[This post is a product of my own creative bankruptcy and laziness ->]
I take anime blogging to be serious business. I don’t mean it in terms that anything I write is of lasting significance to the world, literatrue, or even the anime industry, not at all. It’s just that I put in very serious effort in producing/cooperating to produce writing and creative content — some of the time: Exhibits A, B, C, D, and E.
Many other times I rely on easy to execute mini-posts that can be written far in advance and scheduled for publishing almost regularly. See categories like listen to my song [->] and favorites of the week [->]. The big difference between the two is the work required to do the former is minimal, while the latter required quite a bit of thinking through. This is why I no longer do the latter. I completely failed to sustain it at all; utter fail.
Omisyth attempted to not only do the same format, but also add more content to it (as an in-between kind of post from editorials and episodic coverage. However, he failed to sustain it as well [->]. I’m not here to talk about Omisyth. I’m here to talk about the creative and the lazy.
By creative I mean the ability to come up with very clever content. It needn’t be a multi-media spectacle, it only needs to display an inspired idea (a subjective experience to be sure). I’m fairly creative, and very lazy. I’ll get back to me later. I’m going to mention three other bloggers who are not only some of my close friends in the sphere, but also some of the most wickedly creative people I know.
IcyStorm of Minimum Tempo
I like this post [->] very much. It’s a meta-review of True Tears episode 11 that mashed up a whole bunch of posts by other writers to communicate IcyStorm’s point of view. He didn’t write a single original word in the post. All the text, from the episode summary to the opinion are those of other bloggers, and yet the opinion isn’t necessarily held by most of the people he quoted. Clever and awesome.
And then there’s this series of posts: (1), (2), and (3). The first one is mediocre to begin with, and then you can really see the disintigration of effort in the succeeding posts. These posts are wrap-up reviews in the form of opinions. In the first post, the wheels fall off when he starts talking about Maria-sama ga Miteru 4th Season, where he just spammed the post with “TWIN DRILLS!” the same way comments used to be spamed with “DESU!” In the second post of the series, I submit my comment:
You said you loved Skip Beat! and that Kyoko is your favorite anime heroine without saying anything else except the ending sucked.
Everyone’s going to want to watch the show now. GJ.
Here’s his very telling reply:
Eh. I’m lazy. I could have gone into more detail, but meh.
In the third post, it’s not that IcyStorm didn’t try. He posted one image each to represent his opinions on the subject anime. His use of a roller-coaster photo to represent his experience of Toradora! is clever enough [->]. And yet this is a complete cop-out. This is the IcyStorm creative process:
- Awesome/inspired idea for a post or a series of posts; then
- Confrontation with the relatively massive amount of work required to do justice to it; finally
- Cop-out exectution; great justice is not served.
I argue that IcyStorm is capable of creativity, beyond blog posts I’ve brainstormed quite a bit with him over at IRC. In the case of his blogging, we see that his laziness got the better of him and that explains this Winter Anime wrap-up series I referenced.
lolikitsune of WE’RE FINALLY NOTDOTQ ANYMORE
Clearly one of my favorite people in the sphere, lolikitsune trolls with panache. One of my favorite posts of his I discovered while mining his archives. It’s quite interesting to note that the subject of the post is an acknowledgment that he has been outdone by Baka-Raptor who had employed a trollific convention, the Hisatsu: Maul Comment [->]. lolikit’s post is aptly titled, “trolling across space-time markets; also, lolikit pikchur” [->].
It had working graphs, a personal photograph, and read like a learned essay on trolling. There’s nothing to dislike!
But this post is almost a year old. 2009 lolikitsune reads like this [->]. The post is titled “i endorse eden of the east.” GO AHEAD, READ IT. IT WILL TAKE LESS THAN ONE SECOND TO TAKE IT ALL IN (never mind the comments).
Sure it’s clever. Truthfully I can’t help but applaud the cheekiness of it all. But taking into account most of the posts written by lolikit this year, it’s quite representative of his lazy writing (In before his real life concerns; real life is not a concern of animu blogging and I got his back in that front in my own way).
21stcenturydigitalboy of FUZAKENNA!
On the one hand, there are creative finds like these: (1), (2); then well-thought-out (and well-structured) reviews like this one on Casshern Sins [->], and a trifecta of hard work, guts, and joyful adventure in his series on moe: (1), (2), and (3); a reflection, an editorial, and finally a starter guide. I don’t agree with everything that’s said in those posts, but I had a blast reading/watching them and acknowledge the work and thinking that went into them. I got to work with him in the production of the starter guide. Dude is a beast.
On the other hand there are posts like these: (1) & (2). Both are examples of fanbaiting that can be smelled from oceans away. Seriously I am not an enemy of trolling (see my admiration of lolikitsune), but these posts are lazy-ass rushed wastes of fail. Both posts aren’t fundamentally bad. They have potential in rasing either solid discussion, massive lulz, or both. Neither delivered, because digiboy didn’t put in the same effort he’s put in the posts that I loved.
Now he’s spamming twitter and his blog with MADs. There are creative posts that can be made from these, but he isn’t working beyond just sharing them.
ghostlightning
I try to post every other day, and I normally don’t take shortcuts in content-making. The laziness in me manifests when editing my work. Some of my most successful posts discussion-wise are part-way filler posts, most notably this one [->] (seriously, 50 comments and 5 blog responses) where I was less preaching love and acceptance as much as I wanted to show dancing Gunpla to the musical stylings of the hare hare yukai. Considering this, and the crickets I get when I put in a ridiculous amount of thought and work into a post like this one [->] — surely there must be diminishing returns to the amount of work put in a post. So how exactly does the laziness manifest?
I have a nagging feeling that these posts: (1), (2), (3) could all have been either tighter, or broken up into multiple posts. I feel bad for the third post, a heartfelt but out-of-control deluge of words and media about how the Philippines has or had this love affair for a super robot, and how my generation is, to a degree defined by the relationtship to this anime (Choudenji Machine Voltes V). Sometimes it’s very easy to write a lot of words, it’s quite difficult to do the dental work to make the post as tight as it can be.
Jesus Minci I just wrote over 1200 words. orz.
We Remember Love 
As the author of a dorama blog, I fully endorse this post.
LOL you may be disappointed, because I really, really like all these guys and endorse them wholeheartedly – so they better write kick-ass posts so they don’t embarrass me.
I’m more poking fun at the category of this post (that is, in general, posts calling people out result in dorama) than its specific, actual likelihood of causing strife. 😛
I’d say more in this comment, but I’m too lazy.
And somehow I reply to this comment when I wasn’t planning to.
Too bad your blog has a fatal flaw: a fatal lack of the good doctor.
Great post and intriguing title. This post feels like one of those great frameworks that are super-difficult to maintain. I know I really enjoyed doing the interviews on SSAB, but it always took too long to really go through archives and come up with good questions so I gave up.
I’d like to see some more creative trolling. I mean if one must troll, it would be more entertaining if the troll did not 1) rehash a combo of lame 4chan memes that have no real relation to the essay subject (so many bloggers rely on this crap), and 2) rely on the same basic flamebait topics that cycle multiple times per year.
Could there ever be an Anime Onion?
Thanks! Ideally I could do this once a month, taking stock of writers/blogs and the trend of their posts… but I chose these 3 because we’re pretty tight and they’d get that I’m ‘remembering love’ rather than dumping on them.
Re Anime Onion, I think there’s enough talent in the sphere to make it happen. It’s not my core competency but I would certainly love to contribute.
We are all victims of Real Life. That big monster engulfs us all.
You are not a victim. There’s a Variable Fighter/Gundam with an open and empty cockpit somewhere always, telling you to SEIZE THE REINS OF HISTORY!
It is a fatal combination of real life obligations and ennui that hinders my activity.
Do remember, my kind sir, that I was supposed to contribute to a certain Macross project. Cough cough. I have an idea of what my alternate Frontier rendering would be, but I am not sure how should I go about in expressing my ideas in words. Maybe a chat with you might help. lol
^_^ I’m almost always on gtalk and in #oihayaku save weekends. I look forward to getting our stuff done, but no pressure man. Take care!
Well, that presupposes that there are enough people that get the joke. As responses to my April Fools’ column for AD showed, it can be difficult to gauge the right level of subtlety to use. I agree with our esteemed host that the talent for it exists, though I wonder whether the audience for it exists.
The audience exists. See the viewership stats and comments count on these ‘legendary posts’ [->].
Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to the Animu Onion, or something like that.
Anionion. Make it happen. NAO.
oh jesus VON SCHILLING will love it!
His blog is like it half the time, depending on your perspective.
Kabitzin can lead, I’ll follow. It should be an exclusive club and should arbitrarily disapprove applications and get rid of its own members at random.
That way there’s always enough spite, rage, and elbows rubbed the wrong way to fuel the uh, discourse.
Haha, I had the spurt of creativity, and now I am in the valley of laziness. I’d read it, though.
I realize that the anionion will always exist in some form as the ‘site we tell ourselves we’re awesome enough to make,’ only that we’re too lazy. So we’re trolling in the imaginary meta-space of the anionion, where you just abdicated your presidency – or even fired yourself in an act of inspired lulz.
I quit too!
lelangir, it’s all yours (and this dude’s [->]!
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Quality posting is going to be difficult, and part of that goes with the audience. Who is the audience? Other bloggers, casual readers, forum rollovers, randoms, Totali?
Some blogs are quite clearly, non-blogger, quick news/episode/industry pure-reader targeting (ie RC). My own blog, is often targeted at the aniblogger community, since most of the crap I’ve written in the last year is about methods, standards, tools, theory, or whatever other meta. But, for a moment let’s escape the whole blogger, non-blogger thing and look at it this way:
There are those who are purely anime/J-oriented and those that are blog-aware. The former are pure-readers, who generally like J-media, but read blogs with little attachment/concern about “the blogosphere.” The latter are usually bloggers, or soon-to-be bloggers, who have an interest in not only the J side of things, but also status in the blogosphere. The blog-aware could be considered a superset attribute. The non-blog-aware really don’t give a damn about trackbacks or linking other blogs (sad, but true).
I believe a similar understanding is out there in the subconscious of writers, and I’m glad to see many writing for the non-blog-aware. I think the main issues which debilitates creativity is this audience persona, the necessity of promptness (Canned Dogs), or the ability to churn out posts which are either update-to-date, a meaningful editorial, or a well-taken gesture (Omisynth’s recent posts). It’s confusing to try and consider what/for whom to write, so we should just write, no? No, laziness is embedded, and the solution is non-writer smackdown… the editors.
This mostly goes back to the idea of a blogger-generated, editor tweaked, content-delivery which entirely primes these sparkling notions, which could have been so much more. But, it’s likely not possibly without editors, and even then the time-delay to priming a blogger’s post for the pure-readers may be dated and virtually expired.
So I don’t know, maybe bloggers need to circle jerk behind the scenes in order to boost each others’ writing. I’ve not the slightest clue. In any case, it’s tough to not be lazy about blogging sometimes… that goes for all bloggers in every part of the web.
Editors…
I think this is brilliant. But who? It would take a highly blog and audience aware writer to perform this capacity. Riex at OH did this to some degree, but there were so many of us that I’m not sure if the drafts could’ve been discussed or revised to their best possible releases.
Also we had a ‘public’ view of each other’s drafts. There are discussions at times, but not a lot. This goes to show that even in a team blog one may not get the editorial support that I’m beginning to idealize from your comment.
I would suppose a non-active blogger may be contacted to do this, if s/he is so interested. I think I’ll go beg coburn now.
The general best-case scenario would be a non-blogger, and vicious. It’s pretty much a standard thing in pro-publishing (both online and print). I originally made that suggestion on the OH first recruit post, but it’s a tough position to be on top of rabid
lolikitsbloggers.Okay, got it! I may have a few people in mind. They probably can’t work on every single post, but some posts that I’ve put in a lot of effort already may benefit from this level of editing. Thanks!
Colony Drop uses editors, in the sense that we edit each others posts, so it clearly isn’t very difficult.
As for editing at OH, how much effort does it take to edit a post filled with YouTube videos?
Try posting every day then.
There were legitimate attempts, and by and large the posts were following a direction set by Riex who had the vision for the blog. It just ended before it could deliver most of what it hyped.
Consider that its goal was to post every weekday. To post consistent quality on a daily basis is a very tall order for loosely-knit amateurs and novices across the planet.
Was it an unrealistic goal, perhaps. Not all of us were happy with the quality each of the members were putting out, but for better or worse we gave it a go while it lasted.
Some of your posts are really good, and I’ve quoted one. Your schtick of being full of contempt for anime blogs… is it really working though? Oh, maybe you are being completely honest and really do feel you’re so much better than everyone and that you need to rub it in everyone’s faces. Are you really happy being this way?
My reasoning is that most, if not all bloggers are amateurs, including myself — never mind my own credentials. The newbies (I’ve only been writing about anime for six months), for them to be dismissed and to be treated with contempt by people who claim to represent a high standard is wholly without class.
Posting everyday is silly if you’re just posting for the sake of posting. That kind of requirement just gets you garbage like posts that consist wholly of YouTube embedded videos or chat logs.
I mean, chat logs for crying out loud. If you’re going to stoop down to that level just for the sake of posting every day, scale back your ambitions to something more reasonable. Colony Drop has something like seven or eight writers and we’re lucky when we get out more than five posts per month, but I would say post-for-post we have the highest standard of quality of anime blog out there.
Which speaks of the sad state of anime blogging than it does our quality.
I don’t think we’ve ever pretended to represent a high standard, but we are well aware of the fact that we don’t suck. Newbie bloggers are great, but what we need more of is actual quality writing, not YouTube videos, single episode summaries with tons of screenshots, chat logs, and pathetic attempts at intellectually analyzing stupid cartoons.
Like I said, it wasn’t a reasonable ambition, even if every writer only posted twice a month. What’s more, there was a problem with the writers maintaining their own competing anime blogs.
Comparing the work of the authors in their own blogs vs. their output on OH! I can’t say that OH! got the best of their talent even half the time.
It may take years for writers to improve, given that we can’t really say blog-writing is training or is a workshop. There are all kinds of back channels you can use if you’re really interested in making writers better.
After all you’ve been presenting yourselves as authorities, going as far as flashing your credentials (or at least claim that you have them).
by Sean – November 15 2008 [->]
by Colony Drop Staff – February 6 2009 [->]
You said just now that “I don’t think we’ve ever pretended to represent a high standard,”
Yes you did, real subtle too.
Perhaps anime blogging’s problem isn’t shit-poor posting habits, its people’s inability to detect sarcasm and even overt absurdity.
I am anime blogging now? As in I represent the problems with it?
Seriously that’s your attempt at sarcasm? As in, sarcasm being the enabling communicator of the content of your post meant to correct the problem of anime bloggers?
And with the quality of this sarcasm, you claim
Consider sticking to good anime reviews. That’s something you’re actually good at. I’ve no problem acknowledging your merits. You may want to work on identifying yours too for reals.
FUCK I RED UR COMMENT AND GOT TROLLED
Dorama not related.
Oh inadvertent irony!
The main problem I find with my writing a dorama review, btw, is not lack of content but complete lack of time to give each episode the proper treatment it deserves. Conveying context, etc. and finding proper pictures can be a pain.
Banding together with other writers would eliminate some of this, but then the issue of conflicting writing styles would arise. The Onion tries for a certain style and generally sticks to it.
I can’t really disagree that a certain amount of you-scratch-my-back-and-I’ll-scratch-yours is needed in a self-promoted environment as the blogo[humorous shape name of choice], but there’s a definite point, especially in a hobby-oriented group as the anime community, when the hobby ceases to be “anime” and becomes “the blog”. Ideally the two would augment each other and there would be a perfect balance of back-scratching and reality-checking, but that never happens.
I know, or have heard rumors to the tune of, that some feel that some bloggers love their blog more than they do anime, and while this might not be strictly true in any sense (I hope I am not opening up a can of worms here) in some cases anime does seem to become the means to an end, viz. recognition via a blog. I get kind of edgy and nervous whenever I see a book (or, worse, read a blog post) that talks about the need of the ambitious blogger to market oneself aggressively, which can turn into an addiction. It’s almost, at times, like we need a Blogoholics Anonymous service.
I say all this with the full knowledge that I am extremely terrible and reluctant for aggressive self-marketing (or even tepid self-marketing, at times), but I tend to feel a little uneasy when I feel as though I (or even anyone else) am nothing but a commodity. My blog’s a part of me, not the other way around.
Anime I undoubtedly love, and Macross most of all, but in the spirit of this juicy comment of yours I want to do some self-examination.
Blogging is a fulfilling hobby, it allows me to perform experiments in the following related hobbies:
1. writing (literary appreciation mostly)
2. marketing and promotion (through internet media)
3. observation and commentary on social dynamics (through internet media)
We aren’t commodities, fundamentally. We’re only treated as such. It can’t be helped. There is a limited number of eyeballs that can view our posts. The readers buy our creative content, paid with the currency of attention (page views, comments, track backs).
But that doesn’t make you a commodity to your most important audience: yourself and your own satisfaction.
Oh, it’s a fine hobby (or para-hobby or whatever); I tend to use it more for 1) than I do for 2) or 3) (I get uneasy every time I have to or feel like I have to go around talking about how totally awesome I am). There’s a bit of self-marketing, in the sense that I comment on other people’s blogs every so often, but I prefer to live life, not live blog.
No blogger (least of all me) ever goes anywhere without some kind of readership, but I discovered (eventually) that simply spending the time to sit and think for a couple hours every so often, trying to put wordless thoughts about something into words, and the subsequent mental satisfaction and other personal effects it has were far more important than “lots of comments” or “lots of hits”. I believe, as a result of my blog, I somehow totally changed (without really changing) how I consume fiction (not just anime), and that’s worth far more to me than ego-boosting or monetary gain. And, taken in moderation, neither really hurts.
…is very fine too. Keep doing what you do!
Meta is fun but anime is more fun IMNSHO. Better to catch a few episodes of some show you’re not watching than to write about stupid words like anibloggostratospherichyperarena. Or call people fags. Well, it’s always fun to call people fags, if that’s your thing.
But obviously ghostthunderdude is being lulz here, so maybe the fail is the amount of funnies. I think it’s one thing to trash *chan meme and troll styles, it’s another to actually being able to deliver it effectively. It’s not so easy.
Hey man, I’m not dumping on anyone in the post. I really wanted to write about creativity and laziness. The people I referenced are those who trust me that I’m not dumping on them – which should explain the lack of outrage from them. I just didn’t want to write just about myself. Any lulz I generated is secondary if not accidental.
Yes, if you’re willing to be a pot who calls the kettle black — not to be racist.
I’m a lazy blogger too, and have times where I’m out of creativity. I’ve been meaning to write posts about certain shows (remember when I was watching Macross 7? I wanted to write about it, but couldn’t find an interesting approach on it!), but the half-baked drafts I work on never see the light of day. Hell, I couldn’t even cover the AGP in its entirety! 😦
However, I don’t let it get to my head, since there are always other shows to write about.
I feel you man, I haven’t really written about Macross 7 either beyond advocating it in posts that talk about other things Macross.
One thing I do to get myself going is to post comments. There are lots of posts that I can contribute in the discussion one way or another. And since comments are shorter than posts, it can at times be enough to get me started writing in earnest.
Wait I thought I was the MAD spammer on Twitter. I must defend my reputation lolz.
After that useless note, I will just say that we’re clearly not worthy of the creativity of the bloggers you mentioned (including you), whether a post may be trolling or not. I personally don’t embark in the ways of the troll, in that I freaking don’t know how to make a bad (meaning so bad it’s good) joke. Sometimes I don’t even get in-jokes from the (self-coined) aniblog trollosphere because I miss a lot of posts, because I’m busy with real life.
I think many of our readers feel left out the same way as me. As Ryan A put it, we have different kinds of audiences. So I hope some kind of content-delivery system can emerge where creative posts won’t get lost too easily within the aggregators and feeds.
But then again, my fault for being lazy to read as well.
The way I see it, even for editorial blogs there are ‘meat and potatoes’ or in our case ‘fish and rice’ kinds of posts. These are reliable works of writing that communicates a point of view. Examples are first impressions, previews, reviews, news-centric, and fanboying/advocacy posts.
While one may not win new readers on the strength of these, one can keep the won readers coming back.
Every now and then however, we can put in the work and try to wow people: whether through being informative, thought-provoking, funny, media-rich, or all of the above.
While I think one can attempt to do so in every single post, the frequency of writing will dramatically decrease.
a bit of a comment off of what Ryan said. To me the the main purpose of the internet as a whole is data gathering. i’m like a little fat cyberrat running around looking for juicy bits of information. So when I read a blog spot I want to learn about a show, or about circumstances surrounding the show, or even simply opinions of the show, just as long as they’re opinions I can use profitably. Now,the blogger out there is not going to now what data I can use and what is useless to me, so s/he’s at my mercy. Bottom line is, if you’re writing something and you feel that zero cyberrats are going to want to take away what you’re trying to give them, you might as well throw that post out before it sees the light of day. Or something..
So the net is a tool for gathering information that can be consumed and appreciated at the discretion of the consumer? Ok got it.
There’s almost always someone who’s going to consume your content, even if it’s just your wife. Try looking up long tail economics and the beauty and power of niches upon niches. You and I both operate in narrow niches: you with appreciation for Leiji Matsumoto and me with Macross.
We both write about other subjects (moe, more popular mecha anime) not only to break the monotony but also to reach out to other readers who may then turn to Matsumoto or Macross if we make them interested enough (trust in our writing/taste etc.)
digitalboy: posts so often that his bullshit posts are perfectly forgivable. I have a soft spot for posts that dish out opinions without trying too hard to dissect or rationalize them. Gut reactions are honest, and digitalboy is quite possibly the most unabashedly honest blogger out there.
lolikit: his website was pretty good back when he was gay for me. Everything went downhill once he started chasing after girls.
IcyStorm: melts when the weather gets warm. He’ll be back in action by November.
ghostlightning: likens this to crickets?
yyyess but very BIG, JURASSIC CRICKETS.
Kidding aside, this post was written in under two hours. Most of the work went into fixing the links. Why, because I’ve read all these posts referenced many times, including the posts that they referenced. Actually, I read your post first (the one lk referenced) before discovering his.
So this actually supports the diminishing returns on effort theory in blog content creation.
Jesus Minci…I approve of this meme.
Anyway, as icy demonstrated, our notions of “content” are expanded when we consider meta-content as content in its own right. Hence anitations.
I haven’t posted a “real” post in quite some time, but that’s simply due to lazyness and schoolwork. Music blogging and anitating is fairly easy though.
Jesus Minci, superior to Jesus Yamato.
But of course!
In response to lelangir: THIS
Lazy bloggers I’ve made my point, but as you’ve demonstrated by citing comments made for your own posts, readers are lazy too.
This post actually supports the diminishing returns on effort theory in blog content creation.
Music blogging is easy? I must have missed the memo on that somewhere along the lines… D:
Holy shit, did I just get called out?!
There’s a reason for my laziness. My posts aren’t going up on anime nano anymore so no one is reading them. So I have been really in the mood to do a creative post but don’t want to because of that.
But you’ve pegged me wrong on the two posts you highlighted. The hate post, yes, it’s pretty lazy. However, I wrote it in the exact same way I wrote all of my other top 10-20 posts. Same formula, same ideas, even took the same amoun of time. Those are all shows I really hate, too. But I admit, I wrote it because of the post that came before it.
And the Eden post was not trolling. It was an honest opinion. I thought the show was useless bullshit that sucked hard ass and those are the real reasons I hated it. Now, I was compelled to post about it in part because of people loving the show so much, but the show really did infuriate me when I watched it.
And like I said, if my blog was working on Nano, I’d be trying. I have a lot I want to say about these MADs but my audience is currently closed off. It’d be like putting on a stage show with the curtain closed.
Thought so. Just be sure that I’m not dumping on you, but rather remembering love for the awesome posts you did.
You know you could’ve done much more with the post on the shows you dislike, if you thought more about it. Don’t be too caught up in blog stats and all that, not that they aren’t important to me too — just don’t let it dictate what you write. The best posts are the timeless ones, so they’re worth putting work in.
I’d love to be able to ignore my stats, but it’s hard because I am really, really tring to promote my blog. I’m sure you’ve noticed my comments on a lot more blogs lately and stuff like that, all in the name of promotion. Plus I’ve actually been watching current shows.
But really, this is probably healthy for me and my blog. Because as much as I love popularity and want to keep up with the season, as I do every time I’ve started to realize that it’s just not as fun. I’d go so far as to say I fucking hate watching shows while they air. I don’t think I’m capable of really enjoying a show this way. The past week or so, because I couldn’t blog airing shows, I stopped watching them, and in my insane amount of lethargy I stopped watching anything but niconico videos for like a week.
And then you know what? I totally forgot about the current season – because I don’t really care that much about these shows. I can’t care about a show that I watch at this speed. Except Pandora Hearts, I can keep up with that, but it might even be out of this sick reasoning that I’m the only one watching it lol.
And as of last night/today I’ve started watching Clannad. And I’ll probably watch the whole show, do some posts and a review on it, and then afterward I’ll probably start posting the way I’m used to – non-current and whatever the fuck I want. I always bounce back, bro.
I blame it all on Spring Break.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I can read the fun that went into the content creation. The posts of yours I like, the fun was easy to spot. Real easy. So do what you need to do to have fun with anime again. It’ll show up in the writing. That’s what I think anyway.
So what category does this post fall into? XD
But on a more serious point, I think ultimately it falls on whether a blogger feels obligated to post, and also, obligated to try to get his/her post read. Of course, the very act of creating a public blog seems to imply the answer to the previous two points is a “yes”, but I think that process ends up turning one into a mere supplier of words for the blog instead of the blog an outlet for your thoughts after awhile. Ideally, I think a blogger should strive to be read, but never let site statistics constrain, or force a post. Then again, I’m not exactly a blogger myself (my own sit is more an idea dump that I put stuff in at my leisure than a blog), so my ability to offer actual criticism is vastly limited.
Low effort, high response post that can be heartbreaking trust me. If fully supports the diminishing returns on effort theory in blog content creation theory.
What I told Baka-Raptor:
I see the point of what you’re saying. Consider though, that many people who write in blogs use it too as training for their writing/language skills. Also, some harbor fantasies of doing this commercially so blog popularity and high readership are fundamental measures of success.
For me, when someone like Iknight or Baka-Raptor or Owen or Martin or lolikit writes an awesome post, I feel like I want to write one too in may own fashion. It’s a big motivator for me, to be able to write with comparable quality with people you actually enjoy reading.
In that case, would you think it’s fair to say we put far more effort into being consumers of blogging than producers of it?
For some of us, yes.
At times I feel that way. I started out lurking in anime blogs for months. Then commenting here and there. I’m lucky that I discovered blogs that I happened to love first: Owen’s then Iknights. This sort of spoiled me to the level of content that I want to make. Sometimes when writing very about narrow niches (i.e. mecha) there’s not a lot of useful posts to reference. So it’s pretty much my own viewing and resources like Mecha Anime Headquarters.
No mention yet of a certain ED? Sorry, couldn’t resist it; I checked out the newly-released singles last night.
I’ve stumbled upon these guys when running a blog search on certain animes. Usually fun reads, lots of lulz, some dorama, some flaming, but I think I’ll still be a forum guy for a while. (Haven’t really got my new blog going; got to finish off my old blog first. And the new blog’s not entirely for anime but includes my other geeky interests.)
I’ve joined two forums recently: The Macrossworld Forums, and Mecha Talk 2. Both are very good places where one can have solid discussions with people who bring lots of information to the table.
However, forums don’t let me create the kind of content I can do here and in other blogs. Let me know when your new site is up, and stop using blogger (I used to, it sucks).
I always have something I want to write about, it’s just a matter of efforts and time. lol in that sense I suppose I am lazy.
As Ryan A said above, laziness is part of the whole thing. Sometimes I’m even too lazy to watch anime. Right now I’m taking advantage of a creative ‘mood,’ knowing fully that these things don’t last. Posts you’ll get to see done by me over the rest of this week and into the next are all written between Monday and tomorrow.
Ahem.
Funny is extremely hard. And even harder to come across.
I CAN ONLY PUT OUT SO MUCH FUNNY IN THE ARMY.
I agree. But armies are a comedy goldmine. Stop being lazy and put out the funnies.
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[ID SOJOURNER]
I like to watch people blog about anime more than I like watching anime itself.
All I have to say is that I worry that I might be called out next. :v
Write more posts! ^_^
Haha… is this a subtle insult?!
I know, right? 😛
Of course not. I don’t do insults. Which is why when I kid around I TYPE IN ALL CAPS AND RESORT TO BLATANT NAME-CALLING.
Because the Simpson’s taught me that name-calling is the last resort of the vanquished… which means if delivered in a certain spirit it should be endearing rather than insulting.
So, to revise:
WRITE MORE POSTS YOU LAZY-ASS BORDERLINE LURKER!
For all that digitalboy’s post on East of Eden is pure hate-baiting, it does raise a point I’ve made numerous times before, that in blog reviews some shows get let off the hook way to easily, while others get subject to normal or even extreme criticism for completely arbitrary reasons. I just think he’s looking in the wrong place when he implies that K-On is being victimized. Honestly out of any series to start this season K-On takes the cake (literally in some cases) for most overhyped/overrated show, bar none. And like one commenter said over there, one could just as easily start on a rant about how K-On or any other show this season sucks and bring up a ton of valid points if they look hard enough, but it won’t amount to much more then a rant against the fans and a time wasting hate on.
As for the rest of the article, this is unfortunately the case with the blogosphere. For every well written, thought out and informative post there are about 10 where you are lead to wonder why anybody felt it was necessary to write it in the first place.
Just to add one more thing to this whole discussion on, hype, criticism, praise, rage, hate, and realism, I think it’s going to have to wait until the current generation of anime fandom remembers (learns?) how to objectively suspend disbelief instead of what currently amounts to subjectively suspending it by the series before we can make any progress in levelling out and settling our differences of preference.
Yes, one can decide early on whether one is interested, but to declare awesomeness (to distinguish the wishful thinking the way I preach Shin Mazinger Z) or outright awfulness is premature.
First impressions are there to generate interest, or to declare one’s lack of interest in a show after it throws its first pitch so to speak. We can even recommend based on these.
However there’s simply no data that will spell out that either Eden of the East, K-ON!, Saki or whatever current show as bad or awesome after one or two episodes.
The premises for each can be enough for a viewer to make a decision, but it’s not enough to unilaterally dismiss or applaud a show.
That won’t stop people though.
Nope won’t stop them, but hey at least with don’t have to get the cliche of the Sunrise show being the one to get negatively prejudged by the sheer virtue of there not actually being one for bloggers to mindlessly bash on this season. It kind of makes for a different experience since now I can’t say anything show has been negatively prejudged this season.
K-On! was just an example. Not even a good one, but I felt like I had to us a current show for the example.
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I think I fall into the total fail category as a blogger, I need someone to kick me into using my creativity.
Though our chat today just gave me a hella wicked idea!
Keep communicating with people, but don’t let twitter suck your will to blog. Ask lelangir. Looking forward to what you got coming up ^_^