Frog-kun

Life Update: Leaving ANN and Future Plans

Last month, I resigned from Anime News Network. I met a lot of great people and learned a lot during my time there, but ultimately I decided earlier this year that I wanted to go independent.

Looking back, this blog was actually the main reason I got hired at ANN in the first place. Zac Bertschy, the late editor-in-chief, would compliment my posts on Twitter. After I freelanced a few times, he invited me to become the site’s Tokyo correspondent—a massive leap of faith by any definition. If that twist of fate had never happened, I don’t know what I would be doing now. I am still so grateful for the opportunity, and I can only hope that I was able to contribute positive things during my time there.

In the end, I left because of personal reasons, and now I’m taking life at a slower pace. With more time to write as a hobby, I’ve been realising all over again how fun it is. I’d really like to keep hold of this blog, and I’m definitely going to update it more actively in the future.

This month in particular will probably be a busy one on the blog—there’s a bunch of new anime that I’m really eager to write about, like the new Mushoku Tensei anime and Fate/Strange Fake. I’m also in the middle of a site redesign, so look forward to that as well.

I hope that those of you who enjoyed my writing at ANN can follow me here. As for my long-time subscribers, hello again! Sorry for keeping you waiting for so long. For now, take care, everybody!

23 comments

  1. Just wanted to say congrats on the achievement to become a writer at ANN in the first place, and hope you get some renewed passion now that you can just do whatever!

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  2. I wish you luck on your future endeavors and contracts on your achievements. I hope more people will blog now that Twitter and Reddit are quite literally collapsing. Twitter recently limited the number of tweets you can read and even stopped allowing unregistered users from viewing tweets. At this rate, Twitter might collapse completely and not be able to recover.

    It’s a good thing I never stopped blogging, we need to start creating our spaces that aren’t controlled by big tech. Believe it or not, I have been for 8 months working on building out a Mastodon and Calckey, which are microblogging software that work on what is called the Fediverse. I recently wrote a post on why this is happening and my pitch to bring more Anime Bloggers and content creators onto Sakurajima (the instances I run). But it may be a great time to join us as I wrote a long article on why Reddit and Twitter are collapsing and how it affects the Anime fandom community. Not only that, WordPress added automatic sharing support for Mastodon recently.

    Also Bluesky is not it, it’s a mess (and even collapsing under it’s load besides the boatload of moderation issues), and I’m not sure I can trust Jack Dorsey since he is the guy that allowed Space Karen to run Twitter into the ground.

    But it will be interesting to see the only things left after all the big centralized social networks collapse is Web 1.0 sites, Internet forum communities, regular websites, and blogs.

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    • Yeah, I have to say that one of my reasons for wanting my own little corner of the internet is because the major social media platforms suck right now (especially Twitter). I am looking forward to engaging more with the blogger community.

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      • This is exactly the reason I kept blogging, but of course the problem is that it’s hard to get comments on my blog posts. Sure, the rate of comments has improved after 2020, but it’s nowhere near what is was in the 2010s. :(

        This may change, but it there is no sign of this changing, yet. I have been linking to other people’s blog posts in my post, which is something that TheCrow does on his anime blog.

        I do think the future of social networking is with Mastodon/Fediverse as it’s not controlled my a commercial entity. Even with Threads, which is Meta’s answer to Twitter, it’s still an enshittified mess only promoting influencers, celebrities, and the famous posts without showing the posts from the user’s following list. In fact, there is no following timeline at all, it’s only the algo timeline. Also, Meta has a huge history of abusing their users, so I don’t see this as an alternative.

        While people complain about Mastodon being hard, it’s not after one starts using it. it’s just a bit different, but basically Twitter in the early days. I think the main issue is not everyone is on the Fediverse, but this may be changing if Twitter becomes completely broken that it becomes one of the viable alternatives not owned by a corporation. Sure, there is Bluesky, but it’s owned by Jack Dorsey, the same guy that sold Twitter as mentioned in my previous comment, which can suffer the same fate.

        WordPress developers recently acquired the WordPress ActivityPub plugin, allowing WordPress blogs to interact with the Fediverse, and also with Mastodon. This means that a Mastodon user can follow a blog and comment by just replying to the post from Mastodon. Tumblr is supposed to add ActivityPub support in the future as well.

        But overall, I wish people would comment on my posts, then maybe I think Anime blogging will have aa comeback. Still, I think things like Blogs, forums and the Fediverse (e.g. Mastodon) are things to focus on to keep in touch with the wider aniblogosphere. I don’t think the situation with commercial platforms will get any better in the post I recently published about it.

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    • Twitter’s problems are obvious and known, but what happened to Reddit? I heard that they introduced some dubious paid feature.

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      • It’s actually over pricing the Reddit API to insane levels, pricing out third party apps, including tools that is used for moderation as well. It led to a two day blackout protest with subreddits going private, but when demands were’t met, some extended it indefinitely, which caused Reddit admins and CEO to threaten to force subreddits open or else, the mods will get replaced and the subreddit will open for them. This caused many users to leave Reddit.

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        • Did Reddit literally threaten to retaliate against moderators of objectionable subreddits if they don’t support their policies? It sounds like repression in a totalitarian country, where your property can be taken away if you do not support the policies of the dictator.

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  3. Really enjoyed your articles on ANN, including what might have been your final one (your list of shoujo-esque light novel recommendations). I’ll try to stop by here more regularly… I just looked at your post on “Associate Professor Akira Takatsuki’s Conjecture,” which I had never heard of before, but it sounds right up my alley. Though your post also made me want to read all my In/Spectre manga again…

    It seems to have gotten more difficult to stay connected with everyone, unfortunately. I miss the blogging days of a decade ago, but I suppose that’s partly just me missing the free time and enthusiasm I had a decade ago. (Sigh.) I enjoyed interacting with everyone on Twitter from around that time up to around 5 years ago, by which point the vast majority of anime (+manga, etc) bloggers I knew had either left entirely, or had shifted gears to talk mostly about other topics (politics, Hollywood films, K-pop, etc). I get that’s just how things go though…

    Every now and then I get the itch to blog again? Maybe if I ever come up with a new angle to work with, I’ll have enough motivation to start tossing paper airplanes into the void again.

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    • Thanks! I do think that Associate Professor Akira Takatsuki’s Conjecture is definitely your kind of thing, and it’s a pity it kind of slipped under the radar.

      I relate to what you say about the difficulty of staying connected. It doesn’t help that Twitter as a platform has gone down the drain lately. I hope you can find the motivation to blog again, even if it is just the occasional post here and there. There’s more permanence to something like that compared to a social media platform where your online identity can disappear overnight imo.

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      • Just want to add to this, as someone that kinda started out again (well, I only write when I feel like it), and blogging has changed a lot since back then. And a problem is that most blogs are basically impossible to find to begin with (and so many writers don’t seem to engage on social media, so connecting is impossible!). So it can seem lonely.

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  6. Reading several of your articles and translations was part of what got me deeper into research about anime staff from back when I was in high school. I’ve gotta seriously thank you for all the work you’ve done on ANN, and I wish you the best of luck with whatever you decide to pursue next!

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  9. A little late, but good luck on your future endeavors. Out of curiosity, what was the salary at ANN like when you were a writer there?

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