Resurfacing for the blog’s 14th anniversary & getting into virtual YouTubers

Erika Kurumi being smug in Heartcatch Pretty Cure!

Hey there. I realized a couple days ago that it’s been 14 years since I published my first anime blog post on May 14, 2006. The time feels longer than that to me while I’ve been looking through many of my older posts that I may eventually re-publish/salvage here from web archives. (Some posts are more embarrassing than others…) I still get small ideas of things to possibly write about but almost none have been strong enough to motivate me to compose actual blog posts.

I continue to telling myself that I’ll revive Sport in Fiction in the near future, even though I encounter the same sort of inertia that has long hampered my standard blogging. I would also like to chronicle any forthcoming attempts to slowly read Japanese manga – those might become blog posts or maybe just Twitter threads.

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Trying To Stay Motivated As A Thirty-Something

Mitsune’s shirt: “Don’t trust anyone over 30” (front cover of Love Hina manga volume 4)

Today is my 31st birthday and I’m in a contemplative mood.

Right now, I feel both connected to contemporary goings-on and disconnected from them: interacting with friends and other enthusiasts through Twitter and blogs but still not very familiar with video bloggers popular with younger groups of fans. In the past two years, I have lost interest in attending many convention eventsgiven up on keeping pace with new anime simulcasts, and reminisced about bygone and still active anime bloggers. There are hundreds of things I want to watch and read but I often succumb to indecision about which things to start watching or reading next. I experience moments of self-doubt where I ask myself “why am I still doing this?” and “what do I have to offer?” Continue reading

Returning After A Two-Month Blogging Hiatus

Wakaba-san at a water park.

It’s been a while since I’ve written a proper post so I’ll talk about what little I have been watching over the past few months and what I might make posts about in the near future.

I haven’t been keeping up with most of the summer anime series I started watching in July, mainly the ones with full-length episodes. (Here’s a general impressions post from that month with my feelings about 13 summer anime after seeing a couple episodes from each show.)

I’ll finish what I can over the coming weeks and maybe make a short wrap-up post for each one I complete. The same goes for many winter and spring 2015 series that I began without reaching their final episodes, although posts about those may come sometime after I get done with summer shows.

I was happy that Wakako-zake was eventually added to Crunchyroll’s simulcast lineup in mid-August.

The anime I’ve watched the most recently is the Dirty Pair TV series (1985) with the weekly SCCSAV Classics group – we’re about halfway through it after this past weekend’s batch of episodes. It’s been mainly episodic so far and some of the Lovely Angels’ adventures have been more entertaining than others.


Part of the time I didn’t spend watching anime was occupied by listening to music from various anime through the Music in Anime tumblr. I also participated in an episode of the Taiiku Podcast about Cinedigm’s first two-disc DVD set of ’90s basketball anime Slam Dunk. I haven’t listened to that particular episode yet, partly I don’t like hearing my own recorded voice.

We began by discussing some issues we had with the physical release and then moved onto talking about the content of the 14 episodes in that set. I liked what I saw in those episodes enough that I’d like to watch more of the series. If you’re curious about experiencing the English dub for yourself, the same episodes that were on that Cinedigm set are currently on Hulu. Meanwhile, the whole 101-episode series is still available on Crunchyroll with Japanese audio and English hardsubs.

Briefly looking ahead at the new crop of anime set to debut in October, I’m interested in checking out the following shows:

I haven’t made any progress on the Catching Up On Detective Conan project since my season 2 post at the end of May. The next things I need to watch for that are the 1st theatrical film (The Time-Bombed Skyscraper) and then season 3 as arranged by Funimation in North America, which begins with a double episode (The Mist Goblin Murder) and wraps up with a double episode featuring the debut of Kaitou Kid.

Taking Some Advice from “Build Your Anime Blog”


I’ve been blogging about anime, manga and related subjects for about nine years this month. I started on Wordpress.com and then moved to my own domain after seven months. At first, I wrote about news happenings and weekly episodes of Haruhi and Welcome to the NHK but then transitioned to more analytical posts at a less frequent update rate.

Despite how long I’ve been writing and occasionally getting review or press inquiries through emails, I don’t consider myself to be a big-name blogger. I’m not sure if I would want that distinction but I would like to interact more with my readers and other bloggers (a thought I expressed in a post looking back at older anime blogs) since I have sometimes felt like I’m writing into a void.

So I was interested in reading Lauren Orsini‘s new digital book Build Your Anime Blog (currently US $5.99 on Kindle Store), partly to get some advice on how to improve as a blogger but also to learn more about how fellow bloggers got started and continue to write.
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So I started a side blog this week


On Sunday, I began writing on a side blog that will focus on sports fiction (anime, manga, films, comics, etc.) and I’ve made a couple news-related posts on it so far. My intention is to cover smaller items that I likely wouldn’t bother fleshing out on here as well as profiling various sports series and other media. I also created a preliminary page to keep track of sports-related panels that have been presented at fandom conventions over the years since there’s been a growth in those, paralleling the popularity of simulcasted sports anime.

I’m still early on in this project so feel free to make suggestions on possible improvements.

Before Twitter and Tumblr: Thinking about older anime blogs

Seeing the above tweet by Spiritsnare last night sent me into a whirlwind of thinking about bygone and still surviving aniblogs that started in the previous decade (2000-2009). While memories were swirling around in my head, I realized that this May will be my ninth anniversary of blogging on a semi-regular basis – not as long as AWO has been podcasting (December 2005) but it feels like long in Internet time.

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