Christmas-su Reflections

I wanted to blog about anime because blogging about programming and technology the way I was doing it previously was incredibly boring. Essentially it boiled down into a three component post, question, searching for answer and the answer. It’s not interesting and there’s no real community behind it. Sure, it got views and since I’m a huge view-monger, I was pleased. It still left me empty though.

Anime blogging, I hoped, would allow me to joke around with the shows I was watching anyway, everyday after school, before bed, whenever I had time. For a while I was fine but then it got repetitive for me. I found myself falling into the three component post trap again but this time with intro-summary-reflection. Sounds similar, doesn’t it? My blogroll is full of other lovely aniblogs out there and I finally relent to admit that none of my content was anymore unique than their content.

Valence posted something that I registered with.

I read other blogs in closer detail. How they used this ‘screenshot with text’ sin in writing, yet appear to be unique and professional, despite generating nothing as ‘unique’ as luminodrake had written. I thought for a moment – and realized the root of the problem. My posts lacked ideas. Concepts. New opinions, wit, or substance. They were like cardboard, soggy from the rain. I had even tried writing crappy columns every week to try and spice things up to a little bit, but alas, to no avail.

Remind you of anyone?

I recall my old days attending my English classes at school. I would sit there hopelessly pondering, “For what purpose do we analyze these stories?” At the same time, before, during and after class, a few of us would talk about the anime we watched. We would analyze that in a very different way that we would Shakespeare. It was interesting and relevant to us. Writing the way I talked about the anime at school was what I imagined when I started but that’s not what came out. Essentially a garbage dump of summaries and half-baked reflections were churned out.

Read my last long winded post ever. So that was too long. and this is too short. A mix of long and short was better for me, but not by much.

The question is, did that work? As a view monger, I still get 20-30 views per day on existing content and a few more when I post on twitter and elsewhere. I doubt anyone subscribed my feeds, I certainly wouldn’t which means that’s all unique google-generated traffic from somewhere. So, I succeeded there, I get traffic. As a blogger though hoping to find people who shared my interested, no, I didn’t really win any prizes.

So as I said last time, maybe I’ll do better next season.