Farewell, Otaku Links!

Otaku Links

I’ve been writing these Otaku Links roundups since 2009. The oldest one you can still read is from December 23, 2010. (I made a lot of my older work private because I am not sure if I still stand behind it and frankly haven’t checked.) The question is, are you still reading them?

Now that I’ve quit Twitter, I’m finding it harder than ever to find links for Otaku Links. I tend to find my links from better link roundups, like Anime Feminist and The Rec Center. Chances are that’s where you’re most likely to get your links as well. Because there sure weren’t more than 50 people reading each Otaku Links post I’ve put up in 2017. (That is, with the rare and hilarious exception of Otaku Links: If I say “Devilman” will you click on this?)

Otaku Links isn’t hard to write, which is probably why I never questioned it until now. That said, it requires a little bit of my mental energy every day that I could be using to do other things, and the benefits to me or my readers are few and far between. (One possible benefit: I am the first Google result for “otaku links,” not that anyone has ever Googled that phrase before now.)

The question is, what happens next?

Blogging has changed so much in nine years and sometimes—for years, even—I’m just on autopilot doing the same things I have always done without stopping to wonder why I’m doing them. Even blogging is one of those things I need to think about.

I rarely even read blogs anymore, but I jump at the chance to subscribe to a new newsletter. Maybe you’re the same way. So I’m veering toward using the energy I use to blog here into putting out my newsletter more often, or at least more than once a quarter. But pretty soon I’ll be putting out a reader survey (if you’re subscribed to my newsletter, you already know that) to figure it out.

With all that said, here’s one last hurrah for Otaku Links:

That’s all for now. And whether you’ve been following Otaku Links for the past nine years or this is your first one, thank you for reading.

Photo of my laptop in 2014 when I started using this photo format. (A photo of that same laptop now, on the left.) 

The Twitterless Diaries

Careers, Tech

Productivity isn’t about what you do. It’s about what you don’t do.

I don’t know who first came up with this quote, but after this week I know it is true. As you might have noticed from my distinct lack of tweeting, I quit Twitter. Again. And in the meantime, I filled my empty days with a lot more work and a lot less worrying.

The problem is, I trick myself into thinking my time on Twitter is productive. Especially now that I have more than 7,000 followers and get a lot of likes. I live for those likes and it isn’t healthy. It feeds into my anxiety and I get that giddy, empty feeling every time I scroll.

Last time I quit Twitter, I vowed to limit my time on it. That did not happen. In 2017, I spent 485 hours on social media, and I spent more time on Twitter than any other social website! Last year I also made less money than I wanted to, and never seemed to have enough time in the day. I knew where this was going, so it was time to, once again, go cold turkey.

Here’s how this past week went:

Saturday

I woke up early and immediately checked Twitter. Everybody was talking about Otaku Coin: Chris MacDonald, my employer at Anime News Network, was serving on the same advisory board as Palmer Luckey. I don’t know what Luckey’s views are, but he funded a pro-Trump group that posted white supremacist and anti-Semitic material on social media. I thought I was going to need to cut ties with Anime News Network right away.

I felt like I was having a heart attack while I was scrolling and tweeting, trying to learn more and distance myself at the same time. And at the end of it? Chris said he had no idea who Luckey was when he agreed to the project, and upon finding out said he wouldn’t serve on a board with him. (Later in the week, I Googled for articles on the scandal, and there were none. This was a panic limited to Twitter alone.)

I was so deeply invested in what turned out to be speculation that it ruined my mood for a whole day. That’s when I realized it was time for me to take a break and get back in touch with reality.

The first thing I did was limit Twitter to 5 minutes a day on my StayFocusd app. When you use the app to limit time on a site, it counts down and eventually blocks it from you completely for the rest of the day. I kept 5 minutes so I could still promote new blog posts on Twitter. But I told myself I would use my profile page while I did that—so I couldn’t see other peoples’ tweets. I only stuck with that until Wednesday.

Sunday

I kept accidentally navigating to Tweetdeck. It’s sort of second nature. I realized I’m not even thinking about any particular purpose when I go to check Twitter. When I was feeling anxious or fidgety, my fingers would just navigate there.

Every time I sat down to do anything at all on my computer, from checking the weather to writing a blog post, I would impulsively try to go to the Twitter page first. That’s when I realized I had a bigger addiction problem than I thought.

Monday

Monday is my blog posting day, so I went to Twitter to promote my new Gunpla 101 and Otaku Journalist posts. I posted and closed the window as quickly as possible to avoid temptation.

I managed to resist, but my thoughts for the day took the form of tweets. That morning I found out that the trick to making really fluffy pancakes was to sour the milk with vinegar first, and I wanted to tweet that. I learned I had a stash of Bitcoin from 2013 that I’d forgotten about (it was only 0.50 cents at the time) and I wanted to share my discovery. Even though I spent the day doing stuff with John and a friend, without my Twitter followers I was weirdly kind of lonely.

Tuesday

I woke up feeling terrible—headache, fatigue, muscle aches. Withdrawal symptoms. Not from Twitter obviously, but from caffeine. I forgot to mention that, in a supremely terrible bout of decision making, I decided to quit coffee and Twitter in the same week. Anything to get rid of that jittery heart-attack sensation I’d been feeling so often of late.

I wasn’t too productive but I managed to get dressed and show up on time for my Japanese study group. Usually, I run a bit late even when I feel fantastic. I think it had to do with the loneliness factor—I am a person who works from home and rarely sees people aside from John. Twitter is a great replacement for a social life, and you don’t even need to leave your house! Without it, I need to try harder. To connect with other people, I have to go out to my study group. I have to text my friends or my sisters, painfully aware that my witty thoughts are only going to be heard by one person. This seems so basic, but it was infuriating. Before, I could be heard by 1,000 different people at once.

Wednesday

I got an email from Twitter telling me that it existed and I should go on Twitter. “See all sides of the story. Join the conversation,” it said. This may be a coincidence, but I have all email alerts turned off and I haven’t gotten an email from Twitter in years.

That email should have made it easier to avoid Twitter because I am contrary, but I couldn’t resist going back on Twitter after promoting my Forbes post. Minutes after I published a list of the Anime Awards nominees, the PR person emailed me and told me Crunchyroll had altered the list again, and some of the categories she’d given me previously were no longer accurate. It sucked because this story was under embargo for days, and only after the story went live were there new changes.

I made the required changes, but I was terrified that people who’d see my article before it was updated were confused and maybe replying to my tweet promoting it. I checked my Twitter mentions, telling myself it was for work, and people were indeed confused. I even responded to somebody who was confused about it and let them know what was up. I did notice that while I did damage control, the now-unfamiliar heart-attack sensation came back. Nothing I could do about it in this case—it really was for work. But better not to feel that way about non-work interactions.

Later, John asked me if I’d seen something on Twitter earlier, and I reminded him why I definitely had not, so he told me about Nintendo making toys out of cardboard. I thought he was joking.

Thursday

This was my most productive day of the week, if not my life! I usually get three major tasks done in a day. On Thursday I got six done big things before Japanese class. I even finished a project I’d been putting off since mid-December.

I realized I get things done a lot more quickly without Twitter. Doubly so if my sisters and friends aren’t around on Gchat (I’ve sort of been using them as a Twitter replacement, sharing some of the stuff I’d much rather tweet). All I could think was that my RescueTime report for this week is going to look fantastic—it ranks my productive and unproductive time and shows it to me in an infographic. (It’s a great app for being regularly horrified by your own habits.)

Friday

I had free time today because I got so much done on Thursday. I got a haircut at the mall and chatted with my hairdresser who is pretty cool—we follow each other on Instagram. (Somehow I’ve never felt addicted to Instagram though, maybe because I post rarely and have so few followers.) When I was finished, I ran some errands like getting my wedding ring inspected for loose gems (I’m supposed to do that every six months but it had been four years) and consulting a makeup artist at Sephora about updating my skincare routine now that I’m over 30.

Usually, I hate this kind of stuff but the idea of having opportunities to talk to people, even strangers, was especially appealing to me this week. And that’s the reason I simply have never been able to stick with quitting Twitter. With Twitter, I can tell myself I have 7,000 adoring fans hanging on my every inane thought (though I know half of them are bots and most of the humans don’t actually care). Without Twitter, I am just a lonely, aging woman who spends a lot of time at her computer.

Saturday

I started learning what I had missed when I wasn’t on Twitter. I saw Buzzfeed’s The 29 Stages Of A Twitterstorm In 2018, in which people got mad about an awful T-shirt, culminating in armed police and protesters at the home of an innocent birdwatcher (he has a Twitter name that’s similar to that of the company that made the bad shirt).

I immediately noticed how the people who first raised awareness were cheated out of their likes, Twitter’s currency—even though they’re not worth a dime. But I remember getting furious when other Twitter accounts would steal my jokes. What did “likes” ever get me?

And secondly, how much of the story was turned into sausage for the Online News factory. That used to be the bulk of my work at the Daily Dot—taking Twitter-manufactured outrage and turning it into a researched article. How mad people always were when I asked for interviews. They were already mad about the thing I was asking them about to begin with. Twitter is a really good place to feel mad about stuff, and remembering that kept me away for another day.

Edit: this Buzzfeed article is a parody, and I wouldn’t have even needed to go on Twitter to find that out. I regret the error. (HT @darylsurat)

Sunday

I logged onto Tweetdeck. I expected to have missed everything important for a week. But it was amazing how few mentions I had—because I wasn’t tweeting, nobody was responding to me. Twitter went on as usual without my participation, and why wouldn’t it? This site is huge and constantly active—it would take me months to notice a friend I used to tweet at has left.

What did I learn from all this? That Twitter is perfectly engineered to feed into my need for approval and praise. It’s an easy replacement for a social life. Heck, it’s an easy replacement for work—when I’m part of the Twitter discourse I feel like I’m enacting real change. No wonder one study discovered that Twitter is harder to resist than alcohol or cigarettes! And as you might know, I tried to quit Twitter in 2015. And failed.

I can’t trust my attention-seeking lizard brain, so this doesn’t end here. I still have Twitter set to a 10-minute daily limit with StayFocusd. I’m still going to limit my tweets to promoting posts from Otaku Journalist, Gunpla 101, and Forbes. That’s going to be especially hard: it isn’t going on Twitter itself that is my addiction, it’s the tweet-and-response feedback loop.

Twitter is a great way to communicate for a lot of people, and I’m not suggesting that you quit Twitter. I know I’m an extreme case. I think you can tell from this post that I’ve been using an inane social media service as a bad coping mechanism and that needs to stop.

My hope is that limiting my Twitter use will actually help you to hear from me more often—through regular blogging, reporting, and my newsletter. Even without the instant gratification of Twitter, I still want to share. I’ll just have to work a little harder to do it.

Photo by freestocks.org from Pexels

Otaku Links: Decision time

Otaku Links

  • This Newsweek article is a great example of how to take a niche anime topic and expand on it for a broader audience. It’s fantastic until one funny misstep at the end: “If you like Devilman Crybaby then you’ll love… /scans Netflix/ Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood?”
  • For way more detail, Sakugablog translated Buzzfeed Japan’s interview with Devilman Crybaby director Masaaki Yuasa. I loved Yuasa’s Ping Pong the Animation and remembering how good it was is why I took a chance on Crybaby at all.
  • “Parasites” in Darling in the Franxx. This installment of Emily’s flower language blog series clarified a lot of the stuff I was wondering about with this episode.
  • All the winter 2018 anime have premiered, and it’s time to decide which ones are worth watching so you’re not trying to follow 10 at a time (I’ve been there). If you’re wondering which ones to stick with I’d recommend checking out Anime Feminist’s premiere digest.
  • If you want to watch the same shows as I’m reviewing, those would be How to keep a mummy and Record of Grancrest War. The second is a real blast from the past—I watched Record of Lodoss War on VHS tapes in elementary school. Unfortunately, Yowamushi Pedal: Glory Line didn’t make the cut—though I’ll still be keeping up with it.
  • It’s almost time to vote in the Anime Awards, and the nominees just went live this week. You can start voting for Anime of the Year and 16 other categories on Monday.

Screenshot from Darling in the Franxx, Crunchyroll. 

How to work on passion projects when your day job saps your energy

Careers

If you recall last January, I wrote a four-post series on how to choose a topic, write content, and launch a niche blog. This year, I’m resolving to launch six new niche affiliate properties using the step-by-step I wrote myself. It’s simple enough, but last year I didn’t launch even one.

The problem? New business ventures are always a risk. They consist of a lot of work for no immediate reward—and if the idea is a flop, there might never be a reward! It was hard to chase hypotheticals when I had plenty of guaranteed work to focus on. And once I was done with my regular work, I didn’t have the energy or enthusiasm for an additional project.

This year though, I’ve already launched a new property! While working on it, I’ve realized that there are techniques I can use to avoid letting my day job take everything out of me. If you have a goal to launch a side business this year, here are my tips for you:

Build momentum

This month I sat down for a couple of sessions with Google Keyword Planner to launch my latest affiliate site—a new blog that covers a mental health topic. I’d been sitting on this dot com for 10 months with no energy to do anything with it. So what changed? I decided to just get it all out in one or two sittings: a larger than usual amount of work in a short amount of time.

For a while, I’d had “work on the affiliate site” as a permanent item on my daily to-do list, but I never prioritized it. And the longer I let it sit, the easier it was to continue to ignore.

That changed when I was sitting down to make my 2018 goals—and looking at my 2017 goals to see if there was anything to try again this year. I found this site sitting on the list of goals I didn’t reach and realized I was disappointed about that. But instead of moving on, I decided to start working on it right then—while I had my determination to propel me along. That was enough to keep me going for a couple of days until I finished. I do think it is much easier to build momentum for a short while than it is for a year-long goal, which brings me to point two:

Batch your work

The thing I find tough about New Year’s Resolutions that require a daily commitment is that I have to dedicate a bit of my mental energy to thinking about them every single day. I find it’s hard to build momentum over such a long stretch of time (and studies show it’s not just my impression; it takes 1-3 months of intentional behavior change to form a new habit).

So how do you take that short-term emotional momentum and harness it into helping you achieve long-term goals? I suggest batching your work. The same way that it makes more sense to bake an entire batch of cookies on one tray, it’s easier to do a bunch of related tasks on one project all at once, even if it takes more time and effort in the moment.

Dedicating five minutes a day after work to focus on a passion project doesn’t work for me because chipping away at a big task so briefly doesn’t build momentum. Instead, I’m more likely to block off an entire day to get a project out of the way. I really have launched projects like this—Gunpla 101 was the result of one long weekend with zero commitments.

If you’re procrastinating, ask why

Before I put this affiliate property idea back on my to-do list after almost a year, the first thing I asked myself was, “Do I really want to do this? If so, why haven’t I done it yet?”

Sometimes the reason you are procrastinating on a project can tell you a lot about yourself and your values. Some fears can be dismissed, like “I haven’t done this because I am scared,” since anything worth doing is scary. Others are more legitimate like, “I haven’t done this because it’ll just become another crappy job for me to do.”

That was my main concern—I spend so much time on my existing affiliate properties, I was worried about just hiring myself for work I didn’t want to spend my time on. But I rationalized this by realizing that if one of my new properties is a success, I can hire people to write for me like I do with Gunpla 101. For now, I can create a minimum viable product, the bare amount I need to launch, throw it out there and forget about it for a couple of months. Thinking about my passion project as a one-time commitment and not an endless menial job convinced me to finish it.

As a freelancer who gets paid by the task and not the hour, I have more time to work on passion projects than the average person (and therefore far fewer excuses not to work on them). That means my perspective on the topic may be very different from yours. If that’s the case, what helps you stay focused and motivated to work on passion projects? Let me know in the comments.

Otaku Links: If I say “Devilman” will you click on this?

Otaku Links

This is the week I was finally cool on Twitter because I had two different popular Devilman Crybaby tweets. Between watching that show and most of the other anime season premieres, I’m hoping you spent the week more productively than I did. Either way, you deserve a link break:

Screenshot via Devilman Crybaby via Emily’s blog post.