Changing Things Up

On June 15th, it'll have been ten years since I started this stupid little blog, and things have changed over those ten years. I've gotten my high school diploma, dropped out of college, went through three different jobs, went on two out-of-state vacations, found my all-time favorite visual novel, discovered just how much fun Photoshop (and GIMP) can be, uploaded a bunch of videos onto my now-kind-of-dead YouTube channel (although I would like to somehow get it back up and running), spent time with friends and family, panicked about whether or not I was actually dating a particular friend of mine (I actually wasn't), experienced so many anime, manga, video games, books, and what have you, and posted 96 reviews on a stupid little review blog that is less than a year younger than this one. Oh, and I rewatched The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya at one point, including Endless Eight. Still the best anime ever made, even with Endless Eight being a thing!

Okay, in that last paragraph, I talked more about things I did than things that have actually changed. Well, one thing is that I'm no longer primarily using MyAnimeList to track my anime. I mean, I still use it as my primary back-up, and my list on MAL is what I use to export my anime and manga lists to my other back-ups; however, I don't update that list as frequently as I do my list on the website I primarily use these days, AniList. At some time in 2020, I got sick of MAL constantly being down the way it has been over the past few years, so I tried primarily using Kitsu instead, taking advantage of its feature of syncing your lists with MAL. It worked out for a few months, but I had trouble updating the manga volume count on the now-deleted Kitsu app, causing the volumes section of the manga/light novels I read to not be updated on MAL, which was a source of frustration.

Then, in January of 2021, I discovered AniList.

Sure, you can't export your lists from AniList, and importing my MAL lists onto AniList was a bit of a pain in the butt; however, apart from those two things, I can't really complain. One thing I like about AniList is the freedom you have in how you can rate the anime and manga on your lists. You can use a 100-point system, a 10-point system (with or without decimals), a 5-star system, or even just a system on frowny-faces, neutral-faces, and smiley-faces! Personally, I prefer to use the 10-point system with decimals, but it's nice to see that AniList users have more freedom as to how they rate their anime, as opposed to MyAnimeList that restricts you to a 10-point system (without even decimals) or Anime-Planet that restricts you to a 5-star system (although you can give half-stars there). Too bad you can't use letter grades on AniList, as in my mind, that's how I prefer to rate the anime I watch.... Oh, well!

The above image is a snippet of what my AniList profile looks like. You might notice that on the right, there is an "Activity" section that shows new updates to my anime and manga lists. That's how I get around my inability to export my lists from AniList; I looked at my Activity section and use that to update my MAL lists. Well, I say that I can't export my AniList, but it's technically possible to do so for websites such as Kitsu and Simkl. However, I also use the Custom Lists feature on AniList to add anime and manga that I have no intention of watching/reading, but because I can't add stuff to the custom lists without them being on any of the main lists (that meaning the "Watching/Reading", "Completed", "Paused", "Dropped", and "Planning" sections), I opt to add them to the "Planning" section, click on the "Hide from status lists" checkbox so that they don't show up in the actual "Planning" section, and delete the activity tab that pops up after that. That being said, they're still technically in the "Planning" section of my lists, so whenever I export my AniList lists to Kitsu or Simkl, the anime/manga that I don't actually plan to watch still show up in the "Plan to Watch" sections; deleting them all is a pain in the butt, so I just import my MAL lists to them instead.

Speaking of anime I don't plan to watch, I watch hentai now. Well, technically. You see, not long after I joined AniList, I found out that the censored version of a certain hentai known as "Kite" was available on Crunchyroll and, by extension, VRV, which I had started using in 2020 after KissAnime shut down. (VRV has since been shut down, and I'm forced to use regular Crunchyroll and HIDIVE instead. I miss VRV.) After much deliberation, I decided to give it a chance, and.... well, I didn't care for it too much. I mean, there were two moments where a sex scene was clearly supposed to happen, but other than that, taking them out didn't impact the story too much, in my opinion. Said story, though.... it wasn't terrible, but I didn't care too much about it.

Furthermore, MyAnimeList decided to update pretty much all of their AnimeFesta anime entries in their database and add the "Hentai" tag to them, including the AnimeFesta anime I had watched for myself, such as Shuudengo Capsule Hotel. Yep, that's right; my Shuudengo Capsule Hotel review is a hentai review now, despite the fact that I was reviewing the non-hentai version. I don't make the rules. Anyway, it makes sense, considering that the 18+ versions of the AnimeFesta anime are sexually explicit, as well as the fact that you'd be hard-pressed to find even the censored version of the AnimeFesta anime on non-hentai anime websites. At the same time, though, I'm disappointed that I'm now forced to have confirmed hentai on my anime lists, despite the fact that I've refused to watch hentai for years! Well, at the very least, I'm limiting my hentai "consumption" to Kite, the few AnimeFesta anime I've watched (and I refuse to watch any more of those for real this time), and Mezzo Forte, the last of which I watched to make sure I didn't skip anything before watching Mezzo DSA should I decide to watch that in the future. (By the way, Mezzo Forte is definitely the best of the "hentai" I've seen. I mean, it's just average, but everything else is below average or worse; as a result, Mezzo Forte is the best by default!)

Alright, let's stop talking about hentai on this "wholesome" blog. Instead, I want to talk about the change that I really wanted to write about in this blog post. If anyone has actually been reading this blog over the years, you might notice that the layout looks way different now than it used to be. The layout for my blog used to look a little like this:

This is a stock picture used as an example, but the theme I used is the same as this one.

Now, it looks like this:

Why make that major change? Well, I decided that if I'm going to be writing entries to this blog again, it was going to have to look newer and more visually-appealing. I still don't know if anyone's going to actually read it, but I can at least make it look nice for myself. Plus, I was sick of pictures I added being bigger than the margin for the actual post when I made them extra large! Thus, I went onto the "Themes" section of Blogger, picked a theme that looked nice, and customized it so that it looked bluer and had that kind of sparkly stock picture for a header. It still probably doesn't look that unique, but it's a start, at least!

This blog isn't the only blog that I've changed the layout for, though. If you read a review on my review blog years ago and then go onto it right now, you can see that the layout there has changed drastically, too! In fact, I changed the layout of that blog before this one, and I've even put more work into it! Not only is there a completely new theme, but there's also a new header (which took me forever to make, and I'm proud of it, even though it's really big on desktop), a translation option from Google Translate (which may not be entirely accurate because it's Google Translate), an index for all of my reviews in alphabetical order, and even a page showing where you can legally stream the anime that I gave positive and neutral reviews to (and the Making Fiends webseries)! That's not the only thing about my review blog I've been working on, though; although I haven't really been rewriting the reviews themselves, I have been changing their ratings to make them letter grades instead of numerical ratings (which I think works better for how I judge what I watch/read/play), and I've even been making graphics of those grades instead of just typing them! Out of the ones I've done so far, the one I did for the Ishuzoku Reviewers review is probably my favorite.

I tried basing it on the review sheets in the actual anime, and although I didn't quite match it, I think I did a decent job at it! I even got to place the whole "10/10, would bang again" joke I made at the beginning of the original review in a place where it's not so awkward! Well, it's still awkward in that a C+ doesn't equate to a 10/10 at all, but whatever!

So yeah. I've (sort of) jumped ship from MyAnimeList to AniList, I've gone through a censored-hentai-watching stint, and I've changed the layout of two of my blogs. I'm sure that things will continue to change in the next decade to come, but at the same time, some things should stay the same, right?