From a graduate student’s journalism portfolio to an anime geek’s reporting notebook, Otaku Journalist has changed a lot over the past four years. In that time, I’ve actually published a whopping 415 posts!

This month saw the two biggest hits my site has ever had, Where your Crunchyroll dollars really go and Meet the girl who gets paid to watch anime. Since chances are you actually found my blog through one of these, I’m leaving them out of my list. Otherwise, here are Otaku Journalist’s 25 most popular posts of all time:

1. Gundam Modeling 101. You probably expected this, given I wrote a whole post about how this one article makes me money.
2. The bad romance of My Little Monster (and why I won’t stop watching). A controversial post about a controversial show.
3. What’s the appeal of cat ears? Why are girls with cat ears even a thing in anime? I should really revisit this 2010 analysis.
4. My afternoon as a Lolita. I donned Angelic Pretty and interviewed Lolita fashion aficionados on the National Mall. Here’s what I learned.
5. How to start a career in anime journalism. I reached out to my heroes to write this post. Now I’m friends with two of them! Go figure.
6. Ten things every otaku should do in 2011. Can’t believe this is still a hit. Time to write ten things for otaku to do in 2014.
7. Should anime conventions screen for sex offenders? Another controversial topic. TL;DR the answer is yes.
8. How to date an otaku. Wrote this about my relationship with my boyfriend-now-husband, so I guess some of my advice had to be right!
9. Your fan service experience may vary, part 1. This super old two-parter explores fan service shows aimed at guys vs. girls. Here’s part two.
10. The “Hot Geek Girl” debate: this time it’s not about looks. Why did Miss USA get so much flack for calling herself a science geek?
11. Why don’t more women play Magic? I don’t agree with my reasoning in this 2010 article AT ALL anymore, but here it is for posterity.
12. Is anime streaming site Daisuki worth your time? I need to revisit this one, too. Daisuki has gotten a lot better since it launched.
13. Anime piracy and how the anime industry is like journalism. If we want people to pay instead of pirate, we need to be selling them convenience.
14. Four Leaf Studio releases Katawa Shoujo. I started writing about this game a year before it came out. Here’s my changing views on it.
15. What I’m Watching: Danshi Kokousei No Nichijou. Why we can’t see women’s faces on Ordinary Lives of High School Boys.
16. The day I pissed off 4chan. My earliest encounter with Internet trolls in my journalism career.
17. How to meet geeks with interests like yours… in person! I’m a confirmed introvert, but here’s how I met my board game group.
18. Why you don’t have your geek dream job. Some tough love (mostly love) from my friend and mentor Steven Savage.
19. Do you think anime characters are sexy? Hell yeah you do! Inspired by an awkward conversation with my sister.
20. Maybe you’re the reason anime is dying. I don’t always write when I’m in a good mood, but I always try to come from a good place.
21. How to interview celebrities at a fandom convention. Based on a frequently asked question. Double points if the celebrity is your personal hero!
22. Has anime gone too mainstream? I wrote this back in 2011, but today, in the wake of Attack on Titan, it might actually be true.
23. An open letter to Asian people from a weeaboo. Back before I knew what cultural appropriation was, I wrote an apology about it.
24. The truth about Boys’ Love and rape culture. An important conversation that we can’t have often enough.
25. Can you pass the geek test? This is about me failing the geek test but funny story—I’ve since passed it and I don’t feel any better.

Well, that took me down the rabbit hole. I hope you find an interesting post you’ve never seen before. And no matter how old it is, feel free to leave a comment! I’ll be checking.

What are you going to be doing four years from now?

If you had asked me that same question four years ago, I don’t think I would have said blogging. In my first ever blog post back on November 14, 2009, I expressed my doubts even as I welcomed friends and family to check out my then-portfolio site.

Since then, a lot has changed. It’s worth repeating that my life turned out the way it did over the last four years directly because of my blog.

Me, days after starting the blog, about to film at Anime USA.

In November 2009, I was a 22-year-old graduate student at American University who just got my first smartphone, a giant Android brick. Most of the posts I wrote in 2009 are about general journalism, not geek stuff, because I wanted to be “well rounded.” I thought that if I just wrote about what I liked, I would limit my job opportunities.

I started to see the light in 2010 after I wrote about my experience working at Katsucon’s maid café. I got a writeup on Jezebel that called me “an aspiring journalist,” and even got in touch with Dan Zak, the Washington Post reporter whom I criticized but secretly admired. Zak’s outsider portrayal of the maid café prompted me to write my own. After that, I changed the name of my blog from simply Lauren Rae Orsini to Otaku Journalist.

All through 2010 I continued to report on fandom and subculture topics for my blog, but after I graduated, my internships at Kotaku and the Newseum didn’t turn into jobs. I started working as a cashier at the local gym and moved back in with my parents. It wasn’t how I imagined my life at 23.

When I got tired of marathoning Welcome To The NHK, I decided to buckle down. In November, I applied for 30 jobs in 30 days. In the end, I got five interviews, and finally one job. You can read the entire month-long saga right here, though it’s backwards since I put it up on Tumblr, sorry.

I began working as an interactive developer in downtown DC in December. I was so happy to find work, and so happy to have a highly technical job that made me feel smart and important, but it wasn’t long before I started to loathe it. Part of it was me being a dumb kid who didn’t know how lucky I was to have a job. And part of it was noticing that I never felt as happy working on work as I did when I was reporting for my blog.

Even though I felt like I had to be a different person for work (but I didn’t really; my boss and team members were really cool), I knew I was a reporter on the inside. And it didn’t matter if I was getting paid or just writing for my own blog. This is the gist of my summer 2011 entry to Susannah Breslin’s contest for young woman journalists on Forbes. I won.

After that, my professional writing career truly began. Owen Thomas, then a founding editor at the Daily Dot, saw my Forbes article and offered me a job. It was less than I was getting paid as a designer, but I didn’t even blink. I’d work in journalism at any cost. (Soon, I’d also realize I felt the same way about working for Owen.)

I stayed on at the Daily Dot for a year and a half, writing some of the most interesting stories of my career. I covered bronies, cosplay, and Tumblr communities, sometimes all in the same day, and my editors were cool with it. Sometimes my stories were reblogged at larger sites like Mashable, and eventually I had enough credibility to start pitching my own freelance articles at places like CNN.

Reporting at Otakon 2013, still wearing cat ears four years later.

Eventually, the long hours that come with working at a startup wore me out. I quit the Daily Dot to go freelance in December 2012. I worked at PBS, The Women’s Book, Tumblr Storyboard, Otaku USA, even WordPress, until I got in touch with Owen again. Now he was working at ReadWrite as the Editor in Chief. He offered me a freelance job, and once again I didn’t think twice. Since then I’ve slowly phased out my other gigs until I became a full time contractor, the lead writer for ReadWriteHack.

Some of you already knew the whole story. More of you stopped in somewhere in the middle. Either way, I’m so happy you’re reading this today. I have no idea where I’d be without my blog, but definitely not here.

Here’s to four more years for Otaku Journalist! And if you’ve been thinking about fiiiinally beginning that blog, this is your sign. My only regret is not starting sooner.

Last week, you guys helped make my post about Crunchyroll one of the most popular Otaku Journalist posts of all time. This week, I wanted to give you more.

It’s a really fortunate coincidence that I’m in San Francisco for work this week. So when Crunchyroll’s CEO, Kun Gao, offered to let me tour Crunchyroll’s San Francisco office, I was able to say yes.

Crunchyroll is located in the Financial District of San Francisco, one of my favorite parts of the city. It’s across the street from the Daiso, a Japanese-style dollar store. It’s a short walk from Minamoto Kitchoan, a bakery where all the sweets are flown in from Japan.

The first thing I noticed was the brightly-colored wall on the first floor, leading me upstairs. Crunchyroll lives on the building’s two upper floors. The move was recent, earlier this year from a South Beach location, the better to accommodate its now 50-person staff. (There’s also a Tokyo office in Harajuku, but with just three employees.)

Kun met me in one of the conference rooms, Seele. Each of the rooms’ names is an Evangelion in-joke. The phone rooms are even named Units 01 and 00!

Here’s one of the workspaces. More than 50 percent of Crunchyroll employees are engineers. If you’re good with computers, Kun said Crunchyroll is always looking to hire more talented, anime-loving engineers. Just email them.

The office boasts a lounge area with just about every console imaginable. Unfortunately, it’s not really for fun, but to test the Crunchyroll app on various systems.

Here’s the corner where they used to shoot Crunchyroll TV. They haven’t done it for a while, as you can tell by the messiness. But it does highlight the one most eye-catching parts of the Crunchyroll office—the exorbitant amount of anime merchandise. There are shows, figures, and toys everywhere.

On the top floor, there’s an outdoor balcony!

If you look down, you can see the Daiso across the street.

That’s all for now, but that’s not all. Check Otaku Journalist again at 12 AM Pacific Time (3 PM Eastern) for some exciting news about the future of Crunchyroll, which I heard straight from the CEO himself! Update: I got the time a little off, but the post is live!

Sorry to tease. In journalism this is what we call an embargo, where I make a promise not to break news before the company does. But believe me, it’s worth coming back for.