otou-san’s nifty guide on RSS and the varied responses it garnered from commentators got me all curious about the percentage of our readers subscribed through our RSS feed — or more like the ones who are not subscribed, rather, impossible as it may seem that people are still not seeing wonders of RSS!!11!! Silliness aside, I know people have their own reasons for choosing to rely on aggregators such as AnimeNano, or for the hardcore readers — rely on their skillz to manually visit their favorite blog every [insert set visiting interval here]! But I thought it wouldn’t hurt to share my own thoughts about the advantages that subscribing to RSS brings. And a friendly warning/disclaimer, this post is Google Reader biased.v

Popularity: 3% [?]

September 6 will forever be remembered as the day the 1st ever WordCamp Philippines was held (to all those who attended it, that is). Needless to say, and it was awesome! Fun and insightful, and I got to spend it with fellow anime bloggers hazy and Zeroblade too. I’m pretty slow so both of them have already given their respective reports on the event, while mine is days late orz.

Popularity: 1% [?]

This post is just as random as how I got to read the book “Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet”, which became my source of inspiration for this. And in case you’re wondering, I didn’t type this under the summer sun. I had this post scheduled ^^;

Most of my life I’ve been struggling with a superiority-inferiority complex, and despite how many times I convince myself that I should be proud of myself, take pride in my abilities and what God has endowed me, I was never fully at peace, and that inferior angsty attention-seeker persona of mine would always creep in no matter what. At one point I’d think that I’m so good like I can rule the world! But then at times just a simple criticism is enough to crush my pride as though it was simply founded in sand. That’s how shaky it was.

Popularity: 4% [?]

While I initially didn’t intend to post about our 1st Round-Robin topic about the subject of anime and escapism, I had a sudden burst of inspiration after reading Hinano’s entry, and I found myself empathizing with, and pondering upon this escapism issue. Then comes Soshi’s write-up on this topic, and once again I am inspired.

First of all, what is escapism? According to good ol’ Wikipedia:

Escapism is mental diversion by means of entertainment or recreation, as an “escape” from the perceived unpleasant aspects of daily stress. It can also be used as a term to define the actions people take to try to help relieve feelings of depression or general sadness.

Given this definition alone, one might say that using anime as a means of escapism is actually good. Hey you’re using it as a stress reliever! Instead of getting all depressed and frustrated about real-world issues to the point of being suicidal, you channel all those negative chi to watching anime, and voila, say goodbye to a stressful life! Happily ever after. Not really.

Popularity: 5% [?]

A ‘Good’ Shugo Chara doujin?

As I was looking for some Shugo Chara pics in danbooru a few weeks back, I stumbled upon the cover pic of this Amu x Ikuto H-doujin amidst the pages of of SICK pics *facepalmmm*. I was reminded of Hinano’s RAGE over the sick Shugo Chara doujins she saw months ago, and this got me thinking as to whether this doujin actually falls under the ‘good’ category.

Popularity: 10% [?]

Apparently, what inspired Hiro Arikawa to write Toshokan Sensou is the Statement of Intellectual Freedom in Libraries of the JLA (Japan Library Association), written on a plaque inside the library she and her husband visited. This was mentioned in her postscript in volume 1, but I really didn’t understand it until today, when I checked out the spunky updated Toshokan Sensou article on Wikipedia. I fail as a TS fan! zetsuboushitaaa!

I couldn’t believe my eyes when I read this Intellectual Freedom Statement… it’s the exact Library Liberation Act of the novel — the four articles, expounded upon point by point. I never thought it exists in real life O.O My respect for libraries just escalated to a thousandfold after this. I guess this means that the people mocking Library War for its “ridiculous” premise of fighting for books are also mocking this Library Bill of Rights (the US has one too) in the process. tsk.

Popularity: 5% [?]

While this topic has been argued to no end, a recent issue just sparked me to post my thoughts on this.

First off, let me ask you this, will you watch an anime raw, and even go to the extent of blogging it, if you didn’t understand much of what’s being said in the episode(s)? This is not quite a problem with regards to bloggers who openly admit that they don’t understand the raw episode they’re watching, especially for those who put disclaimer in each post like “Feel free to correct me blah blah because I watched this raw”, “From what I understood…”, “I didn’t quite understand… but I think”, and all that, to highlight the lack of certainty. Not to boast (because it’s not really worth boasting about), but I did this when I first started out in blogging, pointing out how confused I was with Touka Gettan, for example, where I even put (?) in parts of the summary I was uncertain about, etc. FYI, that post sucks butt. The problem comes in when the blogger starts stating things in a matter-of-fact tone, when in fact, it’s far from the truth.

Popularity: 18% [?]

With the outpour of the new Spring animes, I’ve been thinking a lot about what blogging style I should really adopt and stick to. I had already gone weary of making summary posts, not because of the elitist view that editorials and other writing styles are superior to episode summaries, but rather because it’s not my niche. I suck at summarizing, and I’m not being modest at that. The amount of time I spend on writing these is just ridiculous, ranging from 3-5 hours or more, depending on the anime. And the thing I hate most about this is that much of my time is wasted thinking about how to describe the scenes. How more lame could that be.

More often than not, I’m not even satisfied with the summary I churn out. Again, because I suck. (I’m not soliciting any sympathies here; I’m just stating mere facts) So why bother spending hours on something whose results are far from what you’d be proud of, when you can capitalize on your strengths instead?

These thoughts already came to me a few months back, during Fall 2007, hence the change in my blogging style, particularly for KimiKiss and Shugo Chara, though I dropped the latter a few months after. The same goes for True Tears, whose bandwagon I joined halfway through the show, with the sudden spark of writing motivation I had. What I liked most about blogging KimiKiss and True Tears is how the shows itself compelled me to write. And I believe that’s the tried-and-true Way of Blogging^TM.

Popularity: 18% [?]

It’s been more than a month since I had this post in mind, but for some reason I decided to forget about the idea and even scrapped my draft post for this orz. But lo and behold, as Crusader opens up the topic about biases, I decided to give this post one more shot. Also because I’ve learned some insights from a book I’m currently reading, Why Men Love Bitches, as out-of-character as my RL colleagues and friends find it to be. Just for the record, I don’t really agree with everything that’s written in this book, because of several principles I adhere to, but it’s valuable for gaining insights on the nature of both men and women (and it EMPOWERS women), similar to the book Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus Before I divert any further from the topic, here goes…

As you can see, most (like 99%?), if not all, the bloggers of True Tears and KimiKiss are people born with a Y chromosome. But well, considering the measly number of female bloggers on the interwebz, I think it goes without saying that there will always be more guys blogging a series rather than girls (with a few shoujo or BL shows as exception). The thing is, aside from the values, principles, beliefs, etc. that we have, gender also plays a role in our biases in anime, particularly how we perceive characters, why we support a certain girl, or a certain character archetype for the lead guy (or a guy for the lead girl, in the case of reverse harems). Like why I support Noe and Asuka, as opposed to Hiromi and Eriko, for instance, which I will be delving on in this post.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Rumors of my identity have been greatly exagerrated, such as being this Reisen bunny of the game Touhou

The comments I’ve read in my Shugo Chara DS game post reminded me of the time I was in the same boat as them. When I was a Nihongo n00b, yet filled with the desire to play Japanese games, and become a weeaboo On my part, it became a prerequisite that I memorize the Japanese alphabet first, at least, before anything else. Though my original intent in memorizing hiragana and katakana way back elementary grade 5 was no other than to impress my crush and to follow anime songs LOL.

Popularity: 9% [?]