One lunatic's love-hate relationship with the Pokémon franchise, and his addled musings on its rights, wrongs, ins and outs. Come one, come all, and indulge my delusions of grandeur as I inflict my opinions on anyone within shouting distance.
oh hey it’s a month and apparently monthly State of the Blog addresses are a thing I do now
uh
Καλό μήνα!
(in Greece people literally wish each other “good month!” on the first of each month – like, just as a standard greeting; I’ve had supermarket cashiers say this to me – and I kind of love this and think the English-speaking world should adopt it)
Continue reading “State of the Blog – May”uh… nothing is on fire… none of the Pokémon are dead… the horrors of the space between the stars are quiet… I need to buy milk tomorrow but I can probably remember to do that… things are good! I think!
Y’know, there is something weirdly addictive about the WordPress stats page. Day by day, hour by hour, the figures go up, and some number of people are paying attention to my deranged claptrap, fuelling my long, slow and inevitable descent into crippling narcissism.
Continue reading “State of the Blog”Don’t worry, I’m not vanishing into an archaeological dig for a month; I’m just here for a week to attend a top-secret cool-kids-only seminar on ancient glass, my speciality (and, uh, take some photos of the Arch of Hadrian to catch some angles I missed the last time I was here). It’ll be a bit of a slow week on account of the program being fairly intense, but I’m still aiming to get my next Pokémon review (Celesteela) written and posted in accordance with the 10-day schedule I seem to have adopted. So, speaking of that… it seems to be working well? I’m posting things consistently (3 Ultra Beast reviews in March), I’m answering questions (14 over the course of the month), I made a ridiculous cake that people seemed to like, and… well, to be honest I don’t really know what all the numbers on my stats page mean, but the ones for March are the biggest yet, by a fairly impressive margin (more than double those for January), and we seem to be getting more people coming in through links on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc – so, to anyone who’s shared any of my writing over the past month, thanks, and keep doing what you’re doing! And, y’know, keep the questions coming; I know I whine about the difficult ones sometimes but interesting questions are kinda this blog’s lifeblood in a lot of ways, and I literally couldn’t do this without you.
Special thanks are due as always to my Patreon supporters, James Crooks, hugh_donnetono and Esserise, whose contributions pay for the upkeep of this WordPress site. If you enjoy my writing, want to see more of it and have exactly $US 1 too much money per month, consider clicking that link at the top of the page to browse the perks I currently have on offer for my patrons. At the moment, all proceeds will go towards upgrading my WordPress plan so the site can do more interesting and flexible things. Anyway, I should get back to doing glass stuff – until next time!
so you should all follow me on Twitter @pokemaniacal, to make it feel slightly less awful and pointless
that way you can all enjoy important and topical discussions like this:
as well as dumb random brainfarts like this:
and receive ongoing status updates on how bad my Japanese is:
Also I guess I usually tweet when I make a blog post, so if you want to be notified when that happens, this is one way to go about it.
seriously though Twitter is an awful place and you should all stay the fµ¢£ away from it if you can, but if you’re on that nightmare of a website anyway you should follow me so I can at least pretend that having an account is a net positive in my life
According to my WordPress stats, February has been my best month since moving here, and in part that’s probably down to the last week, which… well, it’s been a hell of a week. Sword and Shield were announced, ramping up the urgency of finishing my work on generation VII, and I blended the worlds of classics and cake decorating into possibly my greatest real-world achievement ever, the acropolis cake (if you’re someone who’s been drawn in by that – hello! Neither classics nor baking is what this blog is usually about, but I hope you stay anyway!). So thanks to everyone for reading and growing Pokémaniacal’s following, and an extra special thanks to my Patreon supporters, whose donations maintain the WordPress site. If you enjoy my writing and would like more opportunities to offer opinions about this blog’s direction (more extreme baking? stranger Pokémon theories? just want a say on what order I do my reviews in?), consider setting aside a dollar a month for the cause – with enough support, I can upgrade the site to make it more interesting and easier to navigate. Onwards, my minions, and we shall cover this world in darkness like it has never known!
WHY WON’T THEY LEAVE ME ALONE
what gives them the right to just KEEP RELEASING POKÉMON GAMES on this PLANET THAT I LIVE ON, where I’ll SEE them and BUY them and PLAY them and then have to spend UNTOLD HUNDREDS OF HOURS WRITING LUDICROUS NONSENSE ABOUT THEM ON THE INTERNET just to hold onto the frail shards of sanity that make up my ravaged mind!?
WHEN WILL I HAVE MY LIFE BACK
And I have to be up at 6 am PST? That’s… what is that here? 9 am!? I’ve NEVER been up at 9 am! What the hell even HAPPENS!?
Someone fetch me a drink…
Just wanted to make a quick announcement: thanks to my first three Patreon supporters, we have reached our first (admittedly modest) funding goal: breaking even on the $5/month cost of hosting the blog on WordPress! Having apparently chosen just the right moment to jump ship from the godawful $#!tstorm that Tumblr, deep down, has really always been but has only now allowed itself to fully become, it’s fantastic to have secured the continued maintenance of the site for the future. It’s a great start for the first couple of weeks – so thank you to my patrons!
My next Patreon goal is to hit $10 per month. This is roughly the cost of a WordPress Premium plan, which (among other sundry minor features) will let me customise the site a bit more with CSS editing. Frankly I’m not sure why CSS editing is a premium feature, but it’s necessary for pretty much any meaningful deviation from the basic site themes offered by WordPress. There are loftier goals as well, but one thing at a time.
If this is something you might be interested in being a part of, then please consider becoming a Pokémaniacal Patreon supporter (see the site navigation links below the header). Patrons get special perks based on their level of contribution – from voting on my next projects to behind-the-scenes access to the work that Jim the Editor and I put into all my posts – and tiers start at just US$1 per month.
Anyway, that’s enough of that – we now return you to your regularly scheduled nonsense.
