The Grim Future of this Blog!

I didn't have a release for last month. I'm not entirely sure, but looking at the sidebar, that seems to be the first time that has happened since I started this blog eight years ago. I'm sure there has been months without actual content, but I've at least made a post every month since the beginning. I did release something earlier this week, but never got around to posting it here—which leads us to the main motivation behind this update.

Maintaining this blog has unfortunately become a chore. I've felt this way for a while now, but I've kept updating it, maybe purely out of habit. With my limited time nowadays, I've come to the conclusion that this is one time sink I want to get rid of. Some of you might think it shouldn't take much time to make a post, and maybe I'm just slow and meticulous, but it does for me. The reality is that it includes a lot of small things that have to be done before you can hit the publish button, and it all adds up. Downloading the zip with the edited files, renaming files if needed, uploading the zip to gallery/DL sites, picking out and cropping a preview image, uploading that image, writing something for the release, adding all the links, updating other parts of the site like the release list, and so on.

If I'm to put a number to this process, I believe 20 minutes is a very conservative average estimate. Multiply that with 720 releases and you end up with 240 hours or 10 full days. By comparison, I've spent around 105 days watching anime, 30 days playing LoL, and although it's based on a very incomplete list, at least 30+ days on gaming in general only counting the two latest console generations. Of course, this is completely disregarding the time spend translating, editing, and QCing, which I'm sure is something I'd have to count in months instead of days by this point.

The thing is I enjoy doing all of the above, with the exception of maintaining the blog.

I think I'll still update the finished projects page, because I do enjoy keeping records of inane accomplishments—which is why I know I've accumulated 106 days and 13 hours watching anime. Also this doesn't mean I'm done with translations. As mentioned before, I still enjoy the translation process, and the only difference going forward is that I won't make a blog post when something is released. Right now I'm not sure what I want to do with this site, or even if I want to do anything at all. I've thought about just having the release list on here and remove all posts, or re-purposing it as an actual blog if I feel like sharing my thoughts on stuff. For now, it'll simply remain dormant.

Even though this isn't really a goodbye, I feel it would be amiss of me to not thank everyone who has visited this blog or has in any other way come into contact with me or my releases over the years. I honestly owe most of what I have today to the support I've received ever since I posted my first translation back in April of 2008, so thank you.

With that out of the way, I can now spend the rest of my weekend doing something I enjoy, like playing the Odin Sphere remake or watching the first episode of Orange. Maybe I'll even get around to translating something...