First of all, it's time to announce this year's winner: Anna! Who used this year to finally get into a popular, long-running yuri series:
"Yuri is my Job!" .... at first was eyerolling at Hime so hard thought was gonna sprain something.... but suddenly am like 8 volumes in and very invested in these idiots & their utter idiocy at being So Very Gay.
Congratulations! We'll be reaching out to you shortly so that you can receive your $25 Bookshop.org gift certificate to spend on more good books (be they yuri or otherwise) while supporting your favorite indie bookstore.
2023 was a year of challenge and change. A lot of these changes were a year in the making, after a certain idiot techbro bought out Twitter and turned it into the ongoing landfill fire that it is now. A small blog like this one lives and dies on people discovering it via social media, and once people started to flee Twitter in earnest in light of its numerous changes, ridiculous paid tiers, and descent into outright bigotry, our views started to tank as well. Once BlueSky proved itself to be a relatively stable and viable option for myself and the site, the choice was obvious. I'm not going to say I was happy to lose over a decade's worth of work and followers by deleting the Manga Test Drive Twitter account, but I don't regret it and bit by bit I'm rebuilding that following (and then some) on BlueSky.
Of course, this was all happening on top of the usual challenges, namely distraction and burnout. I think I did a little better than last year as far at filling out each month's worth of reviews, but I was definitely far from perfect. It's also an ongoing struggle to maintain the site's Patreon. My own sometimes spotty output, Patreon's own odd choices, and the overall lousy economy certainly don't help things, but it's been a struggle in recent years to convince people to support something as unglamorous as manga blogging. It simply doesn't have the flash of a Youtube video, a podcast, or a Twitch stream, and when you combine that with the site's decreasing visibility it becomes an even bigger challenge to gain and retain Patrons.
That doesn't mean 2023 was all bad, though. I managed to finally put on my Story of Animerama panel for a wider audience, thanks to JP and Anime Lockdown. While I was not picked as a panelist for this year's Otakon, I was able to share my experience with some loved ones for the first time. I did manage to write some new essays and make some more podcast appearances (most of them being Gundam-related). Some of them are already up, while others will be going up in the next couple of months. I've always got a few projects tucked away in my metaphorical back pocket, be they new essays, new panels, or getting back to some long-overdue Disaster Reports. In the meantime, all I can do is thank everyone who continues to follow the site and share the reviews, along with our generous Patrons. Hopefully 2024 will be a good year for you, for me, and The Manga Test Drive as we enter year 12.
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