(One Year Blogiversy and 100 followers special) 2016 in review and looking into the future

Hello everyone.  Welcome to one year after I started this blog and almost 100 followers.  For those of you who just followed me and are interested in some early material and my opinions of anime that I’ve watched this year, this post will have a summary what series I liked this year and some older series I liked as well.  A little cheating, but on the internet time scale, a year actually feels like decades.  Thank all of you for following me.

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A look at 2016, a year that is thankfully dead:

Looking back at 2016, it was a bad year for the world but a decent year for myself.  Yes, a lot of beloved celebrities died, that Brexit thing happened, Donald Trump is going to be president in 7 days, and I had an uncle that passed away and that was saddening, but I’m trying to look at the positives here.  This has been a good year for personal improvement.

In 2016, I started this blog, started going to the gym at a regular intervals, started working 40+ hours a week regularly, watched some cool anime, some cool movies, cool TV shows, and played in a  couple of community bands.  I’m still living at my parent’s house at the moment, but at least I’m not a complete bum doing nothing.  I don’t make the highest wage in the world, so most of my earnings are going toward college classes that I started going back into recently.  One class at a time and online, but that can still take up quite a bit of time.  Especially since these classes are at a masters level of education.  I’m trying to finish my Masters in Aerospace Engineering and I don’t think it’s going to be easy.  Even at the pace of one class at a time.  I also hate that I am doing this from the University of Washington side of things because I graduated with my bachelors from Washington State University.  This college rivalry thing is going to tear me apart.

So on to talking about this blog.  Watching it grow has been fun.  From the beginning were there were barely any hits day to day all the way to now when the lowest view count that I’ve had in a while is 10 views.  From one follower to 100 at this moment.  All this starting from the first post I’ve ever written.  It is one that describes my history with the medium and how it has changed over time.  This one in fact.  This blog has gone some interesting directions ever since it came into existence.  I’ve written some interesting discussion posts, some anime reviews in different formulations, some other unique posts, the thirty day anime challenge, and so much more.  I’m almost 200 posts in with this being my 183^rd.  I’m pretty excited about the future.
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Mechanical Anime Reviews 2016 Blog Summary:

Here are some of the statistics from the past year:

-Views: 5014
-Visitors: 2619
-Likes: 1032
-Comments: 516

Since this blog started out almost no views from day to day and then had a linear growth over time, I’m happy about how everything turned out.  You can tell what point I started getting involved in the community more because my blog’s growth really started around then.  I remember reading one of Aria Cross’ post about how finding the motivation to continue can be tough sometimes.  Especially in the beginning.  She was right.  Finding motivation is hard in the beginning, but once you get started you don’t want to stop.  At least for me, that is.  Ever since I started getting more views, I wanted to write more and more posts.  I was excited about the feedback and wanted to improve in any way that I can.

I did try writing different types of posts.  Some of them worked pretty well and others just sat there and didn’t do much.  I think most posts that didn’t do well had more effort put into them then some others.  I don’t know, it’s a weird balance.  It’s not like I am aiming for high views at all, but I still get disappointed from time to time.  Doesn’t matter, I’m still learning about this whole blog thing and I don’t think I will ever stop learning.  That’s my philosophy.  I will always be a student of life, because there is always something that I can learn about and improve on.

A quick summary of posts and opinions of anime I watched in 2016:
–Anime I’m glad I watched in 2016: Older series
–“~”: Winter 2016
–“~”: Spring 2016
–“~”: Summer 2016
–“~”: Fall 2016

–Top anime changing moments of 2016
–Best Parents of 2016

My Favorite Post I’ve written this year:
–Of Mechs and Men

To me, this is what I consider my magnum opus.  I admit that I’ve written some good posts throughout the year.  A majority of you people seem to like my discussion posts for some reason, but I don’t know if they are this good.  Maybe I am completely biased, because I am, but this post explains why I love the Gundam franchise so much and I think you can feel that in my post.  I put my heart and soul into writing this thing and I’m glad it did so well.  Everybody has their thing that they love unconditionally and Gundam is mine.  I don’t think I’ve hid that at all when writing all of my Gundam material, but this is me saying it completely blatantly and out loud again.  For the thousandth time.  If you want to know more, well you know where to look.  The link is right above this paragraph.

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A look into the future (2017 from here on out):

Right now, I don’t plan on changing much into the coming year.  I’m not even sure I would be able to, because I’m working 40+ hours a week and going to school.  Work says enough, but school requires studying, doing homework, and taking tests.  I’m going to be slightly busier than I was, so I don’t know if I have enough time to change anything to a massive degree.  I do plan on doing at least two posts a week and my reviews might become a little shorter because I might have less time to write them.  I know that I tried doing segmented reviews with different categories and things, but that style doesn’t fit me.  I’m going back to the free formed style of writing that I did before because that feels completely natural.  Not many changes, but there will be some additions I plan on doing.

The two things that I do plan on doing are adding a themed month and a blogger spotlight.  I feel like the themed month is going to be obvious considering what my blog’s title is.  MECHA MARCH.  I mean, doesn’t that roll off the tongue?  The things that I plan on reviewing right now for it are Gasaraki, Code Geass’ predecessor in a way but I haven’t watched it yet so can’t confirm, all of the EVA rebuild films together, because I recently got 3.0, and Eureka 7 if I have the time.  To do those, I need to finish the two series that I am still in the middle of first and then watch those.  I know its January and I should be able to do it, but I’ve become a slow watcher recently.  I will have other mecha themed posts as well, if seasonal posts don’t get in the way.  Should be exciting, maybe.  As for the blogger spotlight posts, those will start in February.  I don’t how often I will make those kinds of posts, but I will figure that out in time like everything else.

Lastly, I want to get a touch on use this blog for putting money in my own pocket.  I might do that at some point for extra pocket money, but that’s far off.  My personal goal is to reach 250 followers before looking into that, but that is a ways off.  I’ve gotten some offers to write for other blog sites and earn money that way, but I’m not sure if they are completely legitimate.  Also, if I ever wanted to make money on this blog, it would be doing it for me and not for any other site.  That’s not my focus anyway because, the career that I am heading towards is engineering.  I haven’t done an engineering job yet, but I am working at a manufacturing job for experience.  I also passed the F.E. exam recently and made my way back into school.  Engineering is what I always wanted to do because it’s my dream.  Writing is a hobby that I find incredibly fun.  If I can, I won’t ever stop doing it.  If making your blog sustainable by making a Patreon aand supporters, like Karandi from 100WordAnime (please support her) and a few other people that have done it, is your goal, that’s great.  You do what you have to fulfill what you want to do in life.  Just know that it’s not what I intended on doing.

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Whew, that was exhausting.  I wrote a few different categories of relevant things along with finding a way to organize all this stuff in flowing manner.  A lot of people wouldn’t consider this a long post, but it is for me.  Especially when it’s cut into segments like this.  I don’t usually do this sort of thing, so I don’t see how Naja is able to write a post with even more segments every Saturday.  That must require a lot of hard work.  Once again, thank you all for sticking around and reading it.  It’s been a great time.