Archive for the “Uncategorized” Category

I was reading The Sacramento Bee (my local newspaper) today when I spotted the above – the Haruhi DVD collection being mentioned in the Scene section’s To-Do List. It’s kind of odd to see something like that there but I guess it’s worth mentioning to the greater Sacramento area, some of whom might be willing to give it a chance. I don’t know where Rachel Leibrock saw rumors of a film adaptation – maybe she was referring to the second season?

Also: Addict-O-Matic can be kind of cool depending on what you are searching for.

I was looking through the old Animerica issues I bought at Sac-Anime and found a short focus piece in the August 1999 issue: “Be An Anime Missionary”. Some of the advice Tom Root gives for bringing your friends into the fray may be dated with Battle Chasers and FFVII references but other elements are still viable such as the diversity in convention attendees. Reading this and the other issues I got give me a sense of where the fan community was nine years ago; actually I have one from December 1996 when laserdiscs were being sold at $45 a pop alongside VHS sub or dub releases. For some reason, I enjoy reading about the American market before it really began to grow. Anyway, I also found a couple neatly worded ads, which I put after the cut.
Read the rest of this entry »

I got home from classes about an hour ago and found in my mailbox a letter from Newtype USA. “Oh great!” I thought, “this will probably explain how the transition to PiQ will work!” The first sign that there was something odd was that the return address was in Maple Shade, NJ, and not Houston, TX. I opened the letter and found out that it was asking me renew my subscription since I have two issues left. What?!?
Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday I found an online tool called the Blog Readability Test from a post on Evil Avatar that is supposed to test “what reading level is required to understand your blog”. I assume it applies some kind of reading-level algorithm after searching the front page of whatever website you type in; Mental Floss [via Game|Life] thinks it’s likely an implementation of the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level Formula. I guess the results could be interpreted as an indicator of whether you should simplify or tune up your writing depending on if you are targeting a particular audience and who that audience is. The below results were obtaining by entering the main site addresses so readability results will very likely vary among individual full-length posts.

WARNING: This is not meant to be criticism of any particular blogger(s), but rather just as a interesting post about artificial classifications of writing. So don’t flame me, blame the formula!
Read the rest of this entry »

Goddamn! I woke up this morning to check my anime blog newsfeed on Google Reader (which FINALLY got a search addition last week!) and found a bunch of posts about gender in anime, most of them lengthy. I’m not supposed to be reading essays while on vacation, although I guess it does prepare me for reading to class in a couple weeks. I’m adding this topic to the lineup for my revival of a Talkshoe podcast (starts in less than 2 hours!) and probably later today I will compose my own reflective piece about the subject after I’ve read other people’s entries and talked about it for a bit on air.

I’ve decided not to attempt to link to the related posts at the moment because the list would become outdated in an hour. For now you can search for “gender” on Anime Nano or the newly revamped AnimeBlogger Antenna and find them yourself. I will probably include links to the revelant posts if I decide to quote other people in my planned writing but I still haven’t decided whether it will be one where I comment on everyone else’s views or just my own opinion on gender roles in contemporary Japanese animation. Reluctant to combine them though ’cause that would make it hella long.