Greetings, geeks!

Chris, here. Things around the site are about to start changing in a pretty big way. We’ve got some major changes around the corner. Some will see a more gradual implementation than others. But they’re coming together for certain.

Content

This is going to be the least significant tab, but it does have some pretty exciting developments. The first thing to note is that we’re going to be starting up the gaming videos again, hopefully within the next month, starting with more Overwatch content! (Bonus points if we actually manage to get back into that in time for the Halloween event, which would be awesome). Nothing “new” is coming, just some returning content. But that will hopefully be changing in the not-too-distant future. We do plan on moving a few plans forward with Bulletoon in the near future, and if you’ve been paying attention, you may have an inkling of what those ideas entail. In the meantime, Stay Toon’d!

Social Media

Here’s another update for you guys! Social Media is slowly making its return. We’ve reopened the Facebook page, and added a Tumblr account! Don’t expect a lot of posting to be done on them, outside of circulation of site content. But Twitter will remain semi-active. In fact, given their current trial of doubling their post length, it may be used more than ever for us (I tend to be long-winded). That said, we are going to be looking into recruiting someone to aid us on the social media front, very soon. I can’t give an exact timetable on that. We’re following up on a few leads, right now. But that’s where we are in terms of social media, for the time being.

Conventions & Events

I was able to attend MegaCon, this year, and had a blast! But, I was unexpectedly afforded the opportunity to attend Baltimore Comic-Con, as well! Also very fun, and very good for business. I am likewise planning to attend the Washington Comic-Con, early next year. But there is some pretty major convention news around the corner as well, that I can’t quite confirm, just yet. I’ll just say we have some exciting plans for the next year and leave it at that.

Site Maintenance

Nothing will really be changing around the site, aside from some tabs getting added to the top bar in accordance with some things I stated, earlier. Otherwise, there’s just not much to share, here.

Schedule

OKAY. Here’s the doozy. Our schedule is returning, and it’s in for a serious overhaul. You’ve no doubt seen that a lot of the content going up on the site was coming from two places. I’ve been managing Bulletoon, Bob’s been cranking out regular reviews of Transformers: Robots in Disguise (and if he says it was under duress, he’s lying). But if you’re savvy, you’ll have noticed two things. I’ve barely been doing any articles, and Transformers: Robots in Disguise is a two-year-old show. That obviously just isn’t going to due. So we’ve finally managed to work out a plan. The simple fact is that our time management skills are lacking. So as busy as we were keeping, we really weren’t maximizing our time. But now we have an actual work schedule that should keep us cranking out the new content on a much more regular basis. How regular? With luck, daily (with the exception of Sundays).

Bob is no longer going to be grinding out Transformers: Robots in Disguise reviews. All reviews are going to be current. And the same very much goes for me. The only exceptions are going to be sort of retrospective things. Say there’s a show, comic, game, or whatever that we just want to talk about, even if it’s exceptionally old. Usually, though, we’ll save it for maybe a whole retrospective series, leading up to the release of something new in that franchise. But what will we be reviewing? We can say with certainty that we’ll be reviewing a lot of Anime. Crunchyroll is a godsend (as well as a few other legitimate resources, like Netflix, and Anime Strike). We’ll probably be reviewing a few non-anime series as well. Probably some live action shows and American cartoons, or what-have-you. I personally have a little more capability, at the moment, to review movies. The grey area will be with comics and manga. I can make no promises regarding the regularity of comic and manga reviews. They’re more of a money pit since neither of us has access to subscription-based resources for comics. We have Crunchyroll for manga, but their selection is rather limited, and we believe in supporting the industry.

To add to all of this, the review format will also be changing. Specifically, we’ll be aiming more at critique than recaps. It won’t be anything too uniform or dull, still including our brand of wit and all that. But we’re just going to be changing things up so you, our readers, will get more out of our content. If you wanted to know what happened in the episode, you’d watch it. You don’t need us to tell you. So we’ll just focus on what worked and why. Hopefully, that’ll prove more enjoyable. We have other ideas that may involve recaps… kind of. And they’re pretty amusing, but also pretty far down the line.

“But Chris! You can’t possibly just do reviews every single day, can you?!” Well, technically we could, but we won’t be. Reviews are obviously a bit more tied to the release of whatever the content is that we’re going to be reviewing. But what will we do in between reviews? Articles, of course! Yeah, we kind of let this one get away from us because we weren’t really certain how we wanted to do this. But we’re going to be cranking out a whole new brand of articles on the site. Specifically, we’re looking at cranking out news-related articles.

So for those who don’t know, Bulletoon is not a news show. This should be fairly obvious. The subjects they talk about on the show are at least a week old by the time they talk about them, just by the nature of the show’s format. Bulletoon is a news commentary show. They’re not reporting the news, they’re just talking about it.

Now let’s do a quick walkthrough of the process. A typical Bulletoon script is written on Sunday or Monday (lately a bit later, because the past few weeks have been so hectic, but I digress). During that time, I go back over the news from the entirety of the week and pull out all the stories that interest me, or anything I think Rila and Riley might have something to say about. I come up with whatever little mini plot is going to exist throughout the course of the episode, and the script is sent out to the cast. I get the lines back usually by Friday night (often times even before then), and stay up to some ungodly hour, editing so I can get the episode put out on Saturday. Now that process is going to change a bit. Now I’m going to be doing the researching throughout the week, rather than at the end of the week. It might get the scripts written a little faster, too. Then I can stay up to some ungodly hour of the night, editing, once I get the lines.

So why is any of that important? Is Bulletoon’s time slot changing, again? Well… no. The reason it’s important is based entirely on that research portion. You have no idea the sheer volume of topics I have to cut out of Bulletoon scripts. But by doing the research ahead of time, we’re able to instead just turn the things we cut out into articles for the site! That way the things in our articles are also fairly current – no longer than two days after the initial report, and we’re actually aiming to have these reports out, same-day (with the exception of Sunday).

In other words, expect an article 6 days of the week, Bulletoon on Saturdays (Hopefully. Its time slot is still slippery since Bulletoon is a collaboration), and some days you can expect double content, with both an article and a review! Sound packed? It is! We’re already crying about it, and questioning all of our life choices! But we’re all in, baby! Woo! …woo, indeed.

So when can you expect all of this to begin? We’re aiming to actually begin all of this as soon as tomorrow! Will absolutely everything begin then? No. Absolutely not. That would be insane. But you can expect news articles to begin tomorrow. As for reviews, we’re going to start with anime reviews because it’d be easier for us. So what are the first titles going to be that we intend to review? Well, why keep you in suspense? The first anime we’re planning (planning. They may not all make the cut) to cover are:

• Black Clover
• Urahara
• Yuuki Yuuna wa Yuusha de Aru: Yusha no Sho
• Kekkai Sensen & Beyond
• RoboMasters
• Netojuu no Susume
• Infini-T Force
• Dies Irae
• Inuyashiki
• Mahoutsukai no Yokai

Some will be covered by yours truly, others will be covered by Bob. Not every review is going to be done the day the episode first airs, but you can expect them to be at least within the next two days. Look forward to it!

The Wrap-Up

So! Are you as excited as we are? Hope so! Because we’re looking at a looot more content getting thrown onto the site, and real soon, too. If you have any suggestions for legitimate services we can use for comics and manga without having to buy every single issue/volume individually, that’d be much appreciated. Manga is a lot more manageable in that regard because they’re not monthly/bi-weekly, but American comics are wallet slayers if you even dream of keeping up. So any help would be nice.

In other house-cleaning, news, our Patreon account is still live, and open for donations. Pls. We’re poor (;-;) Speaking of which, that Patreon page is going to be getting updated with all the new postings. Previously we’d decided to update it weekly. But we’re going to be updating it real-time, now.

And that’s pretty much everything, folks! Thanks for reading, as always!

Keep up the awesome, and take care,
Chris V.