April 3, 2009

Annoying Pre-Tweens by Chris 10:56 A.M. EST
Well, unfortunately some FTP issues prevented me from updating the site on April 1 as I was planning to, but better late than never, I suppose. Here's the April 1-specific update that I was going to make, in its full glory:

It's anniversary time again. We're just a few days away from the 30th anniversary of the premiere of Mobile Suit Gundam, but today I'm specifically talking about MAHQ's ninth anniversary. To this day, it still amazes me that this site has continued to grow and last this long. If you're a long-time MAHQ visitor, you know that on April 1 I always post some long-winded message, so brace yourselves.

First, on behalf of myself and Dale, I'd like to thank some people who continue to provide support for MAHQ and have helped to make it what it is today, including: Mark Simmons, Neo-Era, RGZ-91, Deacon Blues, Kuruni, Homeless, asterphage, Red Zaku, bilbros, AmuroNT1, Renegade334, ShadowCell, kmagryffindor and the countless others who have contributed something. I'd also like to thank the staff at Mecha Talk, who work everyday to make it a place worth visiting to discuss nerd things. Thanks also go to Adam, Paul, Devon and all the people from Shinjuku Station who are a part of the Gundamn! podcast.

On April 1, I'll typically use this space to announce what you can expect from MAHQ in the future. Surprisingly, it's not too different from what I wrote in 2008. For nearly two years, all my energy has been sapped away by Gundam 00, Code Geass and Macross Frontier, leaving very little time for anything else. Well, now that all of those series are over, I finally have time to work on other content. So here's what you can expect to see in the near future (or in some cases the long term):

Anime sections:
Gunbuster/Diebuster
Rayearth
Gasaraki
Full Metal Panic
Patlabor
Ghost in the Shell
Mospeada

Mecha sections:
Vifam
Ideon
Nadesico

There's also something else on the way. I've been talking for years about redesigning the website (and it really shows after nine years), but I haven't mentioned it lately because it's becoming vaporware approaching the level of Duke Nukem Forever. If you're wondering why the delay, well, when both webmasters work full time, go to school full time and have other commitments, your available time gets cut down a lot. There's also always the troubling balance of updating sections that currently exist and working in the background on new sections. So this year, I can say this much - we've finally settled on a template, so all we need now is our artwork. The process of converting roughly 8,000 pages of HTML to this new design won't be easy, but at least we'll finally have a design to show off soon. I'm not going to say that the new version will be up by X date because that would be a lie. I have no idea when it will be, but I will occasionally update on our process once the grunt work begins.

Finally, in the past we've sometimes had large updates with massive amounts of new content. I had been hoping to do that this year, but for the reasons listed above, that didn't work out. So today's update is more modest: my final reviews for Gundam 00, and some new 00 lineart from ShadowCell. It's kind of fitting, since we kicked things off nine years ago with some Gundam reviews.

Here's to having what will hopefully be another productive year for MAHQ.

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