Month: April 2026

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Meta Personal

Crawling Out of Backlog Purgatory

For the past couple of years, the period between January and the end of March has been spent in preparation for the local anime convention where I volunteer as a staff member. What this has meant is that I spend the time period heavily involved in scheduling events and panels for the convention, as well as putting together my own panels (of which there have only been a few lately). One of the panels I put on is focused around new anime from the prior year (between the end of the previous convention and the start of the current one) and of course the pre-work for that one involves watching a lot of anime. Some years ago this was easy, because I didn’t have a lot of other responsibilities. Nowadays that isn’t the case – not only do I have a kid that I love and want to be around, I also have *gasp* other hobbies. Historically as the convention has come to a close, I’ve fallen into the trap of moving along in my “hobby cycle” (the last few years it’s been knitting, since I like to enter items into my local state fair competition). Anime becomes the last thing I want to deal with after marathoning a whole year’s worth of shows in a short time.

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Anime Reviews Personal Reviews

Dealing with Words Left Unsaid in “Journal With Witch”

For reasons that even I’m not quite sure about, I spent some time a few years ago in the corner of Reddit that deals with navigating toxic family relationships (primarily r/raisedbynarcissists, but also some focused more around other familial and romantic relationships). I wasn’t “raised” by any narcissists, but I think like most of us I’ve dealt with individuals in my life who I’ve suspected had some narcissistic traits, and learning about what that all entails has helped me to unpack some things about the challenging interactions I’ve had.

I think what’s interesting to come to know is that, in many of these cases, the overriding emotion being experienced by the person posting is grief. When dealing with someone whose perception of the world lacks grounding in reality, there’s often not a way to have a genuine interaction with them. Whatever relationship you think you have with them is always filtered through their illness; they often aren’t in a state of mind to see you as an equal existence with your own thoughts, feelings, and desires. The grief comes from mourning a relationship that was never really there, and the reality that you may never get the opportunity to say what you need to say to these people in a way that they will acknowledge. It’s forever suffering a lack of closure.

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Opinion Personal

Is it a Return? Only Time Will Tell

Over the past couple of years my writing output has gone way down (like 99.99% down, haha) from whatever you might call my “peak” output. There are a lot of reasons for this that I think at least some people might relate to. Firstly, I had a kid; while I don’t think being busy is limited to people with offspring, I’ve found that, for me, the mental space that parenting takes up has tended to push out a lot of other things that haven’t been immediately necessary. Secondly, the internet has gone through some changes that have been difficult to navigate. There was the fall of Twitter/X (yes, I know it still exists but it’s not been a place I’ve wanted to be for a long time; I’ve started spending more time on Bluesky though), but I think even bigger has been the rise of AI Large Language Models and how that may be contributing to some of the apprehensive feelings I’ve had to engaging online.

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