…and I have no one else to thank but you, dear reader.

Has it really been one year? I can barely remember what it was like then, but I’ll spare you the usual wall of text that accompanies reflections like these — until after the cut, of course. What, you thought I was going to let up just because it was my blog’s birthday? Never.

fortunately, on the internet celebrations like these are all but impossible

I’m sure by now that everyone must have known how I started blogging no thanks to a certain post that was made somewhere around this time last year, so I won’t go into detail about that (also because I want to spite lk by not mentioning him in my birthday speech). Hey, his writing was provocative enough to get me to sign up on Wordpress.com to start writing, and if that isn’t a gift, I don’t know what is. Insert a Code Geass reference to the title of R2’s first episode here.

In all honesty, I guess I have to give our dear lolikit some credit where it’s due. After all, you could say that he fashioned half my blogging style, which is where I get my troll genes from: the baiting, the reeling in of said baited catch, the subsequent giggles to be derived from said process. It was probably unconscious emulation, to be sure, but all those seemingly careless and bold statements I’ve made from time to time? They’ve always been done with reactions in mind, together with a whole lot of arguments to back them up, and for that I’ve got to thank Mr Michael P, aka lolikitsune. Just as planned.

Of course, it might have something to do with how I’m naturally suited to trolling, just like how Negi’s naturally suited to the power of darkness. It’s nothing particularly significant, but I’ve always had that confidence that comes with knowledge and the ability to reason and out-reason, so that part of my inherent swagger must have worked itself into my writing somewhere along the line. Having a senior that trolled often and to great effect in the blogosphere without much fear of reprisal might have helped, too.

I digress. lk’s stature and place in the blogosphere set a precedent, a statement that said “Trolling people in your blog is okay.” Having a history of trolling on other places on the internet must have set that bit in motion like C.C. kissing Lelouch to awaken his memories, and after subscribing to his blog and finding out what notdotq was all about, I set myself headlong down a slippery slope, the results of which you see today.

But enough of that. There’s another influence I want to address here, but first, a quote.

Hinano left two comments yesterday which I need to address:

That’s strange, I coulda sworn you were a JPmeyer fanboy yet I don’t see his blog listed anywhere HMM….

I mentioned jpmeyer earlier because of his immense influence on how I looked at and approached anime blogging. First of all, the serious way in which he treated anime and its peripherals led me to believe that blogging about anime didn’t necessarily have to default to low art. More importantly, his method of fostering community was elementary and involved reading blogs, occasionally highlighting the deserving ones; replying to the comments he received; linking and keeping up to date with current events — it wasn’t hard to do, and struck me as the right way to go about anime blogging.

I guess I was thinking of this post. So I was under the impression that since he influenced your blogging you’d stick him in one of the categories. I guess not?

Frankly, the only reason I didn’t nominate jpmeyer for “Most Influential” was due to how he simply hasn’t influenced me for a long time. He hasn’t written the type of stuff I used to admire him for for ages, and he’s even admitted this in a comment he left on a post of mine last year:

I do have to say, it became a lot harder to make the sort of posts that I made for the first 6 months once school started to wind down. Contrary to the common “I have a life now so I don’t have time for silly animu”, (I have about a 75 minute commute to work each way that I can and do spend watching anime) I lost out on the kind of stimulation that I needed to make posts like that. It seemed like so many of those posts began with “So in class today we discussed film theory X which made me realize ‘Hey, that’s just like in anime Y!’” That and the fact that writing about a lot of that stuff again would just seem like rehashing old points.

I don’t blame him for it. In fact, I’m not so presumptuous as to say that I could have never done the same were I in his shoes, so I don’t blame him for it. The fact remains, however, that he hasn’t written posts of that type of caliber like what I used to look up to, and why focus on the past when you can focus on the present? bateszi, Martin, and Hige are all still blogging, and they’ve had a significant influence on me in their continued perseverance (bateszi especially, the poor git), something jp doesn’t have since he stopped making those type of posts long ago.

What I said previously still stands, though. jp was my other influence that drove me to write posts as long as I could to the best of my analytical ability, and it’s no thanks to him that I’ve got that drive to write as long and as elaborate as possible, if only because his style suited mine yet again like lk’s did; something I felt comfortable doing. It was all coincidence, really, but who would’ve guessed that such a coincidence would have led me to write an average of a thousand words on anime every single time? Not me.

So if lk’s statement to me was “Trolling people in your blog is okay.”, jp’s statement to me was “Making people think in your blog is okay.” What did I get when I combined the both? Obviously, it would have to be the statement “Making people think through trolling in your blog is okay.” — it’s a deceptively simple mantra, but one that I can safely say I’ve tried my very best to adhere to whenever I’ve wanted people to simply think about the utter nonsense they’re spouting in order to look at anime with higher standards. To treat it seriously as a medium.

If you’d told me a year ago that I’d go on to where I am today, from forming The Anime Blogging Collective to being quoted in Kabitzin’s blog on an irregular basis, I’d have told you to lay off the drugs, take your medication, or even both. It still embarrasses me every single time I’m the focus of some form of attention that isn’t steeped in malicious intent, and while I’d be lying if I said I hated it, I know for sure that I’m never going to let success get to my head or rest on my laurels; if you ever see me blogging about why I’m not blogging about anime, well, feel free to punch me in the mouth (but tell me to clench my teeth beforehand).

And I’ve only just begun to say all I want to say! While I’d like to say that I was initially apprehensive, approaching anime blogging in the same way a mouse approaches a lion and asking myself things like “Would I run out of things to write about? How would I ever think of things to write every week? Would I even be read? What if I got boring?”, the fact is that nothing really held me back in those first few months of blogging, and if you’re one of those blogless anime fans who think you’ve got something valuable to contribute? Never let doubts like those stand in your way. That’s how I’ve came to where I am today.

Now for the most important part of this post: the thank-you speech. Blog traffic may come and go, and while I’m eyeing the number of hits on my stats counter so that I know when I reach 100K, I don’t take it as seriously anymore. It’s great to wake up to FeedBurner telling me that 124 people subscribed to my blog as of Tuesday, and if you’re one of them, my gratitude knows no bounds. That miniscule 3-digit number is what keeps me going, and the fact that a hundred or so people out there are actually interested enough in what I have to say on a regular basis always blows me away. Thank you.

I know I’m going to miss out some people here, and while I don’t intend for this to turn into a awards acceptance speech, I’d like to thank those that I didn’t nominate in my last post but whose presence in my internet life has been no less meaningful or appreciated: TheBigN, Roxas, Sasa, Hidoshi, j.valdez, DS, introspect, DKellis, iniksbane, Xerox, and all the IRC regulars along with those in the ABC or my blogroll that I can’t exactly fit in this paragraph due to space constraints — Thank you.

For those who have commented each and every time I’ve made a post, whether it’s an argument against what I’ve just written, a scathing attack, or words of praise or agreement: I value each and every one of those comments. I don’t have to look far to see how other bloggers tend to be so hard up for comments in a blogosphere where everyone seems to be reading instead of giving feedback, and I know how good I’ve got it; your thoughts are always welcome, no matter what they may be. Thank you.

for someone who’s given up the ghost, they look pretty happy

Last but not least, the reason I have such an awesome blog, and by “awesome blog” I mean the physical virtual copy, which encompasses everything from the hosting to the install to the maintenance to the upkeep: Randall, former host of ikimashou, retired from blogging but always fondly remembered. Ever so often I find myself wondering what would possess a man to start free hosting, as the amount of trouble I’ve given him when it comes to Cruel Angel Theses is astronomical, but I guess I can always ask him if I want the answer that badly. Thank you.

Randall surprised me with a link this morning: the front page of dasaku.net. As you may or may not have known, after our loss of ikimashou.net no thanks to questionable business practices by the domain registrar he decided to retire, and the only blog he’s worked on since then would be the very NSFW Oniichan no Ecchi. I don’t know if it was sheer coincidence that he managed to get a working version of a frontpage up (this after having showed me a mock-up of it the day before) on the day of my first anniversary, but to have me as the first featured blog is a great, if bittersweet present, and something I appreciate a lot. Thanks again.

Naturally, with posts like these come questions, like what I’ve got planned for the future and so on. I don’t know, really — aside from the eight drafts I’ve got staring at me from my blog dashboard, there’s not a lot in terms of the direction I want to take this blog, and I’m not going anywhere any time soon. Why fix what’s broken, right? I’d like to think my writing style’s pretty much developed to the point where infinite possibilities lie ahead, and aside from a super-secret ABC announcement I’m not at liberty to divulge that may or not take place in the near future and an even more secret personal project I hope to see take fruit maybe next year once I get the kinks ironed out and the team assembled, there isn’t all that much I’ve got in mind. Honest. Here’s to another year of blogging, and here’s to all my readers.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 9th, 2008 at 11:49 pm and is filed under Omake, Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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