New Year’s Look Back

I’m looking back right now. I don’t see a stand out show personally. I loved Squid Girl, Working!! and Angle Beats. Yet, none of those seem like an icon for the entire year. Maybe Amagami? It’s been running for six months – half a year, holding my captivation. However it wandered all over the place for me, hot Haruka, family Kaoru, squishy Sae, Mysterious Ai, Boring Rihiko and Two-faced Tsukasa – I could pick the last as the best but that leaves the rest kind of dead in the water.

Perhaps this kind of indisision is how the literature industry feels about plays. They see them but can’t tell if they’re groundbreaking for thirty years. Epi is doing something like that but with the entire decade. He’s done a great job too in my opinion.

Let me just nominate Railgun as my favorite. It’s not special or groundbreaking. It’s average. It was good. As my favorite character though, let me nominate Kuroneko. I’d love to see more of her. There’s that sense of mystery behind a character that I want to see unraveled. I’m waiting for that good mystery to up.

That’s all from me. Have a fantastic new year.

New Year’s Commit!

Christmas-su Reflections

I wanted to blog about anime because blogging about programming and technology the way I was doing it previously was incredibly boring. Essentially it boiled down into a three component post, question, searching for answer and the answer. It’s not interesting and there’s no real community behind it. Sure, it got views and since I’m a huge view-monger, I was pleased. It still left me empty though.

Anime blogging, I hoped, would allow me to joke around with the shows I was watching anyway, everyday after school, before bed, whenever I had time. For a while I was fine but then it got repetitive for me. I found myself falling into the three component post trap again but this time with intro-summary-reflection. Sounds similar, doesn’t it? My blogroll is full of other lovely aniblogs out there and I finally relent to admit that none of my content was anymore unique than their content.

Valence posted something that I registered with.

I read other blogs in closer detail. How they used this ‘screenshot with text’ sin in writing, yet appear to be unique and professional, despite generating nothing as ‘unique’ as luminodrake had written. I thought for a moment – and realized the root of the problem. My posts lacked ideas. Concepts. New opinions, wit, or substance. They were like cardboard, soggy from the rain. I had even tried writing crappy columns every week to try and spice things up to a little bit, but alas, to no avail.

Remind you of anyone?

I recall my old days attending my English classes at school. I would sit there hopelessly pondering, “For what purpose do we analyze these stories?” At the same time, before, during and after class, a few of us would talk about the anime we watched. We would analyze that in a very different way that we would Shakespeare. It was interesting and relevant to us. Writing the way I talked about the anime at school was what I imagined when I started but that’s not what came out. Essentially a garbage dump of summaries and half-baked reflections were churned out.

Read my last long winded post ever. So that was too long. and this is too short. A mix of long and short was better for me, but not by much.

The question is, did that work? As a view monger, I still get 20-30 views per day on existing content and a few more when I post on twitter and elsewhere. I doubt anyone subscribed my feeds, I certainly wouldn’t which means that’s all unique google-generated traffic from somewhere. So, I succeeded there, I get traffic. As a blogger though hoping to find people who shared my interested, no, I didn’t really win any prizes.

So as I said last time, maybe I’ll do better next season.

Fall Season Ends

Looking in retrospect, I failed during this fall season. I planned to cover the remaining half of Amagami SS and Index 2. Did I? No, I left Amagami sporadically, returning briefly only if the arc was decent and not even bothering to even start covering Index 2. Why? They sucked when I started.

Amagami left me disappointed with their lackluster Ai arc. The first two episodes of Index 2 were horridly boring.

Maybe next season I’ll do a better job.

Until then, Merry Christmas!

Holiday Commit.

Tsukasa made a mistake

Amagami’s final arc is surely the best for me. I expected the mystery in Ai’s arc but received none. This arc was more interesting because the impression of Tsukasa was super extra amazing and nice. Well, we’re obviously wrong on that count.

Tsukasa of course has her own on demand personality switcher where she can be as tough as nails or as nice as a puppy. This picture shows her reaction when she accused Junichi of reading her notebook.

Very cute outside and yet so malevolent on the inside.

The topic of her notebook seems like something I’d like to expand more on. Many say that the notebook represented her structured and very orderly ways. That on demand personality change must need a lot of maintenance and the only place that could be is in that notebook. Lies upon lies and to whom she paid extra courtesy to each day. I can’t imagine having such a split personality on purpose, especially not for the state reason of “look out for myself”.

We’re coming up quickly of the presumable finale of Amagami too.

Unmistakably committed.

The World God Only Knows OP 1

I read a fantastic book called The Golden Age by John C. Wright recently. While reading I would listen to the single-loop of the first OP from The World God Only Knows.

The song’s name is God Only Knows. What a fitting name for the anime of it’s origination? Of course, someone planned it that way and they use the “God only knows…” portion of the song during the true OP. Youtube offers a special full version that will no doubt be deleted eventually.

Seriously, the best part is the flowing repetition of “God only knows”. While being in English, sometimes the words are hard to make out. That gives it the illusion of being regular japanese music — it’s not. It’s special.

A few more words on The Golden Age: the main character erases some of his memories. While doing so, everyone tells him that it is simply better to forget them and not bother to pursue them. The song speaks of increasing one’s abilities, exploring possibilities and satisfying curiosities. That is exactly what the main character’s desire is and I found the song quite fitting with the book. Ultimately, it does better with this book than the anime it belongs too.

Committed godly.