Like many kids and teens growing up in the 90s, my introduction to anime came courtesy of Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball Z. I watched Sailor Moon every morning before school in the seventh grade. And while I did not watch Dragon Ball Z in a proper continuity for many, many years due to the way scheduling and broadcasting of it were handled, I knew enough about it growing up that I did have some opinions. (Vegeta is still one of my favorite characters.)

In my twenties, I got into more shows thanks to better broadcasting standards and access to buying content at stores like HMV or Sunrise Records–which sold DVDs / BluRays in addition to music. I also got into buying stuff off of eBay. During this time, some of the shows I enjoyed included Yu-Gi-Oh!, InuYasha, Fushigi Yugi, and Yu Yu Hakusho.

Eventually, I got a Funimation account, and that opened up a lot more options to me. Some of the things I recall watching on there include Fruits Basket, Kamisama Kiss, The Devil is a Part Timer, and Death Parade. I was still limited, at this point, by the fact that I could not properly read subtitles, though. So if I wanted to watch something, it had to be dubbed. Not strictly out of preference, but rather out of medical necessity.

That changed when I went from a 37″ TV to using a 32″ TV as a close ranged monitor. I discovered, entirely by accident, that this changed how I was able to engage with anime completely. I could suddenly watch subbed anime and actually enjoy it. It was a miracle! I could suddenly watch any series I wanted, provided that I could get ahold of it.

I made my first attempt at an anime seasonal discussion channel as Story Mode Kat and set out to cover The Dangers In My Heart, Hell’s Paradise, and Demon Slayer’s Swordsmith Village Arc. My PNG-tuber was hand drawn, I had no idea what I was doing, and my thumbnails sucked, though. I gave it about a month, but with nothing I released getting any response, I decided it was not working.

In February 2024 I celebrated my 42nd birthday and my parents bought me my vTuber model, Katallina, as a birthday gift. Katallina is not a custom model, but she is a high quality model that is full body. By some form of sheer dumb luck, I found a model that was exactly the right design for the avatar I’ve used for gaming since 2009, and managed to buy it for a very reasonable price. Katallina was designed by Uhh Olivia on Etsy, and I would recommend any of her models in a heartbeat. She does gorgeous models and they are rigged nicely and have multiple expressions and toggles.

I decided that my channel would begin in April 2024, put together a video highlighting a bunch of shows I was excited about… And then Akira Toriyama passed away, and I made a tribute video talking about my history with Dragon Ball. Which went the way of the dodo when my BRAND NEW computer’s hard drive decided it didn’t want to work anymore.

Fortunately, my brother Kazary was able to figure out what was wrong, we ordered a new hard drive and got my PC back up and running, and I was able to launch my channel with the opening episode of Re:Monster without a hitch. I’ll tell ya this: that spring 2024 anime season was fire! Sure, there were a couple shows that weren’t as great as the others. I’m looking at you, Unnamed Memory (bad pacing for a show based on amazing lore) and Vampire Dormitory (oh dear lord how did I go through twelve weeks of that?!). But there were also incredible gems like An Archdemon’s Dilemma, Re:Monster, and Konosuba Season 3.

I went into Summer 2024 anime season extremely hyped. I decided to try my hand at setting my reviews up as a podcast, but quickly found that this was something that cost money for very little gain. It’s not that I was trying to make money off of it. It’s that I was not convinced that people were listening to it, and without that, what is the point of paying for it monthly? Maybe it’s something I should give another go down the road. My videos are not heavily dependent on their visuals. We shall see.

I wanted to cover everything going into that season. I watched a bunch of shows to get ready. Some of them great, like Tower of God or Oshi No Ko, or Sengoku Youko. (I need to go and watch the other two seasons of that; I’ve only seen one of the three and it was incredible!). Some that did not work for me. I’m lookin’ at you here, Arifureta. (I can’t stand that bunny girl! She ruined everything!) And then there were the new shows, which included gems like Raising Kids in Another World, Failure Frame, and The Ossan Newbie Adventurer.

I went into fall with another reasonably successful season completed. I think I fully completed six shows in the summer. There were a few that got dropped for a variety of reasons. But as with every season, I faced the same problem. So many anime, so little time. What I wasn’t counting on was an old nemesis, Seasonal Affective Disorder, dropping its disgusting, soul crushing hat into the ring. This is something I dealt with a lot in my mid twenties, but it had not bothered me in years. As such, when it snuck up on me in the fall of 2024, sapping all my energy and essentially turning me into a slug, at first I did not recognize it for what it was.

Suddenly everything felt like a burden. It wasn’t just a burn out on anime–that had come out of nowhere. Everything felt like a Herculean task. Games, books, movies, deciding what to have for dinner. Nothing seemed to matter. When I had initially started losing focus on my channel, I thought it was a burnout toward anime. But when I couldn’t get into Dragon Age: The Veilguard, which I’d been looking forward to for months, for no apparent reason, I knew something was wrong.

It took three weeks, bringing in a sun lamp, and putting together a very deliberate playlist on Amazon Music to sort things out. Before suddenly, finally, my brain went “OMG you can romance a Lich in this game?!” lead to 126 hours of Dragon Age: The Veilguard and me feeling much, much better. But the big curse about running a seasonal channel like mine is that the videos and topics are all about in-the-moment timing. It would be a while before I was ready to ‘get back on the horse’.

Fall 2024 was not a bad anime season. I was in a bad mental space. If I’d realized what was going on, and had been able to face it directly sooner, things likely would have been different. The shows I would recommend from fall are The Most Notorious Talker Runs the World’s Greatest Clan, Dan Da Dan, and Tower of God season 2. When I was able to just walk away from one of my favorite shows, that I’d been covering the entire summer and half of the fall, I should have known something was up. But the time between this, and the last time SAD had bothered me, really threw me for a loop.

I decided that Winter 2025 was still too close after all that had just happened. I was deeply invested in my Dragon Age game at that time, and was focused on making sure I did not do anything that would pull me back into a state of not wanting to do anything.

As the spring 2025 season approached, I was interested. I started doing research and gathering the materials I would need. And then I found out that the show I was most interested in was one I would not be able to easily get ahold of. And that totally pissed me off. And my patience to do all the things I need to do at the start of an anime season–things I normally love doing, like making my new shows list or planning the music and backgrounds I’ll use for each series–lost all appeal.

Stubborn, childish and silly? Perhaps. But as far as I could see, that would not be a wise way to start a new season. The show I was so frustrated over was Your Forma, for anyone curious. How a sci-fi show got me that bent outta shape I don’t know. But that’s what happened. Other shows I was hyped for included The Brilliant Healer’s New Life in the Shadows and My Hero Academia: Vigilantes.

And that pretty much brings us to present day. 2025 has been a bittersweet year for me. My precious Schnauzer / Shih Tzu mix, Pugsly, passed away on March 3rd. But I got a new puppy, a Shih Poo named Suzie, shortly after this. As of writing this, she’s roughly six and a half months old. She’ll be seven months old on July 7th.

I also saved up for, and purchased, a Nintendo Switch 2. I got the bundle that came with Mario Kart World. That lead to me deciding to learn how to use WordPress and start a gaming blog to journal the things I play so I can remember them better. And that got me to bring the Katallina.com domain I bought last year over here and start this blog, which will undoubtedly be more busy than my gaming blog, just based on the nature of how I consume anime.

As the summer 2025 anime season begins to take shape, and I prepare to consume up to a dozen new shows, I’m curious to see what the second half of the year will have in store for me. With fascinating new shows like Lord of the Mysteries, Tougen Anki, and Gachiakuta releasing, the future looks bright and my summer schedule looks packed. I’m sure I’ll come back here and update this down the road, but for now, this is where the story ends. I hope this gives you a bit more insight about me, my blog, and my overall journey with anime.