For those that care, I'll be in Chicago ACen weekend. You can either rejoice or prepare for whatever you want to prepare for. I'll take whatever either way. With the semester being over and no school happening again until the Fall, I can take some time off and still get all my work hours in.

I'll have to do some serious eating while there too. Nothing "real" out here much. Miller's Pub will be a must. As well as some flavor of Chicago Style pizza. I'm sure there will be other things. I'll be out there Thursday (arriving in the evening) and returning on Monday (in the morning). It'll be nice to have a break. :)

Also, now that things are slowing down a bit, I'm looking to get @anime! going again. I'm not sure if anyone out there still watches anime and wants to write about it, but I'll be needing help as usual. Anyone want to get in on that? I'd be very grateful. :)

More when I have it. :P

 

Well, after the year-long experiment that was Ionfuse, the time came to get back to our roots. @anime! is officially back. Why, one may ask? Well, after sitting back and looking at what we had intended to do with Ionfuse, things just didn't seem to be materializing like I would have wanted. The original intention was to branch out a bit more into American mainstream media and that just didn't happen. Yeah, I can say that based on my original intentions, Ionfuse failed to live up to my expectations. It's not the first time something I've done hasn't worked out and I'm sure it won't be the last.

Not that it's been a loss. It's all a learning experience. Ionfuse was a good thing for us here. It somehow got the companies paying a bit more attention to us, which is definitely good. I was able to finally get a site design going in a direction that, with the new @anime! design, I'm extremely happy with. There was always something in each design that I did with @anime! before Ionfuse that really bugged me. It was usually something small that didn't quite fit and I had to find some hack solution for the design problem. I was able to get over that with the new @anime! site design. I think it looks cool, but I know I'm biased.

Now it's back to the normal HUGE problem I've always had with the magazine. Finding people excited enough about anime, manga, video games, j-pop and Japanese culture to want to write. Does anyone out there have suggestions on how to recruit more writers? I'd really love any ideas or help that anyone has.

Beyond that, just happy to see things going again. After things getting sidetracked with trying to get some other projects off the ground, it's nice to see things getting back on track.

Oh, and if anyone knows anyone that wants to write reviews, let me know. We can use all the help we can get. :)