosted on Blogger. On the left is my work-in-progress, currently locally hosted blog mockup using Wordpress. For a long time Wordpress has been the highest recommended blogging platform, hosting other sites I read like RocketNews24 and Sakuga Blog. I hadn't really given it a serious look since I was pretty happy on Blogger, but when the aforementioned problems started bothering me, I started toying around with it. Honestly? I've been able to build the blog of my dreams. Originally I was using the GeneratePress theme, since it was highly recommended for being lightweight. But that's really a power-users theme, being even harder to work with and customize than Blogger. But once I switched to the OceanWP theme with Elementor page builder, everything worked like a dream. All of the features I needed or wanted are there, and then some. I build a wall of old-school Neocities-esque buttons on my footer, a scrolling message on my side mounted header (which is stickied!), and fun icons on the menu. I achieved my most desired customization of all, making the blog background a super darkened image of Kagami peering over the classic Windows XP background. It's so subtle that many readers may not even realize it's there. I couldn't figure out how set it like this on Wordpress when I had the idea about a year ago, but now the dream is achieved. It's great. 10 outta 10. Now having said all that, I actually don't know when this version of the blog is going to go live. Obviously I need to move all my Blogger posts over, and I think I'll go ahead and re-style all my old stuff while I'm doing that. There's also the issue of finding a host and signing up for a proper .com domain name, both of which will cost me money. I'm thinking that maybe I'll make the switch this time next year, but we'll see how that goes. Either way, I'll be posting about the change well in advance, and "otakuhistoryguy.blogspot.com" will auto-redirect to the new blog so no one gets lost.

The push for the new blog redesign was strongly spurred by the calamity happening on Twitter right now. For as long as I've been running the Otastorian project, Twitter was really my main platform even over Blogger. But a great exodus is over the horizon. A lot of the users I follow have already setup backup/new main accounts on other sites like Mastodon and cohost!. Unfortunately that's mostly just the English speaking users I follow. I have no idea where all the Japanese users I follow are going. News sites like Animate Times, Mantanweb, and Akibablog have their own websites, and some others have their own YouTube channels, Instagrams, and Pixiv accounts. But where will all the Comiket attendees live post at. Where are all the animators and mangaka who currently only have Twitter be posting? Twitter was so convenient because it gathered so many different communities and voices in one place. Everyone everywhere in the same place all at once. And that's being broken apart now. The link between communities and people is being shattered, and ultimately as much as people are touting Mastodon as the new place to be, it is not a replacement for what Twitter was for me. The most ideal outcome for this is that Musk stops being a dickhead, quits running the place into the ground, runs back all the godawful decisions he's made, and all this prepwork I'm doing to make sure I know where everyone is was for nothing more than a backup plan. But I'm honestly not expecting that to be the case. Right now I don't have a Mastodon account setup, but once I do I'll post about it. In the mean time I'll mostly be focusing on where I can keep up with the minute to minute happenings of Comiket 101 next month.

But for right now, that is everything I have to say! Thank you for reading, and I hope you are looking forward to new projects and ramblings I have coming down the pipeline. Once again, to those of you who have made this year one of the most popular in the blogs history, thank you!