No April Fool’s for you!

Actually, I didn’t even realize it was April Fool’s Day until I woke up this morning. Hell, I wasn’t even sure it was Saturday. It’s been that sort of week.

Anyway…

Over at Anime Pilgrimage, Alexander ponders time spent anime blogging, and seeing as I’ve been at this longer than most, I thought I’d share my experience. Back in the Nowhere days, I’d average a half hour per post - including screenshot selection, goofy caption writing, and actual post writing. Typically, I’d have already composed the actual post in my head by the time I finished watching an episode, meaning that most of that half hour was devoted to screenshot selection and caption writing. The captions didn’t always come easy. Sometimes, they wouldn’t come at all.

Hop Step Jump! is an entirely different animal, what with its longer posts and varied topics. The most time-consuming part of keeping this place running occurs entirely away from the keyboard. It’s the creative brain-storming process - the “what the hell do I write?” part - that sucks up time. When it comes time to sit down and start typing, however, I’m finished before I know it. Obviously, long posts with extensive formatting take more time to compose, but the average post (like this one, for example) generally takes fifteen minutes, tops.

Image selection can take more time than I’d like, however. Like a lot of fans, I have a giant library of stock anime imagery sitting on my hard drive, but new shows are often underrepresented. Of course, new shows get the most posts, so off to the data mines I go.

Anime blogging can be a time-consuming process, no doubt, but I try my best to balance my blogging time with my viewing time. Nowhere met its demise when the balance started tipping in the wrong direction. I don’t want that to happen with Hop Step Jump! Ever.

So, to better meet the needs of my readers, I’m outsourcing the site to India. Muskeh Bhupathiraju will be handling writing duties for now on, with Hrishikesh Thind taking care of imagery. I’ll check in every so often to respond to comments. Vidyadhar Baalakrishnan will be deleting the nasty ones. Try not to piss him off.