Six years. Hm.

By TheBigN

In 2012 I watched about 30 or so series, OVA and movies related to anime, and while I thought that was a lot, according to this handy page, it barely scratched the surface. Time flies, work calls, and other stuff seemingly keeps coming around the bend in terms of this pastime. How I’ve watch anime  has changed by necessity, with my laptop currently on the road to brickdom and utilizing streaming to the fullest extent on my Kindle Fire. That being said, there’s been plenty of stuff that’s piqued my interest, but it’s been hard to write more substantially about them other than “WOWTHATWASCOOL“. I’ve tried to stay away from that sort of writing style because it felt to me like people wouldn’t get much out of that. And crazily enough, most of the time I try to write, I want whoever reads the finished product to get something out of it other than, “so that’s what TheBigN thinks”. It’s hard to get out of this way of thinking, though I should, especially since there’s fun stuff that happens over the year related to anime, both in the medium, and in the culture surrounding it (like the Otakon Music Festival. Fun times that). So I’ll try at least to shift the quips about anime I drop on Twitter and IRC onto here a little bit more. Whether or not that will be a good thing will be determined, I guess.

As always, I give a big thanks to dm00 for dropping his own bits of experience, excitement, and exposition to this endeavor. Thanks to the readers/glancers/etc. who stick around or follow this blood for our impressions.

It’s interesting to get to a point where the question “what else is there to say?” jumps around. I feel like there’s more to come than what’s been done so far here (although there’s been less and less as the years have gone, I think), so I’m hoping to never find out that answer.

Happy six year anniversary, DMAB.

Though I still like to think of DMAB as a blog of many hats. Picture by 腔子: http://www.pixiv.net/member_illust.php?mode=medium&illust_id=19196614

Doing this for five years with something to show for it?

By TheBigN

This post is a little late, though given my posting frequency for the past year, it’s something.

It’s been an interesting year for me in general, and large parts of interesting stuff kept me from writing lengthy posts here on DMAB (if any posts at all – 16 here in the past 12 months :v) while making several tiny comments elsewhere. I’m very much grateful for dm00 picking up the slack and then some in this regard.

I wish this was how I look when I have free time to do things like this. Picture by rorerurirarirurero: http://www.pixiv.net/member_illust.php?mode=medium&illust_id=23524523

DMAB is Four Years Old. Hey.

By TheBigN

It’s helped that articles like this one pop up every now and then that both help me take stock of how long DMAB has gone (and is still going) as a blog, and provide some sort of subjective measure of our influence (which isn’t much \o). That being said, this blog wasn’t created to be inspiring, and it’s a nice surprise to see that it’s still going strong with the writings of dm00, Link, nomadotto (he’s still alive, don’t you know), and I continually bringing things out of the woodwork. And that definitely includes the extra hand or two that jumps in, to my eternal gratitude, to keep things running, if not interesting. I only hope that it can continue for years to come, and it helps that they still keep making anime at that.

As always, I hope that whoever normally reads, subscribes, comments, lurks, or just so happens to find this blog randomly searching for something like, say, “Hideyoshi Kinoshita”, has gotten something positive from it (:P). If it’s something that somehow makes you smile, even better, and it’s totally awesome if the blog makes you think or inspires you to do something that you enjoy.  Goodness knows that if I didn’t enjoy putting my words out onto this little tiny area of the Internet, regardless of how many people see them or not, I wouldn’t still be doing this. Especially considering how my life is only going to get more consumed by factors outside of anime and manga. And I believe that everyone else on DMAB has sentiments along those lines.

I never feel like I express myself well in these types of posts when I write them given their relative importance, but I think saying thank you for reading Drastic My Anime Blog is best as always. And please keep stopping by if you have the time to do so.  🙂

 

Like a breath of fresh air. By 六羽田共. Website at http://heart.sabax.jp/.

 

 

A Belated Welcome

To those of you who are here from The Aniblog Tourney visiting this blog for the first time, those of you who are constant return visitors despite the relative “lack” of “posts” on the blog from me  (medical school is a hell of a time sink, you know) and my fellow awesome authors, those of you who are fans of GAR GAR Stegosaurus (epic name of a blog, fun times to be had there as well) and want to check out the competition for this round, and so on, I graciously welcome you to Drastic My Anime Blog. There’s not necessarily a set purpose to this blog since it started in February 2007, and it ends up being a bunch of ramblings about anime from myself, TheBigN, and two others, dm00 and nomadotto, along with any other people interested in writing guest posts or writing for the blog in the future.  People say we write editorials in general, so let’s go with that in terms of what type of blog this is. Either way, these ramblings can be serious business or seriously random, and they can even just be about anime in a more tangential sense than the medium itself, but they’re definitely sincere, and I hope they’re entertaining or interesting to you.

As this is the first round (and possibly last) for DMAB in this tournament, I’m not sure what needs to be done to win this matchup and possibly face off against either Mistakes of Youth or AstroNerdBoy, so any suggestions to go for the win (since we’re in it, let’s do it!) are cool save for slander, which I don’t like and suck at (mutually ex clusive reasons) or sucking up to the Tourney organizers that be could be good.  Of course, writing more is always an option (thank you omo :v), and barring other obligations, lack of time, and access to internet among other things, there should be more writing here in the near future. But as for what is already here, if you’re interested in learning more about the authors or the blog itself, the respective links are here and here. There’s the tag cloud and list of categories on the right side of the page if something catches your fancy, and more specific examples follow.  If you’re looking for thoughts in some of the current titles of today, or of yesteryear, the musings category might be where it’s at. There’s some occasional posts on music and manga, posts that list our “gripes”, and posts where I think more about how we as anime fans go with our passions, and what comes with it. And of course, there is always random stuff, random looks back to time long past, random self-patting on the back posts, and random pictures… mostly of Shikieiki.

Like so. Picture by 柴. http://www.pixiv.net/member_illust.php?mode=medium&illust_id=10733683

One more thing. As someone who has helped try to run something like the Aniblog Tourney before, one of the things I like about efforts like these is getting people to learn more about blogs that they otherwise would not pay attention to beforehand, and I hope that this round is the same for others. And one thing that I also want is for people, regardless of whether you’ve been here before or not, to list any comments, critiques, criticisms, commendations, or any other forms of communication that they want to about this blog. It would be cool if we could use this week-long spotlight, if this is all we get, to see where we are in the eyes of others, as well as to see where the blog can go from here.

That being said, please vote for us from the kindness of your heart. 😛

Three Years Old, And Still Chugging Along

By TheBigN

I wanted to start by referencing this, and joke about saying “This Is It!”, but I thought it silly, and decided not to. Besides, I think two years are a long time myself, not to mention three.

Then I wondered if I’d talk about how this  last year wasn’t necessarily that productive. Compared to the second year, there has been a drop-off in productivity, but having 600+ comments, 59 posts and 210,000+ more hits (pushing the blog over a half a mil, though I wonder how many of those now come from image searches for “godzilla”, which randomly started months ago) doesn’t seem that bad to me, though the explosion of spam (from 5000+ to 19000+ in the last year) does. Especially when I don’t feel like I’ve posted much this year, so I definitely have to thank dm for picking up the slack, and nomadotto for the rare incisive posts while I’m off med-schooling or something or other. Having a post a week definitely dropped off from before, but I’m happy that at least there’s been a post about every other week or so.

Then I thought about complaining about having less time to post than before. But seeing how often I comment on others people’s blogs, though it never takes longer than a minute or two to do so makes me feel like I would be unnecessarily whining if I went that route.  It has been a little harder to think about what to write, but there’s still ample ideas out there and I’ve had some in the back of my mind for months. Not to mention the awesome things that come out of the many other bloggers, anime-related or no, that I read when I’m able to. Hopefully I can get some of those out here. Or at least get my co-writers to just write what they feel more often, original or not.

Thanks are always in the cards to anyone and everyone who’s read, glanced, skimmed, excerpted from, commented, praised, complained, mentioned, briefly thought of, leeched bandwidth from, etc. I’d like to believe it’s part of what keeps DMAB going though others may disagree, and no doubt it always helps to make things interesting.

Again, thanks for stopping by, and hopefully Drastic My Anime Blog will still be worth coming back to check up on in the future.

Steady is a way to go, at least. Source: http://www.pixiv.net/member_illust.php?mode=medium&illust_id=5137888

Two Years Down, X More To Go

By TheBigN

So Drastic My Anime Blog has its second anniversary as of today. With it comes three authors. 189 published posts including this one. 1600+ comments. 5000+ pieces of spam apparently blocked. 310,000+ hits. And so on. And while I guess quantifying the stuff that’s been here is all well and good, I can’t really quantify the many thanks I have for everyone that has had something to do with this blog directly and indirectly, be it reading, commenting, linking (or being linked), criticizing, praising, dropping by randomly, leeching (though not necessarily this last one), and so on. Nor can I fathom how things are still going on  here fairly regularly (give or take a week) with how much harder things have gotten for me in med school (and they’ll get even tougher still), how a lack of motivation has always threatened to fatigue me even though I don’t do much here, and how I still wonder where this blog is in terms of the anime blogging community.

But DMAB has managed to get through two years of stuff, and it’s been a fun ride.  I don’t see why it can’t continue on forward as it has. I won’t say expect great things from this little blog here in the future, but I feel like I can say that it will keep moving forward at its own pace. Thank you for stopping by. :3

Thanking you from the apex of her heart.

Unfulfilled Expectations or a Drastic My Anime Blog 2008 Primer

By TheBigN

So according to others, I was apparently supposed to be part of the “12 Days of Christmas” craze that’s sweeping the blogosphere, and I’m kinda confused on how that impression came to be. I’m planning on doing what I did last year with the “Impressions on a Year 2008” coming soon after Christmas, but nothing of the sort was happening before the holiday. At the same time, I feel guilty when I see links from other blogs saying that I’m participating in it when I’m not, so I figured that I should go and do something about it. And from the outset be lazy and selfish about it. So, instead of covering my thoughts on the year of anime that I saw, I decided to write about what I thought were the best posts on DMAB this year, even though December isn’t over yet. Of course there’s bias involved here (yay self-horn tooting!), so if you have different favorites than I do, please feel free to say so. Nor is this post itself going to be the pinnacle of good writing (as I’m tired and lazy right now), but I feel that this helps people who haven’t bothered to check out the blog before, and at least it gives me some time to reflect on things.

A mix-up almost as bad as this one?

A Quarter Of A Million Hits Later…

And nothing of value was lost. Or gained.

By TheBigN