Anime²

I can see a shitstorm coming

Gargron — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 17:59:12 +0000

Sheep can be awesome too. Artwork by かにかま , see ‘Further reading’

And oh wait! it’s already here. Cows, or in our case sheep are flying around, thunder’s thundering and bolts are bolting. This time the subject is the Otaku Elimination project, a hater blog taking the different use of the term ‘otaku’ in Japan and in the West as an excuse to troll. For them it’s clearly not clear that the overusing and self-proclaiming of ‘otaku’ in the West was caused by nothing else than Lucky Star. Everybody wanted to be as cool as Konata, it’s simple as that. But since it’s only an excuse, let’s forget about that.

As clearly as that is also they that will be definitely content with what happens around. I mean, their keikaku works! Everybody is wtf’ing, lol’ing and similar at them, but hey, they are linked to in all this storm. They are the eye of the storm, and according to my own stats, with that many visitors coming from there they must have an amazing amount of daily pageviews!

But what can be their purpose? Is it as they state, to clear the blogosphere from ‘bad’ material? What happened to freedom of speech of the last free medium, the internet? If you don’t like a blog, don’t visit it. But what could it be then? They are anonimous. So they don’t have anything off their newly-baked fame. I couldn’t exactly imagine someone to want as many people as possible to see how they are letting their steam out either, so I’m really intrigued.

Now to their methods. They are cheap. There are just a few arguments they have: using of the word ‘otaku’, doing similar to others things, and being like Danny Choo. Excuse me! Danny Choo is kind of a successful man, ne? And even if I’m for originality, there’s nothing bad at walking familiar footpaths if you don’t go too far. The same goes for the ‘similarities.’ People blog because they want to state their own opinion on something. If there is an episode people want to talk about, expect many similar posts to appear, because many people have similar opinions! That doesn’t mean that they look up. As for ‘otaku’, I already said what I think. Who cares, besides you, ‘eliminators’?

You may think, they didn’t troll us at A² because we passed. That’s wrong. They not only called us odd, they also called us uninteresting, and passed us only because we didn’t match the above arguments. So not because we appeared good to them, but because I’m too lazy to do proper episodics and instead talk on random moments when they come or let myself slide down the meta stream. And because I visit many webdesign-o-sphere blogs and have seen somewhere the use of ‘addict’ towards a hobby, thus described us as ‘anime-addicts’. That’s troll enough for me, to have passed like that.

For others though, as 7-san pointed me at, it worked as an attention-grabber. According to 7, if they eliminated all blogs, nobody would continue to visit them, but because they passed somebody, people will want to know who passes else in the future. Nice tactic. You are good guys, in the meaning of good-at.

Oh, and let’s not forget that they have special, magic-like abilities:

We’re kind. We toyed with the idea of actually removing the blogs ourselves at first, but we wanted an even battlefield and that the best way to prevent the problem from happening again would be to make an example of and simply ridicule (or maybe praise) every anime related blog.

So they can remove others’ blogs, ne? Either it’s Yokuwakaru Gendaimahou or DDOS. And wait, it’s not all. They have Meidocafe.jp in their list. So they can summon the dead too. I wonder how, but in case of Meidocafe.jp I would be only happy about its revival, should it happen.

The appereance of Nagahara Aiko and our meido syndrome

Gargron — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 14:32:34 +0000

Here I come with my latest artwork. This time it took more than four days to finish painting, so, to create some suspense the full image is only available after the jump. Also, I decided to rename her, our blog mascot, to a more realistic name. From now on Tsuki will be Nagahara Aiko. While Tsuki means Moon as well as Month, which could lead to misunderstandings in Japanese, Nagahara Aiko means ‘child of love of eternal plains.’ Of course it’s bullshit too, to prove that just try to define which plains are eternal and then imagine them making love, but it sounds complete and at least more beautiful than Tsuki.

Back to the painting, I tried some new techniques. First of all, I learned the right (as I see it) placement of shadows and lights from Gorobottsu. Then, I tried drawing a different eye shape and made shadows and lights with help of a light contour, inspired by the artist Kokoro whom Mefloraine kindly introduced on Paper Flower. And at last, I post-processed the picture with a slightly grungy texture, like the artist Dhiea I introduced before.

Expect this to appear on our banner soon.

A short blurb on Fall 2009

Gargron — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 17:31:14 +0000

Did we already have had a post about how amazingly good the current season is? To Aru Kagaku no Railgun engages my inner fanboy, Kimi ni Todoke entertains my inner fangirl and Nyan Koi keeps my laughing apparatus busy — and everything else is a bonus.

I would say this is the best season since my first, Fall 2008, when Soul Eater played Railgun’s role and Toradora attempted to be as good a romantic comedy as Kimi ni Todoke. And although nothing can replace the Taiga factor, this season is better.

More than that, this season has such a thing as Miracle Train, which you can happily avoid watching and have great lulz reading posts about.

6 useful Thematic snippets

Gargron — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 19:29:37 +0000

I thought I’d write something webdesign related to fill the almost empty Webdesign category on this blog, and since I use the Thematic Theme Framework and find it is the best thing that can happen to a WordPress blog I decided to share a couple of modifications for it. (These snippets go into the functions.php file of your child theme).

Integrating custom taxonomies

OK, so with the release of WordPress 2.8 custom taxonomies became really very easy. They’re used on all kinds of blogs, from marking post series on webdev tutorial blogs to library management on streaming portals. What you usually see at the bottom meta of our posts as ‘in connection with’ is the following modification in connection with the Anime Dropdown Widget I developed. (The widget creates a custom taxonomy called ‘anime’ and lets you organize related posts better way).

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function addaftercat($postcat) {
global $post;
$sep = "";
$taxonomy_slug = "anime"; //The unique slug of the taxonomy tags to show
$context = " in connection with "; //Any text, like ' filed under ' or whatever
if(!is_single()):
$sep = ' |';
endif;
$taxonomytags = get_the_term_list($post->ID, $taxonomy_slug, $context, ', ', $sep);

return $postcat.$taxonomytags;
}

add_filter ('thematic_postfooter_postcategory', 'addaftercat');

All you need to customize here is $taxonomy_slug and $context.

Inserting things right after posts

Although it’s been annoying me lately, the famous blogger Danny Choo has a huge self-promotion text after each post, encouraging reader to subscribe to his RSS feed and follow him on what-not. As if somebody wouldn’t have done it already… Anyway, it’s the easiest of things to do:

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function addfeedpromotion($content) {
$insert = "";
if(is_singular()):
$insert = 'If you liked reading this post, . get_bloginfo('rss2_url') . '">subscribe to our RSS feed to get more of it right to your feedreader!';
endif;

return $content;
}

add_filter('the_content', 'wt_addids');

This inserts the RSS link after the text of each post on single pages.

Making post images linkable-to

I have never seen this on WordPress blogs, but the above-mentioned Danny Choo’s images all have an id attribute which makes them linkable-to via #imageid. The following code is invented by me though, I thought of releasing a plugin but didn’t see that somebody needed it at all. Mostly because the majority of people I know are not photobloggers or art-bloggers. Anyway, this code wrap all images in a post in div-tags with the ID of the image as in the WordPress database.

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function addimageids($content) {
if(is_singular()):
$content = preg_replace('/(?:|]*>?)]*class="([^"]*)wp-image-(\d+)[^>]*\/>(?:|>\/a[^>]*>?)/', '

${0}

', $content);
endif;

return $content;
}

add_filter('the_content', 'addimageids', 9999);

As you see it also copies each image’s class so there shouldn’t be any alignment problems. On this blog, the transparent link on the images is added via JavaScript, although you can hardcode it or let it be at all.

Removing Thematic-specific scripts

If you’re not going to use the page menu effects, you probably would want to remove the unnecessary scripts from header. Or alternatively, you could replace them and/or other scripts with a compressed version with help of Minify. Either way, you’ll need this code snippet:

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function modifyscripts() {
$content = "\n";
$content .= ''; //Put own scripts here if you want
$content .= "\n";

return $content;
}

add_filter('thematic_head_scripts','modifyscripts');

Remove default stylesheet linking

I wouldn’t know why you would want to remove the stylesheets, but this snippet is actually exactly the same as the above one, and is very good for optimizing page load times. In this example we will replace the default linking to the optimized version of it (optimized with the previously linked Minify, assuming you have it installed in your blog’s root folder):

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function optimizestylesheet($content) {
$content = '. get_bloginfo('url') . '/min/b=wp-content&f=themes/thematic/library/styles/reset.css,themes/thematic/library/styles/typography.css,themes/thematic/library/layouts/2c-r-fixed.css" />';

return $content;
}

add_filter('thematic_create_stylesheet', 'optimizestylesheet');

Adding meta to

Like, if you want to add Google verification code or something similar (or generally any stuff one can put into the head of a page), use this snippet:

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function metathings() {
?>

}

add_filter('wp_head', 'metathings');

Initially I planned to introduce 10 of them snippets, but at last there weren’t too many I didn’t already see elsewhere to begin with. More than that, you see those 10/50/100 so often that I thought it’d be nice to have number without the null at least once. ^^

All of the above code ‘excerpts’ (to not repeat the word ‘snippet’ again, as that would be a stylistic failure for me) (oh sh-) are used on a², just so you know. With that, I conclude my first real (if you approve of its ‘realness’) webdesign post on Anime².

On fanservice and art

Gargron — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 19:37:45 +0000

Megane moé fanservice inclusive by kl, see ‘Further reading’

The following matter was bothering me, and probably other people too for a long time. But I was inspired to write this short rant by the Q&A post on Anime Nation “Why do Americans resent fanservice?”. While I have nothing to do with Americans directly, the problem is world wide.

Why do I feel ashamed when I see fanservice in anime? When girls flash pantsu, or even appear totally naked? Correction. 2D girls, not real girls. The fact aside that real life girls too are not born in ready dresses, where is difference between the Dresdener Gallery full of realistically-drawn naked women and rather flat fanservice in anime? Little children are being let in into the former, but when there’s a pantsushot in anime, outsiders begin to outrage about ‘fall of culture and moral standards’. And this influences an insider’s view as well, making him feel bad for seeing it.

That is strictly unfair, or rather, simply stupid.

One can object to me, saying that one is art and the other not. But I would respond, as my culture’s tradition tells, with a question: What is art?

In my understanding art is when the outside world comes down into a medium through the filter of the artist’s mind. Oi, was that a hard sentence. Thus, still in my understanding, anime is as well as books and sculptures art. And art, as we know, is free. Free for children to see, free for adults to see, free of rights organisations’s rallyes. Otherwise there wouldn’t be a public photography gallery of young and not very demandingly dressed Madonna.

Now to make that clear to the outsiders.

Bakemonogatari — A crazy virgin starved for love

Aizen — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 18:18:37 +0000

The end of the snail arc. I haven’t blogged here for awhile, but who the f– gives a damn, right? Right. So I plan to blog about Bakemonogatari every time an arc ends. Why? Because it’ll make more sense and be less about each episode and more about story line. If the story line sucks, I stop fapping. If it doesn’t, I continue.

That’s what you call a true Pedobear.

Maybe it’s just me, but why is it that one of the main themes in this series about being a virgin = bad. I mean, I can see why it’s bad to be a virgin in this case but making it a term that describes a villifier just isn’t cool. I mean, not all virgins are sex hungry fools, right? Right. Seeing a guy trying to take advantage of a loli, though, is like… borderline pedophilia (i.e. would be against the law) but the fact is, there’s no dick. Basically, Araragi is the Anime essence of Gargron.

I always knew she had some feeling for him. I just didn’t think she would be so blatant about it. I mean, you would expect to see some sort of better reaction from Arararararagi for one thing andfor another, you would expect taht Senjougahara should be more deredere about it. Maybe I just like that kind of stuff. It just doesn’t seem too natural in Anime to have a confession like that. There was no blushing, there was no stuttering. There was only an awkward silence that was broken by a “Omedatou gozaimasu” (Congratulations). The timing of this, though, was hilarious.

God no. We have enough of those secluded fucks already. You are DIFFERENT! You like that mofo not because you’re making yourself but because you’re hot and he’s the protagonist. Now, go have sex with him. You’ll be his new cumdump.

If Senjougahara was a straight man, two years of loneliness would be nothing. Men live on loneliness to grow. Women live on emotion. That’s why when a man shows them emotions the women will start to think better of themselves and become little cocky bitches. That’s where the saying “Know your place, bitch” comes from, I bet.

So I google’d this, ignorantly hoping no one would use that phrase as a title. And what do you know, a shit load of people made it their post title. Fan-fucking-tastic. So I thought of something else more sexual.

I like her face and legs…

The reveal

Gargron — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 22:46:49 +0000

My anime list, no matter on MAL or Melative, has finally reached the 50 completed entries mark. Whereas Melative generally clumps seasons together to just one entry, the number there is one less than needed. But hey. With exceptions of Miyazaki’s works I watched all these anime from Fall 2008 to now, Fall 2009. I am now just one more time the same away from the noobness level of your average aniblogger. And so, why not catch the flame of Hontou ni and list my Top 5? Considering that today the first, again surprisengly tiring week of school after the holidays ended, and I haven’t posted a thing for so long, I think such an easy post can be forgiven.

Let’s not hesitate, there are just five of the Top anyway:

The place promised in our early days
Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann
Neon Genesis Evangelion
Steamboy
Lucky Star

Their placement was really difficult. I have many more favourites, and they’re all equal to each other.

So, I placed Makoto Shinkai’s The place promised in our early days on place #1, because it touched not only my heart in the right place, but also my brain. I like the multiversum theory and find it likely true, while the romantic inside of me was crying and jumping during the whole film.

TTGL had almost the same effect on me, although shounen is shounen and just can’t beat Makoto Shinkai, at least not for me.

Neon Genesis Evangelion was the one that gave me the most food for thoughts as aftertaste, on my own being, my development, on others and many other things. This aftertaste and this rants lasted for weeks after I finished the series… There wasn’t much place for romantic, but instead for demology, psychology, and giant monsters, and that compliments itself, I think.

I adore the steampunk genre and Steamboy is the best of steampunk anime I know. Moreover I like the UK and strange but useful inventions. That’s why it got the 4th place.

And at last, Lucky Star. I can rewatch it again and again. In fact, anime that leaded me into the ‘otakuism’ — though now I know that it’s not really true, one need much more money to be a real otaku — it is like in Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind: one’s first book becomes one’s best friend for life. The same here with anime. Lucky Star is my friend forever.

This art mine list, simple as it is, and now I give the staff further. According to Stripey now one can tell something about me and my personality. Well, go ahead.

The 3rd Anniversary

Llora-chan, Aizen, Ammy and Gargron — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 00:21:28 +0000

If Anime² were a human it would be a loli — but in web age, we’re actually old

Ironically it’s the first time I actually think on writing an anniversary post. Nevertheless, I can remember that day when I uploaded my files to the free hosting provider the first time as it were yesterday. I remember how I was thinking on a name, and how I decided to call it ‘Avatar fansite’ for the first time. Unfortunately, I didn’t remember what day it was back then, and somehow, remembered the 26th October 2006. Yesterday, I dug up an old backup CD with the files from then, and it turned out it was the 9th October. But, to the hell with that little details, let’s celeberate!

That fansite, later renamed to ‘The Avatar Temple’ (back then I had incredible creativity for names) was the first break in the tower of Anime². Without it, I, Llora-chan and Ammy and the somewhere-vanished Aizen and the blog and our mascot Tsuki all wouldn’t be here where we are.

This is how it looked in 2006

This is how it looks in 2009

As the tradition tells, stats

With this post included, there are 230 postssince 25th September 2008, when I moved to KokidoKom and the blog turned into a real blog. There are 1,161 comments and 9,600 caught spam comments.

The visitor statistics begin with Juli 2008, even before I started real blogging. As a short asides note, the time from July till September I was posting embedded anime videos with short notes on them. Kind of a middle-thing between a streaming site and a blog. Forgive me.

The ones without names were deleted or got lost while moving. The top post was a total random post, and it is damn funny it got so many views and favourites from StumbleUpon.

Unfortunately there ain’t any funny searches, only a bunch of inappropriate ones. But I’m pretty happy some people search for us using our brand. ^^ By the way, we take 1st place in Google search results for ‘anime2’, ‘anime²’ and ‘anime squared’, and 5th place for ‘we love maids.’ Hehe!

Um. One my post was once included in a Wikipedia article, not for long though. As it seems, although many people complain about otaku.fm’s idleness, it brings quite a big piece of traffic.

Congrats, Kanzeon! Your Metanorn has got the most click-outs from Anime². ^^

Thank you’s

I’d like to thank everybody who’s coming here, commenting here, and writing here. Llora-chan, Ammy, Aizen, Jusuchin85, Seinime, Shion963, Jesus159159159, Xiao, foomafoo, Ghostlightning, Panther, RP, Baka-Raptor, TJ, and everybody else, thank you! Also I want to thank Eternal and Omisyth for the interviews, and Lolikitsune for accepting my artwork of Neko. I and my maid Tsuki are a little bit more than nothing without you!

And also, the blog theme is built on the Thematic Theme Framework, and I just have to say, Ian Stewart, great job.

The future

I have no plan to close this blog, in controversy, I think on buying a domain and becoming more elitist. The former is a plan, the second is a dream, lol. Anyway, I hope to entertain you further, to recommend good anime and to laugh at bad ones, to share my thoughts and views, and I hope that my team will join me and our readers will follow us, in our journey to pierce the sky!!

Well

This is it, and I don’t know what more belongs to this post, so, why not just celebrate?

Now, what do I have to say? — Llora-chan

I have started a few blogs before. My fist blog… I had no idea what to do with it. My second blog (Drawn Dreams) is where I actually started blogging anime. (I had a 3rd one, but forget about that one~) It was during my second blog when I met kanzeon. We were both starting out and we would check out each other’s blog quite often. But then… SCHOOL. School made me too busy and I just couldn’t fit in any time to blog T-T.

So a school year passes and it is summer. I decide to go check out on how kanzeon was doing (cause I missed her T-T) and BAM! It felt like she stepped into a whole new world. She left wordpress! So I got a little curious and decided to check things out.

My curiosity led me to here, anime², where I saw Gargron looking fo writers. Right then and there, I asked for the position. And then here I am! A writer on a². Of course, then I went to surprise kanzeon by commenting on one of her latest posts at the time.

I’m really happy being here. It feels like a little family to me. Thank you kanzeon for the encouragement (even though you probably never realized it), thank you Gargron for this chance , thank you Ammy :3, thank you Aizen :3, and thanks to all of you readers! XD Please continue to support us!

FML — Aizen

For those internet illiterate people, FML means “fuck my life.”

Everything has to be taken on trust; truth is only that which is taken to be true.

I try to do something but I always find something else to do. It’s a bad habit. Let’s just say I need to look above high school and hence can’t concentrate as much as I used to in summer. Nonetheless, if I were to have allocated time to do something I will be damned if I were to not do it. The shit part of blogging in two sites is really making it distinct of what one (or I) wants to blog. FML for that. It was a good epiphany, I guess.

How did I find Anime²? I don’t remember; maybe it was just through Twitter. It really isn’t important as to how I found this site, what matters is that I just found it. Was this a serendipity? I don’t know. I really just don’t. I don’t care about anniversaries yet either but it doesn’t mean I can’t participate in it, right? I’ve never liked celebrating “trivial” things like this. The only use I found with age is the ability to do more things yet feel more constricted. It’s just how life goes.

What Shall I Say? — Ammy

I really don’t know what to say. Let’s start with this. I’m just so grateful to be a part of this team. I’ve been interested in anime blogging for quite a while. I think it started out with me googling a new episode of a anime (gosh, I can’t even remember what anime is was). I was trying to watch the episode, and I found myself at a blog post of that episode. I started to reading it, and I got interested. The writer’s witty commentary was something to look forward to. Before I knew it, I checked that blog weekly to hear their thoughts about each episode. Now, I only checked out their thoughts about that anime. Never anything else. One bored afternoon, I went over to that blog and decided to read their other posts. That was when I became even more interested in blogging. After checking their blogroll, I looked at a few other blogs. It amazed me how different each one was.

Finally, I landed at Anime². I read a few posts and I saw Gargron asking for writers. I asked if I could, and ka-zam! So thank you for this opportunity. Thank you everyone!

Yokuwakaru Gendaimahou, good one

Gargron — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 10:13:36 +0000

Unfortunately this may be one of the last posts I write frequently, because tomorrow the holidays will end and school, as to be expected, will suck every last creativity out of me. Before, I wondered why I’m posting so rarely, one time per week and more, now I know: after you return from school, however great your thoughts in your head may be, you can’t write them down. You feel tired, and move the task ‘until tomorrow.’ And the tomorrow sometimes comes a month later… Anyway, that’s not exactly why I’m here right now: Yokuwakaru Gendaimahou, the silly anime where you don’t know whether some things were intended or not, had ended. Well, that happened a while earlier but I finished it only two days ago.

And what do I think? The wash basin joke didn’t get old after all. It’s a bit risky when you put such jokes into a consistent show. By consistent I mean that what happens or appears, stays. A good example for inconsistency is the Zucker brothers’ and Jim Abrahams’ Airplane!: They put a lot of jokes and puns into one scene, but let it be in the next one as if things never happened. This is a good style, and I like it — but when you put a joke into the core of a show and don’t use the inconsistency style there’s a risk the joke will become lame and old, making people roll eyes (for example the Johnny joke in Eden of the East). So there, I say the wash basin joke was at the border but managed to hold the forts till the end. All characters were also cute, and even the little codes they’ve shown were real and not some noob stuff. To be honest I found all the reincarnations talk confusing and too stretched, so for the story… It wasn’t big a deal but what matters is that the show was a light watch, something not to break the head about and relax.

The end episode was a bit too stretched though, with Digitalis reasoning her evilness with being alone, then getting a friend, becoming good, and yet still needing to go. If she had the power not to kill Koyomi and to act good at the end, why didn’t she stay?

And at last, the mage-killer ability, I shall call it the Kyon-syndrome. Scepticism is mightier than any magic!

Good show, like it.

Experience is a thing that matters

Gargron — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 17:52:14 +0000

This amazing beautiful artwork belongs to はら, see ‘Further Reading’

Why are people using MAL?

To show off that they have watched so many more anime than everybody else, that they have so much more experience and in general that they rule. That in the first place, and the second place’s taken by um, what was the episode I watched at last, can’t remember, fff!

Why should they change to Melative?

Because there they can do everything above and a lot more. Track your experience on anime, manga, but also music, cinematograph, literature, visual novels, and what medium may come in the future. Melative is future-proof, because it’s fluid. It’s like with the following example: In Judaism, it’s allowed to eat animals who chew the cud and have cloven hooves, but not allowed to eat animals who only chew the cude or only have cloven hooves, in fact — pigs. The Islam simplified the rule, by stating that pigs are not allowed to be eaten. Now, Israel created gen-manipulated kosher pigs, but the muslems still can’t enjoy the tastiest of the meat. (Can it be one of the mid-east conflict’s reasons, the envy?)

So as I say, fluidity. Moreover, Melative has an amazing, Twitter-like API, which means it allows all kinds of Third-Party applications for any aspects of the system.

That’s why you should change, or at least try using, Melative, the experience engine. You can show off far better.

And if you like using it, and have a blog or Twitter, why not spreading the word further?