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.