Update 5: Enough For A Sentai
It's still really hot down in here in south-midwest USA. First day of fall was five days ago but I'm still sweating like a dog everyday when I go to work. It's exhausting, and I'm sure the only moment I'll start to miss it will be when this city undergoes its yearly transformation into a frozen wasteland. This doesn't really have to much to do with my blog, but I figured I'd start with something other than the regular "Hey! Sorry for not posting in a while!" bit. I actually looked at my post calendar last week and realized I actually haven't posted anything here all year, and if you don't count the update posts, it's been almost a year and seven months since I've last cracked my knuckles on a new post. This blog is no stranger to long unannounced hiatuses, but I'm pretty sure that's an all time record, update posts or not. I'd love to say that I'll regularly be much more active on here in the coming months, but I have enough hindsight to avoid makign promises about blogging consistency.
Is what I would say if this next paragraph wasn't me just announcing my blogging plans for the next few months.
So September is literally a couple days from being over, so obviously aside from this update, there won't be any new posts for this month. October really won't be back to the regularly scheduled stuff, but I do have plans for some small scale, simple reviews. I mentioned this in my last update post last year, but I want to try writing in other formats on other topics besides the long-form research heavy posts I normally do for anime and otaku culture. So one will be a music review of MOSAIC.WAV's 2009 album Superluminal Akiba-Pop, and the other will be an expansion of the mechanical design review I did on Mobile Suit Gundam back in 2021, this time on one of my favorite anime series, Mobile Police Patlabor. Following that in November, it'll be back to the books with an anime retrospective on Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam (seriously actually for real this time) and a book review on Mizuko Ito, Daisuke Okabe, and Izumi Tsuji's academic anthology Fandom Unbound: Otaku Culture in a Connected World (also seriously actually for real this time). Finishing out the year in December I want to have a whopping FOUR posts done; an otaku culture concepts explained post (first one in a hot, hot minute) on maid cafes, a book review on Patrick W. Galbraith's Debating Otaku in Contemporary Japan, an anime retrospective on Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ, and a final anime retrospective with the 1988 film Mobile Suit Gundam: Char's Counterattack. Really the main goals are the finish retrospecting all of the main U.C. Gundam anime and getting that review of Fandom Unbound done. Everything else is just re-up and keep sharp my writing chops.
Everything after that writing wise is a big question mark after December though. Assuming I can follow through and these (relative to my normal output) lofty goals, it'll probably be back to the usual months of silence afterwards. I'll be heading back to school after [x] amount of semesters off for, god-willing, the last time. I won't be taking a ton of classes at a time since I work fulltime, but a lot of the free-time I've allotted for writing and watching anime will need to go to studying and classes. I still want to write at least a few posts a year, but yeah, Winter of 2023 will be the weird standout.
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| What in the light mode...... |
Winter of 2023 will also mark the end of my time writing on this website. The name Otastorian and the website Otaku History Guy will live on, but this version of the site will fall dormant for the maybe-forever future. I mentioned this in my last update post as well, but I've been working on moving Otastorian to its own domain powered by Wordpress, free from the weird shackles of my aging Blogger theme. Originally when I wrote that I figured I was more or less done designing the new site, but a combination of the theme I was using both having weird design quirks that I couldn't easily change and bloated code base that made browsing slow pushed me towards learning web design on my own. The new theme I wrote keeps the design elements I really liked from the old version while being much quicker to browse and navigate. Truth be told this process of learning web design is the main reason I've written so little this year. There sit many broken prototypes sitting in my recycle bin, cursed to ever stay literally unusable. But somehow out of the sweat, tears, and error messages came an actually usable site. I'm very happy about it. I'm still doing stress tests and bug fixes on it at the moment, so no link yet, but the plan is to start linking to it on places like Twitter and YouTube starting in December.
And that's really all it is for right now. Not too much exciting, but I figured I'd write up something to make it clear that I'm not dead and that this ship is still sailing. Look forward to the fun stuff coming soon.
[Editor's Corner] So as I was doing my spellcheck pass and adding images, the Blogger editor crashed twice. Not a huge deal since it auto-saves, but man, going from doing nothing but using WordPress for months to immediately having random problems with Blogger on my first day using it again.... man, I love this site and the history I've built up with it, but the new WP site really be off to bigger and better things. [Editing pass finished at 03:05PM, 09/28/2023]
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