For ten years, it’s been time to make the doughnuts–er, anime reviews. By the scale of Internet time, ten years is pretty much an epoch. The dinosaurs rose, craned their necks toward the sun, then pulled a muscle and went extinct. And what we’re left with is an odd reflection of an industry and subculture that rose, fell, and transformed — in ways both positive and negative — over the course of the past decade. Born of an era where RPGFan still liked Japanese games, high speed Internet was a newfangled thing, and piracy hadn’t popped every bubble it could in the Western anime and manga industry, after my ten long years here, it’s time to draw things to a close at Anime Dream.

My earlier reviews could have been funnier. There could have been more .hack reviews, but let’s just sweep those under the rug. And I’ll always be able to look back and recall just how horrible Ikki Tousen was. In the business of watching and commenting on Japanese animation, there’s always a new regret around the corner, but sometimes fun, too. I’ve made some good friends and got a lot of good writing experience out of my time here. Now, I depart for a new pasture over at Mike’s Anime Herald, where I’ll continue to assure you that your dreams will all someday come true: that daily life in Japan is exactly like in all those anime series you like, 98% of the language is ‘neko kawaii desu,’ that demand is high for aspiring American manga artists, that it’s super cool when fansubs insist on leaving as many Japanese words as possible intact in the subtitles while pretending words like ‘nakama’ don’t have a perfectly sound English word they can be translated to, and you’re totally not wasting your life with your fanfiction. Delusions are great, aren’t they?

So long, AD. It’s been real.