2025-10-17
Websites and dot-coms are so last century. The good news is that we're living through another boom cycle, so it's time to get in on the ground floor of another hot new technology called syndicated feeds. If everything went well, you should now be able to read these diary entries directly in your feed reader.
I passed my first writing deadline, which you'll probably see on the blog next month. While I'm satisfied with the result, I'm less satisfied with how much it broke me to achieve it. Some of this is a consequence of sprinting towards a deadline where the result won't be published for a while, which isn't something I've normally experienced with the writing I push online.
Million Live 11th was finally rescheduled! This takes us out of Nagoya at Aichi Sky Expo, not exactly a favored venue, to Kitakyushu, which'll be my first time back in Fukuoka since 6th. It's also in mid-March, so I can hopefully avoid the totally famous humidity I experienced in June. This throws a wrench in my February plans. Hitting my itinerary now starting with Snow Miku likely means extending to a month long trip. It also broaches Hololive 6th fes, which I have so far always opted to watch on streaming, in a weekend between. Maybe, this isn't such a bad problem to have.
New analysis from Otaku Soken focuses a few interesting trends in anime: Milky Subway burned slowly until it exploded in popularity mid-season and half-cour shows like Food Court and Takopi are having a moment. Milky Subway is fascinating for a bundle of reasons (Milky Highway was a graduate thesis project for Kadokawa's Vantan Game academy, which they're promoting pretty heavily now on their site), though a primary one is that it reappraises the shorts boom we saw around 2012-2013. That brought us things like Teekyu and Aiura, effectively passion projects, and with so many streaming players shopping around TV broadcast finally seems to not be an overriding concern, which applies equally to cadence (Netflix drops) as it does to format (the rigidity of the cour). Milky Subway was broadcast on Tokyo MX as an afterthought, but it now being compiled for a theatrical release shows where Japan's attention has gone with distribution. The flexibility of film isn't evenly distributedーLook Back stateside had to be artifically extended to reach a minimum runtimeーthough going to a theater to watch shorts would certainly be a return to Looney Tunes form for us. The short form ONA, accessible inside TikTok and YouTube, is such an obvious growth segment that I expect to see suits begin taking more advantage of.
Something itches me strangely about Teto being giving equal billing as MAISONdes, Giga, TeddyLoid, and Kobo for the Gnosia OP. This is, actually, a leading indicator that the Teto popularity crash is coming sooner rather than later. When Watamote, Mekakucity Actors, and Black Rock Shooter began to insert Miku into the commercial anison mix, those were the death knells for the first Miku boom in 2012-2013. As a trusted expert on this subject, I can pick 'em from a mile away.
I've been thinking about how I want to relaunch VOCALOG still, now that it's been dormant for almost a year. Upping the cadence still seems like the right move, but it remains less clear to me what degree of editorial it needs, or really who it should be reaching. Pushing playlists to VocaDB, so they can be listened to not strictly in a rigid list as I present them, came to mind recently. The original mission statement applies in that I think curation is more important than ever these days. Context may not be what people want to actually ingest when digging through music to find their earworms, but I think that has importance here too.