Hey, folks, this episode is releasing…really late. Even by my standards. We get into what’s going on with Bakacast in the episode itself, but the short version is: I’m totally burned out. I tried various ways to keep the show going, but ultimately after 398 episodes (or more than that, if you include the episodes I lost to my hard drive crashing), it was getting harder and harder for me to watch the shows and actually provide a decent analysis. Even the shows I really liked felt like a chore to watch. Ultimately, the problem was that Bakacast became a thing I felt like I had to do instead of something I wanted to do. So we’re taking a break. I don’t know for how long, and I’m not sure what Bakacast will even look like, format-wise, if I decide to start recording episodes again. But before we went on hiatus, we decided to record an episode looking back at the last decade of anime—which coincidentally happens to be almost exactly as long as we’ve been doing Bakacast—and giving accolades to some of our favorite shows of each year.

In a way, having belated season previews is almost better, because it’s much easier to see how very confidently wrong our predictions were, which is much more entertaining than being correct all the time.

sees original recording date of audio files is December 6th, 2019 “That’s not a real date. Pretty sure December never happened.” checks computer time clock, which shows current date as February 4th, 2020 “January is fake, too.”

Hey, it’s the first episode we recorded after my hard drive died! Are we gonna cover the anime episodes that we talked about on those lost episodes? Absolutely not. I’m certain that would take a good year off my life if I attempted it. So yeah, we’re just gonna start our Fall 2019 reviews smack dab in the middle of the season.

Hey, folks. It’s, uh, been a while. As you may notice, this episode about the end of the summer season was recorded several weeks ago. I go into more detail on the next podcast, but the basics of what happened is this: I had been editing this podcast when my hard drive suddenly stopped working. I have three drives: one SSD and two HDDs. The one the failed happened to be the one I do all my projects on, which also means I lost the audio for three other episodes I recorded. I managed to save my audio for this episode before the drive completely died, but the first few reviews of the fall 2019 season are gone forever. So yeah. Fun times!

On this episode of Bakacast, I finally get fed up with Fire Force, my internet again tries to prevent me from talking about more dumb Fate universe stuff, and also I guess it was my birthday? Whatever, it’s probably not important.

On this episode of Bakacast, Fruits Basket has a shaky couple of episodes, Carole & Tuesday starts getting political, Fire Force slowly burns away its goodwill, and Lord El-Melloi is…maybe the best Fate show that’s ever been made?

On this episode of Bakacast, editing became a nightmare, because my WiFi constantly cut out and I could never tell whether or not my cohosts were hearing me (or if they were even responding). However, I was able to find moments where I could talk about a few of the shows that we stuck with, thankfully.Before we start our reviews, though, we take a moment to offer our thoughts about the KyoAni attack. We don’t go over the actual event in detail, because that’s already been covered extensively by proper news organizations and would feel far too morbid for a silly podcast like ours to delve into anyway. Instead, we talk briefly about what the studio meant to us and what made it unique.

On this episode of Bakacast, we give our impressions of the first couple episodes of…a lot of shows. Too many shows, honestly. Between us all, we covered a lot. Ben even subjected himself to Arifureta, and somehow managed to trick Larry into watching it, too. One day, I’m sure, Larry will have his revenge.

This time on Gacha Journalism, we find a game we actually like again? Yes, we escaped the doldrums that were our last two episodes and landed into gay rhythm game paradise with Bang Dream, which is basically Love Live for band nerds. Are you prepared for positivity and also arguing about which band is objectively the best? The answer is Roselia, by the way, and Sierra can’t argue that it’s Afterglow here because she’s not writing the blog posts.