Ahem; we interrupt my void elf and lightforged draenei leveling to celebrate this website’s ninth birthday. While the dearth of recently updates here is both embarrassing and regrettable, this site is still operating, at least in a nominal sense. What’s more, I’ve probably actually bought more figures in the last year than in any year that I’ve been collecting figures, and I certainly have no shortage of material to cover. I’m not certain how long that trend will last, though, as figure prices at the 12,000 yen point and beyond are a strong deterrent to purchasing on impulse, and I’m thinking I may be more selective in my preorders this year than my financial discipline typically dictates. But we’ll see if I hold to that; SkyTube and Native are certainly intent on testing my restraint.

Site stats for the preceding 365 days show that the number of users dropped compared to last year but pageviews are up by a couple hundred thousand. I’m not sure why that might be. Total site stats are about 1.8 million visitors, 3.2 million sessions, and nearly 16 million pageviews.

Despite the lack of reviews, this last year has been the best of my professional life and 2018 appears poised to be even better. And while figure prices continue to climb, my review queue has blown past 150 unopened figures and I’ve certainly got enough stuff ready to keep this site going for at least another decade. I just need to log off Warcraft once in a while to get posts up. In that vein, reviews of Matsuri and Rei and that one tied-up Native girl whose name currently escapes me ought to be going up soon.

Oh, and incidentally, my current job devotes an inordinate amount of energy to a slavish devotion to agile development processes, which I loathe and has thus made me question the usage of the term “retrospective” for these posts. Truly a random thought.

A less random thought: this site is really going to be entering its tenth year of existence soon. It’s an auspicious event, and yet it’s frightening how fast time goes by.