A recap, in case any of you are even more out of it than I was: there’s an Aniblog Tourney happening. That’s right, bitches, aniblog.

“This is the first time!!! SO EXCITED” scream countless aniblogosphere sycophants. But no, sadly, this is not the first time. We had the Anime Blog Awards in 200…8? Lemme check my sidebar. Ah yes. Best Satire Blog 08. To give credit where credit is due, there are two original things about this Aniblog Tourney: first, it’s sucking on Jason’s cock by being set up in a sports-esque bracket (which Josh so kindly SGML-ized); second, I’m not in it.

Am I bitter? Fuck no! Being excluded from this sham of democracy is the best thing that’s happened to me all month!

This also means that I can kibitz from the sidelines with impunity. I won’t look like a narcissistic whore and I won’t look like an emo loser! I’ll just be me, you know, just be me. And then no one be judging me, except me.

All this said in various shades of verbal irony, I shall now move right along to the first round of the Aniblog Tourney without further ado.

My picks are winning for now, but will it all be meaningless in the end?

Every day, two pairs of blogs are voted on. Today, it’s… well, you see the names in the above-srced image. Calamitous Intents and The Cart Driver are winning so far today. This is good, because those are the two blogs I voted for. Why did I vote for them? Funny you should ask!

I voted for Calamitous Intents because that’s where Choux resides. For those not in the know, Choux is a lovely lovely artist who did the female character designs of CCY-senpai wa 17sai. Yes, this is a plain case of personal bias. What? How much did she charge me for the artwork? Zero dollars. Fuck, this looks like corruption in action. So much for democracy!

As for The Cart Driver, I was unfamiliar with the blog prior to today. I was also unfamiliar with its opponent, Sekijitsu, but the choice was pretty easy to make after a quick peek at both sites. First, Sekijitsu has about 600 pixels of the HTML equivalent of drivel before you actually get down to business and read their posts. That’s a big no-no in my book. To make matters worse… well, I’ll let the blog speak for itself:

Do you remember what I said about the originality of the Aniblog Tourney earlier in this post?

Okay, okay, so something can be 100% unoriginal and still be epic, but this is really pushing it.

Moving right along, The Cart Driver is… well, you remember how Code Geass R2 ended? Remember how a certain Mike was orgasming over the idea of Lelouch still being alive at the end? Remember how, grasping for whatever straws he could, he came up with a 4chan rumor that zomg the cart driver is Lelouch!! ? Yeah. The Cart Driver is that cart driver.

Negative points in my book, but said aniblog quickly shoots to the top of my list of good blogs due to the number of pixels between the top of the page and the first post (maybe 100? something sexy like that). All this pored over, The Cart Driver carts home an easy win.

Am I suggesting that my votes are important in any way?

I suppose I am. Please forgive me, oh aniblogospeers.

P.S. just for the record, if rankings in the Aniblog Tourney are primarily based on blog age, how is notdotq not even featured? I was around before half of the participant blogs. ghostlightning? You gotta be kidding me.

Time for some anibloggerality:

Munto sucks as of episode 7; Kyoto Animation turned the once-intriguing Yumemi into a puddle of moe moe jelly and basically sexified everything. lelangir approved; I just want more Gass. Too bad the guy’s dead because he finished pumping his gas. Har. Har. All he wanted to do was BANG BANG take your akuto. *badabum tshhhhhh*

Clannad After Story’s ending is officially balls, I don’t care what the game-playing purists say. Maybe it’s a good adaptation. A good adaptation of shit is still shit. I’m not saying Clannad’s shit, I’m just saying that this scenario is possible. I do know that the execution viewed objectively was weak, and I do know that the ending felt like Mai Hime 26. Only this time there was no Mashiro-chan to fix things, just a loopy plot that somehow had something to do with some nonsensical dreamscape that just didn’t make sense. Also Fuuko is Fffffffffffffffffffuuko. There—you got it, the invective I promised not to deliver.

Anyway, since that’s all the anime I’ve watched recently, I guess I’ll move onto juicier topics like my life. (I’m just too squeezable for my own good. Some might even call me ‘fruity.’)

Yesterday I helped SAKI relocate her bunnies to a new home, if you know what I mean. You probably know what I mean because I mean what I’m saying, and words are words. Which have meanings. Yeah. There was lots of bittersweetness for various reasons, but mostly it was a good day. I read the first chapter of Twilight whilst lingering at SAKI’s place and I must say, it’s a Shaft production waiting to happen. The sickening overabundance of adverbity is not so dissimilar from Shaft’s overabundance of Photoshop filters—meaningless, trite, a disguise that obfuscates none of the shittiness beneath the underneath.

Ate some delicious curry chicken katsu for lunch (apparently, SAKI’s family is more weeaboo FUCKING AWESOME even than I, and as such eats Japanese foods with more regularity than I—which is to say, more than once a year at anime conventions), which was accompanied by several doses of “oh my god I need to not laugh my food across the table.” I hummed some Loituma and got someone else at the table to struggle against the urge to laugh food across the table, and just now I broke the limit of cluttery anti-flow a lolikit can inject into a single sentence and it just keeps going oh my god I’m going to turn into Faulkner at this rate can you believe it? Tick-Tock.

But enough about yesterday—which concluded with a slew of torrenting and taquitos—and onto today. Because apparently, I’m just blogging my life here now or something.

This morning, I attended my philosophy lecture (History of Modern Philosophy, as you might recall from my course list; currently we are studying some B.S. Ethics), and for the first time in a long time I doodled something in my notebook that wasn’t abominable. Well, it might be abominable, but I was not abominated by it. Maybe my standards have fallen. Maybe I was just happy.

After that, I met up with a high school friend back from college on spring break. This was immensely pleasurable, as I missed this friend dearly. She noted that I was more comfortable in my outgoingness than I used to be. This may be the result of my time stuck in a cubicle last semester, or it might be the result of some decking action.

Speaking of decks, could I get some WOWers to level for me? Hurr hurr hurr.

I ate lots of pizza in the company of good friends and then I went home to mom to shit out half my fullness and sleep off the other half. Finally I made it back to the dorms, a place I’d been avoiding for a week as I tended my cat for my out-of-town father, unpacked ten gallons of clothing and damp towels, thought briefly about the fact that I hadn’t watched anime in weeks and how glad I was that I had no idea what the fuck was going on in the aniblogosphere, discovered that ghostlightning’s illustrious blog had attained the coveted 100th post, cursed my fate for now knowing some of what was going on in the aniblogosphere, and subsequently shut myself out of my dormroom, sans computer, in a frantic search for SAKI, who had similarly secluded herself away from a computer.

Apparently, she was in the library stacks on campus, in the deepest and darkest corner of the trollbooth, drawing ambiguously gay porn.

… I love my life.

EDIT: yes, yes, I’ll post her drawings, up in the Rule 34 section, once I feel giving. Right now, I’m not sharing. Use comes before generosity. Now to go fap to my potentially female self…

This is what I am up to: school. Work. SAKI.

It’s all good in the hood aside from some annoyingly depressing shit that’s going down. Yes, I’m just mentioning it to tantalize the drama queens among you and piss off the anti-drama kings among you. I’m not going to go into any further depth, not in the hopes of being enigmatic and intriguing but just in the hopes of rambling. It’s something to mention in brief and then to rationalize the in-brief-mentioning-of, because I want to take up room, but have no coherent intelligible interesting written words to share with you. This is why I am mentioning the annoyingly depressing shit. I don’t want sympathy.

I WANT WORDS!!

I would find even cooler ways to make this post even more meaningless while preserving its loquacious and overly-verbose nature, but if I get carried away I won’t be able to click “Publish” before midnight and it won’t be Pi Day anymore.

So eat your Ushios, enjoy your nonsense, and celebrate your Pie Overlords.

All is well with the lolikit, and he will return in true form at SOME POINT.

So. My first thoughts when they were showing us the “history” segment were “lolol Code Geass” because you have the same thing: some self-righteous bastards have some new technology that they’ve somehow managed to develop completely in secret, and that technology is humanoid robots on wheels, and they use this technology to take over the whole damn world.

For the record, “lolol Code Geass” is not the same as “lolol this is ripping off Code Geass”—I’m well aware of which work was first conceived in the chronology of creation. It’s more like… “lolol this turned out so well last time an anime did this.”

Psst. Sarcasm.

But I digress. The next thing I thought—still in that scene with the rideback drop pods carriers—was “… Innocent Venus.”

For those not in the know (IV is shit, so it might be obscure), Innocent Venus features a cool Yousei Teikoku OP, a cast of shitheads, and rollerblade mechs the armaments of which are too inaccurate to deal with infantry. Obvious parallels here…

… but then, in reading some post somewhere, I realized: Outlaw Star! These are grappler motorcycles. Yep. Hella original, RITE?!

Discuss.

Oh also, if I could say “typical” over nine thousand times in a row, that might almost describe this show.

For those who don’t understand any Japanese, that last bubble is “make a little sister.” Doremi Fansubs are usually decent, and I think they captured Sachiko’s meaning of “accept someone as your little sister” well enough, but I felt like letting a bit of my literalist side take over momentarily. I checked the word in a dictionary, and while “tsukuru” can mean anything from “make” to “cultivate” to “commit sin,” I didn’t find anything in the long list of meanings to keep me from snickering.

Yes, Yumi.

Sachiko wants you to get knocked up.

I’ll write a real post sometime… maybe.

Visual metaphor for sex. *nod nod*

The final episode of ef ~a tale of melodies~ will have a place in my memories for years to come, I believe. Not because it was touching nor because it was a good closing episode, but because it was so goddamn stupid to the point of becoming an instant classic.

Hi Yuuko, I have some freshly-baked cheese tarts for you…

I’m still in shock because I can’t believe how everything fell into place for this episode. Apparently, Yuu and Yuuko have some problems with their relationship, which drive Yuu over the edge by the end of the episode. Only in Japan, only in anime, and only on a White Christmas can something like this happen without somebody stopping for a moment and saying,

“Yuuko. You’re dead.”

Fortunately, Yuu said…

“Naw, fuck that. Long drawn-out delusions within the boundaries of my own mind can resolve any issue between the living and the dead better than actually believing in God long enough to accept a miracle. The longer I keep my delusions to myself and the harder I rape Yuuko’s illusion, the sooner Yuuko will unspill ink on herself and be alive again! Then she’ll realize that she was wrong and go on a date with me to the school rooftop.”

… and thus a legend is born.

BAWWWWWWWWWWWWthetic

Apparently, angels are petty creatures with human emotions. Never saw that in what of the Old Testament I read for my Bible As Literature class, but then again, this is me we’re talking about. Everyone knows I fail at critical thought and analysis!

So yeah—Amamiya Yuuko is an angel, complete with wings and shit, and she’s hanging onto Yuu’s hand and crying like a slut who wanted the stranger she met in that one bar to use a rubber. I never had much faith in Christianity, and this show isn’t doing a whole lot to change that. It clearly isn’t trying too hard, because I’m totally receptive to messages taught by anime.

It’s funny because in the end the show carries the same overall upbeat message as, say, World Destruction or Clannad: “everything will be alright.” “Hope is all you need.” “The future is bright.”

So after a very “real” first season, ef took a turn for the ludicrous. Everyone knows that hope and friendship don’t actually exist. Angels? Pffft. That’s just the tip of the iceberg.

This was when I realized that Yuuko was an angel and not the dead Yuuko’s twin sister or something. I mean, come on. This is ef we’re talking about.

I didn’t expect Clannad-level supernatural bullshit to blindside me like this!

I WON’T LET YOU TAKE THIS TRUTH FROM ME!!

Mizuki, Mizuki, Mizuki. You rocked hard for most of the show once I got over the fact that you’re way too… uh… ebullient and futuristic, I guess.

And then you said this line.

And you know what I thought to myself?

“This girl would get along well with Lelouch Lamperouge.”

Seriously, Mizuki. What the fuck were you smoking when you spouted that shit?! It’s not funny. It’s not cute. It’s not true. And no—Yuu’s smile does not make it true! Fuck you and your “logic.” I can just see you now, smiling and wagging your tail.

“But if you accept my theory, it proves itself!”

Fuck you, Mizuki. Fuck you.

ef ~a tale of melodies~ went just as planned, and that means that it had some really awesomely-presented scenes, some idiotic drama, and lots of assorted idiocy as the icing on the cake. Nothing could adhere better to the expectations of its fans.

Merry fucking Christmas.

Defying all odds, Code Geass R2 stopped sucking long enough during its final episode to pretend that it had been decent the whole time. It had a strong finale, and managed to do a lot of ass-covering. The moment in anime here isn’t so much in the contents of the episode, though, as it is in cherishing the memories of 50 episodes of black swans, memes, and angry pseudo-intellectual bloggers who kept reassuring us that everything was bright (believe it or not, dumb plot twists are dumb no matter where you get with them!).

Code Geass R2 Episode 25 to me signified the end of an era and was extremely nostalgic. No matter whether you love the show or hate the show, as someone pointed out a while back, it provokes a strong reaction in you, and it has sculpted a significant portion of the aniblogosphere.

Dumb though the show arguably was, it was incredibly influential for us more moronic anibloggers, and therefore its ending has impact.

Love and peace and rock my song,
-Dr. lolikitsune.

P.S. Code Geass embodies lolikitean romance.

I’m going to kick this off with something unimaginative.

Code Geass Episode 15.

“I bought a house in Australia. But to go to Australia, we need to take a plane. And you won’t fit into carry-on, C2… so I’ll make you compact!” – Mao, Code Geass Episode 15

I know that macros of this have probably deluged /a/, but I watched this show unawares of its memeportance and I laughed my ass off at this set of lines so hard it wasn’t funny for very long. No but seriously, I’m surprised that “I’ll make you compact” didn’t become the new “I’ll turn you into junk.” Actually, maybe it did, and I am just blissfully unawares. In any event, epic lulz were epic as Mao’s dialogue ra/i/ded my chest and filled it with pain.

Yet these hands will never know KIRA~☆

Kaioshin Sama of internet infamy (mostly due to his trollish appearance, which in turn is mostly due to the fact that he has taste and a brain) has issued a challenge to me in the comments of one of RABURI RABURI ghostlightning-chan’s suteki My Hometown-style hippie anti-war pro-love posts. **I move away from the mic to breathe in** The post had been about how people shouldn’t mindlessly hate things, and I had sort of “derailed” (har har) the comments by my introducing my belief that love should be justified just as much as hatred, and that people should always be able to back up their evaluations of shows (and studios).

While we were on the topic of thinking and challenging oneself to be more critical, Kaioshin said:

And if you are looking for a challenge I have one for you. Find me something good that Jason Miao did in terms of blogging……..ever. I have a feeling that I’ve sent you on a wild goose chase, but this could prove interesting nonetheless.

I could point at the sky walls of this blog and yell “Who the hell do you think I am?!” but, as some shrewd observers might observe, the Jason Miao love evident on this site is merely high-level mendacity in its most convoluted form. I have no love for Jason Miao. I am not his biggest fanboy. I cannot point at his forced memes and say “BEHOLD!” while crushing Kaioshin’s challenge in his face.

Two drills, of hand and tail combined—the unison of Vindication, Loli-Kitsu!!

Well, I could. But shouldn’t there be some limit to how sarcastic I can be?

Having decided to take Kaioshin’s challenge seriously, I shall now present unto the aniblogosphere the two and a half good things Jason Miao has done “in terms of blogging,” which I take to mean both “behavior helpful to anibloggers” and “spectacularly legendary blog posts that stimulate the ‘sphere.”

2.5 – Jason Miao liberated Sixten

Were it not for Jason Miao, aniblogosphere illustrator-commenter extraordinaire Sixten would not be the appreciable source of lulz he currently is. Yes, in order to unleash Sixten’s Miao Diary upon the world Jason first had to indenture the poor guy and give him one hell of a complex. Check out this quote:

I am not taking commissions right now, except from family members or Jason Miao (who can always get work from me for free if they ask nicely). – Sixten, Artists are cheap

My interpretation? This guy is whipped.

In any event, it is fact that Sixten was bound to Jason and it is fact that Jason set him free. This is perhaps the best thing Jason has done character-wise; it reflects well on him. I wouldn’t say it’s the best thing he’s done in terms of blogging (hence this point only being ranked #2.5), but it’s pretty good. The Sixten we know today is breaking people everywhere while producing and sharing enjoyable artwork. He’s a positive force in the aniblogosphere, using his art to comment on developments in the community.

It’s good to have the present-day Sixten, and for that, I thank Jason Miao.

1.5 – Jason Miao ran Blogsuki horribly

Because Jason was an elitist prick and Blogsuki was nothing more than Jason Miao’s personal feed reader masquerading as a service to the aniblogocircle, there was room for Hung to come on stage, create Animeなの, and weave a basket from the lonely reeds.

Had Jason run Blogsuki well, the aniblogosphere would have evolved very differently. It’s a good thing he fucked up.

What? “How did he fuck up,” you ask?

Well, riddle me this. Can you load Blogsuki? Fuck off.

It’s good to have the present-day ‘sphere, and for that, I thank Jason Miao.

0.5 – Jason Miao is the aniblogosphere’s Virgin Mary

I always pin my genesis as an aniblogger on Fred Gallagher, because one of his Megatokyo rants got me to watch AIR, and that was around the time I was a regular poster on the AnimeSuki forums, through which I encountered Lovely Kitsune. And this is with good reason, for were it not for Lovely Kitsune I would have no idea what anime blogs are. He was also the one to introduce me to blogrolls (I remember he hated bluemist for placing him on his blogroll) and AIM blocks (I hero-worshipped him because I didn’t know better).

From my first post regarding the 2008 Anime Blog Awards:

Lovely Kitsune blogged epic on AIR, and it’s arguable that without him I would not have started anime blogging, and that without that, ANO’s IRC channel would have never been created, and that without that, the ANO community might never have come together, and well… the possibilities run wild from there. But basically, Jason Miao would still run the aniblogosphere.

But all that said, Lovely Kitsune merely gave me awareness. The one who propelled me into creating “notdotq, seriously!” and the lolikitsune persona was none other than Jason Miao. Thanks to his hard work creating this post, singularity was avoided and the present we know is the true and correct present.

I’ll have you notice a few things about this post of his: first, it’s tongue-in-cheek, second, it’s funny, and third, it’s mostly useful. Unbelievable, right? I mean, this is Jason Miao we’re talking about!

… it’s high time I check my quality rating again.

But I digress! Back on the topic of hand, that post got me to begin blogging anime. Now, I ask that you look around you. Were it not for me, would Animeなの’s community have developed as it did? Take a moment to chew on that one. Would Dr. Japes and Hinano be getting married? Would Os have cycled through four team blogs or would he have given up when his friends in KonOSono bailed on him? Would Owen have ever begun blogging? Would he have formed the ABC? Would I have met Author and Sixten? Would I be making a crappy visual novel?

THAT would not have been formed.
Riex would not have joined THAT.
Riex would not have been unhappy with THAT.
Riex would not have launched Oi, Hayaku!
ghostlightning would not have started his blog.

All these “what ifs” build on each other’s shoulders. Really, it’s a circle jerk of hypotheticals, and I could ramble in Aozora Loops about the possibilities, but I think that there are some fairly simple chains of events leading from that one post of Jason’s in early 2006 to the aniblogosphere we frolic around in daily as 2008 comes to a close.

I’m not trying to say that I’m the central pillar of the EL aniblogging community (though I might if I were being less serious). I’m just pointing at the fact that Jason Miao set great things in motion, albeit unintentionally.

So I’d like to be the Raigyo to Jason’s white-haired children, and say this:

“Look at the seed you planted in me. Look how well I took care of it.”

I like the baby monsters given birth to by AoMM’s Echidna, and for that, I thank Jason Miao. Awwww yeah, I just went Greek mythology on your asses. What? You want the good ol’ Bible Bitchslap? Fine. Fuckin’ “monotheists.” Well, buckle up and brace for impact because I’m about to e-jaculate all over your keyboards:

Jason Miao is the Virgin Mary to my Jesus Christ, and for that, I thank him.

Hopefully, the above picture and the one right before it help illustrate the differences between Christianity and Greek mythology: Christianity got rid of the furries and taught people to be ego-centric. Who the fuck needs siblings? Not Jesus Christ.

Well, I’d say I’ve thanked Jason Miao enough. *retches*

Now I’d like to thank Kaioshin Sama for giving me the opportunity to give thanks where thanks were due. I can now return to hating Jason Miao to my Heart’s Content!

P.S. YES I AM THE MOTHER-FUCKING ANIBLOG MESSIAH.

P.P.S.

Bin Laden didn’t blow up the projects
It was U Jason
Tell the TRUTH Jason
Miao knocked down the towers
Tell the TRUTH Jason
Miao knocked down the towers

P.P.P.S. IN B4 “TOO SOON”