I have no idea what to do for the one year mark of this blog's existence, and so I shall ramble aimlessly on nothing in particular, until someone either suggests something satisfactory, or comes to take me away for the good of all humanity.
Apart from the period of time when I did not actually have a computer upon which to make posts, I have kept my goal, admittedly not especially demanding, of two posts a week, until the day I die. Remember that I only promise two posts a week, without any mention of the substance therein, which you, gentle readers, may have to create for yourselves from out of the aether, in violation of the conservation of mass, save for arguments involving hammerspace, and possibly its close cousin hammertime. That, as has been noted before, is the sort of thing which we cannot touch.
In this year of blogging anime, as well as blogging about anime, I have learned a great many things about the hobby which I decided about one year before to engage in. For one thing, it requires a passion for both anime and writing which cannot be faked: I actually enjoy writing up these little posts which may not necessarily be read by anyone save myself, and I might well consider this blog a massive success if it merely stands as an archive of Card Captor Sakura episode summaries for my own perusal. Further experiences in blogging showed most indubitably that it also requires a good spam-blocker, because, in an unexpected application of a variation on Sturgeon's Law/Revelation, ninety percent of the Internet sucks.
Most of all, though, I learned that I hate writing episode summaries, due to reasons of sloth.
For all that the subject of editorials vs episode summaries come up, I've found that writing an episode summary, even just a bland recounting of what happened in the episode in question, is much more difficult than writing an editorial. It could be just me, since I tend to be more than a little opinionated on certain subjects, and I have a great deal of experience in using far more words than necessary to pad out a single statement into a post two thousand words or so long.
Even so, perhaps "difficult" is the wrong word to use; "tedious" might be a closer approximation. I have mentioned before that content may elude me occasionally, but structure is a constant thorn. All I want to do is write something, anything, but before I can, first I must take screenshots and resize them and hammer out the IMG tags and make sure that they all point to wherever they're supposed to and carefully arrange everything artfully and try not to stretch the blog too much and keep everything XHTML-compliant and so on and so forth in the manner exemplified by this inexcusably prolonged sentence.
When I write a Card Captor Sakura episode summary, it takes me about four hours from "I should write a CCS episode summary" to "okay, it's done". About half an hour is taken watching the episode and taking screenshots, and half an hour is spent writing up the actual text of the summary. The other three hours are spent trying to decide which screenshots to keep and which to discard, as well as resizing them and renaming them (thank you IrfanView) and then placing the skeletal framework of the post into the text editor and editing it all into something which works for this episode but which will need to be edited again for the next episode, and then carefully altering stuff like image file names one at a time, until my eyes glaze over as I realize how all of this seems very suspiciously like work.
In other words, one quarter of the time spent on an episode summary post has to do with the content, while the other three quarters have to do with making the post look pretty. This strikes me as an unfortunate and yet ineluctable state of affairs.
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Congrats first on the 1st year! That said, it is definitely very true that it takes a lot of time to write and the likes. In fact, I actually have a somewhat easier but less customizable way of getting it up loaded faster. ^^ If you wish to know, i will tell you in irc later, but it's not the most optimal suggestion for sure, but it will cut short your time of screenshoting to around 15 minutes.
Congrats on your blog reaching it's first anniversary. I agree that it is easier to do the content first and then prettying up your post. And I reckon the prettying up is the part that make people loathe to do regular posting.
Tedious is right. Maybe it was fun the first few times, but unless I've just realized how long it took .. or I've steadily wanted to increase the quality of my summaries each time I do it, such that now they take forever .. and I'm only left with a cheap Impressions section right after the long summary. I've found out that if I write Impressions from the very start, including summary bits as I go (but yet assuming my reader has already watched the episode), then I get out a lot more meaningful writing .. and probably have a lot more fun doing it, too .. even if it ends up taking the same amount of time.
I'd been writing my summaries while I watch the episode, pausing the video only a few times to catch up on a lot of action. So it shouldn't take more than 25 minutes theoretically, but somehow it just takes longer than that… As for screencapping, I don't know if my method is inefficient: MPC has their Save Image feature (Alt+F, I), and then I use an XP Powertoy to shrink them down .. and then mass upload to Photobucket, which provides me the HTML code for them. I think there are faster ways, but I haven't really read into them yet. Being an episode summary, I don't have too much problem inserting them into the text and centering them.
But anyway, I agree that a passion for both writing and anime is necessary, perhaps more for the former. Because I won't stop watching anime for a good while .. but I'll feel really lazy about writing some days. So writing Impressions — more editorial-like posts — are probably better in the long run.
Congrats on one year. You should go out and eat cake.
As I'm sure is the case for many, I also know the feeling of parts non-writing taking forever. Thankfully most of my screenshotting comes down to nine screenshots arranged in a single-image collage, using software I wrote to re-size and combined the screenshots. (Hm, I should have it also output the HTML for me, so I can just drop it into a post… Well, there goes some of my free time this week, into programming.) Thankfully, I like taking anywhere from 10 to 30 screenshots, then narrowing it down to the nine to use in a collage. These collages are easy to manage because they all use the same filename (save for the episode number), the same height and width, and the same alt attribute, with no title attribute.
My Princess Tutu posts (reference material, non-commentary) are the worst offender for me. For this, I use a collage of screenshots for each piece of music used in the episode. My first episode's post has 13 collages containing a total of 44 images. Eep! Different height/width used from area to area, but still the same alt text. It's so nice being able to put the alt attribute as "collage of screenshots" on everything =D Somehow I manage to get by with only about three hours to one of these posts, but that's in part because the music research had all been done prior.
With my own Cardcaptor Sakura posts coming up starting in a few months, I'll probably be using a toned-down version of my Princess Tutu style, with a small collage per scene or portion of a scene; I haven't decided yet as my first two posts on it are text outlines, no images planned out yet. Since these posts will be more reference/learning material (non-commentary), I don't even want to consider how much time I'll invest overall into each post.
I guess the images thing really is a binding requirement for Moe Check!, as CHECKPoint!s won't do very well without them. It's either that, or learn to be a very descriptive writer!
Happy one-year anniversary. ^^ I think you've pretty much hit on why I stopped doing episode summaries – it's easy to do them once you have the material, but distilling 150 screenshots into an amount that doesn't make the resulting post look like War and Peace is quite a pain.
Out of boredom, at four hours an episode post, that means it'll roughly be 18 days of work total for your CCS episode post series (not that any of us really know what will happen when this thing ends). I'm not sure if that's empowering, or demoralizing.
Congratulations on breaking the one year mark! *waves an Editorial flag in the air* Keep up that commendable effort.