Hi everyone,
Apologies for the lateness of this post! A belated happy new year and I hope 2026 is off to a great start for you all. I've been busy but well.
I was determined to release an Umineko video last year, and I made it in the nick of time. Hopefully most of you have had the chance to watch The Role of the Woman in Umineko – it’s a bit surreal that it’s finally done (after living in my head for years upon years) and I’m super happy with how it turned out. It was my best video release yet! It eventually slowed down and began to fall behind the Higurashi videos, but that's no great surprise. My audience really turned up for it and it's really appreciated. It’s been wonderful to get so much feedback. I’ll talk more about the video in an upcoming BTS podcast (and do let me know if you have any questions or things you’d like me to talk through in more depth there), so I’ll move on to talking about the channel more generally now.
So, the Umineko video took a lot longer than planned. I’m not happy about this, and it’s not the first time it’s happened. Keeping up with YouTube has generally been a challenge since I graduated and started working full-time a few years ago, but I started a new psychology role in September that’s left me with less time than ever. I’m in the office five days a week, commute over an hour each way, and I've found myself falling into the habit of overtime. I really like the job, but I work in a frontline healthcare service that deals with high numbers of patients and a lot of risk so there’s always a lot of work and mental strain, and it’s been difficult to balance health, hobbies and social life. I generally feel myself oscillating between sacrificing one or more of these at a time, and while progress with the video was very slow in the latter half of the year, I was still only able to get it out as I was prioritising working on it over other things for a number of months. It’s definitely taught me that this approach isn’t sustainable for my physical or mental health in the long-term.
I don’t plan to make any drastic change in the way my channel runs – you as viewers have already been very patient in recent years despite the minimal output. But while I love what I do on YouTube, I’m making a bit of a conscious decision this year, for the first time, to deprioritise it. Practically speaking, this will probably just mean owning upfront that videos will take as long as they take, and simply providing updates as they come.
I dream of a future where I can consciously carve time out of my work schedule to write, about anime, visual novels, and everything else, and balance these two loves (I love psychology too!). For now, I'm fortunate enough to be in a position to actively grow and progress in my primary career if I make the effort, and that's my main focus. As I always say, I do, at least, feel like this only benefits the quality of the videos I do manage to put out.
With all of this being said, in terms of a road map for the coming year(s), I first have one further Umineko video planned -- Trauma, Healing and Subjective Truth in Umineko (working title). This one focuses centrally on Ange, but also the named themes and various characters related to her, and those, some of whom weren't particularly touched on in the first video (I've had lots of questions about the witches). I haven't begun writing this one yet, but I do already have the notes for it from my re-reads.
I've also always wanted to talk about another one of my favourite series on my channel -- the Ace Attorney series. The video ideas can always morph and grow as I revisit series, but at the least, I've always wanted to talk about AA4 as it's my favourite entry in the series. I've also long considered making a video on the anime adaptation. We'll see, but I have begun slowly replaying the series and taking notes with all this in mind.
Another priority is to make a video at some point on Chainsaw Man, and beyond this, I have lots of fun miscellaneous ideas for the future, some of which could perhaps be smaller projects that I'd be able to get out a bit faster. What order AA, CSM, or other videos will come in is all TBD until the next Umineko video is done, which will be my main focus this year.
It does feel like, with the release of my last video, I've surmounted something I've been building to since making my channel and it's nice to slowly but surely chip away at the list of series I really want to document my thoughts on. I hope some of what I have planned for the future sounds interesting and exciting to you all!
In terms of media over the last two months, I listened to two podcasts: The Protocol and The Birth Keepers. The Protocol is a NYT podcast exploring the journey and evolution medical care for transgender young people has gone through, and how this has been impacted by politics and economics, primarily as it has journeyed from Europe to the US. I found this really interesting particularly as somebody who works in healthcare.
The Birth Keepers is another Guardian Investigates podcast (I really liked their Missing in the Amazon series earlier last year). It's about an online group that promotes free birthing (going through the pregnancy and birthing journey without medical intervention). This was recommended to me by a friend in midwifery. It's a tough listen as it documents how the group operates essentially as a cult and the serious harm to mothers and babies that has resulted. Great investigating.
I set the goal of reading thirteen books last year and managed to reach it with two final books in December: The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and 100 Poems by Seamus Heaney.
The Yellow Wallpaper is a famous short story published in the 1890s which depicts a woman's confinement to a room by her physician husband to treat her "hysteria" and her following descent into actual mental illness. I really appreciate the norms the story challenges and how transgressive it was for its time, and it's worth reading for those reasons.
100 Poems is a selection of Seamus Heaney's work curated by his family and part of my effort to read more poetry and familiarise myself with the work of giants of the medium. My favourite poems from this collection are stunningly beautiful, but there were also many that were just fine to me. A mixed bag but glad to have read it.
Finally, films: I watched Paprika and Marty Supreme.
Paprika was the last piece of (visual) media by Satoshi Kon I had yet to see, so it was bittersweet to finally tick it off. At the moment I'd say it's my least favourite of his films -- I really liked some of the ideas presented (what being able to explore and interfere with a patient's dreams could mean in the context of therapy, using this to explore an unresolved past trauma in the case of the police officer character), but it felt like the film quickly switched gears from being story-driven to becoming a bombardment of sensory information and ideas. The animation is, of course, incredible, creative and so technically impressive for the time, the passion oozes from the screen and Paprika is definitely a fun watch, but the film didn't register for me on a deeper level. I'll likely need to rewatch it at some point. I did, however, enjoy this analysis the friend I saw it with sent me after.
Finally, I saw Marty Supreme the other night with a friend. I don't watch many (non-anime) films and knew nothing going in. I appreciated the at times astounding directing, soundtrack and scoring, but was otherwise a bit lukewarm on the film. I didn't love the roles the female characters played in the story and ultimately didn't take much away. Still worth watching.
And that's all for now.
Thank you all as always for your ongoing support and let's have a great year!