Hello,
It’s been just north of a decade since I created this virtual identity after deriving it from a TopLink stacktrace pair-programming investigation at my first gig in the industry. At the time, I had intended for this handle to represent me informally in spaces relevant to my professional life such as WebDev reddit and twitter. However, after rediscovering anime in 2014, I decided to share this handle with my new budding interest: finding a place in online anime communities.
I had fancied myself as what could best be called a “would-be /r/anime power user”, doing my best to fit in with frequent posters, take part in rewatch groups, and have some sort of general presence in the subreddit. I had a good outlet for writing in Garlock’s What Have You Been Watching threads. I got to experience Gintama with a small circle of first-time watchers and rewatchers. I had a fun time obsessing over Kuon in Utawarerumono, compiling screenshots of her silly faces. On the other hand, I had also made some mistakes that I’m not proud of. I let myself get pulled into silly drama between more prominent posters at the time. I made ignorant comments about subjects I had no knowledge of to farm karma. In general, I grew to feel dissatisfied with my conduct and needed to re-evaluate why I was here and how I could actually contribute meaningfully.
I had made some attempts to find better ways of doing so at the periphery of /r/anime. For example, I was one of the original mods for /r/PostYourMAL, a style of discussion engaging a user on their anime consumption and ratings. It wasn’t until I came across Dragon’s post soliciting help for /r/AnimeThemes that I felt I had found something that fit my skill sets and interests. Data entry and scripting was something I could do. It conformed to my expectations of contribution – I was always told that Apache foundation projects need documentation help more than anything else. It gave me a sense of purpose in the community, building a wiki of links to videos that were useful in discussions on /r/anime and beyond.
I gave a good deal of my free time to this project from the start. There was a lot of work to be done in organizing the subreddit posts into a digestible wiki, which was sporadically maintained. I learned how to use the recommended software to produce videos for submitting things myself. I engaged in discussion with the staff like T9, Wings and Dragon on how to build out more useful indices for browsing themes. I became immersed in helping grow this project and having a claim to some footprint on the broader anime community.
Of course, we weathered some storms along the way. I began advocating for better standardization of submissions which ultimately lost us a significant portion of our volunteer encoders once we adopted our encoding guidelines. We were heavily reliant on drophosts, some of which had begun dying, facing legal scrutiny, and being maliciously taken over. The project escaped death when one such drophost failed to renew their domain and were hijacked by malware distributors. It was thanks to Kagumi and themes.moe – a webservice that had launched to provide a way to link anime list sites to our videos – that we survived.
These incidents started the discussion on self-hosting our videos. We simply couldn’t rely on the longevity of drophosts, nor are drophosts obliged to host our content in the first place. And so I began development on a solution for a webservice to host our content which launched in December of 2017. It was a threadbare application made using a framework I had been introduced to in college. I decided to use this project as an excuse to learn it, hopefully having some positive effect on my professional development.
After the work finished for processing our backlog, we began work on fully lifting the project out of reddit and into its own webservice. Despite this being a two-year process not absent of painfully long nights, this was a very important journey for me. The more I learned while I worked on this initial “release”, the more I began to see how limiting my actual job was. I had become very stunted in my tasking and knowledge, and AnimeThemes was there to prevent atrophy and encourage me in my development. As we began to work with new contributors like Mani, I began the process of improving processes to allow for growing the number of volunteers – creating collaborative spaces like the Github Org, Trello Boards, PyPI Packages, documentation sites, etc. In effect, I was able to start experimenting with the role of project manager as well. Thanks to Gap & Kyrch in particular for doing the lion’s share of the legwork on these day-to-day efforts.
As things progressed, some personal problems did arise. Obviously, my job performance took a hit as I began to lose interest in it. I had also developed some health conditions as I had allocated no time to taking care of myself. Some personal relationships became strained as I appeared more and more closed off. My health, in particular, forced me to begin negotiating with myself how to better balance these competing interests. As I allowed myself more time to address them, the need to delegate and the need to revisit some base assumptions became stronger.
I wanted to have some footprint in the anime community, but I did not intend to have “ownership” of AnimeThemes ad infinitum. There will come a time when I need to step away from it, and AnimeThemes as a project should exist beyond me. AnimeThemes exists for the community. I am just a contributor here for the time being pushing it along in what way I am able.
The confluence of personal issues and recent legal scrutiny has left me feeling that it’s time for me to move on and “give AnimeThemes back”. I believe I have a lot of work to do to continue addressing my health, career, relationships and development in such a way that AnimeThemes has a lesser and lesser place in my life. I don’t feel that it’s fair to stick around without putting in sincere, consistent effort when others volunteer so much of their time here. And I don’t believe my efforts to change will be whole unless I create this degree of separation between myself and AnimeThemes.
That’s my story, and this is where it ends for now. I have full confidence in staff and the community in continuing to grow the project. I am thankful to have met all of you and to have had the pleasure of working with you here. I am very happy to have known such awesome folk and to have something tangible to show for my time here.
This is a goodbye for now, though I may reappear in some form or another in the future. Thanks to everyone that has supported AnimeThemes so far, and to anyone that contributes going forward, though please don’t do so at the expense of your well-being.
Take care,
- para