Nigorimasen! Blog

I can’t believe that it took reading about Bandai Visual’s rather high pricing of the Gunbuster and fans’ reaction to it at SakuraCon last weekend to get me to write a post after a ten-day absence. My explanation is that I was distracted by a bunch of things including classes, chores, laundry, compiling my radio playlist, spending Easter day with my family, anime club, and watching the first season of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” on DVD. In that span of time, I start writing a couple of entries but I wasn’t able to finish them to my liking so I just moved on. In case you want to know, the first one would have been posted on Easter about religion in anime and would have focused on Scrapped Princess, FMA, and Chrono Crusade while the second was an informational post about MyAnimeList. Anyway, I apologize in advance if this is a relatively long post but I have a lot of stuff I want to discuss.

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Okay, guys. If you’re going to Fanime this year (May 25th-28th in San Jose), back me up on this if you can. I just submitted a fan proposal proposal for a fan panel on the topic of anime blogging and I would like more seasoned bloggers (I only have 10 months of “experience”) to join me, if the bid gets accepted at all. Even fledging bloggers are welcome as I want to provide a range of opinions and make it an actual panel and not a lecture. Co-hosts might also help diffuse the nervousness of me going to my first big-name convention.

My rough outline starts with a look back of the beginning of anime blogging as a segment of the blogosphere, the “boom” as it caught on, and a look into the future. I think I might also look at the Japanese blogging scene although that is tenative at this point. The next section will feature advice on what to do and not do when blogging. After that, I’ll cover hosting, the array of focuses and styles (e.g. figures, lolis, manga, parodies, rants), aggregators, and conduct. Q&A at the end if there’s enough time.

Last night, I had to carry a large bag (seen above) back to my apartment. Okay, I didn’t have to tote it all the way as I rode the bus from campus to my part of town but I did have to carry it to the station and from the station to my place. Damn, it was heavy! Anyway, about the stuff in the bag: it’s various things like buttons, cards, drawings, and postcards that are to be given away/auctioned off at my anime club’s Big Showing in late May. Apparently, since I’m the interim president, the officers who are graduating this quarter trust me to keep it for two months.

When I finally got the bag home and looked through it to write down what was in it, I saw there was a lot of manga, about 40 volumes of various series. Some of it was yaoi (I can handle it? right?) and a couple are in Japanese and German but a majority were in English. So I thought it would an interesting challenge to see if I could read - and post reviews of - all 38 or so English-adapted manga by the time May 19 rolls around. You can see my progress on a seperate page I created for this endeavor, which I will hopefully finish.

OK, it may seem like this is an example of me putting effort into a distraction from school (apart from watching/blogging about anime) but here it goes. I’ve been looking at this website called Talkshoe over the past week and made the decision to try hosting my own show. It will focus on anime- and manga-related topics, of course, as well as whatever tangents may come up in the process.

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