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. ;)

Also, Toradora!’s ending (eps. 24+25) pleased me immensely. It did three important things: it brought all the characters together in consensus/friendship/understanding, it was extremely passionate, and it recognized that these are still kids. The eloping theme was awesome to have, and even more awesome not to follow up on—I would have been shaking my head at the idiocy of these kids if they’d gone through with it. As things stand, it was just full of emotional win.

More on these later, perhaps.

Also, more on my life, since I’m supposed to be killing the site with non-anime blog posts. Or something.

Anyway, running for dinner with my dad now, then will be back to write a philosophy essay.

Cheers!

More seriously, though, it’s true that I have not blogged anime in a really long time. My last post on here, in fact, was to the effect that I was totally swamped by that oftentimes elusive, oftentimes painfully-in-your-face thing called “real life.”

But enough of that.

It’s time for a casual and relaxed account of my 2009 anime experience thus far.

Maria+Holic 1-2
I have another five episodes to watch, but haven’t gotten around to it yet. This has nothing to do with the death of subtext; this show is the most blatant thing ever. I think it has more to do with the Shaft style. Bitches need to know when to cut back. I don’t want to watch ef a third time.

Maria-sama ga Miteru Season 4 1-4
Episodes 1 and 2 were awesome; 3 and 4 were terrible. I have 5 and 6 with me but haven’t watched them simply because I don’t have the time. I do want to, and quite badly at that. This show is part of the definition of lolikitsune; it won’t remain unwatched for long.

Aria the Animation 1-3
As one of my New Year’s Resolutions, I restarted Aria. It’s so good.

Toradora 15-18
Slowly, slowly plodding through this. It reached a point where I said “indeed! This IS H&Cesque!” because all the characters seemed to have their own depth and they were all good in very human ways. The only problem is that these characters are like, the pre-H&C good humans, and as such their trials and tribulations all seem painfully immature. I’ll be honest: I’m tired of the mediocrity.

Cowboy Bebop 23
I want to finish this show someday. That’s all I can say.

Aria the Animation 1-3
One of my older brothers (who had seen no Aria previously) decided to try the show out. It’s so fucking good.

Xamd 20-26
The show really petered out in the end. It did the Darker Than Black thing, where there’s lots of unexplained nonsense—and, instead of leaving it unexplained, the creators try to put it all together and come to a conclusion. Like in DTB, this resulted in a lot of stuff not making sense. Shows need to know when to just leave well enough alone.

That said, emotional captain was emotional, cool animation was cool, fun show was fun. I just have no idea why Nazuna got on that bus in the first episode.

Munto TV 1-4
It’s just the OVAs all over again so far, right? Not too big a waste of time, and I’m looking forward to the new material.

Suzumiya-chan 1
I vomited, and couldn’t finish the episode.

Churuya-san 3
I vomited, and couldn’t finish the episode.

Clannad After Story 14-18
Good stuff. Unfortunately, no, this does not redeem 36 episodes of garbage. A couple good moments do not a good show make. No matter what anyone says. I’m not going to argue this at any length right now because I have better things to be doing with my time than engaging in internet debates, but let it be known that that is my opinion. I think the movie did a better job overall. Of course, AS 18 made me want to become a dad, but that’s just because I’m a moron.

Aria the Animation 1-3
Saki, the one-time anime-lover, decided she wanted to give my favorite show a try. I accompanied her. She liked it enough to watch more than one episode. Woot? Incredibly fucking good show.

Aaaaand that’s pretty much what my animescape has been since getting into the UC Berkeley dorms. What, you want more from me? A convention report on AODSF2009? It sucked! Anything else? Satire? Humor? What are those?! I hear the ABAs weren’t happening a second time! I don’t need no fucking awards.

I just want love.

Oh, I watched Coraline, and it scared me shitless more than once. I’m so easily creeped out :(

In this post I track the development of a meme. I may sound theoretical and profound, but the entire framework of this exercise is only based on an excerpt from this guide to some fruity way to live life at a higher level.

The excerpt:

6. Like all things, memes fit better with some things than others. Some memes naturally fit better in people’s minds. Some memes naturally fit better with other memes. When a group of memes fit well together and pull the strings of someone’s mouth and vocal cords so that they pass them on to others, a new, self-replicating thing gets created. The new thing is called a memeplex.

Self-replication is the most powerful force in the universe. One person tells two, two tell four, four tell eight, and pretty soon the whole universe is full of people sharing the memeplex.

Sometimes a self-replicating memeplex makes a mistake in copying itself. The memeplex with a mistake in it will either be better, worse, or the same at making copies of itself. If it’s better soon there will be more copies of the new memeplex than the old in the universe.

The only way for a new idea to gain acceptance is by a series of copying mistakes that turn out to be better after all.

And,

8. Every new idea we think of immediately becomes transformed by copying mistakes that change it into something that is better at making copies of itself after all. A key part of the idea may be sacrificed to something better for copying.

The only control we have over the spread of our ideas is in making them as resistant to copying mistakes as possible.

Okay, so let’s pretend that the quotes above are actually true. Now let’s look at this meme that I’ve been following, and have used in a few occasions:

“coming harder than omo”

It contains the ff. elements:

• An orgasm (the objective of most sexual activities)
• Omo (the blogger from the Omonomono blog)

The context for the meme developing finds its genesis in the comments section of this post on Owen’s Cruel Angel Theses blog, which accused omo of being a poseur for playing games and watching anime raw (unsubbed). Big drama in the comments section. Lelangir caught on and gave us this:

See the full comic here. Epic aniblogger metacomedy is epic. The statement actually reads “I already came.” However, the elements are the same: 1. Orgasm, 2. Omo. This gets copied, in sequence, several times:

1. 21stcenturydigital boy, no stranger to aniblogger metasex (lelangir documents his tryst with Omisyth here) posted some pornographic Toradora! fanfic which elicited a comment from lelangir himself:

lelangir Says:
December 15, 2008 at 8:21 PM

I came harder than omo.

2. These came out on the same day.

1st example:

1. Everyone came harder than omo.

   ghostlightning — 12/16/08 @ 5:43 am | #Link | Reply

2. Have you Come Harder Than Omo Yet?

   lelangir — 12/16/08 @ 6:13 am | #Link | Reply

3. @ghostlightning: best aniblog meme to date, gotta thank all the good folks involved for that.

   @lelangir: I’m going to have to find some way of putting that into KYOUSORA.COM as a tagline or something. It’s too genius.

   lolikitsune — 12/16/08 @ 7:14 am | #Link | Reply

2nd example:

ghostlightning Says:
December 16, 2008 at 9:10 PM

MOAR porn. I didn’t go where you went with Ryuji and Taiga, but you know I boned the shit out of Kinon.

Mix anime characters and add bloggers into it. That’ll mess things up quite nicely and everyone can come harder than omo.

Now it can be argued that the repeaters of the meme are forcing it. It doesn’t matter for the purposes of this post that the meme is forced. Looking back at the fruity guide to meme development: in copying the proto-meme, we were all doing it wrong. It is mistakes like this that stick. We now end up with a meme “coming harder than omo” that means what exactly? Not quite sure yet, but I’m very interested to find out.

Dr. lolikit sez:

If we apply lolikitean cryptology to “came harder than omo,” well, we come harder than omo. And because I’m a practicer of schadenfaggen, I don’t intend to share that with all of you. Gweheheh.

For now… go stand in the hallway.

P.S. Here’s to looking at a small blue bird, kid.

Madame lolikappa moans:

Furthermore, we are already beginning to see the way the meme is evolving. Originally it only applied to single people coming harder than omo, but is now increasing in number, spreading to meta-omogasmic aniblogger orgies. Clearly, the meme is well on its way to self-sufficiency, as it strives to find the form of maximum repetition. By switching to a multi-aniblogger mode, it broadens its potential contextuality; anibloggers can refer to entire teamblogs of anibloggers coming harder than omo simultaneously, in a single instance of the meme.

In conclusion, fuck you all, you’re all just goddamn membots, completely co-opted by the meta. You’re one epicly stupid meme away from being memeoids. Watch your asses.

Comrade ghostlightning Re-claims, In Conclusion:

Had to be done, after such an inconclusive attempt at a conclusion. That said, lolikappa’s use of a maho shoujo wand and a dance sequence turning all of you into memecha titillates me into hoping for another memetic neon genesis. See what we did here! In tracking the development of a forced meme we’re forcing an entirely new one! I think I just came harder than omo. This post is omosexual.

As Toradora! fades, Kannagi continues to impress.

I’m not sure what meaning of “fades” is intended in Karmaburn’s latest post, but Toradora! has, in my eyes, improved over the four episodes I’ve watched. Episode three was a bit of a disappointment after episode two, to be sure, but episode four was very strong in my book. On the other hand, we have Kannagi, a vehicle of moe and typical lulzesque fare. I have yet to discover any redeeming factors in Kannagi. The show’s idea of “interesting plot twists” include nun cosplay, harem development, and… shit… help me here… anybody?

Yeah. I got nothing.

Toradora!, on the other hand, astonishes with a painfully sympathetic male lead (unusual for such shows, as noted by my PR guy) and a psychopathically violent tsundere on a level hitherto unheard of (she is in fact so violent that if she were a real person in my life, she would kill me). Novelties are nice, after a fashion, and Taiga is in fact mindlessly violent to the point of it actually being funny (unlike Louise, who’s just a bitch, or Haruhi, who’s just insane).

What does Kannagi do differently? What impresses about it? Granted, it has some nice character animation, but that does not a good show make. The thing about Kannagi that stands out the most is its OP, which is horrendous when you take a step back from the animation and listen to the song (“YEAH! UNBEREAVABAL!!”). Also, close scrutiny of the choreography reveals that it is atrocious; Nagi flails around like a still-born fish suspended from a string.

And ultimately, as Evirus himself notes, the dance is no more than a continuation of Haruhi’s legacy. Maybe he thinks that’s a good thing.

Me? It makes me puke.

I was looking forward to Kannagi, having heard that it was supposed to be boring slice of life (I blame THAT). Toradora! I went into with absolutely no hope, expecting it to be a grim continuation of Kugimiya Rie’s “legacy.” Even had I had no hope for Kannagi, though, I can’t help but feel like it’d be turning me off in the same way it is now, given past trends.

So—Toradora! is fading? And Kannagi is the pleasant surprise of the season? I don’t believe it.

Bitches be trollin’.

This was two days ago, now, and there’s no way I’m going to reread that post, so I unfortunately cannot tell you why I picked what I did. I like to think I tended to polarize at the two ends of the fail spectrum (you know, fail, and less fail) and went with shows I thought I’d either like or hate, but no guarantees. The “resource” wasn’t too resourceful and I ended up making some wild guesses. Anyway, expect at least one post each on all of these shows, and expect at least half of those to be scathing:

ChäoS;HEAd
ef – a tale of melodies
Akane Iro ni Somaru Saka
Kurogane no Linebarrel
Toradora!
Skip Beat
Shikabane Hime: Aka
Clannad ~After Story~
Michiko to Hatchin
Kannagi
Tales of the Abyss

With any luck I’ll be blogging regularly this fall. I don’t see any reason why I shouldn’t be. Other than, you know, having a job (or two, or three). And maybe trying my hand at NaNoWriMo. Anyway, there should be some free time in there which I can dedicate to bashing shit.

In less well news, I’m down a weapon from my arsenal.

… graphs.

And why am I down graphs?

Because fucking Steve fucking Jobs and fucking Apple fucking broke fucking Photoshop fucking 7 in fucking Leopard.

Thankfully, Google, in classic Athena-senpai style, is still pretending to be an ally of mine:

I shall learn this Google Charts thing, and I shall use it well.