September has been an unpredictable month for me, in a good way for once. I’ve been focusing on some self-care of late, like taking time off from work and dealing with problems I’d been postponing for a while now. I can’t get into the specifics right now, but those who were left worried by the last Behind The Scenes post can rest assured that I am doing a whole lot better now.
My vacation I’ve put to good use to play some games that had piled up in my backlog, as well as to do some shopping. Mainly, I have been getting into Yakuza 0 of late, which was a present from a friend of mine. It’s a cool crime-themed action game with a lot of side-content to indulge in and certainly a lot more accessible than Yakuza on the Playstation 2, which was my only other experience with the series. It reminds me of Mafia in a way, but way more refined and with a far more engrossing story. Besides that I’ve beaten Kandagawa Jet Girls and I’ve been watching the Star Wars movies in preparation for taking care off all the Star Wars games I’ve somehow picked up along the way.
In a prior post I talked about Amsterdam declining as a viable city for anime fans, which led to some people sending me suggestions for shops I should check out. I can now confidently confirm that Henk’s Comic Books is a very cool store with a sizable section dedicated to manga & anime merch, but you do have to go far out of your way to get there or brave the utterly-depressing Red Light District. I scored a fantastic haul and will certainly come back there if I’m in the capital again, but tourists and visiting locals would do well to educate themselves on the area and plan a route.
Reasons to Anime has been going through a healing process. Naturally, the numbers haven’t magically recovered after the crash from last month, but Terrance Crow informed me that this may be due to changes on Google’s end, which makes some sense. I’ll be working on that in the near-future, but for now I’ve been trying to drive up traffic with experimental articles and the extra reviews on Saturday. The movie review for The Thing was absurdly popular for example, as was the mini-review on Police Girl Yayoi.
I do somewhat regret that I still had the reviews for Ballad of a Shinigami and Blue Submarine No. 6 scheduled ahead. While I stand by those reviews, it was a bit disappointing to have full feature reviews for shorter OVA series back-to-back, right after introducing Brief Thoughts On as a weekly segment. Oops.
Another “Oops”-moment came earlier in the month. Driven by suggestions to improve my SEO through plugins, I looked into migrating Reasons to Anime away from WordPress.com unto a separate hosting service. I ended trying out the WordPress partner service Bluehost, but quickly ran into problems, as neither Bluehost’s migration tool nor its support agents seemed prepared to deal with a WordPress.com domain. A rather depressing result for a service built entirely around the premise of hosting WordPress.
This ended up being a time-consuming process where I soon lost any ability at all to monitor if nothing had been lost in the move. With over 300 articles, all of them with pictures, links, categories, and tags, I honestly couldn’t muster the energy to manually check all of them. I’ll probably eat the cost of upgrading to a WordPress.com plan that supports plugins and then do a more planned-out migration when that plan expires.
So what to expect in October?
I already got 3 major reviews lined-up and a 1-week break from writing planned in. It’s a little light on content, but we still got tomorrow’s article coming out and the shows I’ll be addressing are incredibly interesting and diverse. Of course, the Thursday articles and mini-reviews will be there as well.
Halloween is also right around the corner, which calls for an extra article to celebrate. I won’t be spoiling what it’s going to be, but take my word for it when I say that it’ll have some proper Halloween vibes to it. As for the next Behind the Scenes post, that will sadly have t o wait until November. With a mini-review on Saturday the 30th, then Halloween on the 31rd, and a feature review on November the 1st, it’d be too awkward to fit into the schedule.
I’ll owe you something extra nice in November, okay?
