And This Is The Result Of Me Getting In My Own Head (12/4/2019)

So. My day was basically miserable.

Relax, I’m fine. It wasn’t an emotion thing. Though I did spend the majority of my workday pretty annoyed. But I suspect that did go hand-in-hand with what I was dealing with. Because of how sucky yesterday was, and the large amount of time I spent in bed, I didn’t get any sleep, last night. Like… zero. None. At all. So I was basically running on fumes, all day.

I’m pro’lly going to bed right after this. But I did do a little thinking while I was busy trying to distract myself from how much I loathe my job. Nothing particularly related to yesterday’s pitfalls, mind you. Just any random thoughts I could muster that were more interesting than what I was having to physically do. It was relatively productive. I got some good ideas about PROJECT ACADEMIA. But the thing I think I thought about the most was my anime reviews. Put simply, I believe I just need to rethink my approach. Because the way I’m handling them, currently, just… isn’t that engaging to me. And it’s getting to the point where even watching the episodes is starting to feel like a chore. Because I know I’m doing it to write about later and the deadlines are just not helping my already Mariana Trench levels of motivation.

Some perspective. Way back when I first started doing reviews, I wasn’t really doing it with critical analysis. I was just entertainingly poking fun at things I enjoyed… or didn’t. Usually in a video format. I enjoy critical analysis, but I wanna do it in a fun way, not some standardized way that’s ultimately just saying “this is good” and “this is bad.” I’ve already talked about how stories just… do no have personal effects on me. They don’t. So if I’m going to talk about a thing, I want to highlight and focus on the element that actually interests me – storytelling mechanics. And the reviews we’ve been doing on the main site just aren’t letting me do that enough. It’s not keeping my stimulated and I feel nothing from getting them posted other than a brief moment’s relief that I did it at all, despite my current mental state. That’s not a place I wanna be.

So I think I’m going to just stop with the weekly, seasonal reviews and start watching anime for me again, then start making content that I want to make. It’ll take longer. A lot longer. And it’ll require a lot more engagement with and from my base. But I don’t want to be in a position where all I feel is apathy about a medium and profession I love so much. Put simply, I want to make the kind of content I enjoy. Like Bulletoon, which can be a colossal pain in the process it takes to get it made, but usually feels pretty good when I finally hit that upload button. Content I can be proud of. I think it’ll ultimately work out better for me than trying to game the system with pure numbers and output, resulting in burnout and lethargy.

That being said, I’m not likely going to be continuing weekly coverage of My Hero Academia or Bokuben on the main site. Maybe I could try some sort of collaborative chat format. I do like that sort of casual, conversational format of weekly review. We obviously parody it in Anime TKO. And I’ll likely still be doing that next season just because Bob and I have so much fun writing it. Maybe I’ll try reaching out to some folks, see if they wanna try that (though not necessarily for those two shows, in particular, unless they specifically want to). But otherwise, I’m not entirely certain what the format is that I’m going to be taking with this. Bulletoon is obviously one such thing. So perhaps I’ll just focus my efforts more on that and let Bob handle burst reviews? Or maybe an occasional feature, by myself. I do want to keep doing retrospectives because I’ve generally liked those – especially the last few I wrote (Shameless plug. My favorites are the Yuuki Yuuna wa Yuusha de Aru, Date A Live, Kill la Kill, Kyousougiga, and The World God Only Knows ones). But yeah. I’ll let you know what I come up with.

In the meantime, look forward to updates on Burning Sky, as there’s a special surprise coming up on Christmas. Furthermore, I hope we can expect some new details on PROJECT ACADEMIA soon, as well. I’m actually almost ready to get to writing it, I think. But there’s some stuff I wanna do first. If only to build the hype for it, just a little.

But yeah. Today was fine, emotionally. I’m feeling better-ish, anyway. Work was annoying, but I mostly stayed out of my head. And I have off tomorrow, so I’m gonna get some much-needed rest. Oyasumi.