Cruel Angel Theses

And now for something completely different.

• Dasaku.net lives. Formerly Ikimashou.net, Randall’s relaunched the main site to be a lot more functional than it was before — if you’re one of those people like me who can’t afford hosting, a domain name, or both yet want your shiny anime blog, this is the place to go to. Aside from listing dasaku.net’s members and how to contact him, there’s a snazzy application form over at the Apply page that you should look at if you’re interested in a blog that ends in dasaku.net or oniichannoecchi.com, and if you’re wondering about the “rubbish” and “worthless” taglines? Don’t be too bothered — it’s just a play on words, “dasaku” being the pun in mention.

• It’s that time again! Having been nominated for a staggering five categories, I only have each and every one of you, my peers, to thank for sparing me a thought as you cast your nomination. I’d be spouting perfunctory nonsense if I were to say here that I couldn’t care less about the results; I do! Given how this blog’s barely a year old, I’m deeply honoured that I’ve managed to achieve the only thing I’ve set out to do ever since starting it:
• Making people think. If you have only one vote to spare for me, make it the Most Thought-Provoking Blog, please — while winning in any other non-Dorama category would be nice, I know where my abilities lie, and it’s with this one. I ask this knowing full well who I’m up against, but since I’m the David in this battle with two Goliaths, it wouldn’t hurt to be honest about where I stand right now.
• The voting rules can be found here. There’s also a Reader’s Choice voting that will be held alongside the Blogger’s Choice voting, so for those of you blogless readers out there, rest assured that you’re not forgotten. What if you’re a blogger, but didn’t sign up during the nomination stage? No worries. Rest assured, your opinion matters, and you may sign up right up till voting closes on June the 1st.

• This is the reason why I removed the reCaptcha from my blog. I’ve been using it for a fortnight already, and it’s prevented 87 attempts at spam in that period, in addition to reducing my Akismet queue drastically. Forget the irritating anti-spam questions, getting your readers to read Captchas, turning auto-moderation on, or all of the above — WP-SpamFree just works, and extremely well at that.
• It’s a no-frills affair, and considerably foolproof: just install it like you would a normal plugin, and it’s good to go. If you’ve been the victim of one too many spam trackbacks or pingbacks, you can disable those too, albeit at the cost of being less connected to the blogosphere. Results may vary if you use it with any other anti-spam plugin, but its effectiveness with Akismet is guaranteed. Besides, what are you doing using Spam Karma 2 when it’s been discontinued, anyway?

• Preview your comments, Omo-style. Despite how I always pride myself on being in the exclusive, occasionally-elitist club of Bloggers With AJAX Edit Comments And Quicktags Installed, I always felt like there was a missing piece of the puzzle with regards to obtaining high-quality comments, and felt like there was a plugin I could install to fill in that mysterious void.
• Alright, so I didn’t, but you get the idea. I was trawling through the Most Popular section of the Wordpress Plugin directory yesterday when I stumbled upon this, and what can I say? It’s what I’ve been looking for, and helps immensely when you’re writing long comments, or long replies to even longer comments.
• To see it in action on this blog, just scroll to the bottom, type in a comment, and watch the magic. Alternately, if you’re reading this from a feedreader, you could always do the obvious and click on the permalink to visit my blog and see it in action. Not too bad a deal, if I say so myself.

his post’s as explosive as his blog name, if you ask me

• Last but not least, I’ve simply got to highlight this excellent post I found in my feedreader today. It’s mostly about Kure-nai ep 04, but that’s not what I want to call to your attention — while it was a good episode, OGT’s take on our attitude towards anime in the post was even better, and it deserves your full attention.
• I’ve already replied to that post with a comment (excuse the typo), highlighting the parts of his post that I found to be most incisive. Of course, I wouldn’t expect anything less from the guy whom I nominated for Rookie of the Year, and while it’s too bad not many other people are reading him, it’s quiet truths like these that make me realise I’ve got much to learn by way of anime philosophy.
• OGT also updates at a ridiculous pace of one post per fansub release, and considering that I’m watching all the shows he’s actively blogging, this season has been one filled with quality and quantity blog posts, that’s for sure. Highly recommended if you like impeccable episode analysis done consistently, served with a side of fresh commentary, hold the summaries.
• Is he doing episodic or editorial blogging? Frankly, who cares? I know I don’t. Neither should you.

In case you were wondering about the bullet format of this post: No, I’m not switching writing styles, I just thought it would be nice to do something like this for a chance. Yes, I could blog like this all the time in theory, but Wordpress 2.5.1 seems to have screwed up somewhere with its WYSIWYG editor, and it’s a royal pain in the ass to get it working.