Hello beautiful visitors of this site, I hope you have been incredibly well. I think I owe everyone at least a brief explanation of where the hell I’ve been for oh I dunno the past year.

The long and short of it – I was working on a number of projects, all the time whenever and where-ever I was and, to no one’s surprise, I burnt the fuck out. The more I tried playing the social media game and doing things I thought you ‘had’ to do to be successful on the internet, the more I came to hate my work and feel a sense of going through the motions.

I haven’t been doing nothing this whole time mind, but I have taken a huge and unplanned (or announced) step back from social media, and all of my outward facing work on the internet for the better part of a year. I do apologize, but honestly this was a hiatus I very much needed to find myself and figure out how exactly I wanted to move forward with my life and creative work.

Moving forward, though I’m not going to promise ridiculously consistent uploads here, I do wanna start putting out some, hopefully, high quality content in the near term. I have a number of interviews I conducted with a handful of high-profile, badass artists, and plenty of personal developments in my art training and life that I hope to bring back into my work.

There will be some major structural changes to the way that I work and write moving forward as well. First, one thing that I’ve really managed to absorb over the past months, is that anytime I step out of being true to myself and creating the magic for myself that I can’t find in the world, the less possible and sustainable it is to do any long-term creative endeavor. I am someone that has a low tolerance for boredom and bullshit, so in turn I plan to create when the inspiration feels the most genuine and in a manner that delights me to create and consume. This may ostracize some number of people that would come to this site, but I’ve come to realize that is actually a good thing. I would much rather create stuff that I think is awesome that some small number of true fans can get behind and also love, then create content that is both lukewarm for myself and for a larger less engaged audience. If I wanted to phone it in and get a paycheck I could go off and become a dentist or a lawyer instead, but I’m here to do creative work – work that makes me and hopefully the reader come alive and adds meaning to life in a way that many other sorts of things simply don’t.

So what does all of this really mean in practice you ask? Simply put, I will post more frequently, but without having a schedule or expectation for myself. I will do things, no matter how esoteric, as I suspect much of my work will be in the future, even if I think it may lose 99% of the audience. My hope is that you give it a chance, and much like I’ve experienced hundreds or thousands of times, you get lost and then find your way again on the other side of an expanded mind and horizon. I want to create work for myself, that I want to exist, to create that magic that once again I can’t find in the world even if no one is waiting for it, perhaps especially if no one is waiting for it. I will be a maximalist and use 20 dollar words where I see fit and 1 cent words where I see fit, to my own liking without much regard for how it might be received in context of the usual expectations of publishing work online. My hope is delight myself, perhaps the artists with whom I’ve the pleasure of working with, and pray that comes through and surprises and delights a select few misfits who might find great value in the work presented on this website.

So without much more to say I hope you, my dear reader, will join me in this new chapter of AnimeExplicated and gear up for what I hope will be a wonderful ride. Cheers~