I was looking over my 12 Days of Anime posts yesterday because the new editor was threatening to put them out at 8 pm rather than my usual 9 am, my time…and I’ve got too much to say anyway which is cluttering up the “update post” section of the next round-up post, so I might as well make some of it into a proper update post.

First of all, the title. I’m back with the 12 Days of Anime this year, but I’ve scheduled most of my stuff in advance because I stocked up on new content from less accessible libraries and if I don’t work on my backlog, they’ll become overdue soon…the hijinks start on the 14th (i.e tomorrow) with a post about Golden Kamuy, so prepare for the post onslaught!

Within the 12 Days, there are some interesting discussions and some posts for things I’ve only watched in recent days, so unless you want to dig through my AniList, I’ll leave the shows and/or topics up to your imagination until they actually come out…or you could just find me on the Google sheet. That also works, although I keep switching out potential post topics for things I actually do finish there, so you may see things change when you have the sheet open.

In non-blogging things, I’ve realised this is a year of disappointment more than anything else. It’s through no one’s fault but my own, but I’ve had to make some tough decisions about my future in the past few weeks as a result…

The short version of what happened to get to this point is that, if you haven’t picked up on it, I’ve been struggling with aspects of my chosen path in IT this year and when I say “aspects”, I mean “basically almost everything”. The struggles were so hard it made me start loathing myself to a degree that told me I was definitely not alright…I’ve only ever gotten into such a mental state twice so far (once in May – although I called it “burnout” then, didn’t I?…and once more recently – maybe October or so, although it clearly wasn’t “burnout” this time).

I’m able to fish myself out of that murky mental state after a bit, which is the good news. However, I’ve decided to cull IT from the affected part of my life to preserve my mental health, at the expense of closing doorways it held open for me, as well as having to deal with the paperwork/additional changes that come with the fallout, which is the bad news.

It’s hard to be frank about these things because I don’t want to reveal too much about myself for multiple reasons, plus I’ve stopped myself talking too much about this before because I’m meant to be one of the “Continue, Don’t Quit” people, not a person who needs help from them.

Back to the topic of the 12 Days though: I’ve been using other things – such as writing up the posts for the 12 Days – to stop thinking about those decisions, hence how I managed to finish most of my 12 Days before the event began (at the expense of some degree of quality).

In other news, I can’t run the Spellbook Awards post (i.e. this one) this year due to people having similar ideas running at the same time. There’s Raistlin and Ayano’s WordPress Anime Awards, plus Astral had – for a brief time – an idea to do his own awards collab before I reminded him he was a judge for Raistlin and Ayano’s.

Meanwhile, the resolutions are pretty much the same as they were in September, with the exception of having fulfilled the last one (get 60 days watched) over the last few months. I was thinking of doing a big post on the results, but the update in September kinda rendered that useless. I’m not going to have new resolutions in 2019, because it was troublesome enough to keep up with the 2018 ones…

If I say too much in this post, there won’t be enough to say on the 24th! So that’s all for now – good luck to you other bloggers doing the 12 Days, and I look forward to reading what you’ve written (obviously, that isn’t counting any posts that could lead to spoilers – I automatically don’t read those if I’m not caught up with what you’re discussing).

Newer followers, you can see my previous 12 Days here – 2018’s 12 Days will specify they are from that year in the title.