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My Anime Watching Habits Over the Years

I said in my previous post I'd have to make a post about my anime watching habits. Well, here I am, I guess.

In my childhood, I watched anime like Pokemon and Dragon Ball Z. It was a time in my life where I didn't even realize it was anime. Hell, when I first read Harry Potter, I didn't even realize the books were set in England. In fact, being an autistic kid with ADHD, for a good chunk of my childhood, I wasn't even cognizant of when new episodes came out, so I think I missed a lot. By the time I was old enough to know what anime was, I was in middle school and in the middle of a phase where I thought anime (and animation in general) was dumb and for babies. In high school, I softened a little bit to thinking anime just wasn't for me, but I was still resistant to watching it. Then, in 2011, after I had graduated high school, a friend of mine told me I needed to watch Puella Magi Madoka Magica.

Madoka Magica was the first crack in the dam. Even then, I was resistant to watching more anime. I convinced myself I just liked magical girl shows. I would binge shows like Sailor Moon and Cardcaptor Sakura at this point, at night, on my porch, because I was a hopeless romantic I guess. At the same time, I was starting to be more open to watching shows like Adventure Time, so this era was marked by a lot of me getting over myself. However, in 2013, the same friend who showed me Madoka Magica recommended Attack on Titan. I fell in love with that show, and still love it to this day. Yes, despite the weak ending. It was so good, in fact, that I actually started reading the manga after there was no second season in sight. In that time, I also saw the two Little Witch Academia OVAs and got really excited for the prospect of a show based on them. Yet, still, throughout university, I wasn't really into anime.

Come 2016, I had just left university and was looking for my first job. That April, I was excited to watch the first season of the Ace Attorney anime adaptation. This was the first anime I had watched while it was airing from the start. Madoka Magica finished by the time I saw it, and I started AOT seven episodes in. Same with Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress that season, which I started eight episodes in. Eventually, up through 2018, I fell into a pattern. I'd watch two shows that had finished, and maybe one new show a season, two if I was feeling spicy. At the time, I was working weekends, but my shift on Sundays would start later, like in thwe afternoon, and I would often watch anime in the morning before work, and I'd usually try to watch seasonal shows the day the episode came out. I got to watch the Little Witch Academia TV show when it came out, and hey, AOT finally got a second season! I even dropped my first show, Fuuka. I also watched a little show called Death Note.

Death Note was ten years old at that point, nearly 20 now, and I remember hearing about it at the time. Watching it and loving it as much as I did made me realize how truly foolish I had been. All the wasted years I spent being a pompous, self-righteous asshole! I really do wish I had been more into anime when I was younger. I missed so many shows I probably would've loved.

In late 2015, I had a new job with weekends off. It didn't happen right away, but at some point, I started condensing my anime watching into Saturday mornings. This may have started summer 2019, as I had a shift in the number of shows I was watching. That summer, I was watching five shows. Granted, two of them were half length, but still. Even after this, I'd often just add shows to my plan to watch list, thinking I couldn't handle that many shows at once. LOL. LMAO, even. Something would happen that would turn that idea on its head.

In 2020, COVID started and delayed many productions. As a result, the studios kind of just blew their load all over the start of 2021. In that winter season, I watched eight shows, an unprecedented amount for me. It was crazy, or so I thought. The very next season, I would watch 11 shows. Honestly, this was too much, and I was a lot less amicable to the idea of dropping shows, so I kept going with a couple shows I should've just dropped. That summer, I only picked up one show, Sonny Boy. I was still watching four shows that season because of the leftovers from spring! I can't remember if I stopped watching all my shows during this or before, but at some point, I just started watching all my shows as close to release as I could.

I'm looking at my MAL charts as I write this, and it looks like the blowback from that one season lasted longer than I thought. Until fall 2022, I didn't go over four shows, and more often, I'd only pick up a couple new shows. In that fall, I watched seven shows, but four of those seven were sequels. In 2023, I watched a whole lot of shows, with only summer dipping down to four.

Unfortunately, in 2024, I had a year of fatigue. In winter, I picked up one show. In spring, I picked up seven. Then, in summer, I felt like I couldn't keep up, there were just so many shows that looked so good. I felt like I didn't get to watch a lot of shows I wanted to, and honestly, I kinda wish I traded a couple of shows I did watch. Not that any of them were bad! Giji Harem, for example, put a smile on my face, but I would've rather watched Makeine. The very next season, I was just having trouble keeping up. I ended up having to put two shows on hold and drop one. I didn't even dislike the one I dropped, but I just didn't see a whole awful lot of potential in it.

2025 started out looking much like 2022. Three shows in the winter, then two in the spring, despite there being other shows I thought looked interesting. To use my own phrasing at the time, I guess I was taking a break. One of those was Mobile Suit Gundam: GQuuuuuuX, which was more like Gundam G-CUCKED ME. Hold that thought, we'll come back to it. That summer, I watched seven shows, but one of them, Takopi's Original Sin, I ended up watching in the inbetween time before the fall season. I preemptively dropped Sakamoto Days season two (part two of season one?) because, honestly, it's not a great adaptation and I had better things to watch, and I also dropped Kaiju No. 8 after one episode because I just wasn't feeling it. If what I'm hearing is correct, I made the right decision, as apparently the source material just gets more boring and generic as it goes on, ends unsatisfyingly, and completely leaves behind what made it special in the first place. In other words, a waste of my time, and this was when I was starting to try and be more mindful of what shows I watch.

Also during this time, I watched the original Gundam with a friend, the same friend who I watched GcuckS with. Gcucks was my first Gundam, and I wanted to like it, but it was just bad. It was like the franchise sniffing its own farts. It made Char uninteresting! And I can say without a doubt now, after watching the original, Char is an interesting character. I definitely want to watch more Gundam in future.

In any case, summer 2025 was a banger of a season, partly because I didn't waste my time with bullshit. Fall 2025 was also really good! I've even started watching Turn A Gundam week to week to follow along with a podcast type series, which is indeed still going on, if you saw me questioning that in the last post. I was worried because this same pwerson also did a previous podcast that did something similar, but ended abruptly. and it was fun following shows week to week for that as well. This and the Gundam TOS experience made me want to watch more older shows, hence me making that resolution. The same friend I watched Gundam with also wants to watch Digimon, we just haven't found the time, but we'll do it eventually.

If you'd like me to elaborate on anything I've said in this essay, by all means, reach out to me on Mastodon or Bluesky and ask! Maybe I'll even write a followup post. Here's to more great shows to watch in 2026!

Resolutions for New Year 2026

I mentioned in my last post, one of my New Years Resolutions was to write more. I guess I'll elaborate more on those resolutions.

For 2026, I want to:

Resolutions one and two seem to be going okay! Three, four, and five, I still need to work on. I don't know if maybe I'm just not vibing with Don't Talk About Politics or what, but I really don't wanna drop it because I spent money on it. Actually, that reminds me, I also need to write (rant) about the Jujutsu Kaisen "movie" I paid good money for to see in the theater that was literally just a recap of the Shibuya Arc that I already saw and the first two episodes of the new season. So many story ideas! So many blog post ideas! The new year will be a good year for writing things down! Look forard to it!

EDIT: I forgot to put the video game section in and had to edit the post like an hour or two after I put it up lolololololololololol

Friendship Ended with Publii, Strawberry Starter is My Blogging Software Now

Aw shit, here we go again... - Carl Johnson

Well, Publii didn't really work out. So what happened? Neocities CLI happened.

Basically, when I tried to post You Die in the Game, you Die in Real Life, I was out with my Steam Deck. I tried to use Publii to edit the website, but I was having issues because of the way Publii works. Basically, what I needed to do was export a backup file and use that, instead of pushing the site files to a Git repo. So that sucks, but whatever, I just added the story to the site when I got home.

And there appeared the second issue. I tried to update the site using a little program called Neocities CLI, which I had used before. Problem was, it wasn't installed anymore. No problem, I thought, I'd just install it again. Wrong. It was problem. You see, Neocities CLI is a Ruby program which you install by running gem install neocities-cli. This program absolutely refused to install. I tried so many things, uninstalling and reinstalling Ruby, messing with config files, nothing worked. I had to manually upload the index page and the story page. I didn't even upload the rest of the changed files, so the tags on the post didn't even work properly.

After trying off and on to get Neocities CLI to install and even looking into alternatives, a little while ago, I found something I could use instead, a framework for blog sites called Zonelets. Zonelets, however, was missing tagging and RSS. I then found out about Zonelots, a fork of Zonelets with tagging but no RSS, and Bumblebee, a framework with both tags and RSS. I initially went with Zonelots because the Python script included with Bumblebee kinda spooked me, but then I decided to just go with it since that took some of the tedium out of updates (you have to manually edit the Javascript file for each post in Zonelots, and also Zonelets). Working with HTML (or Markdown in the case of Bumblebee) didn't bother me since my chosen writing program, Wordgrinder, can export to HTML and Markdown. I'd still have to manually upload the site, but I figured I could just make that a separate section and have a standalone homepage. I could've done this with Publii, but the other issue would've still been there, so I decided against it.

Now, you might have noticed this blog isn't made with Bumblebee. Bumblebee is controlled by a Javascript file, and no matter what I did, it felt like it was ignoring the Javascript file. At least, I think that's what it was. Even unmodified, webpages acted like there was no CSS file. So I looked at Zonelet's page again, at the section where the author listed some forks and programs inspired by Zonelets. I saw one that looked promising called Strawberry Starter. I was hesitant since it was basically just a template for an SSG called 11ty and I haven't had any luck with SSGs, but Strawberry Starter's site has really simple instructions that are super easy to follow. It also has, in addition to tags and RSS, a simple function to upload to Neocities! I'm going to stick with my plan to use this as a separate part of the site, and hopefully, you'll see this post and many more to come soon.

That brings me to why I want to do this now. One of my New Years resolutions was to write more. Even if it's simple blog posts, I'd like to post more. Hopefully, this helps me do that. Watch this space!

Cleaning Things Up

So some things about Publii aren't super intuitive. Go figure. Still more intuitive than most SSGs I tried.

As you may have noticed, I cleaned this site up quite a bit. The width is now 95% of the screen, I'm actually using the author page, the hero section is gone unless I can think of something useful to put there, and so on. One big thing is the navbar. I had to put the navigation links in the hero section until I realized I still had the Terminal theme's page open in my browser, went to close it, and just happened to notice the navbar in the screenshot. Of course, Publii's documentation for people actually wanting to use it isn't so great, so I went to the demo website and used inspect element to get a hint as to what and where the options for that were. Turns out it's the menus tab, but then after you create a menu, you have to add it to a group called Main Menu? I'm not sure if Terminal just has one slot and there are other themes with more than just the main menu, but it seemed kinda unnecessary, since I don't see a way to create more groups like that. Now that I have that figured out, though, it's looking pretty good.

Aside from that, I recently read The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. It's written in first person present tense, and while I don't really like present tense (it just doesn't feel good to me), it did get me thinking that maybe some of my stuff would be better in first person. Yeah, remember that story I talked about way back in the first post? I'll have to take another look at it, but it might be getting rewritten in first person. I'm actually working on a different story right now, and I want to at least finish a draft of that before I touch something else.

I need to write a postmortem of that VN I wrote as well, also mentioned in that first post. I really am proud of it, even if it was rushed (because I am my own worst enemy when it comes to actually doing this writing thing). People who say they need inspiration kind of upset me, come to think of it. I've got a million ideas and I can come up with more on the fly, I do NOT need anymore inspiration. What I need is that perspiration part. That's my fucking issue. I should also start shitposting more. Shitposting is fun. If you do want to read my shitposty works, you can see my AO3 here. Currently, all my shitposts are fanfiction, and all my fanfiction is shitpost, though maybe I should write more original shitposts.

Something else I'd like to do, speaking of shitposts, is make some web pages that are more in line with the Neocities/Geocities throwback aesthetic that are more typical of this website. This site is somewhat of a throwback to old web design, too. If you've ever heard of Maddox's Best Webpage in the Universe, I actually took a lot of cues from him for both this and the old site. Now, Maddox turned out to be a not so great guy, but I really took his thoughts on web design to heart. Simple, easy to read text, no distracting GIFs or weird microfonts, just a focus on the writing I am putting up here. Yeah, I know this site is a premade theme, but I chose it with those design principles in mind. However, the old Geocities (or Geoshitties, as Maddox referred to it) aesthetic has a beauty to it all its own. If I do make some, they'll be subdomains on this site, so stay tuned for that, hopefully maybe.

Hopefully, you'll be hearing from me again soon, this time with something to actually show for it.

Take Two

So you may have noticed it's been pretty close to a year since I last tried anything with this site. That's because Hugo sucks and I hate it.

Okay, maybe that's unfair. The problem I had with Hugo was that I tried to update it with a new post, and it didn't update. Couple other things just refused to work as well, like how I wanted to archive the old site and the link just refused to go anywhere.

I've since tried a few other static site generators, such as Jekyll, Pelican, and Publii. Jekyll was also hard to understand, Pelican clicked with me, but had no decent themes, and Publii was rock simple to use, but also had no good themes. There were probably others I'm forgetting, but the fact is, if I can't get it to work and look good out of the box, it's probably unusable for me. Writing is my only skill, I'm not a programmer or any kind of web developer. Hell, even though I dabbled in very simple HTML, CSS, and Javascript, the themes for these SSGs were very opaque to me, so I couldn't even modify any of them.

Well, fast forward to now. I was getting back on that SSG bullshit, only to find that way too many of them are effectively dead. I found one that was promising and looked at its GitHub only to find the last commit was two years ago, for example. I soon came back to Publii. There are still things I don't like about Publii, but honestly, since it's a GUI program with no confusing front matter category folder bullshit, at least it's going to get out of my way and just work. I hope. They even finally got a good theme! Terminal was originally from Hugo, I think, and I thought it was pretty attractive, even though I didn't pick it. Well, whatever problems I had with it before, I'll take what I can get now.

I just know somebody's going to swoop in here and tell me that actually, Hugo is soooo much better because response times or some esoteric programming reason. Dude, I don't care. I work slowly and get distracted easily at the best of times, the last thing I need is to have the tools I use also get in my way.

Publii devs, if you happen to stumble upon this, please let me import HTML and/or Markdown files as posts. Maybe even plain text files, too. Also, what were you thinking making the social media share and link plugins premium? Why those? Especially the link plugin, and come to think of it, why is that a plugin? Whatever, I just made a link to my Mastodon manually in the footer.

What I said about my social media usage still holds true, by the by. Best way to contact me is at the Wandering Shop. I hope to see you all again soon with another post, for real this time. May have to finagle a couple things still...

New Look, New You!

Hey, all! I hope this post finds you well.

So if you've ever seen this site before, you'll know that it looks a lot different.

The previous site was built basically by hand, which was kinda cumbersome, both to build initially and to update. It was also purely an archive and directory of where I was at elsewhere. That will now change, at least for the time being. I've built this site with Hugo, which should make it easier to use. Well, I say that, but trying to use Hugo has been a bit of a pain in and of itself.

If all goes well, there should be a link to the old index up on top of the page. I'll keep the old site archived there. Hopefully, if something goes wrong with Neocities, it'll be easy enough to migrate somewhere else. Eventually, I'll make dedicated pages for things that can't go in text posts, like my Twines and the PDF files of my one act plays. I hope to make more Twines and scripts, too. I was also the writer of a visual novel earlier this year. It wasn't a big project by any means, but I thought it was really cool to make it. More info on that in a blog post to follow.

I also have a story that's basically ready to go. It'll be the first in a series. Funny story, I actually had someone beta read it and then submitted it to a magazine, and they both said it seemed like the start of a larger story, which... I guess I have to make it the start of a larger story now? I promise that wasn't my intention, it was supposed to be its own standalone short story. But hey, whatever, I've got some things in mind for where it can go.

As for contacting me and finding me elsewhere, I'm basically only on Mastodon these days, which you can find here: https://wandering.shop/@evilroda

I mean, I still lurk on Tumblr, but that's it, so I'm not gonna bother linking it here. Twitter is fucked, and I haven't used it in years, anyway. And that's really it for other places I'm at online, aside from like, Steam and Facebook and stuff, but that's not something I want to give out.

Hope you all get to hear from me soon!