Upcoming “12 Days of Xmas” Reflection Series

Over the next two weeks starting tomorrow the 14th up to Christmas Day, I will posting a daily reflection on a particular event in anime or manga that had a lasting effect on me in the past year. (Look for the tag ‘12daysofchristmas‘.) This effort will be part of the general ABC postings Owen mentioned in his post yesterday. I might include some of the anime I watched into the list but in recent brainstorming sessions, I’ve come up with more things I did than things I saw so I’m proceeding more down that path.

Also, I just wanted to say a thing about those who do episode summaries as a bit of a response to Owen’s piece. I was going through my past posts last night, applying tags to each of them in preparation to hopefully properly implement a “Related Posts” plugin as well as a sidebar tag cloud. While I was going through the early Part-Time Otaku-era entries, I started tagging many of them ‘episode summaries’ because that’s what I did for the first few months of blogging. The main reasons why I stopped doing them were 1) I took about a hundred screenshots per episode, 2) many other people already had similar posts up by the time I finished mine, and 3) I began to fall behind on watching the shows themselves.

A dramatization of the screencap process. Damn, I really need to watch MariMite one of these days…

Despite my own failings in week-to-week episodic blog posting, I still use others’ archived episode posts to figure out when a particular moment or image happened or when I left off on a series that I haven’t seen in a while (a problem that is for now been solved by MyAnimeList). An recent example is the scene in Lucky Star where Konata was riding public transit looking like a tired salaryman. I had been reminded of that image when I saw AMV Hell 4 and asked my friends who’ve also seen Lucky Star if they remember when that happened. I don’t remember what answer they gave me (I think it was 2 or 8) but in either case, I seem to remember it was wrong so instead of scanning through a bunch of episodes, I searched Anime Nano for posts about Lucky Star episodes 10 through 12 and found what I wanted in episode 11. The parody writers like Karura are also fun to read even if you haven’t seen the particular anime – heck, they (any consistent episodic blogger) can convince someone to start watching a series or get someone back into a series when they had abandoned it. (As was the case with me reading Cinnamon Ass for the first episode of Madlax back in 2004!) So I tip my hats to those of you who follow multiple series simultaneously and write about them because it’s something I certainly don’t have the determination to do it.

P.S. My Dell notebook had an “integral hard drive failure” Sunday so I got a new HP Pavilion with a 14-inch widescreen (1280×800) monitor and Vista Home Premium. The extra screen space has made Google Reader easier to use and has also made me consider a redesign, or at least a restructuring (fluid width?), of this blog. It also will let me more fully appreciate HD subs/raws and take notes on the side while watching “standard-def” fare.

P.P.S. I’ve been occasionally posting links and videos to a tumblog I tenatively named Ranpitsu (??) for the past month or so. Most of the stuff has been more video game and sports related but since I don’t really have much of a side blog, I consider it to be an okay substitute. Only downside is there are no comments so it’s really a one-way process without direct feedback. It gets it out of my system so I suppose it serves its purpose that way. Anyway, check it out (gonna put a link in the sidebar soon) and I’m still working on the design side of it.

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