One Hell of a Year (Obligatory Late Anniversary Post)

I never thought when I started this site last October that I would still be here on the cusp of being in the top 90,000 sites and growing. I figured I would have to deal with low readershp and distrust (which I have dealt with during the year), but now I’m actually confident in the success of the site all thanks to you, the reader.

Para todos los blogs hispanohablantes de anime que me han dado la mano en amistad y que leen a diario, gracias por leer y espero mejorar la cobertura para ustedes tambien en el año que viene. Quiero dar las gracias especialmente a Saouri y a Ramen Para Dos por ser tan amistosos conmigo.

For a good while during the year, I thought about just simply throwing in the towel and giving up on this because I was under the impression that there was no place for me and it became less enjoyable to post news.

I’ve since realized that being the antithesis of the other big news sites is preferable and enjoyable for me instead of trying to play ball with everybody and falling in lockstep, since I don’t like the pro-industry attitude put forth by them very much and I realized that the “rules” that everyone else in this game plays by are wrong in so many ways.

The biggest point of contention with me is that as long as “professional anime news” sites continue to justify watching and reviewing fansubs to drive traffic to their sites as a necessary evil to “support the industry”, you have no credibility. In contrast I’d rather just watch the show, do the review and leave it at that because readers know you’re watching fansubs anyway, so dressing it up as anything else is bullshit.

Following that train of thought, “Anime journalism” is a hilarious delusion because scraping news from Japan isn’t journalism, neither is being given an exclusive or doing an interview. Journalism implies actually going out and digging up new information with analysis which is something I do everyday for the anchor site in this network on PhoneNews.com and here.

I really thought about extending an olive branch and professional courtesy to the big sites at one point, but why bother if they won’t extend me the same courtesy? I’m obviously the most experienced in actual journalism compared to everyone else and have the credentials to prove it. I should say that I consider the crew at Japanator and Tomopop to be cool people, just because they’re that good at what they do.

From what I’ve experienced in the past year, this industry in general is far from the level of professionalism it wants to project. For those of you in the industry that have extended me some level professional courtesy (you know who you are) despite personal opinion, I give you my gratitude.

To close this out, I’d like to thank each and everyone of you that has been reading since the start and to the new readers: Thank You. I’m not going anywhere and my new goal is to be better than AnimeVice and ANN, which will be so much fun (and easier) with what I have planned, with a new layout in the works as well as a rebrand to better reflect the changes and additions I’ll be making down the line.

Now, enjoy Death’s “Lack of Comprehension” as it demonstrates my feelings on this whole year below: