Like the previous couple of years, 2019 hasn't been a great year for me on a number of levels (both professional, health-wise and personal), hence the lack of posts this year. I have thought long and hard if I wish to continue blogging and the answer is still yes.
However after mulling over what I want to do and were I want to go with this blog I have decided to make a number changes;
The first is to separate the Anime Archivist stuff from the other (rather opinionated and maybe political) material I have written on this blog over the last decade.
The second is the renaming of this blog to The Melancholic Middle Aged Anime Fan, and reformatting it to only include stuff that doesn't come under the Anime Archivist banner, which will also now include theatrical screenings. I suspect I will now rarely, if at all, add new posts to this blog.
The third change is to have a break from writing for a while, while I work on some other projects and to concentrate on the rather large backlog of DVDs and Blu-rays I have seeming accumulated over the last 18 months or so (which oddly coincided with a noticeable shrinkage in the amount of English language anime releases in the same period, go figure).
So what I have done is created a template for the new blog for the Anime Archivist which I think will make it's permanent home on Blogger (though I have tentatively also snapped up a Wordpress site as well). I plan to commence work on the new blog at the start of October. I will republish 40 previously published Anime Archivist articles on the new blog, one a week, some with revisions or additional material. As I publish them on that blog, I will delete them from this blog, much like how I was doing when I transferred the material from the original Anime Archivist blog on Wordpress to this blog.
Material previously published on the long defunct Lost World of Anime website and blog (circa 2003 to 2010) will be rewritten and republished on the new Anime Archivist blog. The maternal planed for the new Anime Archivist blog falls into several categories; anime and some tokusatsu published in English but no longer in print or ignored by wider fandom released on VHS, Laserdisc, DVD and Blu-ray, official anime music video compilations, defunct English language anime and some tokusatsu magazines, finishing up my Western Connection series, a new series on English language books on Japanese otaku or other subcultures, otaku or subculture documentaries, a new series on the anime films of Happy Science (aka Kofuku-no-Kagaku) and whatever else takes my interest.
To a large degree a lot of the material I write about isn't covered by anyone else. I also exclusively focus on commercial (physical) products released in English, unlike the vast majority of bloggers. Hence the reason why I want keep writing and publishing this stuff. As I said before, I'm not really concerned if I don't have a large following or no following at all for my writing. I'm just happy to write about this stuff.
To the very few people who may follow this blog, I apologise for the lack of new material for the large part for the next 12 months. In the next month or so, after I have decided on the formatting of the blog and worked out the bugs, I will publish the new Anime Archivist website address.