April has been crazy in a lot of regards, both in my personal life, work life, as well as for this website. We started off amazing. On April 1st, Reasons to Anime shattered its record for most visitors in a single day. A new record that was then immediately bested the day after and then twice more throughout the month. Reasons to Anime has done about as well in April alone as it did throughout the entire second half of 2020. A lot of this has been centered on articles that do well in search engines, and primarily in Asia, but it’s still been a major boost for the site overall. Very exciting stuff.
The articles this month performed well and were fun to work on, with Shuffle! and the buyer’s guide doing just a little better than all the others. For May I got a variety of different reviews lined up, spanning everything from major anime hits to controversial takes on series that went entirely under the radar. I am also working on a collaborative review with a fellow aniblogger and I got a small interview lined up; a style of article I haven’t written in over a decade. Hope I am not too rusty.
Outside of Reasons to Anime, I have mostly been busy with renovating my house. We have had setbacks with delayed deliveries and workmen dropping items that really, REALLY shouldn’t be dropped, but we’re finally getting somewhere. I have a functioning bathroom again, at least. The past few weeks I was lucky if I could shower once a week and I had to wear the same clothes for as long as possible because the washing machine was unavailable. I had involuntarily become a smelly weeb and I had been cursed with a neckbeard as well, as shaving wasn’t possible either.
This came on top of me working quite a lot, with one week in particular peaking at 65 hours. I am doing fine in spite of these hours, but it has caused me to sometimes slip up when running final checks on my articles. Please forgive me if something goes up with a missing picture, excerpt, or a typo here and there. I try to correct these as soon as they are pointed out.
A friend of mine did introduce me to the amazing website themes.moe, which absolutely destroyed my productivity for 2 days straight. Themes.moe can read either your MAL or AniList account, and provides a music playlist of openings and endings for everything you have listed. Usually these come complete with animation, but they are currently running in audio-only mode because the backend is hitting data caps. Considering they are providing streaming for terabytes of audio & video material, I am surprised it’s as freely available as it is. Give it a look if you’re into anime music and want a hassle-free playlist automatically customized for you.
Before I go, I do have one request:
I am playing around with the idea of including something like this at the bottom of my reviews. Basically 3-or-so recommendations for anime similar to what I just reviewed. This would replace the semi-redundant subscribe button that is currently under every article, but is this something that would be helpful? I have gotten mixed feedback from my friends about it, so I’d love to hear if anybody else has any thoughts on this change. Please let me know either in the comments or through the contact form.
Additionally, bonus points to anybody who can guess what the original show is that the recommendations in this example are for. Hint: it’s not a review I have published yet.
Let’s see — Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei?
Well dang. Didn’t expect somebody to just get it right on the first comment.
Well, I hope I didn’t plunge you into despair XD
Looking forward to my reward now.