Boy it sure has been a year.
I wouldn’t say it’s been a bad year but that’s more because I’ve had the mental fortitude in general to push ahead, out of spite if nothing else.
On the blog and game front it’s been a super interesting year, though.
The global servers released and the average hits the blog gets have gone from 100 or so views a day FIVE HUNDRED. A lot of it tends to be very… trend-heavy? By “Trend” what I mean is that I can tell which stage of going through the motions the EN side of stuff is going through by virtue of how many hits specific pages get.
A picture of the last 12 months kinda illustrates that uptick nicely.
You can see how even after the initial boom from the July release passed, the average became higher on the whole. In fact there was a day where the blog outright hit 10.000 daily views and it blows my mind. Funnily enough, the subject of all the attention was my post on Tokino Minoru.
Seeing all the attention I decided to write some posts about other basics like a list of all the roommates up until that post’s publication and for the 100th post I went into detail about the game’s old profiles and I’m glad they’ve been received well.
For fun, here’s a top 20 of the top visited posts in the last 12 months. TECHNICALLY the top page is the front page but we will not count that one:
- Aston Machan -Don’t you forget about me
- Who is Sunday Silence in Uma Musume?
- Tokino Minoru – The Phantom Horse
- The Golden Generation
- Triple Crowns
- Every Roommate pairing in Uma Musume as of September 2025
- Eclipse first, the rest nowhere
- Daiwa Scarlet – Extra Notes
- Those ear ornaments, also Fine Motion
- Manhattan Cafe’s “Friend”
- The best joke in the entire game
- About
- Uma Musume’s Old Profiles
- A quick guide to available Uma Musume media as of June 2025
- Tazuna Hayakawa – The Phantom Secretary
- The one in which I go crazy gushing about Daiwa Scarlet and Vodka
- The Basics – Uma Musume: Pretty Derby
- Special Week – Main Heroine
- Agnes Digital – The true meaning of being a “Hero”
- Silence Suzuka – From tragic to hopeful
First thoughts? I sure don’t mind being the “Machan guy” somehow. I’m still proud of those posts because not only do I feel like they convey how they story made me feel, but they were the ones where I finally found the proper format and flow for those posts about specific characters. The wildest part about it is that every other post is tangential to something fundamental about the game or something from release… Machan is part of the new wave of content, she didn’t exist on release, and yet she’s brought the most eyes to the blog.
Rest of them sound about right because they’re all about basic concepts. I’ve actually seen a few people point to my post on why Special Week was picked as the main heroine as a quasi-definitive answer to that recurrent newcomer question and that’s really flattering.
The Sunday Silence one in second spot is a bit unfortunate because the post itself is the culmination of all the other Sunday Silence posts I made right before it and it’s meant to be a more meta sort of discussion. I do link everything near the start as usual but if someone saw the title and wanted a straight answer only for me to go on meta tangents I wouldn’t blame them for being confused.
Seeing the about page there is amusing, like people coming across the page and being actually curious who the fuck writes all this stuff. Shout outs to everyone who comically spits their drink while shouting “WHAT DO YOU MEAN THE VA-11 HALL-A WRITER ALSO WRITES THIS?????” that is unironically one of the best feelings. I just love conveying that idea that hey, you don’t have to be limited to your One Thing, be multifaceted, do many things, you’ll be better off for it.
The roommate and old profiles pages are fun to see there since they’re so new compared to other posts.
While I’m amused but not TOO surprised the “here’s why Scarlet and Vodka are a good ship” post is there, apparently the Extra Notes for Scarlet specifically made it there from people looking up whether to go to Oaks or the Nihon Derby.
So what’s next on the posts front? Glad you asked! I actually wanted to do some countdown like I did for the first Anniversary of the page but… let’s not dwell in all the bullshit I had to get over just to exist since October at minimum. I’m already writing this at the tail end of strep throat and I don’t feel like jinxing things.
But here’s the list of what that countdown would’ve looked like (obviously names not final).
So did I do away with all of them? Nah, I just decided to not stress in order to make a countdown. The list actually expanded ever so slightly so it now looks like this:
The most chaotic things in my life just ended so I should be able to retake this part of it back relatively soon. All of those are at the stage of “nonsensical collection of notes that only make sense to me to refresh my memory” so the general idea of the skeleton of them all is set, just gotta boot up the game, but… you see…
The main obstacle has been sitting down and playing the game.
Like sure, I’ve played those scenarios, that’s how I have an idea for what I want to write, but the writing process can involve me replaying scenes and scenarios multiple times to hunt for screenshots and details and any other number of STUFF.
That’s why you’ve seen a few more assorted posts in between. While they arguably require more research, I don’t have to sit down to play the game.
Man, it’s not even exclusive to Uma Musume, I haven’t even managed to play the new Monster Hunter in any reasonable amount. It makes me sad.
I’ve also started polishing up the tags (read: adding tags at all) on the past blog entries, but that will be more of a gradual thing.
Some of the older regulars might’ve also noticed the fact that the blog now has a favicon. I was playing with the idea of a horseshoe as a D and when trying it out for fun I realized I could overlap a second horseshoe as an U, I’m really proud of it.
I also opened a proper inbox that you can find in the contact form. That inbox has been (to my shock) one of my best decisions. For example someone pointed out to me the right term is “intersex” and not “hermaphrodite” for the ear ornaments post which I legitimately was not aware of (or the fact hermaphrodite wasn’t as accepted nowadays, I guess). But also plenty of people have asked me when I was gonna talk about this girl or that girl and that is especially encouraging given that one of the fears in the back of my mind was that the global release would make this blog kinda… redundant, I guess? So to get people asking “Hey! I liked this girl in global and I’d like to see one of your posts but on her” is very encouraging.
By the way, I’ve read every single email and they’ve all been a small burst of joy for the day, if I’ve not replied to your message, rest assured that I will eventually. I’ve already replied to a couple of you all since the messages were shorter to address and y’know, I don’t wanna send a simple “thank you for your message!” when someone went through all the extra steps to sending a fucking email.
Speaking of which, I keep getting the question on how I do my research and first of all and just in case: I don’t mind being asked that as many times as needed because maybe the question is coming in relation to something specific, but I wonder if people are maybe curious if I have a secret wiki only I know about or something… except not really. I did note down my general thought process fresh off my Arima Kinen post, though:
Keep in mind, this isn’t some instruction chart I made and then researched, it’s more me remembering what the connections I made were a bit after posting that one.
I mainly use JP Wikipedia as initial reference since it’s shockingly thorough in keiba topics, but I end up jumping around a lot between other articles and websites as needed, like jumping into netkeiba to corroborate the full roster of certain races. The key is to ask questions and ask the right questions. And as you all can easily see just by seeing the older posts from this blog, even asking questions itself is a skill you polish with practice, like those gaps become easier to identify the more you gotta tap around looking for them.
But there isn’t a one-size-fits-all source in the end. After all, even the way I write is all over the place as much to provide surrounding context as to indulge in a tangent.
On that note, I don’t mind people using my posts as a point of reference as long as you take them with the same disclaimer Rare Earth puts on their videos, something to the effect of “Fer is a bit of a dumbass and often talks without thinking so always double check for yourself”.
Here’s the way I’d explain it in more practical terms:
Let’s say you read my post about Digitan and agree with my points or even feel like you hadn’t considered that before. Great! If I’m adding to impressions that already existed that’s even better, but if your only impressions are my impressions please be careful, I don’t want to be a replacement for your own opinions.
Because honestly,if I were to use this page as a platform for a single thing aside from the Slam Dunk Propaganda it would be to push for that curiosity that leads you to look up things yourself. Especially as of Current Time with all the nonsense I won’t mention to not poison the nice SEO the page has, I want you all to be curious. This page started because being kinda curious about the silly horsegirl gacha kept sending me into holes that just became deeper and deeper the more I looked at them and I just had to do SOMETHING with all that information, it couldn’t stay all in my own head that place’s already cramped on a good day.
Curiosity is fun, don’t be like that one person that took my comment about how Silence Suzuka’s early characterization was very clearly based off Chihaya Kisaragi as a canon factoid. Not only will you show your ass and how you didn’t properly check what you just said, but you’ll also show your ass as to where you took it all wholesale from.
Moreover, I love learning and if we’re all learning we might find things the other hasn’t or consider stuff the other didn’t. If I make a mistake and I get pointed out I made a mistake then the knowledge gets polished further.
Learning is FUN!! Don’t let a techbro grift take that fun away.
I’ll stop before I get more preachy, though.
Happy birthday Uma Musume.
And Happy Birthday to this humble blog.
Sorry if I got more preachy and rambling than usual by the end, it’s been A Year.
I mention it on the About page but I’ve got a daily blog if you wanna make sure I’m still breathing (I filter myself even less than here so it’s extremely NSFW on the regular, you’ve been warned). There’s also an original ongoing webnovel I work on whenever I’ve got some spare time.
Oh also our company is revving up a new project. Aside from just pointing towards something you all might find interesting, supporting our games is the best way also to support this blog if that’s something. Don’t feel forced to though, just mentioning it for the couple of people that wondered about that.
That’s it for now. Let’s have some more fun next time, shall we?
