It’s been a long time. I shouldn’t have left you without an update to check to.

Well, January 2015 is actually the 15th anniversary of this site. I don’t have an exact date beyond “January,” although I didn’t exactly intend to wait until the 31st to do this. Ideally I would have done this on the 1st, along with updates to each section and layout changes and everything. Big anniversary stuff. But that didn’t happen because of a problem.

Below the cut I’ll give you fifteen whole excuses about why I’ve been so terrible and bad. But before that I’ll give you a quick status update on each section:

Sailor Moon: I did manage one update last April, after a year long gap. The plan was to update the other sections before resuming it regularly (since they had been neglected even longer), and I haven’t finished either of those because reasons. But it will take a major disaster to keep me from breaking my promise to update again in less than thirteen months.

Words: I have a rather large update coming that is nearly complete, but I wasn’t able to finalize it before I hit my personal deadline with this status/anniversary post. It will definitely be done in the next couple weeks, barring death or disaster.

Dragon Ball: So I was working on some more Daizenshuu 7 revisions, but I haven’t finished the section yet because of reasons. In fact it’s been months since I last worked on it. I ultimately ended up focusing on the big blog project instead, though I use the word “focus” loosely. Odds are DB will have to stay in the backseat a bit longer, because I’ve just given public deadlines for the other two sections. However, I will give a deadline here of “before Fukkatsu no F hits theaters.”

All this new deadline pressure should keep me in line. Now here are some reasons/excuses.

01) Stress
I was all-work-and-no-play for a long time, and it started to wear on me. Eventually I overloaded myself and crashed and burned.

02) Debauchery
In response to #1, I went to the opposite extreme as a sort of vacation. Of course my “debauchery” was actually just large amounts of video games, TV, junk food, and small amounts of alcohol. It would make for a good story if I’d become some out-of-control party person, but in reality I just stopped caring about some things for a while.

03) Backlog
As a result of #2, I fell behind on a lot of tasks and projects, including the ones on my website obviously. And trying to work through this backlog and resume the lifestyle I had with #1 just created new forms of stress. There was lots of temptation to avoid dealing with this stress and just resume #2, and I gave in to it at times.

04) Health Problems
#1-3 took a toll on my health in numerous ways. Apparently I’m getting old and I need to take better care of myself. The end result is that I physically can’t do all the things I used to, at least for the near future. I cannot spend hours at a time sitting in front of a monitor mashing my keyboard anymore.

05) Depression
A lot of the things on this list applied to me. But my morale was really low because of #3 and #4.

06) Other People
Clearly I had my own issues, but so did some of my friends and family. I won’t give any details about their business, but some of it had non-trivial effects on me.

07) New Habits
After everything that had happened, my daily and weekly routine had changed. Trying to resume my old ways in the midst of these changes has been difficult.

08) Regrets
In being less productive, I had a lot of time to reflect on various aspects of my life. And I realized a lot of mistakes I’ve made. Like I should probably never have started any translation projects, and they’re not as helpful towards my immersion and studies as I’d hoped. This doesn’t mean I’m quitting or deleting anything, however.

09) Redemption
Since my website had become so neglected, I wanted to do a big comeback with updates to every section. I almost did it last year, but I kept bouncing between different things because I kept changing my mind about what was the highest priority. The lack of focus ended up with very little actually getting done, although one thing is about 99% complete.

10) Uncertainty
Related to #8, all the time I spent reflecting made me question what I really want to do with my life. And my biological clock is ticking very loudly now, so there’s a lot of internal debate about whether or not to keep focusing on my own goals.

11) Arrogance
I keep overestimating myself and attempting to do more than I’m capable of. I think I can do X, Y, and Z in the span of a week, but in reality I’ll be lucky to have X done in two weeks. See also: #1, #3, and #9

12) Furniture Problems
It’s as stupid as it sounds, but yes. It’s connected to #4 and #7. For instance, sitting at my desk for lengthy periods of time is hell on my knees. There are other issues, but that one is the most relevant and least personal.

13) Computer Problems
This is low on the list because it’s a minor issue compared to the others. But there have been some. My primary PC was down for a while. I had a couple of server issues. Some poorly timed power outages interrupted and inconvenienced me, and even caused me to lose a bit of data (why the fuck didn’t I turn on auto-save).

14) Sleep Problems
Well I’ve had various sleep problems for nearly 20 years, and I could have just lumped it in with #4 and #5. But I really wanted fifteen list items. Anyway, it can be hard to start something up when you feel like you could fall asleep any minute. Especially when I want/need to maintain a certain schedule, and I’m afraid I might get a second wind and stay up all night working on something (which has happened plenty of times).

15) Bill Cosby
I thought of this before #12-14, but it seemed appropriate to save for last. You may remember that Cosby was featured in my banner for a long time. But for 2014 April Fools, I replaced everyone in the banner with their “evil” counterparts. Ultros/Orthros to Chupon/Typhon, Jupiter to Mars (candy bars), Cell to Gohan, Jericho to Stinko Malenko, Link to Tingle, Shinken Red to Decade, Magikarp to Feebas, and Cosby to Deon Richmond. The idea was to leave this “evil” version up to represent my corruption, until I’d fully redeemed myself and started updating regularly again. Obviously that hasn’t happened yet, and in the meantime this scandal popped up. The next thing on my site to-do list (after writing all this) is to make a new 2015 banner and do some quick CSS tweaks. But this Cosby situation is a dilemma. I can’t possibly add him back, but who to replace him with? Should I just start over from scratch, finally?

Tags: Dragon Ball meta, Sailor Moon meta, site general

Categories: Site News

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