I wouldn’t categorize myself as a legend of anime blogging, but I felt that I had decent traffic when I was consistently writing back in ‘07. And with decent traffic, comes a decent amount of comments. And whenever I would refresh my front page and see that I had another comment, I’d get a quick shot of adrenaline. I’d get the following thoughts: “What kind of comment is it going to be? Who is it from? I hope it’s not someone trolling me. I wonder what my stats are now? How large is my e-ego right now?”

To constantly get this… rush, I would do my best to pump out a post every day of varying quality. Some pros by doing such a thing was that I grew as a writer, I was able to improve my writing, build stamina, and teach myself the tricks to bringing in traffic (protip: experience has shown me that a catchy post title does wonders). Some cons include questionable post quality, and a dishonest mentality to blogging, which I feel should be a pure expression of anime fandom. Ultimately, that selfishness lead to my downfall. I burned out and retained my huge ego -which took a while to come down.

Fast forward. I’ve since stopped blogging, and despite immense resistance initially, I eventually bought into Facebook. Not only did I sell out, I became addicted. They won. It won. It really didn’t hit me until this summer, either. That was when I started to really get into Facebook. I went on trips to all sorts of places and started sharing photos. Those got comments and likes. Then, I started to post random status updates. Those got comments and likes. Those comments started to increase. Reach double digits. You can tell where this was going. Before I knew it, I was a serial spammer. You know those people.

It wasn’t until a friend told me one day that I update too much that I realized how bad it got. I tried to ween myself away from Facebook. Instead of checking constantly, make an effort to only check once and hour. The longer the gap between checks, the better. I started to reflect. No one really gives a crap about where I am right now, and it showed via the amount of comments and likes. Yet, people liked and commented on a bunch of stuff that sounded interesting. Gotta stick to the latter, but I gotta make it count.

Sound familar? It was the same as the rush I got from comments from ani-blogging, except this was much easier and lower-brow. Hur Hur, “I saw Mary Poppins at Disney World. I mistook her for a random geisha.” Like. Like. Like.

Anyone think I’m onto something? (Legitimately not trying to comment hunt with that question) I think that by typing this out, at least I am expressing some shame and slight disgust for the social network monster I’ve become. Ironically, I wont be posting this on Facebook -I have yet to embrace my online persona and my real life persona. What I will do once I post this, though, is check my Facebook. I’ve been sucked right back into this black hole.

Unrelated: I bought my first manga since Borders closed down. I hate supporting B&N, but it was nice to buy manga again.