Mono no aware

A few days off work have eased a bit of the writer’s block but I must admit that my K-On! post stubbornly refuses to leave Draft Rewrite Hell. Anyway. A little late given that Global Shinkai Day was last weekend, I feel the need to hammer out more strings of words to mark the event. It’s pretty neat to have a special time set aside to raise awareness for a filmmaker…we should have a Global Kon or Oshii day sometime in the year too.

Given the context, “What she said.”

I’ve rewatched the various bits of the Shinkai back catalogue but it was nice to have an excuse to marathon them all in one go (She and Her Cat, Voices of a Distant Star, Place Promised in our Early Days, 5cm Per Second and Neko no Shuukai, in that order). This time the anchor point for my scattered thoughts was a truly stellar AMV (link after the jump).

While it was relatively easy to whittle it down to fifty the individual order was a last-minute hurried effort so don’t read too far beyond the general place they have relative to the others. I know certain names are cropping up a lot but that’s more to do with my admiration for certain directors and writers than studios and genre boundaries.

I hope the short descriptions speak for themselves; the awesomeness of the titles themselves certainly ought to. Before the word count becomes too excessive then, here’s the final ‘cut’…

Belated Christmas greetings and all the best for 2010! Things have been quiet of late, but I loved what Gaguri did recently and really ought to reply to that and Sasa’s version. I hate to sound like an episode of Q.I. but the decade actually ends, strictly speaking, at the end of 2010. Not that it matters: I was worried about having actually watched enough to reach the Festive Fifty, but the reality turned into some tricky decision into what I had to leave out.

For the sake of simplicity the likes of Trapeze, Bakemonogatari, K-On!, Ergo Proxy, Mouryou no Hako, Texhnolyze, Shikabane Hime, Gurren Lagann, NieA_7, Detroit Metal City, Code Geass, Planetes and Beck didn’t make the list, as much as I like them. Some titles had to go, and “I haven’t finished it yet,” seemed to be a fair enough reason. On with 50-26.

I’m jumping the gun a bit in publishing an annual retrospective but according to my archives this blog is officially a year old…and I’ve managed to update with some degree of regularity for the full twelve month duration. Sooo…firstly thanks to you, the readers and commenters. I wish there were a way to search through the database and pick out your individual names so I hope you can settle for a “Thank you; you know who you are.”

It’s been an interesting year for a number of reasons, not least world events in terms of economies and finances which led to some sad incidents and a general feeling that the film and music industries are dying a slow and painful death. Granted, things have been rough but I don’t buy into the idea that there’s a Moe Cancer killing the anime industry and as for Japan as a whole…who knows what the political changes can do in the long term. In any case, here are my highlights of Interesting Japanese Things from the year.

My first thought on the notorious Endless Eight portion of the new series of Haruhi Suzumiya was “thank God I’m not watching this too!” and proceeded to skim-read the blog posts, which is probably more fun than actually watching the episodes themselves. It reminded me how something that’s popular can divide the fans so strongly and produce the old shitstorm of hype, bitching and RAEG that springs up every time. In some ways it’s as predictable as the “The new season sucks!” posts that ironically crop up every season but the observations are interesting.

What do you mean “the first season was better…”?!

Haruhi Suzumiya is a texbook example of how these things happen although I’m a bit spoilt for choice of other examples. Naruto is an obvious one although it’s the stereotypical Narutard that upsets most people, probably even more so than the filler episodes. To a lesser degree you get a mirror image of this carry-on with notoriously bad shows but the general pattern is the same: a wave of opinion for A New Thing creates a reflex reaction in the opposite direction, forming another retort of the initial enthusiasm and so on. Like the old fave “Toilet Tennis: look left” and “Toilet Tennis: look right” scrawled on the opposite walls of a toilet cubicle, this is Backlash Tennis.

I didn’t want to write this post; I don’t like meta-blogging at the best of times. I prefer to write about interesting things rather than writing about writing about interesting things but even so, I can’t not clarify a point that I was faced with this morning, which is somewhat related to the recent discussions on Twitter and Google Reader about ANN’s current standards of reviewing.

Source: xkcd.xom, a site I love

It started with this unfortunate incident that’s an example of (on this blog at least) a mercifully rare side-effect of the user-comment feature: the Annoying Unconstructive Comment. The anime blogging community is a pretty closed one but every now and then, alongside the usual discussion with your blog’s regulars, you get a comment from a stranger who in all probability is ‘just passing through’. I try to reply to these but when it’s a one-line or incomprehensible comment I don’t normally bother – they’ll probably never read my reply anyway. This time I took the bait and was, well, a bit abrupt; in retrospect I was in the wrong but that’s beside the point. Nor am I taking back what I said. Here’s why.

Just when we thought we’d seen the last of him (I knew better than that, truth be told) Owen rallies the troops and reminds us that Darker than Black aired almost two years ago this week, and drags us along for the ride. I actually put it on hold around ep #8 way back when (‘way back’ meaning the old days of my old blog when I could still be arsed to blog episodically) because it got licenced but hey, if it’s an excuse to see the thing through to the end before my retail DVD copy arrives in August, why argue?

The plan is to watch two episodes (==one story arc) each day through to completion; I’ll add the relevant links to everyone else’s impressions as time goes on but in all honesty I don’t have the time or energy to make a full post of every arc on my own so I’ll set out a short piece for each on my MAL blog and link back from here. It’s pretty well-timed actually, because I stumbled on an excellent AMV (a rare occurence in itself) that married the footage from the show with the song Remembrance Day by God is an Astronaut (Youtube vid after the Moar jump).

Here’s my attempt at irony: a recently-established blog that somehow tries to draw attention to other blogs. Heh. Actually the reason I’m posting the links here is that I’ve started to find I’ve been moving more and more feeds on my feedreader into the wittily-titled Hiatus Disease folder; a feeling shared by others if this is anything to go by. Fresh meat for your feedreader is important so without coming across as arrogant (I know I rule but that goes without saying, right?) I want to see more posts like this one from the rest of you. Hit me with your Recommendation Stick!

I find using a second monitor to be useful at times but more than that I want an audio cable long enough to stretch to my hi-fi rig so I can back up my full catalogue to mp3 on an external HD

In addition to making my tag cloud a bit more aesthetically pleasing I’ve tweaked my layout a bit here and there and had a minor purge of my blogroll. It’s not that the blogs I removed aren’t of good quality – quite the reverse in fact – but they haven’t offered anything new in a while and I want to keep my sidebar tidier than my old blog’s was. There have been some new additions though, so here is some reading that I hope will provide us with wordy win for months to come without them dying on us. So go read them. ^_^