A Goody Goody Goody! It’s my Blogs Anniversary week! And well since I am basically an avatar of my actual self I guess in a way It’s Pinkie’s Birthday-Week as well! So Island Guests this week will be special and filled with celebration activities. Why a week?! Well because I am a bit crazy and I have LOTS of things in store for you! This week of fun our regular schedule of activities will be on hold for a week! Which is nice because at my party I am probably going to end up drunk or hungover! I might be one but in Paradise age doesn’t matter at the bar! Today we shall start with a look back at my journey so far.
On the day this post goes live it is exactly one year ago that I started working on my blog! I started making my assets, drafting up articles , making folders and cute-ing up my laptop! As well as neatly make folders for just about everything! Something that I actually managed to keep up to this day. The blog actually came based on a failed desire to YouTube. My own voice isn’t good enough to put under a video and a friend who wanted to voice act it for me backed down from the project in the very last moment. Mainly because we also lacked a good place to record and it was sooo clunky! So while listening to remade version of Pokémon Red and Blue’s Route 24 Theme I began writing my first blog post. It was titled My Wonderful world of Pokémon. In it I created a way to ambitious blog plan , one that I would be unable to keep up with for very long. Blogging daily about Pokémon would proof harder than it seemed at the time. The first post went live on the 16th of July 2019 and to this day scored 4 likes and 5 comments! Two of those comments were me! Of the five posts only two ever got likes or comments. Which was fine back then because I was completely obsessed with views and this was the first blog I ever had that actually got views! It felt like an awesome welcome!
My first hilarious fail that resulted from a delusion I had made myself was my post about The Most Hated Pokémon Simisear! I talked about it and how I actually liked it and how it deserved some love! I asked people to share the love for the little simian creature that usually got treated poorly but it did not happen! Pinkie had created some false expectations for herself and now she got her little pokémon friend hurt because of it! It got 1 like so at least it wasn’t all for nothing.. but that is when I realised you had to really work a bit in this community to get anywhere! Somehow before that I believed people would flock to this kind of stuff just by sharing the opinion! It was the post that made me reach out more..because Simisear and the likes deserved love!
Up until the 29th of July there was not a lot of progress but when I wrote a piece about Mewtwo The Pokémon that can Defeat God. My first deeper peace in the Pokémon World that was catered a bit more to the casual knowledgeable fans. It got six likes an absolute record at the time..but I also met Ospreyshire! I reacted to his post on the Lion King Live action movie as back then I was already trying to find movie bloggers and Ospreyshire I found through that. Before that it was Mallow and Anime Fan Fiction who interacted with me.. so now I was beginning for form some semblance of a group of people to interact with.
Not that long after I would meet people like Raistlin and Karandi with Raist being such a great and friendly supporter of the blog! He really helped me push through hard times! Around the beginning of august we can see my visual style beginning to shift to the tones I have now.. of course back then I could still fairly easily change a block background colour and select make pink streaks.. which now is a much more finicky process. The pun based review system came into play but back then it was with Eevolutions! This happened around august fifth when I switched to a WordPress paid plan so I felt I had to step up my game.
I made a post called Norse Mythology in Pokémon which back then I was really proud of. I think that was the second and maybe last or second to last post I participated in the Jon’s Creator Showcase with. To this day I really do like that post.. but it was the post that made me hear all my other posts cries just because in that one I tried to be a bit more intellectual. It got a lukewarm reception on twitter as well and people massively ignored it when it finally went up in the showcase and that’s when I decided making my other posts cry by favouring another post above them would not be something I’d do to often anymore! This is my own fault for imagining my posts crying of course and I had fun making it, I just gave myself false expectations again! I had some nice talks about it still and I made myself learn something! So it’s all good! Just not fully what I expected!
On August 18th I participated in my first ever blog award. I was nominated by Amelia and the post got 16! Likes and it had quite a few comments as well. Here I began interacting more with Megan as well! It made my blog grow very hard and while I was super happy it also made me realise something even more.. all the posts that got a lot of likes either had to do with a very basic level of pokémon, something beyond pokémon or stuff like this..The first seeds of Paradise had been planted! I loved hearing all you guys and seeing you like my post!
On 2 September I wrote a post about the god of Pokémon Arceus and how it is based in the ancient mythos of alchemy! A very deep post.. and it preformed rather poorly! Maybe I entered it in the JCS still.. but I think I was beginning to get dissatisfied with my blog and what I wanted to get out of it. I really love the post .. I just realised I did not have the platform for it all that well. Like people were interested.. but I did not get the energy I wanted from it.. I wanted more..community. I got some excellent replies and I adored them but some of these posts took me 12 hours a day to make! I knew there was more to get than what I was getting. I loved so much more!
For the next two months I dabbled a bit with content trying all sorts of things. Including making a Trainer Profiles for anime character.. which all performed rather well. Back then my average post counted in at about 9-10 ish likes. When my next blog tag award and first Owls post not about Pokémon got almost double that I knew it was time to expand! I had been struggling to keep up and sometimes the amount of research that went into a single Pokémon Post was insane. To a point where I became to resent the franchise a bit and that I did not want! So I took a step back and opened my world.
After holding several polls, too which a surprising number of people told me to quit blogging entirely, lots of thinking and quite few Photoshop hours I decided to rebrand and branche out to Geekdom in general! It was a lot easier on the mind, my life was not going as well as I would have liked and I just needed to have less stress from blogging and topic selections.
On November Third I bought my site became Pinkie’s Paradise.. though still under the old web handle. Views were immediately up, interaction skyrocketed and this led to my “bantering” phase with Irina. Where she would frequently comment on my blog. I had previously done so on hers but now that my side became more accessible that bounced back as well. I got more contact with Joy of GeekGirlJoy as well and Lita to. I began enjoying blogging more, which reflected in my more whimsical and mostly lighthearted picking of topics.I also went a lot more personal, for example starting with five geeky things you did not know about me. I got a LOT of tags in that time but in just two weeks after restarting, I had a complete mental breakdown.
The trigger was my father saying he did not have time to celebrate my birthday. At all.. that he would see me at an office christmas party of my uncles company… which he then also bailed on. I haven’t seen him for Christmas or my Birthday I felt abandoned. All around me things crumbled. One friend fed of my negativity as he had a big case of hero syndrome and wanted to cheer me up by taking me to do fun things.. which drained all my money away another moved away, my bestie Bean threatened to move away as house hunting could take them far away. From the 19th of November until the 11th of December .. I vanished. Also in a personal sense.. I just stopped functioning.
Crawling out from my lowest I had been that year, my return to blogging was amazing. My I’m Back Post announcing my return had racked up 32 likes! My highest number ever! It also really marked the beginning of my pleasant interactions with Fred. Blogging become more fun and healing to me..it slightly became more and more about me. Which resulted in some crazy fun experiments such as my New Years Party Blogs Where I’d invite Five Bloggers, Five Anime Characters, Five Game Characters and Five Movie Characters. I had more and more fun as I wrote and felt more free to write whatever I wanted.
I still had a bit of trouble adapting to the internet culture feeling like I had to fit myself in. I wanted to be the voice of happiness and cheer in a very dark and grim world. So on February first I posted the Super Happy Love Award. A post that is all about positivity on the internet. While I do still try to adhere to that message.. I have since adjusted a bit.. I want to be positive but I also want to be sincere! So while I do look for positives when I see non I will say so as well. More and more I learned to adjust.. to not care as much as what others think.. before it was eating me alive. That demon is still on my shoulder and it’s always whispering. I can ignore it a bit but it constantly tells me people hate me and just act nice because it’s the right thing to do!
I am/was scared to death that Irina and Scott actually hate me or that people in OWLS actually want me gone. Something as simple as my comment being the one that does not get a reply or a bit of a short answer when I ask a question can still make me lose my marbles a bit.. but nowadays I have it more under control… most of the time. Hey at least I never claimed sanity! But Like I said that little demon on my shoulder is always there, to make something meaningless into a maze of panicky questions and ponderings.
These struggles I have can really be seen in my blog posts in the period COVID-19 first reared its ugly head and we had to stay at home. Am I a Bad Person or Pinkie in Love the Legitimacy of Online Bonds are good examples that highlight my fear of that time. Having weak lungs, the virus was quite scary to me and I desperately struggled to fight it off. .. withdrawing myself fairly extremely and ending up with a very fragile mind..which just fed the demon! In a way the bond with you were all I had.. along some other online friends, so each time that devil whispered I was actually hated and just accepted for the sake of being nice.. my world broke a bit. In this time Foovay was here for me a lot as well as Fred as my anxiety pushed me away from the Ani-community core a bit. I fled Jon’s chat because I could not deal with some people being very condemning of other people live styles in that chat or on twitter. (Not the main man himself though) I did not blog for OWLS for a while because I felt unworthy and a few topics were against my personal beliefs. It was a lot of blogging from fear. The crush I developed on a blogger was in my way as well making me more uncertain. A pain that would last until the 6th of May..when I made the I Dislike that I Like Likes post, in which told about me being fed up with all the measuring.
The day I managed to finally move past likes is also the day.I managed to move past that crush too. It marked the day that I basically rebooted as a Blogger opposed to as a blog. This blog is my journey and you are just here to join me on the right if you so choose! That is the mentality I needed to have. I am too quirky to go pro! Those delusions of Grandeur came from the YouTube dream. I noticed my crush person was the same.. just a fantasy! I never had a crush on the actual person..just on something I formed in my head. I mean I knew it was from the get go.. but it was like a soap bubble , mesmerising enough to keep me looking. After awakening I began to focus on friendships and some have really picked up since then. I began to feel more validated. I began to see that my community I wanted was not something I could gain by running behind the pack. People would know I was not sincere a bit fake or at least trying to hard. I wanted to do the stuff I like to do again regardless of the number game. So I brought back my stories more and more! So What If Raditz Turned Good became my new What If Story even if that type of content performed horribly before. I wanted to make it.. that is all that matters.
It still does preform but I have fun with it.. and that was my new onlook. Pinkie’s Saturday Anime Adventure I could really easily split up in five episode reviews I post each day, would probably help my views out a lot.. but I like doing it like this it’s fun. That became more important. The first time I began blogging I immediately stumbled on a life time friend picking writing up again I expected a repeat of that golden moment that sense of community I got before, it wasn’t realistic! I love all of you guys that support this blog, but I put up false expectations and as soon as those were challenged my demon was there. I really had fun before! I truly did but whenever someone would not like a post f they normally do.. or I saw a log in from their country I got scared it was the end because my community would walk away now. As I am now.. I would keep writing even if I lost all of you! That might sound cruel but it’s kinda relaxing. You should follow me because you want to and I am now more capable to give that space. Because I am taking that space for myself as well in the form of making stuff I want to make!
Even though I kinda got a new blog crush..ish thing as I found the real me it now all felt differently. Previously I HAD to be liked by the important people in the community. Having Lita, Jon, Scott or Irina or the likes frown upon me, was like god disapproving of my actions. It felt the worst! Then I realised.. I don’t even believe in god. These people are amazing indeed and if they like me that is nice.. but if they don’t that doesn’t take away from the person I am! Maybe one day I can be to a young blogger what they are to me, they are not obligated to acknowledge me! Stop thinking like that Pinkie. At this point I think you can also see a shift in the tone of my blog.. though I am not as afraid to be negative about stuff I do not like anymore.. more fun returns to my blog as well. Games I really wanted to play like, replaying Ducktales or playing games like Ninja Baseball Bat Man become more my thing. Rather than searching a game I thought you’d like to see me play I began playing what i wanted. My geeky lifestyle posts shift in tones to things like The Power of Me: My Voice on MY Blog or My personal rules for Blogging. I am no longer questioning who I am.. I know and I announce it!
Which is a great change! I also had some very great people behind me! Who I now appreciate more than ever!
It took me almost a year for my blogging ambitions to completely die. Until May I always blogged to achieve something and maybe have fun with it as I do so. Now the ambition has been killed and it’s more like, I am blogging as a hobby and as a way to vent and experience things and if it gets me anywhere and allows me to make new friends .. that is a great boon. It allowed me to form more genuine bonds and also plenty of fun but more casual bonds. Blogging is now something I often would play a game or even sometimes as to watch an anime. I just like getting creative or getting my opinion out there.
Doing all video game movies is a blast so far even though I am seeing some seriously bad movies.. it’s just the experience, I get to share it with my discord pals, I get to share it with you and that despite my negative grades makes it an effort well worth it. Blogging is like a soy sauce that can even make bad sushi taste okay because it just makes your experience that much richer. I love to step out of my comfort zone and just write whatever is in my mind. Without it I would not have created Tamago Tomodachi..which to date is my best liked piece of original writing. That doesn’t mean however that What Bad Luck! I got Reborn Into a New Life and Now I Am a Side Character is any less fun for me to write either! I love hiding OWLS members in those stories or other bloggers, or heck even elements from my real life. I like how I have become as a blogger, I am my own thing! I am Pinkie and this is my paradise!
Despite the tone this blog may have I had an amazing year! I grew so much and learned a lot along the way. I just know that if my journey continues like it did now I will be a hell of a lot stronger than I was before! Everyone I would like to sincerely thank you for sticking by with me for a year! You really helped me become much happier than I was one year ago!
Big shout outs to Mallow and Fanfiction Anime World who have been with me since the beginning! You guys are amazing! Stay tuned for some special events to come this week!
Pinkie's Paradise 