With Christmas around the corner, it looks like I’m not going to get my 12 days of Yuri pairings posts out. I do this every year to share the yuri pairings from anime I watched during the year. However, it will come out during my holiday vacation. So I may just limit what I think about the pairing to 1-2 paragraphs and make it brief.
To make it up, I will focus on the year in review stuff and the plans for the future. But yes, 2023 will be a big year for obvious reasons.
As expected, 2022 was a big year for anime. Although there were a few production blunders, it bought us a lot of good shows. It does reflect in the statistics on the blog, almost matching 2021, but I’m pretty sure the page views and visitors will edge out a little when the year ends. I guess COVID restrictions starting to relax thanks to the rollout of the vaccine in the middle of last year contributed to this. However, Omicron is still a thing, although there is now a booster for that.
Another significant development is my sister finishing her Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering and eventually graduating this year. She spent a little over 8 years spending her time on her studies and now looking for a job. I expect her to find one very soon since it’s an in-demand field, but it’s a significant achievement. I simply don’t have the same ambition to spend years doing all-nighters. However, the potential payoff is enormous.
While I didn’t attend any conventions since the risk of COVID is still great. I am the minority that still wears masks and is even up to date on vaccinations. I do not want to catch Omnicron and get unlucky with Long COVID. Long COVID will ruin your life forever, and it’s best to wait until cases get low enough. There will be a time when masks aren’t needed for me, but I don’t think we are at that point when nobody talks about it anymore.
Lastly, I call it quits after 15 years of being on Twitter. While there was a slight concern that a certain someone would bring back hate speech and extremists on the platform. We know how things turned out.
With Twitter drama consuming my life, it’s detrimental to my mental health. With Elon striking three times by bringing back TFG, banning journalists because of ElonJet, and banning links to other social media before reversing it, I needed to move on. So I urged others to move from Twitter to other social media sites like Mastodon.
In fact, a few days after Elon bought Twitter, I gave Mastodon a second try. I set up my own instance for the Anime Blogging community. If you have been anime blogging for a long time, there was a site called AnimeBlogger.net, which had its own community and hosted blogs for free. Sadly, the community was shut down in the early 2010s. Just recently, they ceased operations, as in they stopped providing hosting.
Anime blogging has declined thanks to social networks like Twitter and discussion moving there. The same effect happened to internet forums. Given the recent actions by Elon with Twitter, it’s obvious the move away from blogs and internet forums is a bad idea.
My primary motivation is to create an anime-blogging-centric community with Mastodon and Xenforo for forums. For a while, people have mentioned a lack of a community for other anime bloggers to hang out. I created Sakurajima for this project, and a handful of anime bloggers and fans made accounts there. Not having to see the undesirable parts of Twitter as I went full-time on Mastodon has been a blast. Also, I’m receiving way more interaction from other people. I know some have entirely left Twitter and using Mastodon instead.
I’m still figuring out the moderation. When done, it will be right in the middle. I will only suspend servers with hate speech, no rule against it, far-right extremists, lolicon/CSAM, and rampant harassers/troll farms. I don’t want to be one of those people who get cut off from friends because of one bad actor. In most cases, I think the three-strike rule is more suitable than the shoot first and ask questions later. However, some instances that post the vilest hate speech and brush it off as nothing has chronic issues with harassing others from other instances and post lolicon/CSAM. These are the servers that deserve suspension/defederation.
With Twitter in turmoil and possibly collapsing, I used this opportunity to create an alternative to Twitter. Sure, people are reluctant to switch over to Mastodon since, in some ways, it’s different given the decentralized nature. However, with new clients and more people hopping on the platform, maybe those on the sidelines will make it over. With Tumblr adding ActivityPub, which Mastodon uses, I think Mastodon/Fediverse is the future, given that a centralized social network has one fatal flaw. Someone can buy it and run it into the ground.
As for the future, 2023 is going to be a big year. Many yuri-genre shows are airing next year. Some are second seasons of shows I covered previously. So you bet next year will be busy, although Winter will start off slow.
Also, I do plan to commission some artwork for our original character. However, I will also need to ask for modification/commercial rights. I will provide more details when I’m ready to ask for them. In addition, with the creation of the original character artwork. I want to change my blog’s name since I focus more on yuri and schoolgirl slice-of-life shows than other genres nowadays.
As for other plans, I plan to take the JLPT N2 next year when I finish WaniKani and Quartet II. After that, I might attend Otakon, but it really depends.
With that, I hope everyone has a lovely Christmas and Happy Holidays. I hope to have the 12 days of yuri pairings posted soon, along with the top 5 Anime of 2022, sometime during the last week of December.
Best of luck to you with your social media plans and as always we will keep in touch through anime coverage. Hope you enjoy the rest of the holidays.
Yes, it’s a brave new world out there, but I do plan to participate more in the blogosphere and maybe it will pick up again, but I hope you had a nice holidays.