Behind The Scenes: April 2022

Hi! Sorry for the unannounced break I took this week. Things have been as hectic as ever on my end, so after launching the latest top 20 video I figured it’d be nice to wind down for a while.

I didn’t even get to write a Behind The Scenes post for March, which was down to having too much on my mind. I ended up having to do emergency renovations to my house after mechanics that came to install fiber drilled straight into my waterpipes. While fixing that, the plumber noticed that my gas pipes were in a bad state and would need to be repaired soon. When I didn’t sign off on it right away because I wanted a second opinion, said plumber called the cops on me for “denying him access to an explosive hazard”.

Police, the fire brigade, and the gas provider all showed up and came to conclusion that he was full of shit. He’d also called them under a fake name for both himself and his company, but the idiot had given me his contact info beforehand and gloated about what he was doing over text messages. Suffice it to say, getting him reported and fined was not particularly difficult. Still, the whole ordeal had cost me a lot of energy and the repairs (gas pipes included) set me back thousands of euros.

Subsequently my cat decided to get so sick that he needed surgery, which cost me an extra 1700. Thanks Mason.

Lately I’ve been playing video games a lot more than usual, which has taken a bite out of my anime time. I have been meaning to finish Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous for some time now. It’s an RPG with an engrossing story to it, but due to my unfamiliarity with the tabletop RPG, the rules just didn’t make sense to me for the longest time. I am now 141 hours in and I am still only half-certain of how the mechanics work. It’s a pain in the ass at times, truth be told, but it feels amazing when you get the hang of it and strategize your way through the game’s harder encounters.

I also returned to Crusader Kings 3, now that it has received its first proper expansion pack. I enjoyed the game a lot at launch, but its rampant issues with saves being corrupted caused me to put it away for a while. It’s still not in an ideal state now, but Royal Court added a lot of interesting tweaks to the game.

On an entirely different note, I decided to quit open-water diving. The covid pandemic put it on the backburner for over a year and afterwards I just didn’t have the drive for it anymore. I got so many other things I want to do and work on—Reasons to Anime included—all of it which give me more satisfaction than diving did. I am also not very fond of travelling, which was going to be necessity if I wanted to keep advancing. Spending hours driving to some lake across the country just to dive for 40 minutes with a stranger just wasn’t an appealing notion to me. I’d rather spend time with actual friends or making content for this site.

And content I got plenty of. May is already largely planned-out and I am pretty excited about it. I got a bunch of reviews for niche series lined up, as well as one critical review for a much-liked newer series. Make that one-and-a-half actually. I also got a variety of articles coming, including a piece on the history of isekai anime that I am particularly proud of.

New developments on the site have slowed down a bit, but I am planning to start rewriting some of the pages this month. You may also have noticed that there is a disability icon now, which should make the site more usable for people who need clearer fonts or better contrast to read text. I have also been working on making the site more compatible with screen-readers, though that is proving to be a lot tougher than anticipated. I don’t know what settings are commonly used for these, so when the one I installed (NVDA) messes up, I am not sure if that’s due to the layout or due to my settings. If anybody has experience with these and wants to help out, please shoot me a message. Until then, it’s all on a best effort basis.

Thank you for your patience and I’ll see you all again on May 31st!