Tag: site updates

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The Future of Magic Planet Anime [1/28/23]

Hello again, folks.

As always, when we reach this point, I get nervous. You could pin why on a lot of things, but at the end of the day I think it’s just good old fashioned impostor syndrome. Whenever I write one of these “here is what the site will be like” from now on reports, I feel like I’m going to accidentally reveal some kind of crack in a facade, and the entire enterprise will come crumbling down.

I am, among many other things, trying to learn to be nicer to myself about this kind of thing. So, I am sitting here, convincing myself that you won’t all run screaming at a site status update. Progress! Probably.

Here is the very short version if all you care about is the “what:” frustratingly, I do not know precisely how Magic Planet Anime is going to move forward, but it is going to move forward. The site is not going anywhere. I’m not going to make a lot of strong claims in this article, but, barring something truly unexpected and catastrophic, I will say, firmly, that I intend to continue writing for you all. That’s the most important bit. Related to that; my only current ongoing project, the Darling in the FranXX mini-podcast, should finish through to completion just fine. The other project I need to get started on, the batch of commissions I’ve now had on the back-burner for months, I intend to start on today, and you should see the first of those within the next few days. Fingers crossed. (Honestly, if all you care about is what’s going to be on this site specifically, you can stop reading now. Things are about to get very personal, and I understand if you don’t want to hear about that.)

Unfortunately we must now get to the “why.” In all likelihood, most of you probably haven’t actually been shaking your fist in frustration at me to update the site every day for the past two weeks (which is how long it’s been since I posted an actual article. Even then, it was very brief). But, I struggle with anxiety, and that is how I often feel like people must be reacting. It’s such a simple thing that I feel ridiculous typing it out, but, yes, I often have to actively remind myself that, no, my regular readers are not going to hunt me down with pitchforks because I haven’t written an Anime Orbit article this week, despite my best intentions.

Nonetheless, I think it is worth explaining what’s been up with me personally. Because I’m aware I’ve been sending some mixed signals lately on social media and similar, so I wanted to actually illustrate what’s going on. I’ve usually maintained that the specific millieu of mental problems I have aren’t really anyone’s business but my own, and maybe that’s true, but I’m foolishly hoping that maybe by explaining why this happens to me, I can at least maybe make some of you feel less alone if you’re going through similar things. At the very least, it helps my paranoiac streak to have something to point to if anyone ever actually does demand an explanation from me as to why I haven’t been writing as much in a given period.

Firstly, it is the dead of winter, and I suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder. Basically, I get sad when it’s wintertime. Nothing terribly complicated, there. At least conceptually. (I’m sure the actual neurological reasons behind SAD are incredibly complicated, but that is not my department.) Making things worse is that I normally take Vitamin D supplements for this, but I’m out of them these past few weeks and can’t really afford to get more. SAD conveys all the usual depressive symptoms; lack of energy, focus, and so on. Not to mention feelings of guilt, which, hey, I have been absolutely crushed under the weight of these past few weeks. Definitely feeling that one.

Secondly, my hands are kind of busted right now. Clearly, I can type, or you wouldn’t be reading this, but I have to pace myself a lot more than I’m used to and even as I’m doing so, I can feel the strain in my wrists, palms, and (in particular, for some reason) my left pinky finger. I am hoping to be able to get a brace or a heating pad or something for this soon, but money is a perpetual issue. (You may think that this is where I will once again shamelessly plug my Ko-Fi. You’d be correct.) In a more general sense, I get constant aches and pains all over the place. This is not the issue it would be if I had a physically demanding job—and I know that, because I used to have one. Shout out to Wegman’s—but it still does actively interfere with my ability to keep a consistent schedule. Even in times over the past few weeks where I have felt well enough to read manga or watch anime, I haven’t been able to actually write at length about it, even in the case of media I really like (eg. the riotous otaku action-comedy Ghostbuster Osamu or the surreal, titanic Make the Exorcist Fall in Love in the former case, or seasonal highlight the flashy, ludicrous High Card in the latter. Not to mention Jujutsu Kaisen, which I finally started getting around to.)

Finally, there are all of my other mental problems. A combination of general anxiety issues, my plurality—itself not a problem by any means, but certainly capable of exacerbating others, under the right circumstances. (I am now realizing, I have essentially never spoken about it on this blog before, so there’s a fun anxiety spike that comes along with bringing that up), and just me generally being kind of a mess. I really have to beg you to believe me that I have been trying to get all of this in order. I’ve been trying for years, really. But at the moment, I’m caught in a specific crossroads of this particular mental crucible, and finding my way to where I need to be has proven very difficult. As of a few days ago, I have been given some information that might help me finally get my health insurance in order—that’s been a whole other kettle of fish—which will hopefully help, once I can actually scrape together enough time and energy to act on it.

So! Yes! It’s been a time! I’ve been very stressed! Maybe none of you actually needed to know any of this and I’m way oversharing by posting this. That is a very real possibility! But, increasingly, I feel that making my specific disabilities (and they are disabilities) visible to others is part of my responsibility, not as a critic specifically but simply as a writer, and even just a fellow human being, in general. If any of you suffer from similar problems, you’re not alone. Maybe thinking I can even offer that much comfort is pretentious in of itself, but I certainly hope I can.

As for calling myself a “critic” in the first place; this is another, albeit secondary issue I wanted to address, more for myself than anyone else. I sometimes get self-conscious that, simply by virtue of having a blog, people will assign to me more weight or authority than I really want. Again, perhaps that’s pretentious, but it is a real anxiety I have.

Just to be very clear, going forward, even more than before, Magic Planet Anime is strictly my own thoughts, feelings, and conclusions, at the moment of writing them. I do not hold myself remotely to scholarly standards, and you should not take anything on this blog as the final word on anything of importance. (And art, even—perhaps especially—popular art, is important, make no mistake.) My hope, as always, remains that I can elevate what I truly love about this medium, and when faced with things I do not, at least express my thoughts coherently and earnestly. That really is all.

Thank you for reading all this. I hope to see you all in a few days with the first of this batch of commissions I’m working on. It’s a doozy.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter, Mastodon, Cohost, Anilist, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in Other Posts

More Magic Ahead: Let’s Talk 2022 Plans

Hi folks! As with a couple other things I’ve written lately this is less an article and more of a PSA, though it’s a bit more involved than some of the others I’ve put up recently.

Basically, now that all of my material for the year’s end is written and published (capping with my end-of-year list from yesterday. Read that if you haven’t!) I wanted to talk about my plans for 2022. Mostly in terms of what you can expect from this blog on a week-by-week basis, but I’ll also briefly touch on some other stuff. Before I start, I do want to get out that I know my reader base (that’s y’all) are pretty understanding and few people, if anybody, expect me to be mechanically consistent 24/7-365.

Nonetheless, I do want to try to hold myself to a higher standard in the coming year. I don’t like to talk about this side of running the site because I feel it’s a bit tasteless, but it’s pertinent here; 2021 was the year I started genuinely making some decent money off Magic Planet Anime. I’m still not where I’d like to be in terms of income, and if I’m being perhaps way too frank, I can still only just barely take care of myself even with the assistance of my loved ones, but it’s a great start, and I’m deeply grateful to everyone who’s donated any amount even once.

I bring all this up because part of the reason I want to hold myself to that higher standard is because I want to make you all feel like you’re actually paying for something worthwhile. I can’t realistically promise to always be the smartest or most insightful anime critic on the internet, but I can aim for honesty, thoughtfulness, and consistency. Your donations over the past year have allowed me to do that, and I’m hoping I can deliver on that front even moreso in 2022.

So, with that out of the way, let’s talk plans.

The Future of Let’s Watch

Let’s Watch was one of the things I started on in 2021 that I was least confident in. Which, in hindsight, is pretty funny. It served as a replacement for my former work for GGA. Recap-breakdown-writeup-whatevers about an anime episode once a week, more or less. While it didn’t go perfectly, my takt op. recaps were some of the most engagement my site’s ever gotten. Obviously, I intend to continue doing these in 2022, since people evidently want to read them. But there is a change to take note of.

Most seasons, I will be covering two shows a week, not just one. One anime will be a seasonal Community Choice. You can find out more about the latter here (and get in a last-minute vote if you haven’t already. I plan to close the poll sometime shortly after the new year). The other will be whatever I happen to pick from the seasonal crop of anime I do First Impressions posts on. In the rare event that I can’t find anything I want to cover; I might run another poll or just stick to one show for that season. (I don’t expect this will happen terribly often, if ever, but it’s nice to have a contingency plan in place.)

Reviews in the Rearview?

Traditional Reviews have historically been a thing I focus on here. While I’m certainly never going to stop writing them here, they will be less of a focus going forward, especially in terms of writing them for seasonal anime. Aside from the fact that when I do write a traditional review, it will hopefully make it “mean” a bit more, there’re a couple of other reasons for this:

  1. Everyone does reviews. When I write a review I’m competing with every user-written review on MyAnimeList and Anilist, dozens upon dozens of other blogs, and so on. They simply aren’t a good way to get new eyes on my site most of the time.
  2. My ability to advertise reviews is very limited. I can do some amount of SEO magic, but there’s ultimately a limit on that. And since Anilist no longer allows me to advertise my site when I mirror reviews over there (a way I was able to get some users to follow me from that site to this one), I have even less incentive to review every seasonal anime I finish.
  3. Seasonal coverage always competes with Youtube videos. This is the big one. I simply cannot compete with the pace and engagement that your average Youtube video on seasonal anime gets. In some cases (like my Let’s Watch column) it’s still enough that I’m willing to try anyway. But review posts on this blog are never going to get even a meaningful fraction of the views that, say, a Youtube video with a flashy thumbnail and a title like “The PROBLEM With takt op.Destiny!” is going to get. That’s just the nature of the landscape right now and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future.

What all of this boils down to is; I’ll be largely saving full, traditional reviews for either A) older anime, where there tends to be far less of a glut of competition, B) seasonals I have very strong feelings on, whether positive or negative, and C) movies, which brings us to our next subheading.

Monthly Movies & Manga

This is the big change. For most of this blog’s lifespan I’ve been very lax about getting “extra articles” out there. Stuff like my Monthly Movies column or my Manga Shelf column. I want to change that, because these are some of the projects here that I’m most passionate about, and they are the sort of thing that there is less of, so the field isn’t quite as crowded.

I want to do at least one Manga Shelf column or one Monthly Movies column a month. If I’m going at a good clip by mid-year and am feeling ambitious, I might up it to two. Consequently! If you’re a big anime film buff or read a ton of manga, feel free to toss recommendations my way, I’ll even credit you in the lead-in for any articles I write on them. (And for our purposes here, single-episode OVAs count as “movies.” I won’t tell anyone if you don’t, alright?)

The Front Lines March On

The Frontline Report, my honestly pretty stupidly-titled weekly writeup of whatever I happen to be thinking about at the time, is the column that will change the least going into 2022. I will still aim to write it once a week, although it’ll remain the column I’m most likely to suspend if I’m ill or something of that nature. The only real change here is that the specific day I publish the column on might change from season to season as different things will work better with my schedule.

That’s most of the specifics. I do have some more general goals, such as wanting to do some more collaborative stuff, and some longer-term ideas (I’d like to break the readership record I set here this past October, for instance.) Beyond that, though, that’s pretty much what 2022 is going to look like, barring some kind of unforeseen circumstance.

With all that laid out, I hope to see you all back here in the new year. I don’t have my plans for next season entirely set in stone yet, but it shouldn’t be too long into January before you start seeing me post here again.

Until then, anime fans, thank you for your support over the past wonderful two years of running this blog, and happy holidays. 🙂

Wanna talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers? Consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.