Site Specific Carnivorous Occurrence

I love Anki, really I do. At the same time, it can drive me up the wall like no other, especially when it insists on throwing me simple kanji such as 工 on a weekly basis, which I've memorized months ago, while withholding "new", difficult kanji which I desperately need to learn and memorize. Now, I know that this is simply the nature of SRS - Anki only wants the best for me, after all - but it's just not gonna work... not while I'm working through this stack of cards with a rough timeline in my head, anyway.

What I decided to do, then, was crank up Anki's "number of new cards per day" from 50... to 500. This way, while I have 400ish "old" cards to review, I'll get a more consistent amount of new cards concurrently; rather than drizzling past 10-15 new cards a day while working through a backlog, I'm actually carving through 40-50 this way.

OF COURSE, ideally, I wouldn't even have to resort to this. It's something I've been pondering for a while now, in fact, but hey... when push comes to shove. Besides, my current retention rate for cards one month old or older is 99.2%, so I think I'm doing pretty well on the older cards.
Read: For the love of GOD, Anki, show me something new!

We'll see how this works out in the long run. For now, it's a nice feeling to have the "challenge" back in my Anki reps - less of a mindless process and more of a mentally stimulating exercise. Maybe it's the ol' "gamer" in me, but I love a good challenge. But that much should be obvious, given the language I've chosen to study, eh?