Greetings, everyone. This is a somewhat unusual post from this blog but given that November was completely silent on my end, I thought I'd give a general update on what's to come.
Parts 4 and 5 of the convention coverages for this year's events will be a bit late, as I've been focusing most of my efforts towards some big things to come for the new year and haven't had time to sit down and write blog posts for this very blog as much as I used to. If you visited my Bluesky in the middle of November, you may have noticed that I made a last-minute decision to attend AnimeNJ++, an event that I previously intended to skip. This was mostly due to the extensive retooling and re-scheduling of Defend the North that made me unable to attend the event back in July, and with the desire to fit in a replacement event, I quickly slotted in AnimeNJ++, the only event I could find around here in the mid-November timeslot, in hopes that it would be much-improved over the prior year. To keep a long story short, I'm pleased to report that the event went much better this year compared to 2024 and I'm looking forward to giving it an in-depth overview once I'm able to publish the fifth part. And speaking of parts, I intend to work on the remaining three parts of the convention coverages simultaneously over the holiday season, including starting the sixth and final part in mid-December, which will focus on Festival of Games and my general thoughts on the year of events.
As for what I spent most the year doing, I mostly gravitated towards three hobbies aside form conventions: Character development for personal projects, setting up various PC and console games to play with friends (including mod packs for games that can be modified with custom content), and perhaps the biggest task of them all: prepping for game streaming on Twitch. Since the idea of live-streaming video games has been a major focus of mine as early as last year, I've been steadily building up a list of games that I want to showcase and practicing being able to hold conversations and reactions for the entire length of a multi-hour stream. This would include major changes to most of my social media accounts, including repurposing SuperJustinChannel, my Youtube account, into a steam VOD archive, as well as (finally) opening a community Discord server when and if I can amass a small community. I am planning to begin this streaming adventure sometime late next month after the holiday season, mostly as a form of experimenting with my current setup.
There are also some new year's resolutions in the works for next year, which is to ramp up productivity and finish whatever leftover projects I had from this year and even from 2024 that have been stalled out by other interests. We'll see whenever I am able to get to them or not, as I got quite a lot on my plate at the moment and will soon have to decide on my schedule for in-person events next year.
