Posts Tagged “Self”

I don’t know exactly how long this was implemented (a week ago?) but Yukan Blog’s categorical annotated blog list has the potential to assist people in finding new blogs of particular strains, be they week-to-week episode chronicling, intellectual, humorous, varied in content, comprised of many writers, those of the Yukan staff, or yet to be filtered into a particular classification. (’Kings of Funny’ is gender-specific but its intent is understood.) Although I found only a handful of new blogs that interested me in an initial run through all classifications, others may have more success in discovering different voices that resonate with their prose-reading personalities.

This blog can be found under “little of everything” (i.e. miscellany) accompanied by the following, as of this writing:

When you don’t feel like watching anime for a while, CalAggie is here to deliver all the news! Not once has he blogged a particular episode or review any movies (or so blissmo thinks), so this is definitely the place to be if you just want to be updated with all the latest gossip in the Anime World. CalAggie is also an awesome guy himself, who started a Podcast a while back but is also willing to join the Podcast at Yukan if he can too. CalAggie is brilliant at wording his thoughts and his blog is really pretty. He also had an old blog some time back, and this is now his new one! CalAggie is a man searching to fill in his spare time.

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I’m currently selling some of my anime DVD’s because I need some money for next month’s rent and also I want to free some shelf space. (Can’t believe I got myself in this situation in the first place…) Anyway, I already sold some to people in my anime club during the past few weeks but there are still a number of them remaining so I decided to just put them up for auction. The first group of auctions ends around 1:30am-2am PST 11/26, the other around 2:30pm-3pm PST that same day, all but one have Buy It Now options, and I’ll be shipping them by Media Mail. Listings below the fold!
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If you have been unable to access many aspects of this blog for the past couple days, that problem was fixed this afternoon when I upgraded the blog’s software to Wordpress 2.2. (It was previously on version 2.1). I made a post last night (please go back and read it!) and then realized I couldn’t access my own stats page or users online page so I decided to upgrade and although that happened to solve the problem, I doubt that was the actual issue.

Next, a little bit of personal news: I hurt my left elbow while biking to campus today and my left arm is now in a sling and my wrist in a brace with what the doctor at the student health center called a “radial head fracture”. I will attempt to continue making posts over the next couple weeks but it will take longer than usual as I will be typing (read: pecking at keys) using only my right hand. Perhaps I should try some voice recognition software…or just scan in handwritten stuff… Anyway, I hope that recovery will be quick so I can get back to my normal way of life.

Finally, I’ve come to the conclusion that I likely will not be able to finish the manga reading project that I set upon a couple months ago but I’ll try to read as many volumes as I can and write mini-reviews for whatever I end up completing.

Okay, I know I haven’t made a post in a couple weeks but I am not dead. I was just busy with school and distracted by many things like a trial subscription to Blockbuster Online. Also I didn’t have much inspiration to write about anything in particular. Hopefully there will be a flurry of manga postings over the next week as I try to get as close to finishing the Buncha Manga project as I can before next Saturday.

For those of you who care, my panel at Fanime will be Saturday at 1pm in Panels room #1 (aka the Santa Clara room) at the Hilton Hotel. Some of the other panels I am interested in checking out are Blogs and Anime Popularity (the other blogging one with Lolikit), Mad About MADs, and of course the industry panels. Apparently, there will be a maid cafe as well so I’ll try to stop by and take pictures.

Also, something from the May 11th edition of the Anime Corner Store newsletter caught my eye:

- TOUKA GETTAN ANIME AIRING EPISODES IN REVERSE ORDER -
The creators of the Touka Gettan supernatural anime series have acknowledged on their blog that the twenty-six episodes have been airing in deliberate reverse order from the chronological story. The first episode (which aired on April 2) told the ending of the story arc, and each successive episode has been going backward in time to tell how the ending came about.

I haven’t seen Touka Gettan yet so can anyone confirm that that the ordering is like that and if it works as a narrative device?

OK, on Friday I turned into the Education Abroad Office at my college my enrollment packet for a summer abroad program (Japanese Culture in Film) to take place in Kyoto, Japan, from June 29 to July 28. I was told I am fourth on the waiting list since it filled up quickly so I’m hoping people drop in the next couple months. Not damn likely but I can still hope.

So my backup plan for overseas learning this summer is Düsseldorf, Germany, during the month of August and taking a course called “Germany under Hitler’s Third Reich”. And I know a good amount of German so that might help me get around there better than not knowing kanji and walking around Japan. Still, I know a friend who was the first one to sign up for the Kyoto trip so I’d prefer to go there than Deutschland, at least for this summer.

Anyway, I set up a separate blog to document my attempts and experiences with the study abroad program. There’s only one post there now but it should pick up around mid-April as more stuff happens. Wish me luck, guys (and gals)!

Maybe the pure power of the aniblogsphere can influence the situation…or not…

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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My so-so meatball lunch at the IKEA restaurant

Over the past two days, I’ve been moving stuff into my new apartment and tonight will be my first night sleeping there. My roommate’s cool but I have a couple problems right now: there’s no Internet and one of the outside windows is broken. It seems that I’m not alone in the lack of connectivity department; I heard some guy down the hall (Mike, I think?) calling a friend about it. So right now I’m using my university library’s wi-fi connection to post this. I’m also going to file a repair request tomorrow to fix the window. Read the rest of this entry »

When Pokemon debuted on American television, I started watching it and eventually got the Game Boy games. At the same time, I got hooked on Digimon. I followed both series for probably about a year or two and then quit Pokemon after the Ruby/Sapphire characters and May were introduced. I kept with Digimon until the fourth season, you know, the one where the kids transformed into monster forms. That was also when the show stopped airing on Fox Kids and went to syndication on my local UPN station.

Soon after Digimon began, I also started occasionally watching Cardcaptors, Yu-Gi-Oh!, and Shaman King. I also remember that Moncolle Knights and Escaflowne were on Fox Kids at one time but I didn’t really watch them because they didn’t seem that interesting to me, a middle-school student.

My real push toward true otakudom began with Toonami and flipping through channels at night. On Cartoon Network, there was a late Saturday evening programming block called the Video Entertainment System or something like that. I started to watch some shows on there like Rurouni Kenshin, Yu Yu Hakusho, .hack//SIGN and kept watching because I liked them.

In (I think) the year 2002, I started to watch Adult Swim, for which I suppose I was a few years “underage”. However, most of the Comedy shows on there like Home Movies and Futurama I had already seen on primetime network television so I felt that I was mature enough. After the Toonami/VES block ended, the Adult Swim block started and included shows like Big O, Inuyasha, Furi Kuri, and Kikaider. Soon after that, I followed Wolf’s Rain and I’ve continued to tape anime on Adult Swim, most recently Evangelion, Ghost in the Shell, and s-CRY-ed.

The third step was acquiring a thirst for fansubs. I had previously downloaded single, subbed episodes of various shows off eDonkey as well as some of the Digimon movies. It really wasn’t until an issue of Newtype USA (December 2002), which had a cover story on .hack, caught my eye in a Borders (or was it Barnes & Noble) bookstore. The pack-in DVD was alright; it had the first episode of Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi on it as well as some trailers for other ADV Films offerings. In the magazine itself, though, were articles on the first three series I saw from start to finish on fansubs: Full Metal Alchemist, Scrapped Princess, and Chrno Crusade.

My DVD collection, in terms of anime, started when I saw a used copy of Noir volume 1 at Blockbuster one day. I had gone in there for a 2 for $20 previewed sale and ended up also buying “American Splendor” and “Kill Bill Vol. 1″. I came home and watched my purchased discs in the standalone DVD player I got that summer for my birthday. My desktop computer already had a DVD-ROM drive in it so I’d previously watched DVDs in my bedroom, but this standalone player connected to the TV. This convenience allowed me to lay on my bed and watch movies. After finishing the first Noir disc, I wanted to see the rest of the series. So I started to buy used copies of the other 6 volumes as well as those of other series.

There was an Anime Club at my high school but I had already entwined myself in many extracurricular activities like Yearbook and German Club. When I joined the collegiate, I joined the club here and also signed up for the newsletter of a couple of student organizations (College Dems & ACLU). I probably should go to one of their meetings one of these days. Oh, yeah, and the high-speed campus ethernet has very much helped me quench my thirst for fansubs. ^L^

I have thought about making an anime/Japanese culture blog for a while but never got around to it until now. I decided that I had come to the point where I needed to express my observations and complaints about anime, manga, and Japanese culture in general.

Mostly I’ll write short column-style posts about a subject or just focus on an anime I recently revisited. I am not trying to be an “official” anime blogger, like Jeff Lawton and the other well-read people in the anime blogosphere, and post episodes summaries with screenshots and I don’t really want to be. If there is something interesting in something I happen to be watching that I’d like to point out (like puns in Yakitate!! Japan), I will make a post about it. But there are not going to be posts titled “Blood+ 15″. Remember that.

And now, the reason why this is named “Part-Time Otaku”. I don’t really have a lot of time to devote to this blog because I’m a second-year undergraduate student with lectures, papers, and finals (OH MY!); I will probably start working soon, which will leave me with less free time. I also am interested in many other subjects than Japanese culture. These include politics, philosophy, economics, and linguistics. I might post about these things intermittmently if I can articulate them clearly but I’ll try to maintain the focus on Japanese culture.

Also, when reading this blog, keep in mind that my language background is as a native English speaker and a beginning to intermediate German speaker. [I took some German in high school and am currently taking a three-quarter series of classes to fulfill a foreign language requirement.] As such, I know little to no Japanese (some katakana and hiragana but no kanji) and those few words that I do know I learned from…you guessed it, watching anime. Words like nii-san, kanojo, onna, sekai, tenshi, chigau, etc. I would like to learn Japanese someday but as I said, I’m currently taking German. Maybe senior year, I could try but I think I would probably suck at writing the characters out, especially kanji so I might be limited to conversational Japanese.

About my otakudom, I would say it is about at intermediate level. I have never visited Japan, cosplayed, or been to a convention. However, I would like to do all of those things at least once in my life. I have probably 20-25 DVDs of various series and have purchased a few manga volumes. I think I’ve been to Japantown in San Francisco five times. I’m currently a member of my college’s Anime Club and may soon become an officer of that club. I suppose my thirst for anime started in 1999 or so, Digimon came on the air here in America. This first post is getting to be pretty long so I’ll probably cover “My Road to Otakuhood” in my next post.

So, I already have a couple ideas of things to talk about including licensing, “off vocals”, and the art of Japanese puns. I will strive to make posts at least once a week, although my ultimate goal would be to regularly post twice a week and perhaps use a webcam every once in a while for fun and effect. Now I have to get a webcam…that costs money. But my first task is to create some header art so I have some customization.