Reviving BAYOG: Where We’ve Been and Where We’re Going

Hey, it’s been a while, BAYOG fans! I’ve been putting this off for far too long, and I feel like I owe it to you to sit down and have a chat. Since the inception of the BAYOG blog/podcast, a lot has happened. We had big dreams for what we wanted this to become, but sometimes life gets in the way. Instead of telling you where I’ve been and why I haven’t been posting, I’d like to talk about BAYOG as a whole and where I want to go from here.

Back in 2016 or so, I was watching 16-18 anime shows and consuming anime podcasts when I wasn’t watching shows. Looking back, my goal for BAYOG was to create a community to share my love for anime. The closest thing I can compare that goal to now is the Trash Taste podcast, which is tough to compete with, but they were just YouTubers back then. If I had the chance to do it all over again with the people I started this platform with, I would.

I’ve never talked about this publicly, but my biggest inspiration was Evan Minto from AniGamers. If I never watched, read, or heard his content, I don’t think we would have even thought of BAYOG. As co-founder of Azuki, he pushes me to want to further my engineering skills to work on projects like this or even build my own platform. Even though I’ve met him a few times, I never got to mention how much he influenced me and thank him for the direction that I very much needed. Appreciate you, Evan.

As we continued to build BAYOG and find our voice in this space, we did what we thought was the norm for Aniblogs and podcasts: anime first impressions, full anime reviews, and seasonal breakdowns. We were consistent and had a strong start with the podcast streams and 4-6 blog posts a week, but as I mentioned before, life gets in the way sometimes. After my mom passed away and an opportunity with work came up, I needed to take a step back. I went back to school, got my bachelor’s degree in Software Engineering, and now I’m a Senior Software Engineer. As much as I wish I continued building up this platform, you have to take care of yourself before you can take care of anyone else. Thankfully, we have @piecesofminty around to kind of keep the ship afloat.

I also realized that once you treat your hobby as a chore, it becomes something you no longer want to do. Knowing that you have to write your thoughts on a show while watching it becomes dreadful. I’m now a firm believer in writing about whatever excites you, but only when you want to speak passionately about it. I refuse to go back to scheduling shows I want to watch and require some variation of a post after I am done. I’m pretty confident that most of the other members of BAYOG were feeling the same way. With life happening and watching anime becoming a chore instead of an escape, I can see why everyone else doesn’t feel like posting.

So where do we go from here? I want to launch myself back into this space. I want to catch up on the anime that captivates me, but only if it is something I want to watch. I want to podcast again so badly! I’ve been dying to talk about The Last of Us on HBO, but I haven’t talked to anyone, so I’d love to chat for an hour and talk about what I believe is one of the best Live Action adaptions of a video game ever. Hopefully, you guys miss hearing from me and would like to hear more. I’ll be back I promise. Sooner than you think. Thanks again for listening and sticking around with BAYOG even though most of us haven’t been here.