Welcome to the official Project AFTER homepage! If this is your first time visiting, then please come in and enjoy the site's many exciting and comical features* that exist solely for your entertainment. Also, feel free to bookmark the site in case you want to come back and view it again at a later time. Return visitors are almost unheard of around here, but hey, maybe you'll have unusually low standards or something. "But hold on a minute. What is this 'Project AFTER' phenomenon you speak of, anyway?" If that's what you were thinking just now, then congratulate yourself for pondering a damn good question! First, let's start with the meaning behind this cryptic title. Project A.F.T.E.R. is actually an acronym for:

Project Anime Fanfiction: Twisted Entertainment Review

News and Updates

February 19, 2010

Alright, enough screwing around. It's update time. I had originally planned to put this up about a week and a half ago, but you can blame No More Heroes 2 for the delay.

And before anyone goes calling me a hypocrite for shelling out $50 on a new game after talking at length about my financial troubles, it was a birthday present. Rest assured, I'm still poor. In fact, I'm pretty sure all the Taco Bell I've been forced to consume lately is beginning to eat away at the lining of my stomach. I've been throwing up more blood than a bulimic vampire, and it all tastes like that strange mixture of vinegar and pureed tomato skins that Taco Bell tries to pass off as hot sauce. But I digress.

I thought it would be appropriate to officially bring this latest hiatus to an end by posting something that fans of the site haven't seen in a very long time. My first idea was to write some new material that was relevant, informative, and genuinely funny thanks to plenty of snappy topical humor and witty observations that my readers could relate to. That ended up being too hard, though, so I just wrote another review of some homoerotic Naruto fanfiction instead. Even I can't remember how long it's been since the last time the site got an honest-to-goodness brand new episode, so I hope this one was worth the wait.

Speaking of the site's episode count, one project I want to start making some progress on involves filling up the holes that are currently present in the Season 1 lineup. The remaining "lost episodes" (#5-#8) have been down for so long now that I wouldn't be surprised if most of the site's current readers have never seen them. That's probably for the best, actually, since reading them now makes it painfully apparent that I was even worse at this whole fanfiction reviewing thing five years ago than I am today. Needless to say, those installments of PA still need a LOT of work before I'll be willing to put them back on the site. Putting in that work is something I intend to make a top priority, though, so expect to finally see some of the old episodes make it back online in future updates.

Until then, consider killing some time and brain cells by reading this.

January 25, 2010

Well, as long as I'm going to continue paying the monthly server fees to keep this site online, I guess I may as well do something with it. It must seem absurd to bother updating a website after it's gone an entire calendar year without seeing any activity whatsoever, but to be fair, missing 2009 is like neglecting to watch Superman 4. No one cares. In fact, it was so shitty that you're actually better off just pretending that it never happened and moving on to the franchise's reboot. I don't know if 2010 will be history's Superman Returns or not, but either way, 2009 was such a horribly godawful year that I'm perfectly fine with mentally retconning it right out of existence. That would mean it's been just over one month since the site's last update, so things are right on schedule. Kick ass!

It has been a long month, though, hasn't it. I wouldn't be at all surprised if readers of this site felt like it had been a much longer stretch of time closer to a full year (even though it actually wasn't) since they've opened this site and had something new to look at. With that in mind, I guess I should probably address the question that's been on the minds of the three people who still check the site regularly: "What the backflipping fuck has been going on with this place?" The answer to that involves a very dull, lengthy explanation about my living situation and a somewhat amusing story about how a large money transfer company came to label me as a suspected terrorist, but rather than bore you with a bunch of details no one cares about, I'll just say that I've been preoccupied with other matters for some time now.

Concerning what limited time I have been able to put into Project AFTER, it's mostly been a matter of pursuing different avenues to generate interest in the site and prepare for the big re-launch, the majority of which have failed pretty spectacularly. I was able to meet one goal by getting a new layout designed for the site a few months back, but truth be told, I'm not wholly satisfied with the finished product. It still needs a great deal of work and a number of significant alterations before I'll be ready to begin constructing the new website, and the work that has to be done is something that I don't have the time nor the necessary skill to handle myself. Ironically, this puts me back in almost the exact same situation I was in nineteen months ago (minus the twelve months of 2009 that never happened) when my old hard drive crashed. You'd think I'd have accomplished a lot more with the site by now, but a lack of time (and interest, if I'm being honest) combined with no money have made moving forward with the re-launch plans incredibly difficult.

Speaking of which, I feel like I should emphasize the role that my zero-income lifestyle has had in the massive delays. I can presently scrounge up enough dough to keep this site and the forums online, but realistically, that's about it. I haven't even been able to invest in some new web design software that I need if I'm going to give PA more sophisticated code than the pathetically basic table-based design it's running on now. Hell, I'm still using FrontPage 2003—a program that was already outdated when this site first launched over six years ago. My financial situation wasn't exactly ideal to begin with, and college has definitely lived up to its reputation of being exceedingly, absurdly, un-goddamn-reasonably expensive. Now I know why so many people spend the majority of their adult lives working to pay back student loans. It's a carefully-balanced system organized by the US Department of Education where people go to school to get a degree for the purpose of being able to make more money so that they can spend the next thirty years working hard to pay back the money they had to borrow in order to get the degree that would enable them to make enough money so that they would be able to repay the costs of earning the degree. Genius.

The good news is that my finances are currently so bad that I'll be dropping out of school for awhile and going to work. I'm actually pretty excited about this since my horrible sleep schedule makes my top two career choices gigolo and night watchman in a haunted Halloween mask factory, and both of those sound way better than writing any more 4,000 word papers about what I learned from a group project building a visual representation of trickle-down economics out of popsicle sticks and construction paper.

As for the website, I've decided that it's pointless to let it stagnate and gradually lose the handful of readers I still have while I wait for an opportunity to work on a new design that may very well never be completed. While I'm at no point in my life to commit to any kind of regular update schedule, not putting up anything for months at a time is just ridiculous. It may end up that I'll only be able to put together some new content once every couple of months or so, but I'm determined to breath some life back into this place. I worked too hard building this site during the first five years of its existence to let it die off like this.

Expect the first real new update to go up some time next month. Also, the Cosplay Caption Contest will be returning to the forums starting February 6th, so be sure to check that out if you were a fan of that feature. If not, check it out anyway. It's great fun.

I know a truly convincing guarantee that Project AFTER hasn't been abandoned would include me uploading some new content today, but the best I can do is offer assurance that I haven't completely lost interest in this whole webmaster thing and that I'll try to work hard to dispel all rumors that the site is dead. I know just letting it die now with some remnant of dignity would probably be the smart thing to do at this point, but I've never been about making good decisions as much as I've been about unfailing tenacity and the inability to know when to quit. After all, I owe every major accomplishment in my life to that foolhardy stubbornness. Also blackmail, I guess, but I doubt that would be of much help in this situation.

December 21, 2008

Oh wow, it's a special holiday bonus update! I haven't changed my plans to hold off on adding any significant amount of new content until after the site's reboot next year, but I thought I'd throw in one last update for '08 for the sake of (hopefully) keeping people interested in this car wreck of a site for a little while longer.

Since I know how much fans of this site have come to love recycled filler material written by other people, I'm very excited to unveil the 2nd collection of entries in the Cosplay Caption Contest! If you thought the anime geeks in the first session were fat and ugly, then holy fucking shit boys and girls, prepare to learn just how little you actually knew about fat and ugly. In addition to being easy to put together, I also uploaded this feature as a way to cleverly advertise the fact that the Cosplay Caption Contest is now running on the forums again. If you missed it before and have been aching to write some funny captions for sad people in even sadder outfits, then here's your chance to get in on the fun!

Also, there's a special bit of news specifically for any experienced web designers and/or graphic artists reading... If you think you've got the skills to assist me in designing a bigger and better Project AFTER, then read through this topic on the forums and find out how you can help make internet history while making some cold hard cash in the process.

That should just about cover it, I think. Thanks for reading guys, and have a Merry Christmas. 'Till 2009, I'm out.

October 26, 2008

I don't know if anybody is going to get the above reference, but it's basically my way of saying I can empathize with the frustration and despair felt by anyone who's wasted all those lonely nights checking this site for updates, only to find the same page staring back at them time and again.

Speaking of which, I imagine some of you are probably wondering what the hell has been going on for the past four months. Wellsir, allow me to explain! Back in June, my old hard drive decided it was tired of functioning properly and suddenly died on me for some reason which remains one of history's greatest unsolved mysteries to this day. After that, I spent the better part of two months trying to recover the data I'd lost using every conceivable method known to man, all of which ended in what became an increasingly dazzling series of failures. I don't know if anybody will have any interest in reading the entire story now that I've gone and spoiled the ending, but if you're curious about the details regarding how the whole thing went down, you can read through these topics on the forums where I explained exactly how things went wrong as they were in the process of going wrong. Read away and laugh at my pain.

Fast forward to the present, where I've got a brand new—and vastly superior—computer, and have just recently overcome the problems with my server's FTP settings that were preventing me from updating the site. The great comedic tragedy has come to end, and now I'm left more or less where I was back in June. The only difference is, of course, that I lost everything related to the site in terms of unpublished content. So I'm afraid I won't be updating the site with anything new right away, because I don't have anything new to put up.

I'm sure my contributors will be quick to point out that they have, in fact, submitted articles that I haven't uploaded onto the site yet. That's because they're BASTARD LIARS! Actually, the reason I'm not publishing anything just yet is because I've decided that this little hiatus the site has been on is going to continue for awhile longer. This news is probably going piss off a few people , but just hear me out before you go firing off those angry e-mails and/or telling me what an asshole I am on the forums...

While it's true I still have access to everything on the site that was already online, losing the contents of my hard drive completely killed my backlog of half-finished articles and new features. Without overselling it, I easily lost well over a hundred man-hours of work. In a lot of ways, it feels like I'm being forced to start over from scratch. The way I see it, as long as I'm starting from square one anyway, I may as well go ahead and treat this like a genuine re-launch of the site and rebuild Project AFTER the way I had originally intended to build it. Believe it or not, my lack of skill as a writer and a web designer have resulted in me making a hell of a lot of compromises to the site over the past five years. I think I'm finally at a point where I have the ability to redo a lot of things for the better and correct past mistakes, though. As a matter of fact... Oh, dare I dream it...! Yes, yes I think my vision of making Project AFTER into the internet's most popular 21 Jump Street fansite may finally become a reality!

Concerning a timeline for this re-launch, I'm afraid I have to stay pretty vague in that department. I don't even have everything worked out in my head yet, and the actual physical work for this project is currently at 0% completion. I'll be sure to make more news posts as this grand plan of mine gets underway and keep everyone updated on what's happening behind the scenes, but for now, all I can really say for sure is that it's going to be awhile. I know at least a handful of folks would rather I just stick to writing new content for the existing site to keep things on a more consistent schedule, but please understand that I'm not planning this re-launch as a way to stall for more time or anything. I've put five years of work into this site, and nobody wants to see it succeed more than me. A reworking of the site is something that will need to happen eventually in order for me to continue to have any interest in it, and I think now is a good time to initiate such a large-scale plan for a variety of reasons. It might take some time, but I have to ask that those of you who are loyal to the site show me that same patience and understanding that have been demonstrated on so many past occas—Actually, never mind. I'll just set aside some cash and bombard every single site on Project Wonderful with ads to attract new readers who are unaware of my long history of procrastination and broken promises. Hmm, I'll have to remember to delete this part of the update before then...

In the meantime, to prove I haven't just been aimlessly screwing around for the past several months, I'll share a couple of links to some pieces of guest content I had the pleasure of writing for Dear Jimmy and Socks Make People Sexy. Feel free to have a look for yourself, provided you're not already exhausted from reading this seemingly never-ending update.

On that note, I suppose I've rambled enough for this evening. I'm just going to assume I've covered everything since I'm too lazy to go back and look over what I wrote. As long as I got the message across that Project AFTER isn't dead, it's all good. If anything, I'd say the site is in a coma right now, and even though I can't say when it'll come of out it, the site will be back sooner or later. Not only that, but it should come back roughly fifty times as awesome as before.

Until next time folks, stay golden.