Gene Marques, host and producer of Super Happy Anime Fun Time, brings you his unique slant on anime, manga, pop culture(Japanese and American), gaming and other assorted things on the mind of the young mind behind anime’s podcast sensation.

This past weekend Blizzard Entertainment held their big gaming convention, Blizzcon. Blizzcon is a convention that allows their company to make large scale announcements on their own turf to their own fans and have a crap ton of fun in the process. Judging from this post you may think I went to Blizzcon… no. But the things coming out of camp Blizzard helped me set a few things that I had done into perspective.

Retirement from WoW

For those of you who follow me here, and at The Instance, you may have come across some information that I had retired from the WoW scene. That is entirely correct. With the exception of gathering the achievement ‘What a Long Strange Trip its Been‘ I have more or less retired from the game. I’m not logging in with the exception of gaining that achievement. The game has grown stale and offers no one with my play style much to play even given the big announcements at Blizzcon. The new expansion looks great, and may even draw be back when it releases but until then, I have no real reason to enjoy the game right now. But this gives me two things…

No More PvP Tip of the Week

Though I do have enough material to last until October for The Instance, I decided to stop doing the PvP Tip of the Week at the same time I announced the retirement. It just felt like it wouldn’t make much sense if I were to continue a tip for a game I no longer play. Don’t get me wrong I think Scott and Randy two of the nicest guys in podcasting, and that goes for the rest of the gang at The Instance as well, Patrick, Darrel and Buxley.

Its been a fun experience and has helped me to make this podcast fun as well. I honestly am going to miss the folks over there who made me feel welcome. A truly awesome community I’m going to miss… well an exception I’ll make for about two dozen in the ‘alea iacta est’ portion of the community… I won’t miss them.

I’m still a huge fan of all of Scott’s podcasts and I’m not gonna stop listening, even to The Instance. And I’m a huge fan of the comic, and its one of my first stops every day to help bring a smile to my face and you can’t put a price on that. I’m still watching over there even if I’m not posting.

More time for Stuff

The other reason for leaving The Instance was to focus on projects in regards to SHAFT and 132Productions. Chris and I have been talking about what to do with the now defunct 132Productions and we have a few ideas and I think that we’re in a position to start acting on those ideas. The majority are ones for SHAFT that I talked about in my last column however, the rest are related to 132Productions. Under the 132Productions banner we plan to launch 2 new audio podcasts and at least 1 video podcast in the next 6 months. I will be assisting in the production of all these projects but I’m only slated to be behind the mic/camera on one of them, the rest are brain childs of others who have and are working on our 132Productions section.

We’ve got the network

While not finalized, we are also planning on changes to the ADD Network including the addition of at least one new member podcast, a centralized network podcast containing hosts and staff from our networked podcasts, and a possible stream of all of our networked shows. We’re constantly looking for new ideas for the network, so let us know what you want out of it!

Wrapping up

If anything Blizzcon has taught me a few things: 1) While somewhat fun, World of Warcraft is sort of fading out. New MMO’s are on the horizon with the potential to rival or even dethrone WoW and it might be time to look into them. 2) I can’t ride on someone elses coattails forever, and to be honest in some small way I was sort of doing that with The Instance. Most times I’d talk about a big podcasting story… it was related to The Instance. I want to make SHAFT that big, and I think we have some ways of making that happen. 3) We have some big projects coming up, and we want to work our hardest to make them happen. Some for the show, some on the anime community stage, and some in other venues. This is a passion that not only I have but everyone at SHAFT has and its time we got to work.

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