Tuesday, March 13, 2018

The End and the Beginning of the Anime Archivist, and Future Plans

It's taken over eight months, but I've finally republished (and modified and updated) all of the material from my old blog, The Anime Archivist, which ran for a few years, but I abandoned in 2014. Now that I have transferred all the material over, I have deleted the old blog.

You may note I have now changed the title of this blog to the Anime Archivist. Not 100% sure if I'll kept the name or change to something else yet again. This is the third name I've had for this blog. The original plan I had when I transferred all the material over from my old blog was to keep on going in the same vein and continue to write posts based on the ones I've previously published; ones about anime music video compilations, out of print English language VHS and Laserdisc titles that never made the leap to DVD or Blu-ray, writing up the remaining Western Connection titles the company released, and looking at titles on DVD and Blu-ray (out of print and in print) that fans just ignored or have been forgotten by fandom. I also had planed to keep writing about any anime films I go to see in the cinema, any fan events I attend and to keep writing about my trips to Japan.

Due to a number of issues which have cropped up and changed my life forever, honestly I'm not to sure what I'm going to do with this blog. Currently I'm having a bit of trouble finding time to do any of the writing or finding time to update the two websites I have in addition to this blog. It's been a really tough 12 months for me as both my parents had to be put into a nursing home, almost simultaneously. By myself I had to sort out their financial matters, legal matters (they only had power of attorney for each other), what to do with the house and contents, the car, their dog, upkeep of the house while it was vacant, pay all of the bills, collect the mail etc. Worse was the fact both of them lived over 200 kilometres away. The stress of work and other factors didn't really help the situation either.

At any rate, most of that stuff is sorted out, more or less. But in the last six weeks I've fallen in a heap due to the stress of it all and have had nearly a month of that time off. Most of that was due to taking an anti-anxiety medication and reacting very badly to it. I've weaned myself off the tablets over the last week or so, and have only started to feel normal again in the last day or so.

So in the short term, I plan to keep writing as much as possible, when I can. I think I'll go back to doing reviews of my backlog, as it's pretty enormous now due to the fact I hadn't felt like watching any of it or doing anything else for that matter. Hopefully I'll get back to the core articles that were part of the original the Anime Archivist blog as well as updating, rewriting and formatting old articles I had written for my old Lost World of Anime website and blog around a decade ago.

I'm also planning yet another trip to Japan, this time in the life sapping humidity and heat of late July and early August, mostly so I can experience Wonder Festival and Comic Market, as both events are held close together during that time of year. In between those two events, there's at least one local festival or summer event held in the metropolitan Tokyo area almost every day, so I'm planning to see as many of those, as long as I don't die of heat exhaustion... Planning for this trip is really only about a quarter or half done (but the flights and accommodation are of course already booked), so I expect a lot of downtime on this blog while I plan for the trip.

In short, the plan is not to abandon this blog. Unlike most blogs of this kind, I do this mostly out of fun for myself and I don't care if I have an audience or not. I know I'm generally out of step and sync with the wider anime fandom community anyway. I plan to continue writing about the stuff I enjoy and about material that generally no one else seems to write or care about.

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