anime|otaku

Some denizens of the #animeblogger channel were talking yesterday, and they seemed to be distraught with the lack of raws on WinNY and Share. I believe this was a repercussion from this incident, where the people instrumental in producing anime RAWs have been arrested by the police.

It is very understandable that a lot of RAW providers have disappeared from the scene. Is this the end of fansubbed anime as we know it?

I believe William Faulkner said it best: ‘I decline to accept the end of (m)an[ime] … I believe that man will not only endure, he will prevail.’ This was proven true with the ODEX fiasco: I believe this will remain true despite this debacle.

To everyone, cheers to anime!

… where angels fear to tread.

Attenborough’s the one with the pink and violet striped shirt. He wears eyeglasses.

While some of us may be perverts, let me try (hopefully, in the next posts) to prove that we can also do a lot of things well in our lives.

I’m often glad whenever a novel or an anime series mentions the Philippines in either anime or literature (which are my favorite media). When the first episode of Black Lagoon mentioned Philippines (I think it was an island in Basilan, or something), I smiled. It doesn’t happen much.

Doesn’t he look African-American in origin?

This is a light post.

Anyway, zaitcev linked to #animeblogger (and has posted about it) regarding the Google trends of searching for ‘anime, hentai.’ If you check it out, the people who top the list are …

You guessed it right, Filipinos.

I had a good laugh over it, really. Oh wow.

The lack of updates can be attributed to a very taxing (yet supererogatory) paper on Maxine Hong Kingston’s novel Tripmaster Monkey. I am grateful to all the people who have helped me. Special mention must be made regarding Daniel, who, despite with his exams of Shakespeare allotted some time to help me organize my paper; Shance, who shared my paper to Daniel because I could no longer stay awake and offered insight on the paper as well; and Andrew, who read my paper but was sidetracked by a terrible migraine.

Someone please give this to me.

This is not an excuse: I do have an exam in a few hours.

Wise beard man does not approve

I am an idiosyncratic guy (I believe everyone is, to some extent). Among the quirks that I have noticed in me, however, is the quirk of being a bibliophile bordering on obsession. Simply put, I have this itch to read, and I tell you, it has not been pretty most of the time. This comes from a personal exigency to do something productive when I’m not doing anything, and since I cannot channel this exigency to be productive towards studying I direct it to reading. While I haven’t read as much as the scholars and litterateurs, I think I’ve read quite a significant amount of books. Read the rest of this entry »

You guys may have noticed that I’m way ahead of schedule. It’s true, I am. But I’d rather fulfill it faster than not fulfill it at all. Maybe I’ll get some bonus points, I don’t know. As long as my mind can think of different topics to write about, however, why should I stop? (This post is lengthier than the rest of my Lunar New Year posts. I hoped to delve deeper into what I wanted to talk about. I hope I was successful.)

Since I have totally no idea what to place here, have some fun at badly designed pictures.

Thenightsshadow just wrote a new post in his updated blog. I know this because I was talking with him yesterday; the post deals with character music. He quipped:

However, I feel that people have overlooked a gem of the characterization of anime characters; that is, their character music.

This statement reminded me of James Joyce. It’s quite far-fetched, right? Read the rest of this entry »

I have been unable to sleep early since the onset of my sickness. Since I have ideas still roiling around in my head, I decided it would be best to write another post (it would also bring me closer to my aim of fifteen posts).

This book is worthless.

I gave some of my books today to a friend of mine. There was supposed to be a gift exchange among the different students of Biology (my course) for last year’s Christmas, but I wasn’t able to give that friend anything (since I picked him from the lottery) until yesterday. I gave So Human an Animal, Hyperion, and Greenmantle. All are notable novels to some extent, but they simply did not appeal to me. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure, however.

I decided to give it to that friend of mine because he loved reading about different things and would probably appreciate the ideas of those books I gave him. I chose the novels in such a way that they had variety in them: every single book was different from one another that if he failed to like one or the other, there remained another option. This experience made me think.

Not everyone likes Honey and Clover, even though I think it’s the best anime series ever. It can be noted that the writer of that article also dislikes Twelve Kingdoms. While the reasons may be very valid, for example someone’s irritation with the character designs of Honey and Clover, as they are admittedly unique, there may be some reasons also that simply stem from the personality of the viewer.

Real looks like an actress . . .

I’m sure how the viewer was raised up or grew contributed to his future choices and decisions (even as supposedly simple as choice of anime series), and I’m also sure most of us will never know the reasons why one likes this and the other likes that. However, do we even need to?

Anime, first and foremost, is a medium meant for entertainment. It is not like literature in that some literature aim simply to make people think either in its sense or nonsense. I fervently believe that The Sound and the Fury was written like that because it did not mean to entertain in the first place: it meant to force people to think, to intellectualize and experience how the thoughts of a retardate, an intelligent madman, and a rational asshole flow all within the same nuclear family. If it meant to entertain primarily, the story won’t have been written in such a method.

. . . and he looks like a model

Anime, however, even at its bleakest and most complicated, is a medium meant to entertain first then to provoke thought second. Things are just like that. For even with the supposedly labyrinthine anime like Ergo Proxy, the heroes are very cute and pleasing to the eyes (Re-l was hot; Vincent was a bishie). There are no ugly leads. Because as long as one is entertained, even if he or she didn’t understand the totality of the (non)story, he will remain attracted to the series (even if only to the lead character), and this makes money for the studios.

And as long as enough money is made, both sides are happy. The cycle returns again to its starting state.

P.S. I finished this post at almost three in the morning. If I ever wrote something wrong, kindly address me in the comments.