Ultimate Post

lolikitsune — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 16:41:06 +0000

Hi all. lolikit here.

I saw the challenge of the Ultimate Post call-out, and felt the need to show digiboy that picking strong allies is only one factor in deciding the victor. He got Baka-Raptor, he got ghostlightning—formidable opponents, to be sure, but not the best team players. I used science to determine which trinity of anime bloggers would form the best gattai and, swallowing my pride, called up three old enemies: Jason Miao, Sixten, and Pete Zaitcev.

Surprisingly, they answered my call—Jason seems to have gotten over the fact that my sense of humor uses his as its urinal, Sixten seems to have overcome the trauma dealt him when I told him to remove the “amateur” qualifier from his About page, and Zaitcev seems to have finally accepted the truth about my Night Switch series (that it’s not serious, and thusly not a left-wing alarmist allegory)—and here they are, full of fight, ready to put digiboy in his place.

Please, listen to their song.

J.C. Staff’s A Certain Anime Blog Post, Twittered

In 2008, when J.C. Staff announced that they had acquired the rights to do a movie adaptation of Kazuma Kamachi’s A Certain Anime Blog Post (TOARU ANIME NO BLOG), there was much rejoicing in the aniblogosphere. Here’s an idea of how pumped people were for this thing:

“just read the 6 chapters in one go, pretty good stuff. too bad it’s only one novel…” – boo

“I mean, wow Jason.
I still feel like Kamachi and Haimura should reconcile and continue work on Index, give it another 24 episodes, and that might fix the uneven narrative. They could even shoe in a Kuroko arc!
This new story’s lame in comparison.” – Myssa Rei

“Needs more Index. Cutest one there. No way to have TOARU Anything when Kamachi eliminated all partner artists with penises.” – Haesslich

“Riiiiight. Specifically pick up on the gay innuendo that’s used as a gag. And keep repeating Touma penetrating Stiyl jokes because THAT’S what J.C. Staff was getting at. Don’t worry, though, I still love you jason :)” – Beowulf Lee

Yes, these are my readers… and they weren’t particularly enthralled with the prospect of Blog Post, no. But other bloggers were. Ones more into the whole meta thing. And ones more into J.C. Staff (which really should have folded after Takasu passed up on the Minorin buffet in episode 18). And that’s why Author and Sixten are joining me today as we pick apart the Blog Post movie.

First, to clear up some misconceptions people had about the movie prior to its release in Japan, because these were rampant.

4. J.C. Staff announced a movie, so it’s going to be high quality.

The truth of the matter is that you can only have so many minutes of people looking at a computer screen before the audience gets bored. If people were watching basketball on their computer screens, it might be an interesting exercise in breaking the fourth wall. You could have a show about basketball, but it’s actually about people watching basketball—you could get into the mentality of sports fans, and a lot of people would relate to that.

But no. The Blog Post book is about just that, a blog post. There’s nothing interesting about that. I mean, a fanservice blog at least! Melonpan! But it’s just a blog.

And you can only have so many minutes of that, so they chose to make a movie instead of a TV show.

3. J.C. Staff announced a movie, so it’s going to be at least an hour long.

Nope. It’s almost as if the director, after having spent the entire budget on tacos and lapdances—and subsequently putting the animation studio out of employment temporarily—, wrote in to the producers suggesting that they steal footage from other anime rather than rely on J.C. Staff’s, well, staff.

According to Heisei Democracy, a month before Blog Post hit the theaters, JASRAC smelled blood and cracked down on the already-sorry production. Half of the major animation studios whose content had wound up in Blog Post sued, and so half the movie was simply cut. It’s twenty-seven minutes long… almost short enough for a normal TV spot.

2. J.C. Staff set the release date as May 2010, so they gave themselves a long time to make sure the film would be a masterpiece.

For those who read the original light novel, you know there’s some magic even in something as mundane as a story about an animeblog post. Namely, Kamachi described several bits of web technology that simply didn’t exist back in the day. J.C. Staff—always concerned with realism—decided to consult with Google and subsequently scheduled the film to come out only after Chrome’s speed test videos proved that yes, the internet IS faster than a potato gun.

1. There would be graphs.

I am guilty of this one, I admit—I anticipated an anime about a Japanese anime blogger to include at least one or two graphs. Unfortunately, it seems graphs fell out of fashion in the Japanese-language blogosphere shortly after Spring 2006, and we’ve been following in the footsteps of mediocrity for the past four years.

I would insert a graph of graph decline here, but eh. I need to be trendy.

Well, let’s get down to business, shall we?

Sixten: before Jason scares off all our readers—or worse, encourages people to not watch the film—it should be said that even though this is slice-of-life (bordering on iyashikei, no less), there is still that authentic J.C. Staff tsundere flavor. If you’ve considered selling your soul to J.C. Staff as I did, you can’t afford to miss this movie. I know it’s hard to compete with Haruhi’s disappearance, especially when that movie made it clear that it was serious with Windows 95 footage, but I think true fans such as myself may well end up remembering Blog Post as the best anime of 2010.

Author: I also have a brief note before we get deep into the bones of it. Evirus noted something interesting in an e-mail reply to my post about Pizza Hut:

“Did you wonder about all those fuzzy black squares in Blog Post? I hear the majority of the budget came in the form of Pizza Hut sponsorship; once the news with JASRAC broke that poor director was forced to censor all the Pizza Hut boxes in his show for fear of incriminating the chain.”

“Poor director?”

He’s just lucky he didn’t get AIDS from all those strippers. In any event, you will no longer be confused by the fuzzy black squares!

UPDATE: we’ve updated the post to use screenshots from the uncensored version. Er, the Pizza Hut is still gone, but the black squares are, too! No trace of the pizza chain remains.

0:07

Brilliant. I haven’t seen this much meta since Remote Island Syndrome!

Sixten: For those of you who, like us, watched this raw, yes, Mugen no Juunin is Blade of the Immortal. The premise seems to be that these two friends, Hiki and Ri, read the manga together and feel it resonate in their souls. They fall in love.

Author: (With the series.)

0:52

Nosebleeding… that’s original, Mr. Kuroko!

Sixten: I have to say this is one of the better nosebleeds in a while. Sure, they stole the animation from Summer Wars, but look at his eyes! The sweat! You can tell that this is taking a lot out of him. Poor guy needs to go drink some vanilla salt.

Author: My buddy Evirus has an index of all the nosebleeds in anime—

1:25

For the fools I pity who didn’t read the book back when NNL turned it into a translated visual novel, the story goes something like this: Hiki and Ri read Blade of the Immortal. Hiki becomes obsessed with the idea of the slashfic pairing male!Rin x Manji. Ri, upon attaining Hiki’s level of enlightenment, puts the pedal to the metal and writes at least a hundred fanfics using the pairing.

Sixten: Here we see Ri typing away. They used very dramatic music—

Author: —probably stolen from Death Note—

Sixten: —to make this scene more suspenseful. Will he succeed in writing his fanfic? Will it suck? Will he even finish? Remember, kids, the lotus cobra helps you combo out.

2:28

Is Komo designing a mascot for the fanfics?

Sixten: The two gay boys’ friend, Komo, steals their manuscripts and publishes them to his super-popular anime blog.

Author: For some reason, the use of ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ here was very appropriate.

3:22

Loved Komo’s expression here. “Did I just publish that?” Yes. Yes you did.

(How do you ‘accidentally’ steal yaoi fanfic and publish it on your own site without realizing it’s yaoi? Is that like how Robert Green ‘accidentally’ scored a goal in the England-US match of the World Cup? Totally the true US striker.)

4:15

“Son, no!”

Author: Somewhere at Google Komo’s mom reads his postings in her buzz stream. She’s not particularly worried about the fact that her son is posting gay porn. No. She’s a market analyst, you see, and her job is to know how the internet will receive content. And she knows this one’s going to be way too popular.

Sixten: It was around here that I started yawning. Not enough Dengeki tsundere loli.

4:25

As anticipated, the world goes crazy for the male!RinxManji fics. The girl in front came, hard. I was surprised that they slipped that in there, but I guess all the organizations that usually persecute such content were too busy censoring the stolen video footage.

5:15

The internet begins to discuss.

(Is this what it looks like when I update my blog? Do people all across California stop in the middle of what they’re doing to comment? YTAMR.)

Author: Is this where the boring part starts?

Sixten: Yep, fourteen and a half minutes of people typing furiously on their cellphones. Apparently Kamachi was more interested in the psychology of the blog comment author than in the content of the blog comment, so the original book had a few chapters dedicated entirely to describing the faces and movements of the people replying to the post. It also went into a lot of detail on the various things people stopped doing in order to read. If J.C. Staff had help up to my expectations, they would have had an epic forty-minute-long montage of the scenes described in the book. Unfortunately, because all the footage is stolen, this dialogue-less portion just felt kind of cheap.

Author: The Requiem for a Dream music is oddly fitting.

5:26

Yeah, we became fairly unenthusiastic around here. It didn’t help that the most interesting parts of this sequence from the book—the parts where Komo has to defend the gay porn he stole from his friends from the attacks of flaming trolls—were lost in the cut when JASRAC chopped out half the movie.

6:11

Dat ass.

7:02

Love the expression on the kid. “Mommy? What happened to dinner?” “Eat your cake son, I’m busy reading homoerotica.”

(Even the grandpa is into it.)

7:08

For some reason this made me think of Nurse-kun.

7:39

Crime rates in New York dropped to 0 for the day.

8:06

Pedrobear, on parole after six years of prison for touching young boys, is back on his farm. But he just can’t quit the gay porn. He just can’t quit the internet. And his wife’s so whipped she’s reading over his shoulder.

9:44

Vegetarians drop their kitchen duties to make internet war with the meat-eating homogays.

11:58

This movie had a lot of neglected children. I don’t remember if that was in the source material, or if it’s just a consequence of the stolen footage.

12:24

“We used our cell phones with the matching design / That was your signal, wasn’t it?”

13:35

I’m eating hummus.

14:14

Sixten: Can we skip ahead to the interesting part, please?

Author: You clearly don’t understand the Art of Jason’s posts. Be quiet and let him work his magic.

14:50

15:46

Someone probably just got penetrated. Somewhere, a Sunrise executive is shaking his head. “Why didn’t we think of that one?” Subtle, off-screen penetration. Kiiiinda featured in Mai-Otome, but not really.

16:06

16:27

A face to rival Beckham’s.

17:18

Here’s where things finally get interesting. This batch of female trolls finds that the page is loading too slowly. The gay fanfic can’t come fast enough! The billions of comments are crashing WordPress’s paginator plugin!

18:00

Everyone pauses, mid-cheer, as Chrome’s theme background becomes visible and the browser displays the “could not connect” error message.

(Do people really cheer at screens like this? Only for sporting events. By the way, LAKERS!!!!!1.)

Sixten: Author left to go make a sandwich.

18:35

The movie takes us back to Google—which for whatever reason runs the internet—and shows us the maintenance staff expressing a bit of worry. Odd red blips have shown up on their monitoring equipment, and they’ve been getting a lot of tech support phone calls.

19:03

NETTO KYUUKYUU!

(China is probably unaffected.)

Sixten: The absurd barrier is breached as the gay porn’s traffic overload begins to negatively affect the entire apparatus of the internet. Sites worldwide slow to a crawl and then die. Code Red is established at Google.

19:49

Google does its best to reboot the internet, but…

20:03

“Sir, we don’t have enough light orbs!”

There is no happy ending for Tomoya; the Nagisa that is the internet has died.

21:47

“Facebook should crash more often! Buggy Farmville is pretty!”

Author: What did I miss?

Sixten: The internet died.

Author: … the post was that awesome?

Sixten: Believe it.

22:04

Gotta love the pragmatist characters. Google CEO Captain Harlock cops a feel from his secretary as she bends over to document the death of the internet.

Author: We live for this moment.

22:27

Without the internet, our net-dependent world shuts down. We lose luxuries like running water, gas heat, and, of course, electricity. Because this is Megaman Battle Network.

Author: The last shot of the movie is of the International Space Station. All power plants on Earth have turned off, and, along with them, the Zearth program. The noble astronauts sigh as they realize they will die because some thirteen-year-old boys wrote bad yaoific.

26:41

Loved Kyon’s face here. More shows should use this cameo at the end, it’s a real slam dunk for the mood.

Well, that’s that. Should we do final impressions?

lolikitsune: No, stop there, guys. We’re at 2330 words, and the limit is 2500. I know Author is a man of concision, but if you drag Sixten into a digestive discussion this could go on forever. Thank you, all of you.

So the only other person who participated in the contest was digitalboy. He picked the team of ghostlightning, Baka-Raptor, and Shin. He thought he would win. I talked to him yesterday—he still didn’t know I was participating, one day before the deadline—and he told me that baaaawwww, his buddies abandoned him.

I suggested that he publish the current working draft for his ultimate post, and he laughed.

I was thinking about making th epost called ‘Fuck You Guys, I’ll Make My Own Damn Ultimate Post’ and then talk about why these kind of projects fail lol – digiboy

Protip to digi, and, well, to everyone.

The secret to success with group projects such as these is to not rely on anyone else. ;)

IcyStorm 4koma – Do You Remember Blogging?

lolikitsune — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 15:56:46 +0000

Thanks to the implementation of CommentLuv on Shin’s blog of filth, I noticed IcyStorm’s latest blog post. Thing about that blog post? It was posted on October 8th. IcyStorm—is this how you want to be remembered?

notdotq » shin