
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. Please 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 the site's rather cryptic title. Project A.F.T.E.R. is actually an
acronym for:
Project Anime Fanfiction:
Twisted Entertainment Review
This previously top-secret operation is the result of many
years of costly and tiresome research to discover what
exactly is causing modern society to plunge into its current
downward spiral toward oblivion. Astonishingly, all test
results have thus far pointed to one horrifying conclusion.
War, pollution, disease, world hunger, natural disasters,
cosplayers... They all stem from the same vile source: bad
anime fanfiction.
Admittedly, it may seem harmless enough at first glance, but
in reality it is a potent, all-consuming evil that has
silently corrupted humanity since the dawn of time (and, by
"the dawn of time", I mean the mid 1980s). Today, bad anime
fanfiction is content to waste your precious online
web-surfing time with its seemingly never-ending tedium and
idiocy that has infected hundreds upon hundreds of
unsuspecting websites. Tomorrow, however, it may very well
be out murdering your children and setting fire to your
homes.
While the future may seem ridden with pain and despair, all
is not lost! Through Project AFTER, a creation that can only
be described as a demonstration of human ingenuity at its
finest, I will select promising pieces of anime fanfiction
that have unfortunately ended up in the realm of awfulness.
By providing an astute running commentary within the
fanfiction, I hope to inform readers of how to identify bad fanfics, and even more importantly, how to avoid writing
them. Such a concept may seem to some of you like little
more than an uninspired way for me to publicly display
malicious outbursts of rage to help me deal with my own
inner suffering while garnering attention from strangers
over the internet, but I assure you that I am doing this
strictly for the good of humanity! Why? Because that's just
the kind of selfless guy I am.
If you're interested in learning more about my epic struggle
to save all mankind, then please feel free to take a look
around the site and see what one man is doing to save the
world which he so dearly loves... One bad fanfiction at a
time.
*Note: Features contained within this site are not
guaranteed to be exciting or comical.

News and Updates
October 23, 2014
Let's keep this momentum going with another update! Who wants to
read some more articles about Gamergate?! Ha ha, just kidding.
We'll save that for next time. There's no reason to rush because
Christ knows people will still be talking about this shit six
months from now.
In the meantime, I think you folks deserve a little release... A
little Comic Release, that is!
Maximilian "Maximum" D. Vader (a.k.a. Max-Vader) has served up
another sizzlin' skillet of sumptuous webcomic reviewery, cooked
extra crispy and drizzled in hate—just the way the regulars like
it! This time, his critical eye is focused on
The Lounge, a long-running webmanga
drawn by beloved bestiality enthusiast John Joseco. I can't wait
to see what kind of hatemail we get over this one.
Publishing this review marks the end of an era. The Lounge was
among the original ten webcomics I talked about in a canceled PA
feature that predates Comic Release (which, for those who don't
remember, debuted on this site in 2006), making Joseco's
disaster of a comic the most enduring occupant in the CR queue.
Part of me is almost sad to see it go—and yet, I feel a sense of
pride at the same time. I imagine this must be how educators
feel when their dumbest student finally graduates after eight
years. In any case, this is the last time I'll know for certain
what's next up on the chopping block. I guess Max could always
tell me what he's got in store for future articles, but gosh
darn it, not knowing is kind of exciting. That doesn't mean you
folks couldn't conceivably influence the selection process in
some way, though. For instance, say if you happened across an
anime-style webcomic you felt was the recipient of undeserved
popularity and decided to suggest said webcomic to Max
via
Twitter. I can't imagine there'd be any problem with that.
(If you wanted to check out
my
Twitter while you were at it, you could do that too. You
know, hypothetically.)
Before I wrap this up, I have an important announcement for all
present and future members of the PA Forums: Keep your eyes on
the
Cosplay Caption Contest section, because bi-weekly contests
will resume this Saturday! You boys n' girls asked for it, so
now you're getting it right in the face. That's Saturday,
October 25th. Mark your calendar or camp out in front of your
computer with a blanket and a can of beans and keep hitting
refresh until a new contest thread appears. Your call. Either
way, BE THERE.

September 27, 2014
I could write up a lengthy post explaining why PA has been
inactive for so many months, but I feel like that would be a
waste of everyone's time. The important thing is what comes
next, right? As the great philosopher Bruce Lee said, "Running
water never grows stale, so you just have to keep on flowing."
Let's be water, my friends.
If this happens to be your first time on the internet, I can
only recommend you run as far away from this and every other
online-enabled device as you can. All the free pornography and
Cyber Monday sales aren't worth the mental anguish and
misanthropy-induced depression the net will inevitably plunge
you into. If, however, you've been entangled in the World Wide
Web for more than a day, there's a decent chance you've
encountered some mention of Gamergate by now. Because I can't
imagine anyone ever getting sick of this topic, I invite you to
check out Gamergate: What
Went Wrong. Whether you've been following the scandal from
the beginning or lack the faintest clue what all the hubbub is
about, this thorough play-by-play will get you up to speed on
all the sordid details of one of the biggest controversies to
rock the internet this month.
My original plan for this article was to shop it around to a
handful of sub-mainstream gaming news sites to see if anyone was
interesting in picking it up. While increased exposure and the
possibility of some compensation were tempting, I felt a little
guilty handing away content when my own site was so long overdue
for an update. Not only is the piece now a PA exclusive, but the
version hosted here is significantly less processed than the one
I'd intended to market (for example, the original version had
100% fewer instances of the term "assclowns").
Regrettably, as much as I relish the creative freedom, the lack
of expansion into more potentially profitable territory is
something I can't keep up much longer. Times are tough, and
bandwidth ain't free.
Accepting donations has allowed me to continuing focusing on
this site while reducing the burden of server fees during a
stretch when paying the essential bills hasn't left much in the
bank. I know I'm not the only one tightening his belt right now,
but anything at all is appreciated. If you want to see this site
continue to grow and have even a couple bucks to spare, every
little bit helps immensely.

December 24, 2013
Well, this is embarrassing. Even though overshooting a planned
timeframe for an update has become a trademark feature of my MO,
I usually don't miss the target by multiple months with nothing
to show for it.
I have a whole freight car full of excuses I could dump all over
this post to fill space, but I'd just be wasting everyone's
time. To cut to the chase, the second half of 2013 has been a
hectic time for me. Some rather sobering events have recently
led me to rearrange my priorities, and PA wound up in a position
much further down the list than it previously occupied. Hence
the coating of dust you've no doubt noticed gradually
accumulating on this page.
The good news is that I haven't pushed this site off of my radar
completely. I've got multiple new pieces of content already in
the works, in fact. That major redesign I teased in the last
update is still scheduled to go live as well, although it will
likely be happening later than I originally planned. Things are
moving forward. They're moving slowly, but I'm okay with that—my
hope is that you all are, too.
At the beginning of this year, I asked everyone still following
PA for their patience as I tried to get some things in my
personal life sorted out and set to work figuring out where the
hell I was going with this site and its community. I believe I
got exactly what I asked for, and for that I am immeasurably
grateful. I only wish I had a better way to express my
appreciation for everyone's support and dedication than with
another nebulous promise that new material is just beyond the
horizon. Regrettably, the only gift I have to give my readers
this Christmas Eve is the gift of hesitant optimism. Think of
this as a sort of Project AFTER
empty box campaign, I guess.
The one item on my to-do list for the site I was able to cross
off is completing some long overdue maintenance on the
Links page. A couple new links are up,
while a few more have been axed—most notably, VG Cats has
finally been removed from my personal lineup of choice online
attractions. Because fuck you anyway, Scott Ramsoomair. I gave
you chance after chance to be funny again, and what do you do?
Start hawking Nigel Thornberry and doge meme t-shirts!? You
piece of shit. You miserable waste of physical matter.
But I digress. Check out the updated Links
page if you want my recommendations for some good ways to keep
busy during the remainder of the site's hibernation. I'd
actually like to recommend you leave the house and meet some
people, maybe learn a new skill or something, BUT we all know
THAT ain't happening anytime soon! Not when wasting your life is
this blissfully easy.
Have yourselves a merry little Christmas, folks. Hope to see you
back here in 2014.

August
30, 2013
Truth be told, I never have any idea how to begin these news
posts. Anniversary updates are no different. Today marks exactly
ten years since Project AFTER first appeared on the internet. I
think that requires me to write a few words here, but damned if
I'm not having a tough time figuring out what they should say.
First off, I believe some thanks are in order. My sincerest
gratitude goes out to everyone who has supported PA at any time
over the course of the last decade, whether it was through
contributing content to the site, bringing your thoughts to the
forums, participating in the Cosplay Caption Contest, expressing
your support in an e-mail, or even being one of the raging
basket cases responsible for any of the fanfiction I've torn to
shreds—in one way or another, all of you have had a hand in
crafting the virtual wonderland that is Project AFTER. This is a
victory I share with all of you. If you have any champagne on
hand (a little vodka and ginger ale will do in a pinch), I
invite you to drink up.
Since I have no idea what else to write about, I'm going to take
this opportunity to answer a question I've been waiting ten
years for someone to ask me: "Why do you want to run your own
website?"
I understand why no one pitched me this question in the early
days of the site's existence. I've already explained how PA was
created out of necessity due to my inability to find anyone who
wanted to host my malicious fanfiction reviews on their site.
[On a side note, I have to quickly mention how awesome it feels
knowing that not one of the sites that turned down my offer for
free content made it to their tenth anniversary before fading
into obscurity and going offline.] You have to remember, the
internet was quite a different place in 2003; in those days,
starting your own website as a creative outlet was simply what
people did. If you had any kind of content you wanted to show
off on the web, your options were extremely limited. The only
thing that even remotely resembled the current definition of a
social networking site at the time was LiveJournal, which
offered very little flexibility for users who wanted to
customize how their content was displayed to viewers. Really, if
you wanted to share anything besides a post revealing which of
your high school friends were giving each other HJs in the
bathroom and how that put you in an emotional state that could
only be described through the lyrics of a My Chemical Romance
song, your only option was registering your own domain and
building a personal site on which you could strut your stuff. I
started my own website because, back in '03, everybody started
their own website.
What I find a little strange is the fact that no one has asked
me why I want to run my own site in more recent years. After
all, things have changed a lot since 2003. MySpace and LinkedIn
both rolled onto the scene the same year as PA and brought with
them the beginning of the end of the personal website. The
social networking community quickly became the new standard for
individuals and groups wanting to establish their presence
online. The ease of setting up one's own "page" combined with
the lack of hosting fees and the myriad of in-built networking
tools made the self-contained website model obsolete with
remarkable efficiency. In the present day, the non-corporate
.com address has become such a rarity that continuing to operate
one practically makes you a Luddite. Facebook and Tumblr are
electricity, and here we are, the stubborn fools who needlessly
stumble around in the darkness, bashing our elbows and stubbing
our toes in the process of filling our lamps with fresh kerosene
each night. In more ways than one, we are chasing the dinosaur.
It isn't as though running a website of even moderate success is
a simple task, either. Whereas the wordsmith on Blogger and the
illustrator on deviantART can rely on a completely automated
system to bring their work to the attention of others through
the magic of keyword searches and related content windows and
recommended reading lists, I have to rely on promotion through
an shaky combination of word of mouth and the occasional Google
hit (my tracking statistics show that visitors brought here from
the latter source spend an average of less than one minute on
the site before leaving). Of course, I also have the option of
buying ad space, in which case I can roll the dice that my
banner will be displayed for someone who doesn't have ad
blocking software installed, notices the ad, feels compelled to
make the effort to click on it, and happens to belong to
the miniscule niche audience this site appeals to. Statistics
say I'd be smarter to wager my money at the blackjack tables in
Vegas. Another luxury I don't have is a team of professional web
designers constantly coding new features and reconfiguring every
aspect of my site for optimized viewing on the latest
web-browsing gadget to hit the shelves at Best Buy. If I want my
site to be more Web 2.0 friendly, the process involves me
reading web design magazines at a Walgreens until I get kicked
out, attempting to copy some rough approximation of what I saw
into the site's raw HTML code, hitting Ctrl+Z approximately
eleven thousand times, then giving up and hoping nobody notices
the giant string of swear words left in the source code where
the OpenID-enabled comment box was supposed to go.
My reward for sacrificing the time and effort required to keep
the site "active" with semi-regular updates is the same reward
received by many of the Web 1.0 pioneers who came before me:
dead silence and the sight of a line graph that indicates no
substantial change in the number of search engine bots that
visit my domain name in the average 24-hour period. My work is
sometimes acknowledged by a few dedicated regulars on the forums
(a fact for which I am genuinely appreciative), but it pales in
comparison to the attention garnered by the social media
celebrity who uploads a new Death Note parody dub onto YouTube
or posts a ten-panel comic on Tumblr exploring what would happen
if the worlds of My Little Pony and Doctor Who collided in an
explosion of manic-depressive eroticism. No amount of effort on
my part can possibly compete with automatic instantaneous alerts
that notify a community of millions whenever anything they've
expressed interest in is updated, just as no amount of effort
from my supporters can match a system where people are able to
validate a person's existence with the click of a "like" button.
Even
my Twitter profile—my solitary foray into the accursed realm
of social networking—sees followers increase at a snail's pace
since I don't have a live feed embedded into the site's front
page or update my status ten times an hour.
I could talk about the financial burden of running a private
site, but I'd rather not. The last time I sat down to run some
numbers was over a year ago, when I started to tally up
everything I've spent just on fees for hosting and domain
renewal. When I realized the total broke four digits, I threw up
in my mouth and went to bed six hours early with all of my
clothes on.
I don't mean to complain about my circumstances or cast myself
as a martyr on a doomed mission to bring anyone free
entertainment at the cost of my emotional wellbeing. This is
simply the reality of the situation. This is the reality that
leads me to wonder why, in ten years of doing this, no one has
thought to ask me why I do it. Maybe everyone just
chalked it up to the insanity and was too polite to confirm
their suspicions.
In truth, the reason I continue to work on this isolated site in
this antiquated system is because I still want to put stuff on
the internet without having to deal with a bunch of bullshit.
But hold on, there. Didn't I just finish basically whining about
all the bullshit I have to put with as an oldschool .com
webmaster? I should clarify my terminology: The above paragraphs
contain explanations of the shit I have to put up with as
a webmaster. As I see it, shit is every undesirable,
stress-inducing, or potentially harmful facet of any undertaking
one is required to endure in order to accomplish anything
worthwhile. When you're mining for precious jewels, chipping
away at the bedrock and pushing heavy carts full of sediment and
outrunning the occasional cave-in is all part of the shit you
have to deal with in order to finish the job with a bag full of
a million dollars worth of gems. No matter what we do, we all
find ourselves facing down a mountain of shit at some point or
another. Life is absolutely chock full of shit.
Bullshit, in contrast, is all the unnecessary shit we
shouldn't have to wade through that winds up in our path thanks
to the stupidity and greed of other people. Social media sites
are notorious for overflowing with rivers and lakes and oceans
of bullshit. You see this bullshit every time someone makes a
thoughtful observation and has their post or tweet or status
update or whatever ripped apart by people claiming the author's
privilege negates any value in their message because they failed
to acknowledge the plight of all the poor little black girls
trapped inside the bodies of 37-year-old Hispanic men. You see
this same bullshit in a far more heavily concentrated form when
someone else cracks an innocent joke and Johnny Attention Whore
jumps up shouting how he was cyberbullied and fires off a few
suicide-threatening messages to the police.
Aside from being comparatively free of bullshit, there's also
another significant benefit to being in charge of your own site:
You own it. You are in control; not just of the content itself,
but the way it's arranged and presented, what surrounds it, who
can see it... Everything. You don't get the team of
professionals maintaining your work, but you also don't get
those same professionals making comically idiotic decisions and
mangling your work without any power to stop them.
I stated before that the personal site is presently on the verge
of extinction. This is true. Fortunately, nothing on the
internet has to stay dead forever. In some small capacity,
something is happening; something akin to the first signs of new
growth pushing up from beneath a field of charred stumps after a
massive forest fire. People—that is, creative individuals with
actual passion for what they produce—are beginning to emerge
from the abyss of the social network to find the ruins of the
larger internet, and I believe some of them are seeing the
potential for something new. For this first feint light of what
could be a new dawn for the privately-operated website, we have
to thank the abject ineptitude of those who run the gigantic
social communities. They're the ones who earn their paychecks
deleting videos because of a five-second clip of a copyrighted
song; forcing upgrades that completely obliterate the custom
layouts users spent weeks designing; banning accounts for "adult
material" because of a single photograph where a woman's nipples
were visible through the fabric of her shirt; removing material
because of unverified reports of a TOS violation that no one
even knew existed because it was never enforced; and all the
other bullshit driving more and more people away from the
corporate behemoths of the internet and forcing them to
reexamine their options.
Seeing what appears to be the early stages of a mass digital
migration fills me with hope. I'm not so stuck in my ways that I
can't see social communities have their place on the web, nor am
I so naive as to believe they'll ever go away. The likes of
Facebook and Tumblr (and maybe even the big-budget art and
writing communities with ads plastered all over every spare
pixel) make for inferior creative outlets, though, and I'm glad
to see more people beginning to realize they have alternatives.
Despite the unavoidable hassles involved, I would
enthusiastically encourage anyone to start their own website.
Aside from the power and freedom that come with having control
over your very own plot of online real estate, there's a kind of
authenticity to the personal site I find most social communities
lack. I don't know quite how to describe it... The best analogy
I can think of is to liken it to selecting a place to live.
Setting up a profile on some social networking site or a blog
generator is like renting an apartment: it's cheap and you have
a landlord who will fix leaky faucets for you, but you can't
change the wallpaper or the carpet and you'll probably get
kicked out if you make too much noise. Creating your own website
on your own server is like buying an acre of land and building a
house on it: the process is expensive and requires a lot of
back-breaking work, but when you're done, what you have is
wholly yours and yours alone. As long as you're not brazenly
breaking the law, you can do literally whatever the hell you
want. Feel like having a kitchen on both floors and a walk-in
freezer in the attic? You can do that. Want a hot tub in the
living room? Make it happen! Think every third Sunday of each
month should be Naked Fight Club Night in your basement? Quit
teasin' and get those invitations printed up!
The freedom is nearly limitless, and it is intoxicating. There's
more to it than that, though. Your website, your custom-built
house that you made according to your own blueprints, isn't just
yours—it's you. A well-designed site is the canvas on
which you can fashion the digitized essence of your own personal
style. You're not just filling the gallery; you're responsible
for the architecture of the building itself and every shape and
color of everything inside of it. Your site, should you decide
the effort needed to create the thing is worth it, can be a
reflection of everything you are and aspire to be. I think
that's amazing. I also think it's a miserable waste that I have
to look at a thousand identical web pages with different names
in the header and mile-long lists of profiles that all fuse
together to create a jumbled texture of sans-serif banality when
I could be filling my monitor with an interactive carnival ride
through someone's most vivid desires and personal wisdom. Even
if you're just another face in the crowd, you don't have to stay
camouflaged when you step onto the internet. You can make
something as unique and as incredible and as weird as you are.
For most people, this will mean the creation of something
monumentally obnoxious. So be it. Anything is better than being
boring. The surface of this planet is covered in more boredom
than water.
The more I think about everything a website can be, the more I
inevitably think about everything Project AFTER isn't. Not to
rag on the ol' girl; this site has served me well, all things
considered. There's a kind of unpretentious hominess to it, and
I can usually hand out the URL to people without too much
embarrassment for what occupies its pages (even all the old ones
that deserve a rewrite now that I've studied something beyond
12th grade English). PA is simply not living up to its
potential, however, and that is enough to fill me with a sense
of unrest. When I look at the site in its current state, what I
see looks unfinished. While I'm hardly leading the cheer
praising all the "upgrades" of the New Internet!, I would like
to outfit this place with at least a few of the net's more
modern amenities. I must admit, it's a disheartening sensation
when you pull up your bookmarks and notice that yours is the
only link on the entire list without a custom favicon next to
it.
For the sake of making sure PA remains a project I can continue
to work on with some semblance of pride into the foreseeable
future, I've decided to dust off my plans to give the site a new
layout and bring its feature set up to speed with the rest of
the internet. Given that I first announced my intentions to
launch PA 3.0 in early 2010, I wouldn't blame any long-time
readers for rolling their eyes right now (even if it does kind
of make you an asshole).
As a way to offer some tangible evidence that I'm serious about
moving forward with the proposed redesign—and also because I
didn't have time to finish anything else for this update—I've
decided to pull aside the curtain and show everyone an early
preview of what will become a key element of the site's future
visual design (and, if I play my cards right, its future
merchandising campaign). Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the
next logo for Project AFTER:

(Click on the image for a larger
size.)
Please note that the above image is a preview of a work in
progress; the final design will look slightly different. There
are still a few minor issues with the geometry of the shape, for
one thing, plus the final version will be decked out with
gradients and textures and all that bitchin' stuff. As far as
the basic design goes, at least, that preview is a fairly close
approximation of what the finished logo will look like. I think
it turned out pretty cool, personally. At the risk of setting
myself up for disappoint, I wouldn't getting some feedback
regarding what my readers think of it. I'd ask you to click the
"like" button or reblog this post if you're a fan of the design,
but, as you already know, I don't have either of those things.
The spell checker on my horrendously outdated webpage design
program doesn't even think "reblog" is a real word. Frankly, I
agree with it.
While I am committed to bringing you all a new and improved PA,
I don't intend to rush the process. Having unrealistic
expectations regarding how much time and money are required to
completely overhaul a site of this size is a large part of the
reason the first attempt at building PA 3.0 went tits-up. I'm
going to approach the project at a far more leisurely pace this
time. In fact, don't expect any major developments on the
upgrade before 2014. I want to spend the rest of this year
focusing primarily on creating new content, anyway. Even with my
schedule likely to become busier in the coming months, I see no
reason the site shouldn't be able to finish this year stronger
than it started.
The increasing blurriness of the words on my screen tells me
I've rambled on for long enough. To recap, running a site is a
pain in the keister, but it can be an extremely rewarding
experience. If you need proof, consider the following: I can sit
here at this desk where I've spent countless hours over the past
decade blowing off social engagements and missing sleep to work
on material that will earn me no money and zero professional
credentials, and I can still get excited looking forward to the
idea of revamping everything I've done up to this point in an
undertaking that will take many months of my life and many
hundreds of dollars from my pocket.
On second thought, forget everything I said before. Don't start
your own website. Doing so obviously turns you into a goddamn
lunatic.
Once again, thank you to everyone for ten incredible years.
Here's to another ten ye— Ahahaha, no, absolutely not. No way.
Maybe I'll do another three or four years of this. Maybe. Maybe
five, tops. We'll see what happens. |