Tentacle Armada turns 10 years old today! When I published this site’s very humble first post, I did not imagine that I would keep this site going for another decade. Yet here it is; not as frequently updated as I would like but with 345 figure reviews in the archives, on top of a number of dakimakura cover and doll reviews, I don’t feel that this site has ever lacked for content.
Here are the site stats for the ten years of this site’s existence. Pageviews are off by maybe a hundred thousand due to a several-month period where views were being counted twice. It’s funny; I remember obsessing over site stats for the first few years but I don’t pay a lot of attention to them now. For one, there’s not much point in doing so; also, a lot of internet activity is tied up in social media, from which I generally abstain from participation, and thus never promote this site to new visitors. I do have a Twitter account that I infrequently post to, but I stopped using my Facebook profile a dozen years ago and – perhaps strangely for someone who runs a photography-based blog – I have never had an Instagram account.
This site hasn’t changed much over the years. Sometimes I think about giving it a revamp, perhaps switching over to a more slick and contemporary WordPress theme rather than the rather dated main-box-and-sidebar blog layout that I’ve been using for this last decade, but I’m not motivated enough to do that much work, and I actually like how this site has maintained a consistent look even as self-published blogs have become less of a thing over the years.
There are some other things that date this site, both obvious and less so. A very obvious one is the ex-president doll that I have used, who has kind of become a site mascot, particularly with the more lecherous figures I review. It would certainly be more appropriate for me to incorporate a doll of the current president in my photos, but somehow, I don’t think he’d be very popular here.
A less obvious thing is a post I never actually created. One of the prevailing ideas when I started this site is that you needed an expensive camera to get good pictures. I therefore resolved to do a series of photo shoots using a very inexpensive compact camera, knowing that I could get good results with my standard lighting setup. As usual, I waffled and procrastinated on actually doing the required work, and much to my surprise, the entire compact camera industry collapsed a few years ago, extirpated by smartphones. That was certainly something I did not see coming.
I’ve seen a lot of figure sites come and go over the years. I did take down the blogroll section because almost all the figure review blogs I liked to visit are now defunct (Wieselhead is the only one that is still maintained). That’s unfortunate, I suppose, but for myself, I still enjoy running a figure review website and I have no plans to cease updates. Therefore, here’s to another ten years of figure reviewing and pillowcase photographing (still one of the more popular aspects of this site, peculiarly enough).
