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.

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. ;)

Click the thumbnail to see Sixten’s blog post.

As for CCY17 progress on my end, er, school just started. I have an essay due Thursday so I’m not even worrying about visual novels right now.

Will update soon~

=-= 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.

Damn. What a manly man.

I continue to be very pleased with Sixten’s work.

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

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.

I do not believe shirking the responsibility of paying for this artwork is acceptable. However, it’s a hefty blow to me to just dish out a few hundred dollars.

As such, I am accepting donations.

See, normally, with art as good as what Sixten’s, I’d pay him out of my pocket and then sell the game, and make this disgusting thing called a profit. I’m not interested in that profit thing, and I’m not interested in making anyone pay for my game. It will be distributed for free at every stage in its development. That’s a promise.

And because I’m not making money off of it with which to recover from paying Sixten, I ask those of you in the target demographic (anime bloggers) who may or may not have five dollars, ten dollars, twenty dollars lying around to spend on a bit of entertainment, to spend those spare dollars on a bit of entertainment.

Lest you think I am trying to shift the entirety of the payment onto the community, think again: I have shifted the donation count up by $100: I am only asking for donations for the remaining two thirds. (The extra 20 dollars are from an anonymous benefactor, who shall remain anonymous unless he or she desires otherwise.)

• • Donations should be made via Paypal.
• • My account is dotq11@gmail.com .
• • If the deal with Sixten falls through, I will reimburse all donors.
• • If development of the game ends prematurely, I will pay Sixten personally and reimburse all donors.
• • If you need convincing that Sixten’s art is worth a couple of your dollars, see: Exhibit A / Exhibit B / Exhibit C / Exhibit D.

To all who contribute: thank you.

And finally: I have decided that this project will see fruition. I once joked that I was doing something dumb for fun and it wouldn’t go anywhere. The community spirit that subsequent “releases” of my game stirred up was gratifying; I felt, I should really deliver this. And then people began contributing things to the game. Choux made five amazing character portraits. lelangir sent me music to use. And so on. I can’t and won’t let the community down: I will complete this game.

Click for Sixten’s blog post.

Sixten continues to please with the male character designs for CCY-senpai wa 17sai. I quite like how my character turned out–it’s a welcome change of pace from most of this stuff.

And oh man, I’m looking forward to Owen.

Click for Sixten’s blog post.

Sixten is doing a fabulous job with the art for my game thus far. Our protagonist now has a sprite.

Obviously someone has to fail the cut. TJ, Omo, SDB with his cane, Crusader, BigN, Kuro, Evirus, Aroduc, Zyl and his brother, John and Zepy the newsmen — all went under the knife.

Well, for one thing, Omo is definitely in the game (receiving lots of mutated-clit-penetration from Owen). For another, I’ll say this: now that character art is in the picture, the overhead for adding characters has increased dramatically. If I want to add a character, I need to charge Sixten—onto whom I have already piled work—with the character’s artwork.

That said, I can find some outside sources of help.

Otou-san, for instance, has volunteered to make me a ghostlightning.

And some characters don’t need amazing character art. TJ won’t be appearing in my game, but I intend to make use of RIUVA‘s mascot: Tripeman. I hereby humbly request permission of the RIUVA staff. If it’s denied, I will bear Tripeman’s children and bring lawsuits against Jason Miao for removing RIUVA from Blogsuki in 2006 (in all honesty, its largest popularity bid to date), as that obviously will have led directly to my bearing of Tripeman’s tripenile mangobat children. If not explicitly denied, it will be taken for granted.

Man, I’m on a roll with the funniehz.