In view of the nice things that well-meaning people have said and the not so nice things that other, more tragically misunderstood people have said, I guess now would be a better time than any to clear the air on the inaugural Anime Blog Awards, of which I happen to be part of the organising committee. We’ve been railed at countless times, and I’ve kept my silence on the matter for quite some time, so this reply is somewhat overdue.

It also goes without saying that poor Impz has been tearing his hair out about the criticism, a matter I was supposed to follow-up with in a more vitriolic post tearing apart the flimsy reasoning and half-baked arguments, among many others, with massive amounts of logic. However, apathy for the misinformed and procrastination both led to me eventually forgetting about making that post, and just as I was going to write one regarding my nominations for the awards, I figured I’d just kill two birds with one stone by posting about them at the same time.

I’ve never viewed this as a popularity contest, if you ask me. The point for me has always been about the nominations and the accompanying transparency — I care about the results like I did the outcome of True Tears, which is to say, somewhat, but not as much as the process of getting there, and it’s this period that I want to highlight. Think of it as a mini-awards of sorts, my little “Up yours, fags!” to those with their inflated egos and/or popular blogs who haven’t even deigned to see where we’re coming from. Heaven forbid we didn’t consult your Excellencies in our bid to make something that everyone could take part in.

I’m sure you’ve heard about how my very first post was inspired by lolikitsune, so we won’t talk ill of the dead. What you probably don’t know about my blog was what or who exactly inspired it. Since the original blog has since been deleted, I’ll use a placeholder in lieu of the real thing, also because the author doesn’t really write the same stuff anymore, so linking to his current one would be rather pointless.

I started reading anime blogs somewhere around the time where the Anime Nano podcast was still alive, and jp’s was the first I started following consistently for its resemblance to what Oscar Wilde would write, if Wilde was an otaku instead of a pederast and dug films instead of poetry. I forgot which post(s) of his struck me as particularly awesome, but I remember telling myself that I would make a blog like his if I ever got around to it. Then Kanon finished airing, and I watched it over three days. Spring 2007 came, along with some of the most utterly retarded opinions about an anime that was to be judged by its OP. My anime blogging began.

I recently discovered while reading Les Miserables that Marius, Book Four, is entitled “The Friends of The ABC”, which this doesn’t happen to reference, unfortunately, but the better you know…

I picked up Goshuushou-sama Ninomiya-kun. Yes, that Ninomiya-kun with the succubus, not the tragic yet hilarious metafiction in Minami-ke. Now, while I’m certainly not short of shows to blog about or watch this season since I’m keeping up with a grand total of 16, I’m tired of anime blogging. Not in the commonly understood “woe is me, this is a meta post about why I’m burnt out” sense, but in a “this is a post to let you know I’ve not lost it” sense.

I’m sorry CCYoshi, as much as I wanted this to be a counter-culture essay extolling the virtues of fanservice in Ninomiya-kun, there simply wasn’t anything to write about. Which is precisely why I like Ninomiya-kun, in any case:

one distinguishing characteristic of dango society is that they have no distinguishing characteristics

Here are some spoilers: Your blog dies in Wordpress 2.3. Or at the very least goes into sudden cardiac arrest, requiring a mouth-to-mouth and a frantic trip to the ER for that quadruple-bypass you’ve been putting off. You might even need to shut down for a couple of days while it lies comatose, like I unwittingly had the foresight to do while upgrading.

Let me tell you, however, that the upgrade, amidst all that blood, sweat, tears, and missing out on reading (and writing) Autumn posts was worth it. I have seen the future of anime blogging, and it is Tags. Spelled with a capital letter. Tags. With bold. Tags. You get the idea. While this might seem like a small matter to some of you who have been using categories for your anime series for ages, the benefits of using Tags were immediately obvious to me.

what goes through my mind everytime I see Gensokyoans(sp) using computers isn’t “oh, they’re using them”, but “why do they suck so much”, since their scope of powers are so hax, you’d think they’d be able to get better rigs

Just a bit of link blogging before I return to the normal schedule (wait, what schedule?). I’d like to think that four whole days away from the PC at camp did my hands good, but a prolonged bout of instant messaging proved otherwise. I can live with the pain, though, seeing how it serves as a good reminder to take frequent breaks and all. Workrave’s helped a lot, too.

It’s always a joy to discover new anime blogs worth your time and effort to read. To my chagrin, ever since I started proactively looking for blogs with both quantity and quality, I’m quite embarrassed to note that my daily reading efforts have been stunted somewhat. Gone are the days of being able to skim through the list of daily entries effortlessly before breakfast, and I have these blogs to blame for adding to my “burden”, although I’m not in the least morose about it.

the concept of relevant/related pictures in my posts are practically unheard of, I know, but in the picture Haruhi’s saying “oh! this is a unique site…”

When I went and asked if anime was deep, or was it just entertainment, dragging my fellow bloggers into the fray, I knew full what I was getting into. The statement, “Is anime deep, or is it just entertainment?” is flawed in that it makes the unstated assumption that it has to be either/or, which means that those reading the statement have to make a stand for one or another.

Of course, this isn’t exactly the case given how we’re rational, thinking human beings. Anime is the term we give to a medium, like cartoon or live-action shows, and therefore there can be no assigning of values to it in the first place. Why then did I go ahead and use such a misleading statement for a topic in the first place? It’s simple — the statement was my little exercise in social engineering and symbolic interactionism.

Blumer, in his coining of the term, basically states that our reaction to objects are based on what understanding we have of them. This understanding is in turn derived from, or comes as a result of the interaction between our fellow men. We take the understanding of an object, and then use or modify them as circumstances see fit.

About this double-feature with Impz over at THAT Anime Blog: For those of you not in the know, there’s all manner of bloggers, about 20 give or take, that can be found over at #animeblogger @ irc.irchighway.net on a fairly regular basis. Now the average age in the channel is anywhere from late teens to early twenties, and naturally, when you put a group of people with that median age together in a space for prolonged periods, fun stuff happen — it’s like a younger, self-absorbed Survivor in action, but with more e/n and angst thrown into the mix.

The topic of elitism came about due to my being bored and wanting to spice things up a little bit. Much like Lelouch and his Order of the Black Knights, I wanted to see how easy it was to bring about revolution discussion, albeit in a very roundabout way, regarding the topic, and what better way to start then by applying the label to myself? Unfortunately, I rubbed all of two people the wrong way in the process, and this is where the fun began.

So I’ve noticed that the anime blogosphere is as incestuous as a chapter in COMIC LO. Everyone links to the same old same old, and I’m guessing you guys haven’t updated your blogrolls in ages, or can’t be arsed to get out there and look for new things to read. Which is fine and dandy with me, since I’m about to showcase a few blogs that, shockingly enough, are actually fit for the good old feedreader.

Links to follow. If you’ve got any blogs of special note that you feel I should be reading, too, don’t hesitate to link to them in the comments. I’d like to think my taste is pretty diverse, about 50 blogs in the anime folder and counting. Check my Links page above and this post before you get about to linking anything, though, and try not to overdo the linking too much, since Akismet is funny about stuff like that.

Seeing how Impz’s post made him sound like he had cancer (to ease the pain of not being able to finish the Spring season he wanted to spend his last days writing editorials), I wanted to make a post painting him as a tragic victim, torn between his desire to live and his desire to drool over moe Konata.

replace America with Singapore, and Cirno with Drmchsr0, etc

But he linked to Riuva’s post so he ruined everything. The bastard. My condolences to the neighbours down south, things will be a lot more dull around here without you guys. Suppose there’s always #animeblogger, but meh. Best wishes to everyone.

Ninja edit for bj0rn, who doesn’t want me mentioning where I got this news from someone who doesn’t want to�be mentioned either,�since he won’t stop whining in the comments, jeez. Since I’m not under the rule of 1984- I mean, Singapore, I’m mirroring the list of anime that’s licensed, which they apparently don’t want you to see, nevermind how 5 seconds in Google with “AVPAS Singapore” gets you the same bloody thing.

List of licensed anime after the cut, and since I’ve used up my quota of words for the day I’m going to keep this short — you morons. Trying to censor the internet is stupidity and futility, they tried it over here and it didn’t work. Watch as a Malaysian who’s using Tor and has a German IP, posts on a blog hosted on American servers, spreading what you didn’t want them to see. Oh, and FYAD.

Props to Impz and his band of merry men for sparking off the discussion. Demian in his response, however, overlooked what I believe is a key angle of how anime wouldn’t make it to mainstream, and that’s what I’m going to address in this post. Will also be commenting closely on drmchsr0’s, uh, “character-driven” response that, while being theoretically valid, has critical flaws in terms of practical implementation.

I agree with Demian that anime will never make it to mainstream, but for different reasons altogether — the medium itself is what makes it an inherent impossiblity. I don’t know how many of you might have experienced this, but I personally have difficulty getting my friends to watch anime, even after I tell them that the DVD of Honey and Clover does not contain porn.