Happy Anniversary! (Year Five)

Dogasu's Backpack | Rants | Happy Anniversary! (Year Five)

By Dogasu
Posted 01-31-2005

When I was in Japan this year, I got a chance to meet with Archaic, the head of Bulbagarden. We were both studying in the same city (Nagoya), and so we hung out a few times. We were talking one day about sites had been there from the beginning, and somehow my site came up. I don't remember exactly how the conversation went, but I remember his surprise when I told him that my site's been up since January 2000. It meant that my site (at the time) was almost five years old. I remember how shocked he was, and, after thinking about it a bit, the same shock ran its course through me.

FIVE years...do you realize how rare that is? With anime fansites, the number of sites older than that is small. For Pokémon fansites, that’s almost unheard of. Most fansites are born and then die within the space of about three years, but somehow my site is still here. I still get mail about it, I still get Guestbook entries, and I still see people on message boards linking others to my site.

Of course, I realize that congratulating my site on making it to the half-decade mark is a bit unfair. For the majority of its fourth year, my site sat there without a single update while I studied abroad in Japan. Even after I’ve returned, updates have been infrequent, and there are still many sections that are horribly outdated, filled with errors, or are just waiting for me to finish them. I simply haven’t been able to update as often because of the tired old excuse (“schoolwork”), and that annoys me as much as it annoys you guys.

What all that means for this site is that I have no shortage of material to update with. There’s always a list for me to finish, a manga summary to write, an edit list to compile, or a song that needs its lyrics typed out. The anime could end right now, and Nintendo could stop producing the games, and I’d *still* have enough updates to last me several years. I know of a lot of sites that quit shortly after new episodes premiere in Japan, but this site won’t have that same problem.

I usually include, in these yearly reflection essays, some sort of promise to keep going for another year. I do intend to keep going with this site, but with this essay, I want to do something different. I want to kind of outline what I want to get accomplished this year without making some promise that I know I won’t be able to keep (like how I said that I’d finish the Humans’ Bios all those years ago). My main goal for 2005 is simple: I want to clean up my site. I want to have some sort of consistency across the site, and I want to fill in a lot of the blanks that plague just about every page. After 2005, no pokemon will be referred to using two different romanizations (like, for example, calling the pokemon Mewtwo "Myuutwo" on one page and "Myuutsu" on another). Sections that I don’t see going anywhere will get the axe, while others will be completely revamped. Overall, the year 2005 will be devoted to making the site as professional as I can make it. Of course, I’ll still update with new Episode Comparisons and other such updates, but my main focus will be on fixing what’s already here.

The year will also be big for the franchise, regardless of what’s going on with my site. Satoshi will make his way through the Houen League this year, and then he’ll go to his next region. 4Kids’ Pokémon Chronicles is set to debut this year on 4Kids TV, and a new movie will be coming out in Japanese theatres in the summer. And, if I have my information right, the new Diamond and Pearl games should debut later in the year.

I’ll leave this rushed essay with two words: Thank you. Without you guys’ constant encouragement and input, I probably would have given up long ago. Thank you all for visiting all these years, and I hope that my site can continue to attract you in the following year.