Thinking About Otastorian in the Big 2026

meirl:

It turns out I had way, way more thoughts about my Twitter getting nuked then I originally thought. 

At some point I had come up with this nice, neat, categorized idea of how I wanted to post things across the different sites I "lived" on; short, simple posts went on Twitter, and long, complex posts went on The Blog. I can't remember exactly when I had this idea, but it's been my framework for years at this point. And it really worked. Some thoughts I had after binging ten episodes of Zeta Gundam? Twitter. A big long retrospective on the history of late night anime? The Blog. Yapping about funny Comiket cosplays? Twitter. A discussion on the imminent death of Akihabara? The Blog. Simple and clean. It let The Blog have this vibe of being "polished," since everything on it was completed projects. Not only that, but Twitter was also a great place to do a basic version of the research I'd like to do. Japan has a humongous Twitter user population, so it was a great place to hear and see the latest and greatest (and worst) of what was happening in the Japanese side of the community. An obvious example was seeing what was going down on the ground level of Comiket every summer and winter. But another even better example was the passing of Taku-Hachiro. I don't think I ever would have heard about him and all the various opinions different people had on his impact on otaku culture if I hadn't seen people talking about his death on Twitter. Of course, everyone thinks of Twitter as an absolute landfill of scum and villainy (and it is, don't get me wrong), but it was a really useful tool for me for keeping track of otaku culture around the world. 

AND THEN MY ACCOUNT GOT NUKED.

twitter to me:

In retrospect, this categorical "X goes Here, Y goes There" system is probably why I ended up not doing anything with some of the old ideas I had like doing short reviews of mecha designs and doujin music. And it's why the whole "Summer of Posts" has been a total wash as well. Mentally, it feels like I'd be cluttering up the blog with "low effort" posts. Even way back in Update 3 in 2020, I pitched the idea of doing more anime reviews as low-effort filler in-between my high-effort heavyweight otaku culture posts. But from the very beginning I included the staff breakdowns in my anime reviews, which made me feel I could justify calling them "retrospectives" instead of "reviews"; even though they were supposed to be low-effort, I didn't want them to feel too low-effort. Even back then, I had come to like the idea of the blog having a "polished" aesthetic. Of course, I never got into a consistent posting schedule on here, so instead of low-effort filler in-between my high effort posts, I have big empty gaps in-between the low-effort and high-effort posts alike! But for the most part I was OK with that while I had Twitter. As long as my Twitter was alive, and I was regularly talking about what I was working on, I felt it was OK for the blog to be mostly empty. That all really changed when the first OldTweetdeck ban wave happened last year. I probably should have really considered all this then, because even after we all got unbanned, my Twitter usage plummeted like a rock. It was effectively as barren as The Blog was. 

So here we are, some months after my account was banned again, this time probably for real. And even though I said I would, I'm having a hard time justifying trying to build a new Twitter account up. In-between me saying I would ban evade and now, I actually made a new personal Twitter to replace my old one. Things were going good for a couple of weeks, but now that account is locked behind a verification loop. So I'll most likely need to create a third personal Twitter account. That all being said, I think for Otastorian, I'm going to have to hop on Twitter again. I have a personal Bluesky that I've been using to check out that site, and while there's not a lot really wrong with it on my end, it's missing the worldwide otaku culture mix that really made Twitter interesting and useful for me. It's a really frustrating feeling though. It really does feel like nothing nice lasts forever; I went from old forums and LiveJournal and watched those places die slow, horrible deaths, to social media, which I'm now watching becoming truly miserable to use because of AI, ragebait, vibecoding, and the never ending crocodile tears-drowned plea to tHINk of ThE chILDreN as user privacy is flushed down the toilet.

Anyways, this was supposed to be "Thinking About Otastorian in the Big 2026", not "A Requiem for Social Media in the Big 2026", and the point of me writing all this is to say that after I made that whole to do about the "Summer of Posts," I found myself once again running up against that wall of feeling that this idea will make The Blog even more low-effort than before, and hurt that "polished" aesthetic I've enjoyed up until now. At the same time though, I'm asking myself if it's just better to have all of my thoughts and material on my own site just in-case these other social media platforms ban me or simply go under. After all, I sure wish right now that I could read all of the different plans I've had for the blog over the years, but now they've all been sent to the Shadow Realm. It's kind of a frustrating back-and-forth; I think the idea of these posts being shorter and lower-effort to get myself back into the rhythm of writing and posting is good for my development, but I also like the idea of the blog being this clean collection of a bunch of finalized projects. These are two bloggers I really like and respect equally, but for a while now I've wanted my blog to look more like Animétudes and less like Ogiue Maniax.

But now I'm wondering if that's still the way I want my blog to look. After all, if you check out the new Otatsorian website design, it looks way more look Ogiue Maniax than Animétudes. I love the idea of the big retrospectives and series, but I also find myself wanting to make them even better than I had been before. Better research, better writing. Which would mean the gaps between posts would be just as big as they now. I think I want my research posts to be more "serious" and "academic," but I don't necessarily want the whole blog to be like that. I really want to have the "low-effort" gap-filler if for no other reason than to make the archive look less barren and sad, but should that come at the cost of the "polished" aesthetic? Must it come at that cost? Is it time to evolve the aesthetic of The Blog to fit a more diverse writing repertoire? Should I move back towards more casual explanation and away from heavier research to decrease the time needed on each post? Or maybe I shouldn't change anything, and if I do, in a couple of years I'll wish I hadn't? There's a lot of questions and ideas bouncing around in my head right now, and it's kind of hard to restructure my idea of what exactly I want the blog to look like when my idea didn't really need to change for eight years. 

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Ok. So despite the fact that the summer is over halfway over, the "Summer of Posts" concept is not truly dead yet. I'm going to aim to have this idea re-worked and the structure of the blog re-organized for the Fall (so late August/early September). In between then, I have a couple of posts that I want to make that I feel fit fine into the old "X goes Here, Y goes There" system, if for no other reason than they are topics that I have a lot of thoughts on. So look forward to those. Sorry that that's the most concrete thing I'm leaving you with, but my hope is that what comes after will more than make up for the weeks (and years) of dead air. 

I have no idea how to end this.

Oh. I posted this on my Twitter awhile back, and now it needs somewhere to live. So I'm putting it here.

I originally started writing this on July 13th. Good lord. But hey, funnily enough, this is the third straight month that I've posted something on here! So the Summer of Posts isn't a complete failure after all.