we're finally notdotq anymore

Let us shed now one silent tear for the passing of 2010, the greatest year in anime history. This year marked some truly watershed moments for the medium, the fandom, the aniblogosphere… Things were glorious. Let’s give some well-deserved awards.

BEST NEW SERIES

Nozomi no Densetsu, without a doubt. I don’t think anyone quite saw this one coming, and in a way I’m glad we didn’t. GAINAX’s masterpiece was one of the best-kept secrets in years–which is made even more impressive by the fact that they chose to simultaneously broadcast it on American TV as well. Every aspect of this show so far has been a masterpiece. The manic enthusiasm of Gurren Lagann crossed with the emotional depth of Evangelion’s twisted psychology… This is very much an adult show, and embraces that. There’s a reason it’s skyrocketed to the top of the charts both in Japan and America. It’s the first anime since Cowboy Bebop to be really socially acceptable to watch in America, and is practically the talk of the nation these days.

And you know what the best part is? We’ve got the whole second season to look forward to next year. (But dear gods, what a cliffhanger! GAINAX are horrible people!)

BEST CONTINUING SERIES

There were some really fantastic series continuing this year, with FMA’s stellar finale and some of Naruto’s best arcs, but the real standout was Eden of the East. The announcement of a full second season at the end of the second movie was thoroughly exciting, and lived up to its promise. The world it painted was rich and fascinating, and extremely poignant. Everyone who saw it came away with a hell of a lot to think about, and deeper for it.

BEST MOVIE

Oh wow, Fuyu no Tobira, no question. Mamoru Hosoda has knocked another one out of the park. We all thought Summer Wars was brilliant, but it was nothing compared to this–especially given the turnout! And now the American premiere of it has opened to stellar box office results, not to mention the pundits saying it’s a shoo-in for Best Animated Picture. Not since Spirited Away has an anime movie been this widely-accepted. I personally think that Hosoda could well be the next Miyazaki.

BEST BLOG

This is gonna be cheesy of me, but… the entire goddamn blogosphere. You guys really stepped up to the plate, and made some amazing posts. The whole community seemed to really cohere this year, and swelled immensely in size. There were occasional bouts of drama, but nothing out of the ordinary. On the whole, you guys just fucking rocked this year. Mad props.

MOST INTERESTING BLOG

The OEG. We never figured out who exactly they were, but they sure stirred things up a lot. And, in the end, they were successful, on a much broader scale than even they intended, I think. We all underestimated how powerful our own viral marketing schemes could be, and… Well, frankly, we have the unofficial OEG panels at Fanime, AX, and Otakon to thank for a lot of the publicity. Sure, it resulted in a fuckton of trolling, but… go to any anime convention these days, and you’ll find a mind-boggling decrease in the quantity of idiotic narutard-style otaku. The fandom as a whole seems to be finally growing up, and the OEG may well have been the catalyst.

SADDEST MOMENT

The return of Jason fucking Miao. Goddammit. The one blemish on an otherwise glorious year. I won’t spend any more time on this cumdumpster than I need to.

HAPPIEST MOMENT

Do I even need to list this? I think everyone knows what’s going to be said.

Everyone was horrified when ghostlightning announced BusterBeamSlice’s illness. We all anxiously followed the hospital mess on Twitter, and were right there with him as he waited in anguish for the diagnosis. And when we heard the news…

Well, that’s when the magic happened. There wasn’t any one real leader to it. We all just kind of spontaneously rallied. And what resulted was a truly beautiful effort. I’ve seen fundraisers. I’ve seen charities. But this… this was something special. There’s a reason that baby is alive and healthy today, and the reason is every single one of you. You’re all beautiful people.

Fuck, listen to me! I got into this business to troll all of you, and here I am singing your praises! Shit man! This must have been one hell of a year, to get me talking like that.

And you know what? I have this weird kind of feeling, like 2011… 2011 might just be even better. We’ve got so much forward momentum. So much to look forward to. So much potential. All we have to do is… not fuck this up.

.lolikappa

Um.

Wow.

2010 is finally over, and good riddance to this fucking trashpile of a year.

I’m honestly not even going to bother with awards, because really, what this year possibly deserved an award? Let’s see if we can’t recap all the horrible things that happened this year…

The year started off pretty uncomfortably with the fall of the OEG. Things seemed to have been going well, but they made the mistake of pissing some fans who were more, uh, devoted (read: crazy) than any of us anticipated. Once their contact information, it was honestly only a matter of time.

And then the media backlash started. The murder of two random guys didn’t seem that big a deal, but the media can never quite seem to let a potential scandal die. So it became the Blogger Murder. And suddenly there we were, aniblogs at the center of a huge news circus, and reviled by everyone.

There’s kind of a reason we started this year with a few hundred aniblogs and are ending it with barely three dozen. No one wants to be a part of this mess any more, and for good reason. I mean come on, this is the first post on notdotq by anyone for eight months. Shit.

Of course, the real shitstorm hit at Otakon. It was luck of the draw, really. Bad luck, that is. I maintain it could’ve been any convention center, and we just got the worst luck. With the bomber long dead, obviously, no one will ever know if it was targeted or just a random act of terrorism, but… the damage was done. Thousands dead (including half a dozen anibloggers–the most tragic of course being lelangir getting hit by an ambulance as he tried to pull himself from the wreckage), and apparently all over some Japanese cartoons.

The subsequent collapse of the anime industry, both stateside and in Japan, caught absolutely no one by surprise. The bottom fell out everywhere. It didn’t help that the fans went fucking nuts in the wreckage. Stragglers running to save themselves, ignoring burning and bleeding friends around them. Talk about the dregs of humanity. There’s a reason the world as a whole seems to hate anime fans these days.

So here we are. In the twilight days of anime.

And what do we have to say for ourselves?

Not a whole fucking lot.

I’m going to go read some webcomics now. That’s a ship that doesn’t seem to be sinking any time soon, and those few of you left are welcome to join me. The one we’re on is heading nowhere but down.

.lolikappa

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

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!

I don’t know what that faggot ghostlightning has been up to, but I’ve been working on my visual novel. I made this promise on Twitter already, but here it is with a bit more info:

=-= This Friday, July 31st =-=
I will release version 0.1 of my visual novel CCY-senpai wa 17sai, a satirical epic featuring our beloved eternally youthful senpai CCY. Last version released was version 0.04, in which I introduced a ton more story and some background images.

This version will bring many new things to the table.

1. The first smatterings of Sixten’s contributions to the game. CCY’s sprite will be present in every scene, and one of the backgrounds is Sixten’s.

2. Music. lelangir transcribed some anime music, so we have suitably annoying midi backgrounds.

3. More story. Lots more story. More branching, more options, more bad ends, more good ends.

4. Character art from Choux: five beautiful character sprites to liven up the game’s scenes.

And there’s more… touched up dialogue, improved ending notes, credits, an opening, and, well, more. I won’t enumerate it all here. But there will be a changelog when I release the game this Friday. It’ll be good.

This is a major leap forward from last release.

And remember: this won’t be a final version of the game. It’s still very much unfinished. There will be more releases as I make suitable progress in the future. Continued community feedback throughout the game’s development is crucial to a good final product, so please: play every release and comment in as much depth as possible!

Thank you, and look forward to Friday.

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.”

In the “better late than never category,” I started anime blogging on my old livejournal four years ago May. This officially makes me as pro as Jason Miao, and should elicit throngs of fanboys screeching “four more years! four more years!”

I would do a retrospective like lelangir did, but it wouldn’t be too interesting—every few points would be interspersed with “then lolikit gave up aniblogging in an emo rage fit, and closed down notdotq for five months.” Not that I ever stayed away for long, but…

… I do have a habit for, shall we call them, disappearances.

Instead of a retrospective, let’s do a highlights, and without dates, because I care more about the feelings than I do the historical accuracies:

- after one year of animeblogging, notdotq is born on wordpress.com, one of the handful of “first” anime blogs to use wordpress.com, along with jp meyer’s fairy tale of love and courage.

- Jason Miao promises to put notdotq on Blogsuki.

- Jason Miao removes newcomer RIUVA from Blogsuki, refuses to put notdotq on.

- Various bedraggled anibloggers realize that Jason is a cancer.

- Hung builds AnimeNaNo, invites Jason Miao.

- I start spreading my name by creating and maintaining the AnimeNaNo IRC channel. The community is thriving. Mr. Pippers is still an aniblogger.

- Jason still doesn’t join AnimeNaNo.

- So there are no killer lolis in Higurashi, mmmkay?

- Jason says that Japanese anibloggers are better than English-speaking anibloggers. Reason: graphs.

- Beginning of holy anti-Jason crusade.

- Oh by the way Haruhi sucks balls.

- I go to France, where I finish Fate/Stay-night and die a premature death due to suck. While in France, AnimeNaNo takes off like a flock of majestic birds, Japes becomes my friend, and Haruhi 12 blows me away.

- Hung, Japes, and Hinano–later, Japes’ girlfriend, now, his wife–start the AnimeNaNo podcast. Pips and I parody: podcast.dotq.org.

- wait, this is turning into a chronological recounting. SHIT.

Okay. Deep breath.

Here are my top ten moments in animeblogging.

#10. The founding of AnimeNaNo. Shit was so cash.

#9. Blogging Kyoushiro to Towa no Sora, Sola, and Aria the Origination with Shirukii.

#8. That time a newbie added me to her initial blogroll along with the big names–Jason, Jeff, Japes, Omo, etc.

#7. Baka-Raptor informed me that I was the king of trolls. (Or maybe it was ‘trolling king,’ either way.)

#6. Konoe and I enjoy many philosophical discourses over AIM, I publish these discourses (“on disagreement,” etc.), ghostlightning realizes that love needs explanation just the same as hate, various anibloggers begin defending their stances more rigorously, “lolikitean” invented.

#5. Kyousora.com is registered and built. My first exercise in hilarious satirical porn stories, perhaps the genesis of my visual novel project.

#4. Graphs. So fucking many of them. Everywhere. All the fucking time.

#3. When Jason stopped posting for three months. Hell yes. This was also when lots of people (ghostlightning, lolikappa, lelangir) were posting on notdotq. I was being extremely productive and the ’sphere was looking happy.

#2. Miao on My Mind.

#1. So, CCY-senpai, I herd u were maiking a gaem?

I’m going to stop the nostalgia train here because I’m not being very coherent or classy. This was really just a poor excuse to post more.

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