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

December 30, 2011

Just when you thought PA wouldn't see another update before 2012 hit, here I am to take your expectations and slap them upside the head before demanding they grab me a cold beer and iron my shirts. A lot of things happened earlier in the month that managed to obliterate my planned update schedule, hence the reason this one is getting rushed out the door at the last minute. I'm not going to patronize you by pretending that I think you care about the specifics of what's been keeping me busy, so let's skip all that and jump right into the meat of this update.

The holidays may be winding down by now, but hopefully you folks can still summon up a little seasonal spirit and enjoy a newly revised version of the 7th Special, Christmas Fluff. I was never satisfied with the original draft of that one when I first uploaded it years ago, and for a long time it's stuck in my mind as being one of the weakest fanfiction reviews on the entire site. This new version (which has been painstakingly rewritten and enhanced to make the leap all the way from "unreadable" up to "not terrible but still disappointingly unfunny") was supposed to be a special Christmas gift to both my readers and my nagging sense of inadequacy; unfortunately, I wasn't able to finish the revisions in time to get the thing online before Christmas. So just consider this a late present, like the kind you get from those friends who obviously got you something in a panicked rush three weeks after they'd finished the rest of their shopping because they didn't expect to get anything from you but now they feel obligated to reciprocate the gesture to make it look like they give a shit and hopefully avoid any further awkwardness the next time they see you.

Continuing the theme of stuff going up later than it should have, this next item cranks the lateness up to eleven! Forum regular Screaming Soulcatcher sent me a guest editorial last August(!!) that fell to the back of my overcrowded list of guest content pieces to upload and has sat in my inbox during two season changes. Thankfully, not only does SS happen to be the Champion Grand Master of Patience, but the article he wrote feels just as fresh now as it did last summer. So make sure you take some time to read Panty and Stocking: A Casual Perspective on Animated Garbage. You'll applaud his opinions if you hate Panty and Stocking, and you'll love them even more if you like Panty and Stocking. Because there is no greater pleasure for an opinionated anime nerd than the chance to send some vitriolic hate-mail to someone they disagree with.

Last on the agenda, I've recently been involved with a project that begs to be plugged here. While it's not directly related to this site per se, anyone who enjoys the kind of dark, angry, ultra-cynical humor found here should be able to appreciate The Other Side. That link points to a new podcast series starring yours truly and Cody "Shmeckie" Baier (who you'll remember as the guy who used to write Comic Release before Max-Vader took over) now appearing on the popular multimedia site Anime 3000. Each podcast consists of Cody and myself discussing some subject related to anime, various fandoms, internet subcultures, or anything else we can come up with to talk shit about for roughly an hour. Each episode is packed with of foul language and hateful ramblings sure to spark plenty of controversy, because that's how we roll.

Speaking of rambling, this post is already running longer than I intended. Thanks to all the readers and contributors who made 2011 such an incredible year for Project AFTER! Despite things slowing down a little over the past few months, this has been a hugely successful year for PA that saw record hits for both the website and the forums. Here's to making the community even stronger in 2012!

November 23, 2011

Hey folks, you looking forward to Thanksgiving tomorrow? Yeah, me neither. I always used to think the sugar-coated treats and fried dishes oozing artery-clogging calories were parts of the traditional Thanksgiving Day meal because the pilgrims were on a mission to make America the fattest nation even before McDonald's was invented; a few years ago, however, I figured out that the menu evolved from generations of people trying to induce a fatal heart attack after spending an entire day with their neurotic, judgmental, bickering families. I'm actually thinking of starting a new tradition where I give thanks over a meal of instant cup noodles in my car.

If the holidays have got you feelin' down or stressed out, then you might want to consider unwinding with a little Comic Release. In the eleventh installment of the internet's twelfth favorite series of derisive webcomic reviews, Max-Vader and myself take a look at the long-running online manga Misfile and conclude that it kind of sucks a ton of ass. Sorry to spoil the ending for you, but the review should still be worth reading if you're curious what all the fuss over this one is about. I mean, someone somewhere has to be talking about this comic, right? Misfile has been running for over seven years now and includes almost two thousand pages. You don't hit those kinds of numbers unless your work is extremely popular or you're extremely oblivious as to what a colossal waste your life has been. But perhaps I've already said too much...

Provided I can resist the urge to use the electric turkey carver on my wrists tomorrow and don't get trampled to death beneath a stampede of frantic shoppers on Black Friday, I'll try to roll out another update sometime within the next couple of weeks. My goal is to make at least two more content additions to the site before the end of the year, but pretend this says that I'm abandoning the site forever and this is the very last update. That way, anything that goes up after this will seem like a treat no matter how late or disappointing it is.

November 03, 2011

Aw shucks, couldn't quite make it before the end of the month. And I didn't even have that much in the way of academic assignments to slow me down—you can blame this delay on the creators of Batman: Arkham City. Sorry guys, but I can't even pretend like beating throngs of henchmen into unconsciousness with the Caped Crusader isn't immeasurably more satisfying than working on this site. You wouldn't even be seeing an update this soon if it wasn't for the fact that the game disc suddenly stopped working because... Shit, who knows. At this point, my best guess is ancient Egyptian curse.

The good news is that it's finally time to end the drought with a flood of new content. Okay, not quite a flood; more like a light rain. We always stress quality over quantity here at Project AFTER, though, and this is some good stuff. Courtesy of forum member Dr. O comes a brand new (read: this is NOT a repost) Guest Special! Ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy Room 666. The story itself is pretty terrible, yeah, but ol' Doc O. gives it a thorough examination and administers plenty of bitter medicine to dull the pain. My diagnosis? Chronic hilarity!

Real quick, I want to give a shout-out to Dr. O and thank him for his unfailing patience in waiting for this review to make it online. I'm too embarrassed to admit when he first sent this to me, but let's just say it's lucky that guest content submissions don't have expiration dates, otherwise I probably just poisoned everyone reading this. I'd totally carve "PATHETIC FAILURE" into my arm to make amends for such a grievous lack of professionalism in sitting on this for so long, but that sounds painful and messy, so I'm hoping this public apology will suffice.

To everyone else who sent in guest content that I've yet to upload, shut the hell up already. I'm getting to it, okay? Goddamn.

October 24, 2011

Ugh, I hate making announcements updates... These are always met with all the enthusiasm of an IRS audit notice. In fact, anyone who only checks this site periodically to see if any new content has gone up can go ahead and skip this post; there's nothing new to read besides what you're looking at now. If you actually care about the behind-the-scenes aspects of PA at all and would like to know why there's been such a cavernous gap between updates, keep on reading. I dare you, asshole!

To put it bluntly, life has been kicking me in the face lately. I can only assume that all the bad karma I have stored up from publically humiliating total strangers for eight years has finally caught up with me, since no other explanation accounts for all the bullshit I've gone through since early September. I'd like to write about the horrible, world-shattering tragedies that have befallen me, but the less interesting (and less sympathy-grabbing) truth is that I've been up against a seemingly unending procession of minor problems and annoyances that collectively add up to one gigantic pain in the ass. I think this is why so many overstressed, middle-class salary slaves go insane: you spend most of your time pushed to the knife edge of total physical and emotional exhaustion, yet you can never seem to come up with a good way of explaining why without launching into a lengthy rant that most people just write off as complaining.

But I digress! Back to complaining, an unexpectedly heavy workload this semester has kept me busier than a Child Protective Services worker assigned to one of the families from Toddlers & Tiaras. Meanwhile, some personal issues I'd rather not delve into combined with a flare-up of some chronic health problems have ensured that the majority of what little free time I do have is spent standing in the shower, fully clothed, muttering to myself incoherently until the hot water heater is empty. Also, as you might have already guessed from reading this unfocused mess of a news post, I haven't slept well in several months now. The most restful night I've had in recent memory took place on the neighbors' front lawn after I somehow managed to make it home following a marathon of Ouzo shot races with a terminally ill Greek man and two lesbians who work in a failing record store.

I have managed to make some headway on the next update during the past week, but I ran into a little technical problem that's going to push back the nearest date I can get that shit online. My webhost service recently dropped support for FrontPage extensions, so the software I use to code the site no longer has a way of communicating directly with the host. I can still use a third-party FTP service to get the files online (which is how you're able to read this update), but it requires extra work on my part and results in some compatibility issues. This site doesn't use a whole lot in the way of FrontPage extensions outside of file transferring, thankfully, but I have noticed that certain pages and images are loading more slowly than usual. Truthfully, I have no idea if there's any correlation between that and my host dropping FP support; if you notice any portion of PA behaving sluggish, though, I'm guessing that's probably why.

While having to jump through more hoops to update the site is frustrating, part of me is glad this happened. I've known for years now that it's stupid to keep working with such ridiculously outdated software. If this is what it took to slap me awake so I can finally modernize the site, so be it. This old girl of mine deserves a new dress, and by God, I'm gonna get her something pretty!

Speaking of which, I'll be on the lookout for someone to help me design a new layout for PA before too long. I haven't decided whether or not I'm willing to pay someone for their services yet, but I suspect it will most likely come to that... If you're an aspiring graphic designer and/or coding wiz who's looking for a reasonably basic project to help build up their portfolio, however, definitely send me an e-mail and we'll talk a little about the what and the when.

Now that I've gotten the explanations out of the way, I'll return to finishing up what I originally intended to post before the file uploading process became all scary and confusing. I'm going to try to get everything finished and online before the end of the month, but the feasibility of that plan will largely depend on whether or not my professors feel like being bastards hell-bent on ruining my weekends. If so, then the next update should happen in early November.