we're finally notdotq anymore

Here we are, coming up on the end of yet another year. Another notch in the grand ticking clock of life. On the whole I think we can call this year “pretty good.” There weren’t any huge surprises, in either direction, but overall things seemed to go well. So what earned my awards this year? Read on to find out!

BEST NEW SERIES

There really weren’t any huge standout new series this year, but I guess I’d have to give it to DRRRRRR. It was a fun ride, and the twist ending of Dullahan actually being an advance AI manifesting a holographic projection was really clever. To be expected from the people who brought us Baccano!, I suppose. I also quite enjoyed the cameos from the Baccano! characters–no reason for them not to be a shared world. I realize a few people found it distracting, but they were only there for a handful of scenes, and didn’t do anything significant.

BEST CONTINUING SERIES

Fullmetal Alchemist, no question. The finales (in both animated and manga form) were just as spectacular as we’d all been hoping. The month-long hiatus from the anime to give the manga time to get that last chapter out was perfectly fine (and well-timed, set to the actual in-story timeskip!) and thoroughly preferable to filler. Unsurprisingly, the english dub is also pretty good, and has garnered absurd amounts of critical praise and so on. Whoo!

BEST MOVIE

There were some pretty solid movies this year, with Evangelion 3.0 taking the series in a RADICALLY new direction, but I’m going to have to give this to the second Eden of the East movie. (Yes, those are both technically continuing series. Go fuck yourself.) It did a brilliant job of tying up all the loose ends, and left everyone who watched it with a lot to think about. There’s a reason it inspired so many introspective blog posts.

BEST BLOG (overall)

I’m going to have to give this one to 21stcenturydigitalboy. He’s really stepped up his game this year, holding to his various promises and ideas. He started off the year right by finishing off his Don’t F This Up series, and carried that momentum in an almost-daily string of posts on anything and everything. He didn’t break any new ground, and the majority of his posts weren’t particularly memorable, but overall this was a very solid year for digiboy.

MOST INTERESTING BLOG

The OEG! These guys set out to stir up trouble, and boy did they succeed. The eventual reveal that it was actually LovelyKitsune (the original LK!) and Baka-Raptor working together wasn’t a huge surprise, but it didn’t diminish from their goals. They haven’t been entirely successful, as there are still assloads of people claiming to be “true otaku,” but they certainly made everyone think.

SADDEST ANIBLOGGING MOMENT

Lelangir getting hit by a car. As we all know, he’s recovering, and according to his recent posts should even get functionality back in his legs eventually, but… seriously. Our hearts all go out for him.

HAPPIEST ANIBLOGGING MOMENT

Nothing topped the birth of BusterBeamSlice. Ghostlightning kicked the year off right, with an incredibly adorable baby. Ongoing congratulations to him for everything!

So overall, this wasn’t a half-bad year. We had some fun new series, some good endings to old ones. The occasional spat of aniblog dramu, but nothing we couldn’t handle. The industry is fairly stable, and con attendance continues to rise. It looks like next year could be another fun year, with things continuing their gradual upwards slope! So here’s to that, kids! To 2011!

.lolikappa

GREETINGS, UNDERLINGS!

A new decade is upon us! There are many strange things afoot in the world of the aniblogosphere! A great otaku cleansing is underway! A baby has been born! Certain females have embraced their true calling as agents of the truth of YFR! These are all clearly omens and signs that it is high time to shake things up in the world.

As such, I have stepped up to the plate to rule as notdotq’s new overlord.

Greetings underlings, I am lolikappa, your new lord and master.

Or something.

For those of you who don’t recognize me, I’ve been here longer than all of you, so shut the fuck up and sit down. I’m a duck and shit, I watch animu, I play vidjamagames, I go to school in the frigid east, and I’ve been IRL archrivals with lolikit for like six years or some shit. Traditionally I make one post on here a year, despite having originally been a coblogger or something like that.

So what happened to lolikit? Well, see, last week he made a grave error. He took on the guise of someone he shouldn’t have. He overstepped his bounds. He took on the mantle of the most rapturous raptor, the madman in the sexy hat, the one, the only… Baka-Raptor-Jesus. He reigned on high for a few glorious hours, but was soon struck down by the mighty hand of the real Baka Raptor, and is thus lost to the world. The mighty lizard cast his pale imitator out into the wild world, where his scrabbling family caught hold of his flailing limbs, and dragged him off into the horizon.

(Of course, I was the one who got him to take on that guise in the first place. As Kurosawa would say… just as keikaku.)

So what will notdotq be like under my reign? Not much different. I’m going to try to post every day, even though most of those posts will be meaningless drivel. Maybe there’ll be a Winter Kickoff Shit? Or maybe some ramble about Eden of the East, or Brotherhood, or Bakuman, or Casshern, whatever else I’m watching/reading these days. WHO THE FUCK KNOWS.

And maybe this regime change won’t be permanent. Maybe someday lolikit will return. But maybe, just maybe…

Maybe this is the dawn of a glorious new decade.

.lolikappa

The archetypical trio.

I took it upon myself to check out the first episode of “educational” anime Chu-Bra after reading about it on Chocolate Syrupy Waffles blog. The screenshots seemed titillating and the descriptive jabs hinted at aspects of “so-bad-it’s-good.” Too bad I missed the memo about this show’s characters being in the seventh grade.

I deleted the episode in such a hurry that I wasn’t even able to take screenshots. The above is pilfered directly from the aforelinked blog post (thanks, Jubbz!), and is used here only for illustrative purposes.

For the uninformed, Chu-Bra is a show about a chick in the seventh (7!!) grade with tits as large as her malformed anime head. She and her asshole troll classmate from elementary school decide to stalk the class cum dumpster, only to discover that said cum dumpster isn’t a cum dumpster at all but an underwear beta tester! They befriend her, and she gropes them.

The moral of the story seems to be that if a seventh grader looks and acts like a prostitute, she isn’t one.

… riiiiight.

Anyhoo, I am dropping this show like the train-planes dropped cubes of bombs in Casshern. Good riddance.

In this last week, I have been berated on several occasions by several people. They clamor for more activity on ¬.Q. They say that there are a million people out there desperately sucking on the RSS straw, seeking any drop of lolikitean trollogic, any drop of anime-lampooning humor.

Let’s face it: Baka-Raptor does it better than I.

Funny thing is that this past weekend, I was Baka-Raptor. Long story, and one I don’t think I’ll tell here. If I start talking about this particular group of my meatspace friends, I may end up exposing various embarrassing stories about anime conventions and the dreams of jizzing on men’s faces that are the stuff of such conventions. What? You don’t know what I’m talking about?

Clearly, you have never been to a convention.

ANYWAY—I come here to deliver some words. I know for a fact that my friends, being the drillsluts they are, enjoy exaggeration and hyperbole and various other redundant nouns all meaning the same thing. The word “epic” is rampant in their vocabulary. This is to say that I have a hard time trusting them. Me? A million fans? Last I checked, though the aniblogosphere had grown considerably, a million was still pushing it. And that’s presupposing that the entire sphere likes me.

But, despite all my True Knowledge, despite knowing that my friends exaggerate, I am posting here: there are no millions at the RSS teat, but I know there are at least five of you out there waiting with bated fingertips for my metaphor-mixing magics.

With a respectful nod toward those who would rather see me never stir my grave, I shall now announce my intentions:

I, loliknowimtsundere, shall henceforth return to posting on ¬.Q.

This is a new year’s resolution, bitches, so you know it’s true. Bitches.

Toodles!

Today, I went to the admin panel of notdotq. I logged in as lolikitsune, clicked ‘Add New,’ and pasted the full text of my Endless Eight post into the text box on the New Post page. I changed the title to ‘Endless Eight is Endless Lulz,’ added the appropriate tags, threw on a handful of tags like so many splotches of paint on an unfinished wall, and then I said to myself, “not this time, Ghastly Crucifier!”

And I clicked, ‘Delete.’

Never again, quoth the phantomflash, Never again will I desecrate lolikit’s sacred Jasonian (pronounced JAY-SOH-NEE-UN) shrine with my tomfoolery of a trolling attempt. Never again will I trick people into thinking that lolikit is the one posting these posts. Never again will I so much as think of outdoing Kyoto Animation, henceforth, Team Troll.

Never again, quoth the spectralthunder, Never again.

And then a Frosty Hurricane came upon me, and I sampled his scrotal sweat, and I thought to myself, “what a wonderful world.”

Within the last 24 hours Sixten delivered another two beautiful character portraits for my CCY-senpai visual novel. These are Baka-Raptor and Scott Von Schilling.

The full portraits can be found at Sixten’s site, with on-the-mark character descriptions he wrote himself. [ Baka-Raptor | Scott ]

So far I am quite pleased with Sixten’s work.

If any of you are as pleased as I am, feel free to help fund this artwork.

He sleeps beautifully.

Gentlemen, above: a refined dinosaur, a well-groomed dinosaur—but don’t let his appearance trick you. He’s a total dunce beneath the count-like exterior.

Baka-Raptor, LET ME INTERVIEW YOUUUUUU