State of the Blog

Back when this blog was the most active, I liked to kick off the new year with a post that shared some of my intentions for the coming year. Although it included things I wanted to do with the blog, it went beyond that, and would lay out projects that I was hoping to make happen. As 2018 comes to an end, I’ve been feeling like it’s time to do something similar, focusing on this site.

As I’ve written before, after this site was on what amounted to “life support” for quite a few years, I started writing again regulary a couple of years ago. In part it was by merging my media consumption diary with this site (it used to live on Tumblr), and then it was by blogging about Japan-related happenings again. I eventually tired of the latter — it just wasn’t the same when not there, and made me miss my life in Japan more than anything else — so I stopped, and tried to focus on things that touched my current reality, i.e. being a game developer here in Montreal. I launched what was to be a weekly column called “Game Boy,” but as much as I enjoyed writing those posts, I started feeling like I needed to write something “proper” (meaning more thought out), and then I started procrastinating a bit, which led to no new posts. At the same time, my media consumption diary (called “Debaser“) started building a huge backlog, to a point where I just stopped updating it, other than adding the movies that make up my movie marathons (as I like collecting them in a post when I’m done said marathon).

What to do?

For the foreseeable future, I’m doing two main changes. First is that I’m no longer going to log all of my media viewings like in the past, and instead will just continue to write-up the movies I watch as part of my various marathons (or whatever content fits the bill, as I did for my October horror marathon). I’ll also keep doing my seasonal anime posts, which I started doing again last year (here are this year’s winter, spring, summer, and fall posts).

As for the rest, I’m going to combine my old blogging style — quickly written short posts — with my current gaming interests and life. I’ll still tag them in the “Game Boy” category, which will make them all easy to find.

I do still like the exercise of writing regularly — whether anyone is reading or not — and so I just want to find a way to do so that is interesting and fun for me, and doesn’t feel like something I need to do or that I’m behind on.

In the meantime, I invite you to check out my “Favorite Media” list for the year, an annual post I quite enjoy putting together, and that I’ve done for 9 years now (2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018).