Wow! It’s not 2020 anymore, and we’re still here! We hope that you’re still here too!

Let’s be honest, it’s been a rough year for all of us due to the various amounts of things going on in the real world, but that doesn’t mean that it was all bad either. We hope that you’ve at least had some good moments that have stuck out in your memory which will hopefully push some of the worst things out of your mind when looking back upon the year.

Unlike the past anniversary posts and in the same spirit as last years (which I will get into more detail about shortly), this one will be brief and condensed, sort of showcasing what will be upcoming throughout the year, celebrating some successes, and throwing out some announcements as well. 

Retrospective from 2020

“I’m doing my best, guys” – Owningmatt93 as he’s writing this post

You may or may not have noticed, but this year was a lot different for us than the previous years. You may have noticed the more consistent blog post presence from us and also some more on-schedule posting, which we all felt was part of the great success that we’ve had this year. Although we’ve been a little bit distant from most of the other bloggers (mostly due to the year as a whole, not because of anything we’ve necessarily done), we’ve definitely made some good connections with you guys and hope that we can keep that energy up in the future as well. 

We’ve had one of our best years stat-wise as well, probably for lots of the reasons above. More interactions with some of the bloggers within the community, more streamlined processes that we emphasized in last year’s anniversary post, and more activity from the entirety of our crew. We basically had a plan and executed it in a planned manner. That’s pretty much it! Without even aiming for big numbers or a massive amount of content, we managed to pull out an extremely good year, and I think our entire blog team at The Backloggers can be satisfied with the results that we’ve obtained. 

Announcements for 2021

That’s not to say we’re going to stop here though. We’re going to keep improving upon our working formula and try and do as much within our power to continue improving our blog. We’ve learned that small adjustments are the way to do things with our blog because it allows us to fine-tune things in a way that doesn’t feel completely alien to us and prevents us from having to reinvent the wheel every few months. Because of that, we’re going to follow suit with this in 2021 as well.

Long-time readers probably have noticed our monthly release of a blog-post focused around a deep-dive analytical topic, and that won’t be going away anytime soon. However, as General Tofu pointed out in his rollout of the Backlogger Busters posts, it’s kind of weird for us to not have had our namesake as a core concept that our blog revolves around at this point. So, in order to keep things fresh, you will likely see this intermixed with the normal monthly analytical content from now on. 

Beyond that, you may also see brief hiatuses from Mythos in the coming days, which means that the Monthly Manga series will also be taking a hiatus as well. I won’t go into much personal detail regarding the circumstances, but 2020 has created a ripple effect for him that’s going to force his projects to be temporarily halted. This also includes his activity involving the podcast but doesn’t necessarily mean that he won’t be present either. It just means that, at least for now, there will be instances where he won’t be present. We wish him the best until his full return in the future!

There will likely be some more personal projects that will appear in order to get some more content on the blog, but honestly, we have no solid ideas for them at the time of writing this post. So if you have anything that you’d like to see from us in terms of content, please get in touch with us through either The Backloggers main Twitter account, the contact form on our website, or direct message Owningmatt93 on Twitter! We’re open to any and all ideas, even if it involves a potential collaboration opportunity!

“Okay Matt, this post is getting too PR heavy. Back on track please!”
– General Tofu, ready to use his mighty editing powers, probably

Final Thoughts

We couldn’t obviously be successful without promotion through other AniBlogs, our friends on Twitter and Discord, or without you guys, the readers. We are glad that you’ve stuck with us for this long and hope that you stick with us in the future as well, for whatever sort of plans that we have in store for the coming year!

We just hope that we don’t get any more surprises as we did in 2020, and we hope that y’all don’t either, because nobody needs that in their life!