The two-year death and history repeating itself in the aniblogsphere

I mean, can you really claim that XX years from now, you’ll still be inter­ested and as devoted to anime? Or any of your other hob­bies? Espe­cially after you go through college’s thesis years, or get a job, or start a fam­ily? Per­son­ally I just see a blog as another period in life, espe­cially for the pure-anime-bloggers. Maybe the pseudo-personal anime /rant blogs would last longer. Not to men­tion, invest­ing too much into a blog too quickly seems to be a sure­fired way to burn out faster…

In the end, does it really mat­ter? Do people take up a hobby or game know­ing that they’ll run along with it until the end of time? Have fun with it in the mean­time is all that mat­ter IMO.

the thing is with blogs in gen­eral (not just anime) it’s gen­er­ally the same issue. People stop or loose interest in about that amount of time (2 years) and there are even more than gen­er­ally don’t last past 2 months. I for the most part don’t see a prob­lem with that. People come and go. it’s life. Sure it’s sad to see someone you talked with a lot over those 2 years go but there will always be someone around the corner want­ing to be heard.

I per­son­ally should have star­ted up a blog YEARS ago but only did it recently because I didn’t really have enough con­fid­ence i sup­pose. I plan to keep on going as long as i can keep typ­ing as i do not see my interest level drop­ping any­time soon if ever. If i do stop before then you can totally wag a “i told you so” in my face

I really enjoyed read­ing chikorita157’s post about “innov­a­tion” because I like to think that I am doing some­thing dif­fer­ent from every­one else even if some of it is the same. Gen­er­ally though we all are doing the same thing, it’s just dif­fer­ent views. I do agree with news posts though… I never saw the point in mak­ing a post about some­thing that the major anime sites already do con­sid­er­ing for the most part that the blog­gers news post will just be a link to those major anime sites story on the subject.

any­who i’m ram­bling here. excel­lent post! lots of great blog info to keep me busy read­ing for a good while ^_^

@ ghost­light­ning

While I was still act­ive, I found that there would always come new good com­menters. Someone who had never com­men­ted at LoHP would come along and just blow me away. I also found that com­menters would usu­ally stay for a cer­tain period, and then dis­ap­pear only for new voices to appear in their place. Of course, this could be my own fault for not keep­ing them com­ing back for more.

@ scamp

Hon­estly, I’m not sure why so many blogs die out in this fash­ion. Bey­ond my own reas­ons (which seem a bit unique), it seems most people stag­nate in growth and take that as a sign to exit… maybe. That’s just a guess I’ll throw out there. My own reas­ons weren’t really time or growth related: I wanted to do some­thing dif­fer­ent, that some­thing dif­fer­ent requires a lot of time and work, and for the time being that effort needs to go else­where… even if I have been cheat­ing away time to work on the new site.

OH NOES! MY DEMISE I CAN SEE IT! :-p

It’s funny, I always think of a Nightwing quote from the old Bat­man car­toons where he says: “Things changed! I changed! The games over, Bat­man! I quit.” when it comes to top­ics like this. It seems oddly fitting.

Sadly, the cycle is what it is — unavoid­able. I don’t think any­one ever starts with the inten­tion to quit, but it’s like rela­tion­ships that last a couple months, or a job you leave after a year or two. You never start things expect­ing to end it. But things change. People change. And pri­or­it­ies shift. It’s sad to see old faces go, but the world is a huge place, and soon, another face pops up. I hate to say we’re inter­change­able pieces, but I guess that’s exactly what I’m say­ing

Even I won­der how long I’ll stay in this game. I think I may have caused myself undue anxi­ety in my anniversary post by men­tion­ing that I wanted to stick with blog­ging “for the long haul.” Not that I don’t, but the last thing I ever want to do is have blog­ging become a chore I feel like I have to do, than some­thing I want to do. And that state­ment seemed like an albatross in the mak­ing. Plus, how can I know? What if I end up get­ting a new job that takes up all my time? What if I strike up a ser­i­ous rela­tion­ship with a cer­tain spe­cial lady? I’d like to think I could con­tinue unabated, and I cer­tainly think I could to some degree, but even the optim­ist in me would admit that I’d devote less time to it.

But I think it’s always inter­est­ing to remin­isce about things like these, not because any­one has any answers, but because I think in the back of our minds, we’re all think­ing sim­ilar things.

On a com­pletely sep­ar­ate note, that Kam­ina x Simon pic­ture is really dis­turb­ing for some reason.

Haha, I think I am one of those rare birds who star­ted blog­ging after I fin­ished col­lege. Gran­ted, I was job­less when I began, but hey. I’m pretty lucky in that my cur­rent job has the per­fect hours for blog­ging. (After­noon and even­ing work, hooray!)

I’ve actu­ally been anime blog­ging for a little more than a year now, although I star­ted the “real” blog a scant six months ago. There have been a couple of times where I’ve come per­il­ously close to burnout, but what keeps me going is strik­ing a bal­ance between anime and everything else. Anime is the hobby I am most pas­sion­ate about, but it doesn’t con­sume my life. If I did noth­ing but watch anime all day, I’d prob­ably hate it, haha. I watch anime, movies, read, lay about like a bum, etc. My anime con­sump­tion is about an hour or two a day, which suits me just fine.

As long as I am not burned out on anime, I won’t be burned out on blog­ging, I think. I write because I want to write; I like shar­ing my thoughts with oth­ers, and writ­ing helps me under­stand more about a series in gen­eral because it forces me to think more about it. I would have enjoyed Dur­arara any­way, for instance, but I like it 10 times more because I am about it each week. There’s always an inter­est­ing series to write about, and often an inter­est­ing angle to take with indi­vidual epis­odes. Seek­ing those angles is fun for me. I was a journ­al­ism stu­dent in col­lege (and still work in journ­al­ism), so I approach blog­ging like that — what are the angles? What’s the story behind the story? Writ­ing with that in mind won’t stop being fun for me.

If life even­tu­ally gets in the way of blog­ging, then that’s what hap­pens. I’d rather not worry about that. It’s much more fun to con­cen­trate on what I can do now and squeeze every drop of enjoy­ment out of it.

While I don’t think I’ll be blog­ging forever, I hope to keep it up for as long as I can while I’m still an inde­pend­ent young adult without any idea to where her life is going. Mainly, I love the com­munity of the anime blog­sphere, though when they die out…

What’s scary is in May, I’ll hit my two year mark for being a blog­ger. And still be in high school. Gah! So I guess I have six more years or so.

Inter­est­ing read alto­gether though. Kudos!

HA! I laugh in the face of death! My ISSS may become a piece of shit, and no longer garner views or sup­port (oh fuck! that already happened!), but I’ll never stop post­ing, because I can’t take a hint!

Take that death!

Great post, and I am prob­ably the only one who clicked every link. (lit­er­ally, I did it).

@Gargron

It will have to remain a mys­tery then ~

@Scamp

I don’t think my sub­jects and style are to your tastes (noth­ing wrong with that at all), but pay close atten­tion and you’ll see that I exper­i­mented with a wide range of ‘tem­plates’ and styles (even epis­odic ones). Chan­ging isn’t a problem.

But yes, going out with a bang is the way to go.

@Sorrow-kun

OH! died because Riex pulled the plug — his life got in the way (he’s in the Air Force now). We actu­ally had a fair bunch of planned pro­jects in the pipeline. Speak­ing for myself, some of the tem­plates I use in WRL were ini­tially planned for OH! (e.g. use of slideshows, self-insert ‘inter­views’ with char­ac­ters, etc.).

@Michael LoHP

Oh I’ve come to meet new great com­menters (I actu­ally archive their com­ments in http://welovecomments.wordpress.com/ (hat tip to Scamp who gave me the idea to accept sub­mis­sions from out­side WRL).

How­ever, I miss the old guys (Owen, Iknight, coburn, lelangir, Omisyth, Lbre­vis, otou-san, lolikit­sune, etc), who I never get to dis­cuss my posts with any­more (kinda awk­ward for me to bring it up dur­ing conversations).

If their com­ments aren’t always being insight­ful or inform­at­ive, they non­ethe­less lead to fun dis­cus­sions anyway.

@ExecutiveOtaku

Thank you very much. Who knows had T.H.A.T. accep­ted my applic­a­tion around August ’08 I’d still be there and we’d be doing team posts. LOL I picked your blog to join because of the Macross love obviously.

Instead I vowed to out-fag Cru­sader, who’s still a favor­ite com­rade and has been a friend of WRL from the very start des­pite his foul mouth and hat­erade at me.

I star­ted blog­ging last October.

I star­ted read­ing other blogs last Octo­ber. After I star­ted blogging.

So I have no idea how the anib­lo­gisquare works. But I know how the inter­net and inter­net com­munit­ies work. I guess we can call the ani­biod­ome a big inter­net community.

I’ve been a part of a small inter­net writ­ing com­munity for eleven years. A few people, like myself, have stuck with it for the dur­a­tion (or at least stick close enough to it to be con­sidered a part of the com­munity even if they aren’t “act­ive”). Most people last a few years at most and go on their way to other stuff.

It’s just the nature of the inter­net as far as I can tell. I chalk it up to the fact that there isn’t as much of a tact­ile, per­sonal con­nec­tion to the com­munity like you get from a group of people you meet in real life. It’s easier to just move on and not feel as attached to some­thing when it’s just a bunch of poorly-spelled text and screen­shots on your com­puter mon­itor. Some people still have it in them to say “adios, bitches” when it comes to a real life group of people, but it usu­ally takes more than mal­aise and dis­in­terest to get someone to totally break away from a group of real life peeps. Even if real life crap gets in the way, if it’s someone that you know face to face you at least try to make time to hook up with them and hang out.

So yeah, Damn you Inter­net! for mak­ing it far too easy for people to just go “poof.”

I star­ted my blog in Octo­ber 2006, and in the past eight months or so, I’ve been post­ing more than ever before. So per­haps I may become one of the long-lasting ones. How­ever, I wasn’t able to post much from late 2007 to mid-2009 because of col­lege, so I’ve been mak­ing up for lost time since then by post­ing at least a few times a week.

I only recently star­ted pay­ing close atten­tion to the anib­log­sphere so I didn’t notice much of the changes and events that happened in early years. I rarely do epis­odic posts and mostly stick to writ­ing about whatever anime-related topic I feel like, whether it’s my first impres­sion of new shows, reviews of com­pleted shows, essays/rambling about cer­tain top­ics, etc,. Keep­ing up a blog con­sist­ently for years on end is an admir­able feat and I com­mend any­one who’s able to do it.

I think it’s less people start­ing at the same time and fall­ing off, but rather people around the same stages of life. For example, I star­ted DMAB in my senior year of col­lege, and I’m cur­rently going through my third year of med school, which increas­ingly lim­its the time I have avail­able to watch anime, let alone blog about it. Doesn’t mean that I’m stop­ping any­time soon though.

@Scamp

It’s at times like these I need those layered com­ment­ing sys­tems. Put­ting this into all one com­ment is going to look pretty silly

And here I was think­ing you were one of the rare people who under­stood why the lin­ear com­ment­ing scheme is unques­tion­ably super­ior to threaded com­ments (when people use them properly).

If there was a sim­ilar blog to Oi Hayaku except with a pur­pose to pro­duce posts that I wouldn’t ever write on here then I’d be inter­ested in see­ing one kick up again.

But then the ques­tion is, what wouldn’t you write on here, see­ing as this is your own blog and you’re essen­tially the boss? Team blogs give a good oppor­tun­ity to do col­lab­or­at­ive posts and net­work­ing and what not. But, to play devil’s advoc­ate here (com­pletely, since I’m really a pro­ponent of team sites) what else can you do on team blogs that you can’t do on your own site?

I (like to think I) know the answer, but I’m just curi­ous in your take.

“There are more excep­tions to the rule then there are those who con­form to it. Every case is dif­fer­ent and to try fit people into this sys­tem you’ve cre­ated is an insult to the unpre­dict­ab­il­ity of human life.”

I wouldn’t say it’s a sys­tem I’d cre­ated. I’d say it’s another way to look at things. Of course situ­ations are dif­fer­ent for every­one, since that’s how life is. But I do notice that a lot of blog­gers are around sim­ilar ages/stages of life. Does that mean they’re all doing the same thing? Nope.

Bril­liant post and sorry for the late com­ment. I believe a blog dies when the blog­ger hits life’s turn­ing point like fin­ish­ing school and going into col­lege or get­ting new job. I star­ted blog­ging 2 yrs and 3 months ago but I wasn’t always act­ive dur­ing those time. 2008 was when I reach my final year in med school and I post like…once a month or none in two months. Right now I’m pretty act­ive cause I have more time but in the approach­ing sum­mer, I’ll be busy again. Nev­er­the­less, I’ll some­how man­age to keep my blog alive. It’s my only escape

Wow, this post brings back memor­ies of blog­gers since departed…and some reflec­tion of why we’ve las­ted a rel­at­ively long time. Yes, some of it is because we do con­stantly bring in new fresh blood, and also because of the com­mit­ment of most of us in the core team to con­tinue put­ting out new material.

I’d say, though, that an even big­ger reason is that we’re not just an anime blog writ­ing about epis­odes or edit­or­i­als. The pod­cast is as old as the site itself, and is tons of fun to record. The con­ven­tion report­ing is some­thing that we do which rel­at­ively few other blog­gers do, as well as the pan­els we’ve helped run in the past couple of years. A lot of those activ­it­ies keep us pro­du­cing stuff even if most of us aren’t exactly in the mood to blog about a par­tic­u­lar show; it helps keep us con­nec­ted to fan cul­ture not just online but also in meatspace.

In fact, this year we want to expand even more and think about ways to earn some change in the pro­cess. Anime blogs don’t have to be only about one thing, and I’m really look­ing for­ward to the future of Anime Diet.

wow, this post cap­tured everything I’ve been bitch­ing and cry­ing about on Twit­ter since the blogs star­ted dying!

It’s true, I think anime blogs die in waves. I’ve only been around since the begin­ning of 2007 as well, but I don’t intent to go any­where. As they say, ‘I’m a ten year man.’

That’s a really great meta post for the cur­rent cycle. I’m actu­ally expect­ing a big dropoff of blog­gers this year with the record lack of shows and also the two-year cycle thing.

The reason I’ve las­ted so long is prob­ably because blog­ging and anime are embel­lished very closely in my mind. When i star­ted in to anime around 2000, I was closely fol­low­ing the first-ever crop of anime blog­gers, such as hayama, Jef­flawson, Momotato and so on that the act of watch­ing anime meant I would be also read­ing the blogger’s writ­ings about it and learn­ing new things that I wouldn’t have noticed at just one watch.

As time passed and I star­ted my own blog at 2005, it’s gone from “read­ing about anime” to “writ­ing about anime” and as I slowly grew to felt com­fort­able about blog­ging, it’s pretty much become a habit i can­not kill off.

I shan’t make any prom­ises, but I do hope to go on blog­ging for as long as I can watch anime and are will­ing to go to the hassle of doing a post. I still think it’s a chore to do a post everytime, but hey, it’s because of that I really appre­ci­ate the com­ments I get in return.

Seems I’m a bit late to the party here, in more ways than one.

I star­ted blog­ging way back in May of 2008, mostly as a lark. Janette, the same one who com­men­ted above, intro­duced me to it as she had just star­ted recently as well. The blog she joined still needed more writers and I figured, “Well, why the hell not?” I sub­mit­ted a review on King of Ban­dit Jing (which I now feel was very under­whelm­ing), got accep­ted, and there I was. I had no exper­i­ence in the anib­log­sphere, except that I could write at a pro­fi­cient Eng­lish level.

I am one of those blog­gers that fizzled out quickly. Nice to meet you. Part of that I might attrib­ute to my poor choice of series. I picked up Wagaya no Oinari-sama, which I ended up drop­ping after six epis­odes because I just couldn’t bear to watch any­more. I also picked up Him­itsu, which had a train-wreck of a sub release sched­ule. So, I found myself just start­ing out with noth­ing to write. I tried to keep it going with vari­ous posts, con­ven­tion reports and the like, but I just couldn’t do it.

Besides that though, my life really opened up right after I began blog­ging. I star­ted really get­ting out there in the world and hav­ing new exper­i­ences. Some of that was great: I got into wake­board­ing, met many new people, and found my first job. In other aspects, well, people change and per­son­al­it­ies clash. And some­times, you end up get­ting news that you never thought you’d hear in a mil­lion years, and I mean that in a bad way.

Com­bined, it killed me as a blog­ger. Sure, I still pos­ted on occa­sion, but I hardly call mak­ing a post once every two weeks to a month as “act­ive”. I became com­pla­cent, fig­ur­ing that other writers still con­trib­uted to the blog, so I didn’t need to devote the time to it.

Well, some­times life throws you a curve­ball, and events sud­denly left me need­ing to step up to the task. I star­ted by com­pletely over­haul­ing the blogs organ­iz­a­tion sys­tem. I found I enjoyed the task, as mind numb­ing as it was. I then resolved that I’d take a series or two and stick through it for the entire run. We’re now at the start of week 7 this sea­son and I’ve man­aged to keep up that resolve. I also actu­ally star­ted read­ing other blogs, though only two so far, this and BnB.

Whereas before it felt like a chore, now I’m actu­ally enjoy­ing myself. I find writ­ing to be a cath­artic pro­cess too. I don’t see it as a rebirth, but rather, as start­ing com­pletely from the begin­ning. I ran two pan­els on blog­ging at Ohayocon a few weeks ago with my team leader, and in that interim I already feel woe­fully under qual­i­fied for the task. I’ve actu­ally thought about the future, and how long I could keep going. If noth­ing else, I would like to at least find one series to fol­low and blog each season.

I’m not entirely sure where I was going with this wall of text. Per­haps it’s just a view of the whole pro­cess. Someone who has been around, someone who has fizzled, and someone who just star­ted, all wrapped into one weird pack­age. I hope it’s at least been interesting.