So here's a big announcement

I'm pretty sure most of you (Spongey444 certainly did) noticed that I've (Ray) made a grand total of two posts this year, and one is really short and the other one literally ends mid-sentence.

Yeah that's no accident. 

I've talked about whether or not I'll continue this blog for so much I probably sound like a broken record or a Spider-Man reboot cycle, and I'd be willing to bet it'd be a meme if our readership was more than five people. 

But I think the number of updates and posts I've made in the past two years really speaks for itself.

And that's how I know, definitively, that I'm finally beat, at least in the form I've been making this blog into so far.

At the very least, no more long-form posts until at least April. More likely...umm, probably, uh, ever.

There's several reasons for this:

 - it's just not practical. I just don't have the time or personal resources to write long-form posts anymore or post much at all. In fact that's been true the last two years, as the paltry number of posts themselves attest to. Especially with the, let's face it, low readership numbers I have anyway. 

 - I'm not in a good situation right now. If you've been paying attention this has been true...pretty much from day 1 of this blog (in fact arguably I created this blog in the first place because I just haven't been in a good place in a long time, if ever). It's why I decided to outright cancel a collab Spongey and I have been planning for Zombies (er, Z-O-M-B-I-E-S as I keep insisting). I'd like to think the situation will get better April, but I've been saying that so much in the past I think it's just more honest to say, look, it's outright not healthy for me to keep up this blog, I mean it, so in my own best interests I simply won't, because I can't.

 - this wasn't the direction I wanted my blog to take in the first place. The intention was always to copy word-for-word Christian and Sean's style at Girl Meets World Reviewed - that specifically meant a bunch of small updates throughout the week, which is why Mike's contribution to this blog has been so critical. Unfortunately, I forgot about that and instead trying to put everything together into one big lump sum. That completely screwed up the tempo of what I wanted this blog to be. It made every single meaningful post into a three-hour endeavor or more (and I type at 120 WPM!) and it was literally getting to the point where doing posts and updates wasn't healthy - taking away from time I desperately needed for other things, including sleep.

By that I mean, I spent a lot of hours into the night working on this post explaining my ratings system that probably nobody read, and I do blame that consequent lack of sleep for a very serious mental and physical breakdown I had the very next day.

Yeah I'm pretty sure that if I keep doing that for the sake of four or five people, I'm going to very literally end up being dead, I mean it.

So I'm going to quit doing that. Literally, for my own health.

Also, it's very clear to me that traditional blogging is dead anyway.

All the big money (if you want to call it that) is going to YouTube videos, guys with lots of sarcasm and cartoony avatars of themselves (this seems to be mandatory for whatever reason even though I think it's patently stupid). These guys are pretty excellent too - PieGuyRulez, NICKtendo, even the I Hate Everything Guy and our very own (if I can claim ownership of him, which I can't) Spongey444 (stupid avatars included, although I Hate Everything Guy's is, um...downright ugly yeah there's no getting around that).

Especially since I'm too poor to hire someone to make one for me, my stupid

animated avatar for my YouTube videos would probably look like this.

The obvious lead-in would be to say that I'm making my own YouTube channel, which I at least technically have, and I've thought about it plenty of times, but it comes with its own complications:

 - for starters, the same time/resource issues I run into for this blog would def apply to making YouTube videos, probably even moreso since 1.) the expectation would be to upload a video not once a week but several times every week for, well, pretty much the rest of my goddamn life so no, 2.) My equipment is ghetto af, my iPhone barely works (yeah this is pretty much my first and last iPhone, I have to imagine Tesla adopted the Apple consumer model for some reason based on ownership feedback I've been reading on various blogs because it's complete and total garbage) and I'm otherwise stuck with the built-in webcam on my...$100 laptop...which also barely works, probably because I only paid $100 for it and 3.) it also means I have to have regular and immediate access to a guaranteed quiet, uninterrupted space which in this household just doesn't exist (yeah I'm going to outright say it if I haven't already, I pretty much live in a broken-af and miserable family situation that I more or less have to be rescued from).

 - since I want to be a published fiction author I have to tread very carefully with how I do reviews. Give the wrong review to the wrong thing and blammo! your publication prospects just evaporated. This applies doubly so for the type of sarcastic, outright caustic review style that nets the viewership and Patreon support that makes the whole venture financially worthwhile (I'm assuming NICKtendo and PieGuyRulez aren't pursuing the type of young adult author career I am). 

One potential workaround is that I just make an anonymous (or rather, semi-anonymous) separate YouTube channel, but there are hard limits to how "anonymous" you can make that (basically anybody with a functioning brain and Internet connection can figure it out within minutes if not seconds). My first and only practical defense would be relying on my viewership to just simply not care enough to bother and thus bet on their apathy (and indeed I'm taking that same risk on this very blog - which is probably a relatively safe risk to take given, you know, there's about five of you total). I can take further steps like voice disguising/modulation but 1.) there are hard limits to how far you can do that without effecting quality or in this particular case, basic comprehension, 2.) I don't even really know how to do it and 3.) again there are hard limits towards how effective it would even be towards its intended purpose and you start running into diminishing returns almost immediately.

And oh yeah 4.) I just really, really suck as a presenter. I have a really nasally voice (I pretty much sound like Lois Griffin) and I'd bet I'd be obnoxious to listen to anyway.

Actually maybe some voice modulation wouldn't be a bad idea.

That said there are some book reviewers out there that have nabbed their own book deals, but they're not exactly the most caustic ones either. Maybe there's a lesson in that.

So that's basically it. I'm not saying I'm quitting the blog, but if I am going to do updates especially between now and April they're going to be short, minor posts and even the frequency of those would be iffy. But that's how I always envisioned this blog being anyway so who knows maybe it'll work out. I really enjoyed the back-and-forth between Christian and Sean and that's what really inspired the creation of this blog. And I really don't want to say making a YouTube version of this blog is out of the question. Despite the relatively heavy resource investment there are extreme advantages to the video and even YouTube-specific format I cannot ignore, at least if I really want to keep blogging (or vlogging) about Disney Channel, Nickelodeon and tween/teen entertainment in general. Not the least of which (in fact I'll readily admit the biggest factor) being far more lucrative monetization potential, if not from YouTube itself then from Patreon and other third-party monetization vendors. 

Extra Thoughts (yes even on a post like this)

 - Speaking of which that segues into some topics I've always wanted to talk about: it's kind of impossible to ignore the so-called "culture war" going on, a war that (if you don't mind me being political) originated and existed solely on FOX News but has now managed to successfully propagate into the culture-at-large, not coincidentally timing with the rise of a certain President in office right now. That said (and this coming from someone who gleefully self-identifies as a SJW) certain left-wing actors and the left-wing at large isn't exactly innocent of some of the most annoying aspects of this culture war or for that matter helping to propagate it in the first place, either. Again, this was a war started intentionally by FOX News (really decades ago, in the late 90s, as soon as they started this "War on Christmas" nonsense), and like The War on Terror it was a war its instigators very carefully engineered for the other side to lose almost from the mere act of participating in, and whether they realize it or not the Left is indeed losing. 

But I don't really want to talk about that (although I guess I can, but upon request only) but what I do want to talk about is the issue of Patreon now "censoring" certain YouTube channels for political content - and I have to say, again as a self-identifying SJW that not only do I believe this does indeed qualify as a form of censorship, but many channels being effected are outright apolitical. Even if you do believe it's a third-party corporation's right to censor right-wing extremists and Neo-Nazis (and to be fair, I do believe in that right), it's exceedingly clear that handing off those duties to an algorithm is as it stands an outright irresponsible thing to do. At the very least it's troubling implications for any channel looking to monetize their videos, regardless where you stand on the political spectrum or how hard you try to be to be apolitical. If there's one lesson YouTube has taught us over the years that they themselves have ignored, it's that we can't trust algorithms in order to afford us the luxury of just being lazy asses.

I mean, I'm a trans-questioning feminist Liberal who very clearly does not like Trump or FOX News and there's no doubt in my mind that the Patreon algorithm would single me out all the same. And yes you can bet Patreon is using an algorithm in all of this, there's just no way they have actual humans trying to filter this all out (although I could be wrong).

But at the same time, aside from Patreon and YouTube itself (which has its own problems) or PayPal (which not only has its own problems too but are financially/corporately tied in with both Patreon and YouTube anyway) payment/funding alternatives just simply don't exist. So the only thing I can say is, tread carefully and who knows maybe people's behavior will be policed and modified for the better, although I really don't like the idea of people's behavior having to be "policed" in the first place (I advocate people should be outright taught actual behavior habits as part of basic schooling instead, but oh well. The shambles that is the American education system isn't its own topic, it's its own YouTube channel, indeed. Let's just say if I do ever have kids I'm getting the hell out of this country ASAP, I mean it).

One topic that's been very important to me is the idea of cultural arts and expression and the idea of censorship itself, especially with the #MeToo movement. This is only a fraction of what I wanted to talk about but: I mean, Chinatown is to this day one of the most amazing films I've ever seen but...it doesn't take away from the fact that Roman Polanski is, at the very least, accused (and convicted!) of raping a woman. Under circumstances uncannily similar to what my own ex-fiancee had to face. 

I don't know how to balance between the two.

Furthermore, when you do a full boycott of a work based on the actions of a single person, even if that person is the principal player in all that, you're also boycotting the earnings potential of everyone involved. Each movie is effectively a small (or even medium) business onto its own in terms of the people involved and I'm not kidding when I say a boycott puts a lot of those people's livelihoods on the line, even for movies decades old.

I guess what I'm asking is, at what point does a boycott become censorship? At what point does a creative work deserve to be censored? We live in a country where we (allegedly) cherish free speech so much Mein Kampf is readily available and we have entire web communities dedicated to white supremacy. And pedophilia. And how The Handmaid's Tale is actually a brilliant model for society and how we should turn all women and girls into sex slaves and suicide bombers (and no I'm not talking about ISIL/Daesh there are a lot of white dudes in this very country who very seriously think this).

But like I said, I don't know how to balance this. One way might be to let people accused of rape still allow their works to be distributed freely but their personal proceeds go directly to their victims, which is indeed how most modern interpretations of "Son of Sam" laws work now. But, I dunno, maybe the five of you have some thoughts.

 - Now that I've looked at it, Angry Perry looks more like an Angry Ninja Turtle.