I may roll with a bit of bravado around these parts, but people who know me IRL know that I’m a pretty modest sort, rare to toot my own horn on things that actually matter. So trust me when I say that I look at this milestone that I’ve been hinting at for a few weeks as more of a testament to us than to anything particular to me.

It happened. More to follow. Just wanted to make it official at about the time it became official. pic.twitter.com/9bstNMQTz1

— Homicidol Maniac (@homicidols) August 8, 2016

I officially launched this site on Feb. 1 — if you search back through the post history, stuff goes all the way back to last October, but everything prior to this post was just being saved to Drive for the moment when I was ready to start populating the actual site, and everything else prior to this was being added while I got a bunch of other stuff ready. This post about Party Rockets GT’s video has the dumb luck of being the first live post I ever added.

The reason at the time was the same as it is now: There was a lot of news and sharing when it came to heavy and alt idols, but it was kind of all over the place, and there wasn’t a good one hub for it. At 697 posts and counting since then, I still don’t know if we have one, but I didn’t then and still don’t want to be some definitive anything; like it says in the Rules, go ahead and disagree with me, tell me I’m wrong (which is why the comments exist), etc.

The whole point here is a lot bigger than a website or whatever. This site is a tool. Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr — tools (and I’ll thank you to not make any “Maniac=tool” equivalences, I say while stealing the joke from you). The tools are in play to do something important: We’re going to build the popularity of the hard side of idol in the West.

Babymetal is cool and good, but we all know that it’s much bigger than Babymetal. They’re the trailblazers, and good for them. While they open the door for more people to get into idols, they unwittingly prepare the ground for other idols — PassCode on a major label, NECRONOMIDOL willing to tour anywhere, a BiS/H making the biggest leap of all — to build a Western fanbase bigger than they could have ever expected just a couple of years ago, and somebody is going to be the big beneficiary there.

But that isn’t going to happen because we’re all well-connected to each other; it’s going to happen because we — and let me emphasize, WE — are going to connect with fans of various musical styles at appropriate connection points, and we’re going to convert them. They’ll be our friends, our family members, people we randomly run across online, and we’re going to make them idol fans.

That’s the significance of this 100,000 page views. In a way, it means that we’ve found each other. Yes, there are way more idol fans out there in the English-speaking world than even know that this site exists, but six degrees of separation in a digital world mean that we can’t be more than a touch or two apart at this point. Our reach is very, very big.

In other words, because there need to be arbitrary limits on things, we’ve accomplished the basic goal of Phase I, and it’s time to transition into Phase II.

More on that and what it means and what I hope you’ll take part in over the next couple of days, but I do want to give you a little look at what the immediate future of this site looks like:

• I’ll actually be posting less! Given the recent pace of things, that might be hard to believe, but I mean it when I say that I recently got a really big promotion at Day Job and have fortunately not had to do much with it yet while we restructure ourselves organizationally. But the real work starts soon, and I don’t anticipate having anywhere near the current amount of time to spend on this.
• But because the momentum is so good, and because we’re getting to where it’s really possible, I’m going to look to recruit another regular contributor or two. I got started in digital as an editor, so it’s oddly fitting that I wind up back there while professionally transitioning out of the field.
• The group profiles are getting to be in a sorry state, and we desperately need more of them, so look out for that.
• The various games that we’ve been playing? I want to get more interactive, with more direct input from you all dictating not the content per se (though that’s always welcome, too), but the directions that we take in Phase II.
• I also want to build more, and more regular, connections with other sites. We can share content, play games together, cooperate on initiatives, etc.
• The Homicidols Census — you guys, I did not expect those results — is going to play a role in how we look at things. I’ll publish the results within a few days.
• As the site continues to grow, it’s going to need to get better — better hosting, better design, things like that — and that better is eventually going to mean generating some revenue on its own. I’ll never sacrifice editorial to accounting (as if my SO IMPORTANT #hottakes are worth the trouble), but maybe some design space and the like.

There’s a bit more to it, but, like I said above, I’ll cover that shortly.