For the third week of “the remembrance of love,” I recall some of the more dramatic moments of Clannad After Story as Tomoya and Nagisa starts life as a new family before it gets cut short. (Image Source)
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Remembering Love: Clannad After Story Part II
Continuing on “the rememberance of love,” I dived deeper into the second quarter of Clannad After Story.
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Competition and Anime Blogging, is it Harmful?
Given the various posts floating in the blogosphere about the Aniblog Tourney and competition that came after the first round, I like to share some of my thoughts about the negative externalities of competition and why it’s not necessarily a good thing. (Image Source)
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Red Bracket Blog Critiquing – Part 3 & 4 of 4
Since spring semester is coming to an end, things are about to become busy for me in the next two weeks. For that, all my thoughts for now on will consist of two days of polling in one post.
In this part, I will review the last two days for the Red Bracket. For intensive purposes, I will not review CSW’s Anime Blog since they got disqualified. However, I will do a review of Sekijitsu in the next round. Since the decision is controversial, please do not talk about it here. If I see any of these comments, I will delete them because I don’t want any drama to come on my blog.
As always, if you are the author of these blogs, please take the criticism with a grain of salt.
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Green and Red Bracket Blog Critiquing – Part 4 of 4 and 1&2 of 4
Same routine, but I will examine the last four blogs in the Green Bracket and then, hitting the Red. If you are the author of these blogs, please take the criticism with a grain of salt. (Image Source)
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Green Bracket Blog Critiquing – Part 2 & 3 out of 4
From the feedback I have received, I will not give blogs a grade nor focus too much on grammatical or spelling errors. Instead, I will place all my attention on the overall content and design. If the content sounds rough or awkward overall, I will indicate it in my suggestion that he/she should work more on their writing. Even with the changes I made, I will not tell anyone who I voted for.
Since I fell behind yesterday, I decided to combine parts 2 and 3 together. If you are the author of these blogs, please take the criticism with a grain of salt.
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Green Bracket Blog Critiquing – Part 1 out of 4
As promised, I will critique people’s blogs so people can improve their blogs for the future, regardless if they win or not. As stated in my list of criteria in the inaugural post, I’m basing my grading on that. For blog owners, I will write a few suggestions and my overall impressions. They will get published after all the blogs in the bracket had their polls opened.
For the first one, I will give criticism to the first quarter of the Green Bracket. If you are the author of these blogs, please take it with a grain of salt as these are my opinions and they aren’t meant to offend you.
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Papa Kiki, Clannad and Family – A Worthwhile Commitment
After watching 8 episodes of Papa no Iukoto o Kikinasai, there was something that really got me thinking. Although many dissed the show as something perverted, the drama in the 8 episodes I watched proved that raising a family is a difficult task and reminding me of Clannad, which had similar themes. Despite the difficulties the fathers faced in both shows, they continued because its worthwhile experience. (Image Source)
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Little Busters and JC Staff: The Changes of Time
Just recently, Key announced that JC Staff would produce the Little Busters anime. Unfortunately, this was not well received by the fans. It stirred a lot of harsh criticism since they expect Kyoto Animation to make it. From what I have seen, this makes me wonder if the rage is justifiable or the fans are too entitled?
In the past two days, I read three opinion pieces regarding the whole matter. Therefore, I felt the need to share my own thoughts on why their decision isn’t as bad or rather, marks a transition to the New Key. (Image Source)
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What Makes a “Good” Anime?
In a perfect world, most fans would enjoy all the anime that gets produced. Sadly, this isn’t the case since we do not know what the show will give us until we watch it. This leaves us with the usual remark, “It gets better, I swear” which is frequently used as a defense. I’m a firm believer of that because any show can have a potential of becoming good. This leaves us with the question, what exactly makes a good anime? I will explain just that along with my experiences.
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Getting into the Producers Chair – Experiences of Producing for 765 Production
Before I begin posting my Let’s Play, I have always wanted to write more about my experiences in general about The iDOLM@STER in regards to the Anime and the Games. As you know, the anime like the game has important life lessons such as interacting with others, solving problems and teamwork that gives us the fabulous dancing and singing. (Image Source)
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Anime and the Perception in the West
While I was lurking around the Internet, a particular post at the Project iM@S forums has caught my attention since it has a close relation to the Anime Fandom besides just Japanese games.
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Anime, Blogging and Life – Enjoying and Managing Time
In this week’s editorial, I decided to take up a topic in the blogosphere that is relatively important with any Anime fan: “How does one fits time to watch shows while juggling with college or work?” Given that I have managed to survive three years and made over 830 posts about Anime, you wonder how the hell I manage that when college gives you a lot of work to do. I’ll share my experiences on how I find free time to watch shows and blog while doing well in college. (Image Source)
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Winter 2012 Anime Midseason Impressions
If you notice the lack of weekly Anime Digests, it’s mostly because I didn’t have much to say for the past two weeks. Therefore, I’m won’t be doing them until the spring season. For now, the focus is now on the midseason impressions for the current season.
Compared to last year, this year has been pretty underwhelming season considering that we had two great shows (Madoka Magica and Hourou Musuko), which you may already have fresh in your mind. Nevertheless, I managed to find shows that entertained me for the season, so it’s not that big of a deal. (Image Source)
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Valentines Day Special – My Favorite Idols
For those who celebrate, I hope everyone a Happy Valentines Day/Singles Appreciation Day. To commemorate this faithful day, I want to focus this week’s opinion piece on my favorite idols from The Idolmaster. I know people will have different opinions since they are many to choose from and I will respect that. (Image Source)
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Anime and Video Gaming: How they changed everything…
Like Anime, video games had played a big role in my life after I was introduced to it during my childhood. After some thought, I felt the need to share my experiences with video games and how it influenced me to watch Anime since these two mediums are closely related to each other. Not surprisingly, most anime fans are probably gamers as well. (Image Source)
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Weekly Anime Rankings & Digest – January 23rd-30th
This week in general was rather quiet. On the other hand, ACTA, a disastrous treaty similar to SOPA/PIPA had picked up steam last week as people in Europe started protesting against it. As you noticed, I changed the announcement to reflect this and everyone should fight this treaty since it will affect everyone globally, not just in the United States.
Also, I decided to watch Mouretsu Pirates since I got bored of not having enough stuff to watch (Image Source).
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Brief Thoughts about the US Anime Industry and Anime Collection
By now, this topic got hammered to death in the blogosphere by now, but looking back at my DVD collection back in 2009, it has significantly grown into a sizable stack. Therefore, I feel the need to share my brief thoughts about the current situation with the anime industry in the United States and of course, taking a look at my collection after these years. (Image Source)
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Weekly Anime Rankings & Digest – January 16th-22th
Knowing that Milky Holmes Second Season Episode 3 won’t get released until after I published this digest, I may as well write it now.
If you heard the big news about the Internet last week, SOPA has been officially killed off for good with PIPA getting delayed indefinitely. Congress has finally listened after the unprecedented SOPA blackouts/protests by Wikipedia, Google, Reddit and the Aniblogosphere. Although the battle isn’t over yet, these achievements are great and we should continue putting the pressure on everyone so the Internet stays open.
Also during the weekend, I worked on tweaking the theme even more and made a new header on my test site (featuring Miki Hoshii). I decided not to change the color scheme since I couldn’t come up with a better one and I felt that there is no reason to fix what’s not broken. The good news is that the header will celebrate my three years of Anime Blogging, which started back in February 17, 2009. I plan to have this up by the first day of that month. Despite these developments, you should have noticed the apparent tweaks I made to the theme such as the inclusion of number of comments/trackback in the headers. (Image Source)
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Improving Anime Blogs and Writing – 2012 Edition
Yep, it’s that time of year again with the wave of competitive e-drama from 2010 known as the Aniblogosphere Tourney. Since then, the blogosphere landscape has changed significantly with some blogs dying and new ones popping up while others improve. With 2012 being a big year for bloggers, I want to share how people can improve themselves, especially for the newcomers who have yet grasp the joys of blogging and writing good posts. (Image Source)
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Weekly Anime Rankings & Digest – January 9th-15th
Considering how quiet it is since I’m only watching two shows this season, I spent majority of my time playing more Idolmaster 2 last week. Just yesterday, I wrapped up my 5th play through before the spring semester starts. I had lots of fun conquering all of Japan with my idols in that produce (except the capital region as there is no reward). Aside from that, it’s back to college studies and studying more Japanese so I can expand my knowledge of the language with the hope of understanding more of the story later.
Also happening this week, I will write reviews for the Fall Anime, write more editorials and the Japanese Self Study Progress Part III. So, look forward to that. (In addition, some stuff about SOPA/PIPA after the jump) (Image Source).
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Thoughts about The iDOLM@STER 2 – Probably the Most Fun I have from a Music Game thus far…
Have you ever dream of raising a Japanese pop idol? If so, Idolmaster is the game that allows you to. Surprisingly, I haven’t heard much about the game even though I have seen other fellow anime bloggers played the actual game. This is mostly because typical Namco refuses to localize the game (and others) for obvious reasons and that it’s originally on the Xbox 360, a console I do not want to own. Sure, a PSP version of the original game and the Nintendo DS spinoff, Dearly Stars eventually came out. What made me interested in playing the game is the Anime that recently finished. When I heard that there is a Playstation 3 version of the second game, I just had to play it. It basically motivated me to learn Japanese and thus, I gave it a spin.
The iDOLM@STER 2 is a “second vision” game in the series that puts a lot of emphasis on “Unity” (or 団結) as shown in the Anime. In this game, you have to create an idol unit with three members (leader and two sub members) and manage them so you achieve the top position in the Idol Academy. Like in the older games, the choices you make are crucial in order to succeed. Since I played the game for most of my winter vacation, I may as well share my thoughts about the gameplay rather than writing a full review.
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Weekly Anime Rankings & Digest – January 1st-8th
As the Winter Anime Season starts, I may as well resume my weekly digests since the Power Rankings restarted shortly after the New Year’s break. Since I’m only covering two shows presently, I will resume finishing my backlog to fill in the remaining stuff I can blog during the week. Starting next week, I’ll continue where I left off with True Tears and Tears to Tiara. These titles will not appear in the ranked episodes since they aren’t current shows. In addition, I will come up with a redesign for the third anniversary before February. Don’t worry though, I will modify one of the old banners and change from the Christmas one as a placeholder until February begins.
In addition, I’m planning to post the third Japanese Self-Study progress later this week and thoughts about Idolmaster 2. I just got sidetracked with video games and winter break that I haven’t been updating lately. With the spring semester happening pretty soon, hopefully I can restore my regular blogging patterns (Image Source).
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2011 in Review – Top 10 Anime and Blogging
Before I go overboard with video games and completely forget about the year-end post, I may as well do it now so I can bring in the next year on a high note.
Although 2011 was a very eventual year with a big Earthquake in Japan that occurred in March of this year and some disasters that hit close to home like Hurricane Irene and the October Snow Storm, it was a very good year for Anime. While noitaminA had many disappointments, there have been some great shows, most notably Madoka Magica, which aired earlier this year. So for a further ado, I’ll share my thoughts about the year as a whole and some accomplishments. (Image Source)
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