Miscellaneous

Introduction: I Have To Say…

It’s certainly strange to be here now. I can remember discovering Random Curiosity sometime last spring where I found myself getting back into anime. For the past couple years I wasn’t what you’d call a serious fan of anime. I probably can identify with a lot of fans now who discovered Dragonball Z and Gundam Wing on Toonami way back when they first premiered on Cartoon Network.

Every day after school you could find me and my brother glued to the TV watching with eyes wide with amazement. Eventually for me anime became something like an on again / off again relationship. It wasn’t until one day during the winter of 2007 that I picked up a copy of the Bleach manga. Then I started picking up Fullmetal Alchemist and Death Note and that’s when I decided I wanted to see some of these series on the screen and just like that I was sold.

My discovery of Random Curiosity stems from a little series some of you might be familiar with. It was a little show called Code Geass R2. To say the least I was blown away by the first season’s cliffhanger and I simply had to know what happens next? To my dismay I couldn’t find any real information about the series until I stumbled my way here and you could say the rest was history.

I’m here now to provide you with a brand new Daily Dose that will continue to bring you the latest news that you love from within the world of anime and manga (with my colorful commentary, of course.) I’ll also try to blog a show or two if I have the time when the new season of series’s start up this spring.

It may be strange to be here now, but I’m looking forward to having a great time here.

Miscellaneous / Random Musings

Random Musings – The State of the Blog

On this day of Barack Obama’s inauguration (I had to stop myself from titling this post “State of the Union”), here are some notes on myself and the series I’m blogging:

  • I said last month that things should be better for me schedule-wise in this new year, but it hasn’t quite turned out that way. As some of you may know, I’m a grad student right now, and a big project recently came up for review, so I’ve been scrambling for that. That’s the reason Rideback and Soul Eater haven’t been blogged yet, though I did get some time to watch them. I’m probably going to try to continue on normally with writing up Bleach today and Toradora tomorrow and catch up on blogging those two series when I get a chance later this week.
  • Speaking of which, I’ve created a Winter 2009 Schedule page listing all the series I and Trillian will be blogging. You might notice that Tales of the Abyss, Kuroshitsuji, and Michiko to Hachin are not on the list – these series have been dropped. The latter two because Trillian is in the middle of job hunting and doesn’t have the time to cover four series, and Abyss because I had to let go of the show that I was least interested in if I wanted to pick up three new Winter 2009 shows and not kill myself.
  • Concerning Daily Doses, I do hope to restart them at some point and have been contacted by some prospective writers.
  • On a more positive note, I’ve been trying out Twitter as part of a social networking research class I’m taking, and I was surprised at how quickly I was able to create a list of friends just by importing my Gmail contacts. I also found some people I haven’t talked to or seen in a while who are apparently quite active on Twitter. Now I don’t know how much I’ll end up using this or if I’ll integrate it with the blog, but it’s been interesting to play with.
    • Best of Anime / Miscellaneous

    The Best of Anime 2008

    Now that 2008 is over, here’s a look back at some of the best series the year had to offer. Also included at the end are the final results to the Reader’s Choice Poll.

    Disclaimer: These are purely my personal opinions based on the shows that I saw in the past year (and in the case of Best Comedy, the shows that Divine has seen). For a show to even qualify for consideration, it had to have met the requirements outlined in the Reader’s Choice Poll. That means that series like Toradora! and Soul Eater are not up for awards this year – they’ll be saved for 2009.

    Miscellaneous

    Concerning the Poll

    As you may have noticed, the Reader’s Choice poll is showing wildly inaccurate vote totals right now, much of it thanks a few individuals who thought that ballot stuffing would be cute. Now part of this is my own fault for not having the correct poll settings to prevent this kind of cheating and so that the results weren’t visible until the conclusion of the poll, but unfortunately I don’t have the time to tinker with it and run a second poll.

    So what does this mean? I’ve closed the poll early, and network admin Maestro and I have gone through the database of votes. We found that the last legitimate total before the massive ballot stuffing began was at approximately 7AM server time. We’re going to take the results at that time and go with it since it’s pretty clear who the winner will be anyway. Final results for all choices will be posted tomorrow with my Best of 2008 post.

    In the future, we’ll be looking at alternate, more secure solutions for polling.

    Miscellaneous / Poll

    Reader’s Choice – Favorite Anime 2008 Poll

    It’s time for the Third Annual Reader’s Choice Poll!

    Every year there are so many good choices, and I’m still in the process of choosing my own favorites (GEASS, Macross Frontier, and true tears are at the top of my list), but below, you can vote for your Favorite Anime of 2008 from a list of every single series that’s ended this past year.

    The criteria for a series being included on this list is that it had to have been a complete TV series that ended in 2008 or will be ending very soon. The general idea here is that you can’t really judge a series until it’s over, and that means that fans of shows like Toradora! will have to wait until next year’s poll. I also wasn’t able to include any OVAs because there were just too many of them, though I’ve added Detroit Metal City and Kara no Kyoukai to the list by special request. In addition, I’ve combined series that were split into two parts into one listing (i.e. Vampire Knight and Vampire Knight Guilty). Still, if there’s anything you think I omitted that fits into the above criteria, feel free to email me, and I’ll add it to the list.

    Choose your favorite, tell your friends to come vote, and the winner will get included in a post later this week!

    This poll will close Tuesday, December 30th, 2008 at 11:59 PM EST.

    Edit: There were some problems with the polling software, so voting got frozen for a few hours. Please try voting again if you weren’t able to earlier.

    The poll has been closed early. Please see this post.

    Miscellaneous

    Back

    Well, after a week with family and being away from the website, I’m back. I mentioned in the previous post that I was visiting a sick family member, however I don’t want to get into the details other than to say that my grandfather is doing relatively well for the time being. What I do want to say though is that nothing drives home the importance of family and friends more than this kind of experience, and it gives new meaning to the themes often touched on in shows like CLANNAD.

    In any case, the next couple of days will be spent catching up on the series I missed, and regular blogging shall return shortly.

    Miscellaneous

    The Keitai Novel

    This is an interesting article about Japanese culture and cellphone novels that some of you may enjoy. It’s both enlightening and slightly depressing, but those of you who are familiar with the source (The New Yorker) may already be aware of that tendency.

    At first it introduces the story of a young woman who wrote a keitai novel on a whim and posted it electronically to the internet. Even though it was unedited, raw, and unplanned, it was so successful that the printed version made the top 10 list of literary hardbacks sold in 2007.

    This article discusses the origins of this cellular genre and its rise in modern day Japan, especially for young women. 2-chan gets a shoutout, as well as Pynchon, Tarantino, and many established Japanese literary giants. I think it has found a niche in the world quite separate from the literary circles it only pretends to want to enter. The article suggests the entire genre fits more appropriately into the spoken story-telling tradition, and even compares it to the Tale of Genji in a school setting instead of a court and palace.

    I myself have had some exposure to this cellphone-age phenomenon, but my initial reaction was more along the lines of “wtf is this?” – and promptly went back to reading language books and novels that make up the bulk of my belongings. Well, the electronic novels themselves may not suit everyone’s tastes, but the article is a very interesting read and gives some great insight into both modern and historical literacy in Japan. It doesn’t relate directly to anime, but it’s a close cousin, and satiates the needs of my Random Curiosity.

    Artwork at left courtesy of くろぶた on pixiv (account needed to access).
    Miscellaneous

    Important Announcements

    This is sort of a state-of-the site post since there’s a lot I need to update everyone on:

  • This has been a pretty brutal four month period for me because I’ve been studying and helping teach a class as well as doing some work on the side and blogging. Hopefully things will get a little better as we start the new year, and I thank all of you out there for continuing to read Random Curiosity.
  • This past week was finals week, and with it done, I will be taking some time off from the site – approximately a week starting from next Tuesday – to visit to a family member who is ill. I will be away from the Internet, though I may try to find a way to get some access to blog the December 21st episode of Gundam 00 (no guarantees). Fortunately, Divine has kindly offered to cover some of the shows I’m blogging in my absence, and I’ll pick back up the week after. This includes CHAOS;HEAD which I know I’m behind on.
  • The end-of-the-year awards post and the preview for the Winter 2009 season are in the works. Those posts will be done sometime after Christmas and (hopefully) before New Years.
  • The reason there haven’t been any Daily Doses for a while now is because Sixthdawn disappeared on me in early November, and I haven’t seen him since. That means that the position is technically open right now, though I admit I’m very wary of adding any new bloggers right now because I’m happy with what Trillian and divine have been doing and don’t necessarily feel the need for anyone else. Still, if you’re really passionate about anime and the news related to it, you know how to reach me.

    • Artwork at left courtesy of もんもん on pixiv (account needed to access).

    Macross / Miscellaneous

    Nakajima Megumi Takes Nico Nico Douga By Storm

     

    …And causes a storm for that matter. A few days ago, Nakajima Megumi (中島 愛) of Macross Fronter/Ranka Lee fame got the attention of a lot of Nico Nico Douga viewers with the release of the video above — a choreographed dance to her new “Be MYSELF” song. While my initial reaction was that Megumi is coming off more and more like a real-life Ranka with her “cuteness appeal” (moe?), evidently that’s not the case with people who love trolling anything and everything in cyberspace. Mixed in with the supportive comments on Nico Nico were a lot of slanderous ones, which got out of hand to the point that Nico Nico’s management intervened and started removing comments themselves. This (ridiculous) incident even made headlines on some Japanese sites. The original video found here (account required) now has over 285,000 views and 28,000 comments, which probably makes it one of the fastest videos to achieve such popularity. As for the song itself, I heard it earlier from her Akihabara performance and didn’t think too much of it then, but it’s grown on me after listening to it for a while. Megumi also has another new song, “Tenshi ni Naritai” 「天使になりたい」 (lit. “I want to become an angel”), and both are available for sale on the iTunes store (Japan only). ~Kira*

    -divine
    …is still hoping to get a hold of some May’n and Nakajima Megumi duet performance videos.