Site Updates, Ramblings, & Our Upcoming 2020 Winter Hiatus

To say that 2020 was a hard year is an understatement. It was rough for everyone and we were definitely not the exception. Everything seemed to be 1000x harder to accomplish and the slow-burn exhaustion of burnout was a constant theme. We persevered and kept going, but we also knew when we were hitting our limits. We took a few impromptu hiatuses and had a few publishing dry spells. While we were not too happy about them, we knew we needed to take our own wellbeing into consideration and we had a lot going on in offline life that required our full attention.

There’s been a lot of heart-to-heart discussions floating around the community from other sites in the fandom about the struggling of day-to-day work on running an editorial/blog/news site. Sam from Anime Herald did a great tweet thread talking about it. While I won’t go deep into it, I do ask that if there is a site that you follow and you love what they are doing, please consider backing them in some way. It can be financially or just being supportive by sharing their content in other places via retweeting, telling friends, etc. Every little bit counts. I will admit that every time someone retweets our articles or I just happen to find one floating in the wild because someone shared it, my heart gets all warm and fuzzy. It really does mean a lot.

Surprisingly, we still had a pretty good year on the site. Traffic is higher than ever and it seems like more and more people are taking a look at our little corner of the fandom and finally seeing us. We definitely want to thank our writers and staff members for helping us get a place at the table. I’m hoping this will lead us to more opportunities in the future.

A little reflection

Looking back on what we did in 2020 (though it wasn’t much), we did accomplish one big thing. We launched a complete redesign of Yatta-Tachi at the end of July (which now feels like years ago). It took a lot out of Chris and me, but we couldn’t be happier with how it turned out. One of my main goals was to set a good foundation for Yatta-Tachi to show that, “hey, you can have a nice-looking, fun site that is also compliant with the WCAG 2.1 guidelines.” Being accessible and inclusive is something I’ve always wanted to shine through when folks think of Yatta-Tachi. Reading y’all’s comments about the redesign and just knowing that we are helping folks by having a site they know they can rely on is something I will hold dearly for a long time.

So as I’m writing this 2020 is coming to a close and 2021 is just on the horizon. I wish I knew what to tell you as far as what we have in store. We had a lot planned for 2020, but nearly all of those plans never came to fruition. My hope is that we can just roll them into 2021 (or the way things are going here in the U.S., possibly more like 2022). Regardless though, I wanna make sure that we are being considerate of our own wellbeing.

So, what’s next?

With that being said, we are going on our annual winter hiatus starting today until January 4th, 2021! While we are on our break, a couple of things will still be happening. We are still going to be publishing our January 2021 manga, light novel, and book releases list! It should be the first article to go live when we get back.

Also, we just opened our Winter 2021 First Impression poll! It will be open until January 1st at 5 pm Central time, so please consider filling it out and letting us know what shows you’d like us to give our thoughts on.