Behind The Nihon Review

This will probably come off as a bit of a “State of the Union” type blog post, similar to the ones you used to see on the now neglected 4chan staff blog (as an aside, I’ll admit that I’ve always greatly admired some of the philosophies behind how 4chan is run as an internet site… the content itself, at times, less so).  And, in typical uncriticizable presidential style, I’ll state that the State of the NHRV Union is quite good.  Yes, that is even after considering three (I think, I lose count sometimes) hack attacks over the last nine months, and an “incident” with our host.  But I think we’ve made some vital progress over the duration of the year so far.  Things haven’t always been easy for us, but the people we have on board at the moment are all very good, particularly with regards to the enthusiasm.  That’s what makes me most upbeat about things at the moment.  A lot of failed attempts at anime sites have been built on a group of people with only a passing interest in what they’re writing about, and the same was true of us for a long time, especially back in the old AMGReviews days.  A team is made on its people, and when some can’t commit for whatever reason, you replace the dead wood with people that have the desire to put in effort and are willing to see the tough times through and want to see their work and effort translate into the site becoming popular and forging its place on the internet.  I believe we have the right group of people to do that right now.  That’s not to say that we’re going to stop recruiting new staff, I just think that our current line-up will likely (hopefully) stay fairly constant for a long time.

But I value the contribution made by our past members and there are two people in particular that I really want to pay tribute to, because if it weren’t for their efforts over the journey, we wouldn’t be where we are.  Those two are Kuma and dheu.  Kuma decided back in October last year that things were at a crossroads for him and that the next stage of his life wouldn’t involve The Nihon Review, a decision that we all totally respect.  But he’s been with the site longer than I have, all the way back to the AMGReviews days, and I’m certain that he knows more about our history and where we came from than I do.  And he improved so much as a reviewer over that time.  I remember Niner in particular being very critical of his work (but Niner has been critical of most of our staff’s work at some stages, so that’s nothing new :p), but he turned into one of our best writers and most knowledgable and dedicated reviewers.

The other is dheu, who retired very recently.  Circumstances denied us the most of dheu, but before real life swept her away from us and into the service of her country in one of the most dangerous parts of the world (which puts the meaningless little activities on our site into perspective), I considered her my partner.  We, dheu and I, “inherited” the site from a waning Tamashii who was lacking the time to dedicate to maintaining the site.  Temporarily of course.  I’m convinced that in that time, we improved the site by magnitudes, taking a review site that lacked focus and direction and a group of reviewers that lacked conviction and turning it into something which I think is pretty special.  In many ways, she was the voice of reason to my wild ambition and aspirations, tempering me where necessary, and encouraging me where necessary.  I’m certain that without dheu, we wouldn’t be where we are… her contribution and impact to the site cannot be overestimated.

The point of this post, other than heaping praise on current and former staff members, is to revive the blog.  I’m very restricted for time, we all are, it’s one of the things that crippled our first attempt at a staff blog.  But I want this to work, and I’ll be making a concerted effort to regularly dedicate a reasonable portion of my spare time to maintaining the blog.  I think there’s very little that I need to do with the main site now.  I asked the staff last month to write fourteen reviews for the month, thinking it’d be a high target.  They wrote eighteen. There’s enough momentum behind the site right now to guarantee that it will run of its own devices and will have enough new content to remain interesting and relevant.  So, again partly inspired by the 4chan philosophy of constantly trying to expand one’s site, and also partly inspired by the fact that, when I recently revisited this site I realized that what we put on this blog the first time round was pretty good, I decided that this is as good a place as any to put my energy in the next phase of our site’s growth.  I mean, the framework already exists.  All it needs is that continuous supply of new content.  And some tweaks here and there.  And readers… yeah, that’s something we kinda lacked in the first incarnation of this blog.  *cough*

The last thing I wanted to mention is the new forum.  The feedback from the staff was mostly indifferent, but I was looking for overt negativity before I was going consider changing things.  The forum has been as is for just a bit less than a month now so people have had a chance to get used to it.  I wanted to get some indication from our readers (all two of you… to repeat the joke) about what they think of the new forum, and suggestions for things we could do to tweak it (short of going back to the old software) to make your experience more enjoyable.