I’ll be frank, as much as I enjoy writing this blog and talking about new anime, I am slowing down significantly since I started in 2009. I used to average one or two posts a week, sometimes more on shows I like. Now I average one or two a month, the past two or three seasons, barely five or six posts for the whole season. I know a lot of this is real life, holding down a career and a home leaves me with little time to watch and write during the week, and on the weekends, I am just lazy as shit.
I’ve been exploring video formats for a number of years. The only guy I probably watched the most was Yahtzee’s Zero Punctuation. I’ve never paid much attention to Youtubers and other content creators until the Gamergate fiasco in video gaming. I started watching more Let’s Play videos, more Youtubers like TotalBiscuit, and other video series on non-gaming topics. I haven’t investigated many anime-centric channels because when it comes to anime, let’s face it, a lot of people either focus on the cream-of-the-crop from Crunchyroll, or titles of the past pre-2005. When I say cream-of-the-crop, what I typically mean is two or three extremely popular titles that enter the mainstream, like Sword Art Online. I don’t want to say I am a pretentious hipster, but I don’t always see eye-to-eye on shows popular audiences latch on to, and thus I end up more on the bottom of the pile in the anime blogging universe. Combined with how I do zero advertising, zero pimping my shit out, and zero networking with other bloggers that aren’t from the European Union or nearby, it seems, I’m not ANN-tier material. Thing is, I don’t want to be ANN-tier material. I enjoy covering a myriad of shows a season, and letting you, the person reading and watching, to determine what you like. The old joke on places like /a/, /r/anime, MAL, and other sites, is that “You have shit taste” and I imagine I do. I am watching the shit out of Symphogear this season, and yet I doubt many others are because it’s “seiyuushit” or “overhyped SELL ALL THE MUSICS” and such. That’s fine. I am not going to write pretending that this show is the shit, and if you don’t like it you are a fucking retard and should piss off. If you don’t like it, tell me I have shit taste in the comments, I’ll laugh, and go to work and tell the next person to call in with a printer issue to set it on fire. Everyone wins. Except the printer, but they don’t have souls.
But anyway, I have been exploring video for years, and watching these people make videos has been slowly getting me to wanting to make videos. Right now, I have a few dozen videos up of long-form Twitch streams of games, but they’re long, and without any hits of any kind. I need to edit down, make them hit, and make them count. Eventually, I want to make a video format of this blog. I don’t want to stop writing, because I prefer the written format, but I’d like to try to do more video content in-between the First Looks and the Reviews to fill the weeks in-between, maybe something more Mystery Science Theater-like to poke some fun, or scroll through Twitter comments. Something.
So I may be doing some field testing in the coming weeks to explore these ends. I’ll post it on Twitter for perusal. Let me know if it works, or if it does not work, or you have PROTIPS for how to do it better, because honestly my last experience with a camera was high school videography, and remind me to copy that VHS to Youtube some day, because it was the worst thing ever made.
