Blog User Input Survey – Just a Reminder

I just wanted to post a reminder about my blog user survey.  I’d greatly appreciate it if people took a couple minutes going through and filling them out.  I have two of them set up, each with 6 questions:

Click Here for the Survey on the Blog’s Content

Click Here for the Survey on the Blog’s Navigation and Structure

Of course, if you read this over the RSS, I wouldn’t necessarily expect you to fill out the Navigatoin and Structure survey, but if people could fill out the content survey, that’d be great.  I’m trying to collect information that I can use towards my next design, which I hope to launch somewhere around the end of August.

And one final note not related to the surveys: I hope to get Aoi Hana episode 5 out tonight.  However, like last week, that’ll depend on the raws.  If the raws get out by 9 or so tonight, I’ll probably be able to get it up.  Otherwise, it’ll probably have to wait until tomorrow.

Blog User Input Survey – 12 (hopefully) Simple Questions

I’m in the process of designing Version 7 of this blog, and as part of that process, I wanted to see if I could get input from those people who actually visit this blog. As a result, if you could just take a few moments to answer a few questions, it would be greatly appreciated!

Click Here for the Survey on the Blog’s Content

Click Here for the Survey on the Blog’s Navigation and Structure

Of course, if there is a problem with the survey itself, please let me know…

Thank you for participating!

Update

I had forgotten about those who might view my site via the RSS feed.  Hopefully you’ll be able to at least fill out the Content survey, since I hope that’s mainly independent of how someone views the site.  I’ll understand why those viewing via RSS wouldn’t be able to fill out the Navigation and Structure survey out very well.

OMG…Something Is Coming!

Perhaps you have or haven’t noticed, but for the past 10 days or so, if you visit the ANN website, view it in it’s default theme, and then mouse over the left side of the page, you see a black silhoutte pop up on it with a question mark on it.  When you click on it, it takes you to a crazy looking site called omgitscoming.com.

The site features a rotating silhouette picture (they’re on their fifth version) and a ticker counting down to noon on this upcoming Thursday, which is registration pick up day for Otakon, by the way.  The site has no HTML comments and has been registered with a service to keep the real registrant’s identity private.

Thus far, the five images on the site have been the following:

Whether these things have anything to do with whatever is going to be announced, who knows.  About the only thing we can (possibly) assume is that it’s anime related, as the add is on ANN’s website.  But what about anime – a con announcement, a new license announcement, etc. – much less by whom is completely unknown.

There have been some theories floating around that it could be an announcement for Kannagi, as the Kannagi fan site has a somewhat similar pixelated photo on it’s page with a note to check back for a “special message,” also on this Thursday.  Also, there is the fact that It’s OMG (oh my god) and Nagi is a goddess, so there would some level of hinting there if it turns out to be that.  Of course, if it’s Kannagi, what could the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th image possibly have to do with it?

Update:

I should note that it is counting down to noon in the timezone correlating with UTC-0700, which is Pacific time (I think originally it didn’t have a time zone set).  This signifies a couple of things: a) it’s probably not Otakon related.  b) it’s probably not related to a Japanese company.  c) It’s probably not related to Media Blasters (NYC), Funimation (Texas), ADV (Texas), or Right Stuf (Iowa).  The only major anime companies based on the west coast that I’m aware of are Viz and Bandai.  I guess I should also note that Geneon Entertainment – what’s left of it anyway – is also based in California.

Update 2

And as soon as I post this, ANN puts up a new skin, and the old question mark man is gone, even if you switch back to the old design.  Odd that whoever is pulling that stunt would suddenly stop advertising it on ANN 3 days before whatever announcement is going to happen.

June Web Stats

Here it is again…the post no one but I and a few other people in the known universe care about…the web stats post! Get all the numeric goodness below the fold!  And see a review of stats for the first half of 2009 at the end!

April/May Web Stats

Here it is again…the post no one but I and a few other people in the known universe care about…the web stats post! Get all the numeric goodness below the fold!

Also, sorry for being slow with this (if anyone even cares, that is).  This may be the last thing that I need to catch up on from my month of hell when I was finishing my masters.

April:

May:

Evangelion 1.0 to screen on 70+ Screens in North America

So, you may be lucky and have a theater close to you showing it. Well, if you live in Canada or California that is.

Funimation has announced that they are screening Evangelion 1.0 on 70+ screens in North America, starting off with Anime Expo in Los Angeles on July 2-5, then moving to Seattle July 3rd (for a week), Houston on July 16th, Phoenix on July 17th (for a week), San Diego Comic Con July 22-26, and then 4 locations in San Diego and Riverside, CA on July 29th.

Then the movie is showing in Boston August 14-17, followed by a screening in 67 Canadian theaters on September 30th.

So we have 67 Canadian locations, 6 California locations, plus Houston, Phoenix, Boston, and Seattle.  Not a very good selection of sites if you live East of the Rocky Mountains in the United States (except for you damn Bostonians).  It’s not even currently scheduled to screen in what seem to be obvious locations such as New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago, or Atlanta (to at least make a trip non-suicidal for those in the east.  I mean, who is going to fly out to San Diego or up to Canada to see a movie?)

So alas, the rest of us will have to wait for the DVD release on November 10th.

This is Why We Can't Have Nice Things

Two issues tangently (or not so tangently) related to anime and manga have suddenly popped up their ugly heads and are causing quite a debate, both within and outside of the anime community this week: the conviction of a US comic book collector for having “Japanese manga books depicting illustrations of child sex abuse and bestiality” and the possible ban of so-called “rape games” in Japan.  Both issues have been topics of heated discussion.

However, both of these topics largely deal with the same issues:  what to do material which a vast majority of people may and probably do find patently offensive, yet which do not physically harm anyone in their production, sale, or usage?

Those on the side for banning such things basically argue that the mere existence of these materials are harmful to society – that “rape games” create a social acceptability to abuse women, and that child sex depicted in manga create a social acceptability to abuse children or view them in an overtly sexual manner.  Those on the side of not banning these things are essentially arguing that, since no harm was done to anyone in the production of the work, that banning such works amount to “thoughtcrime” and censorship that is worse than the work that is being banned.  Personally, while I empathize with those who make the former claim, I’m pretty firmly in the camp that it’s hard to make something illegal if no harm is done to anyone while producing it.

On the issue that is more well known at least within the US – the comic collector’s case – anime and manga fans have the problem of misunderstanding exactly what the medium is as well as perhaps those who are, shall I say, highly emotional about the topic.  The first problem has to deal with the age old problem that, to many people, “anime,” “manga,” and “hentai” are all the same thing or interchangable terms when clearly they address different things, as obviously not all anime and manga (indeed, the great bulk of it I would imagine) isn’t hentai.  Yet, that’s perhaps the most well known type, so that’s just what people associate with it.

The second conflation that I’ve seen which complicates debate on these issues is the difference between arguing whether something should or shouldn’t be illegal vs. whether something is or isn’t ethically or morally OK.  I’ve found that those who argue that it should be illegal often conflate the position of “it shouldn’t be illegal” with the position of “I have no personal ethical or moral problem with it.”

All of this leads me to the title of this post which is, of course, a comment people seem to make whenever something like this comes up, which just makes people misunderstand anime and manga even more, and thus makes it more difficult for it to reach mainstream acceptance.  I suppose the easy path would be to, as a community, just say “we’re not gonna put up with this stuff,” but that ignores the more complex issues at hand in these cases.

Masters is finished = I'm Back

Yay!  My hellish last month of getting my masters is over!  The only thing left is for them to mail me my piece of paper.

However, that also means that I should actually have time to do, well, anything animated related as the number of episodes I’ve watched in the last 2 or 3 weeks can probably be counted on my fingers.  I know I’m rather behind on everything, so I’ll need to catch up. However, now that I don’t have to spend several hours a week working on the masters (and several more hours studying for the final oral exams that wouldn’t die), the blog should be back up and running like usual in a few days.

Web Stats for March 2009

Here it is again…the post no one but I and a few other people in the known universe care about…the web stats post! Get all the numeric goodness below the fold!

The Unsatisfactory Ending of Toradora

I thought about adding this into my review for Toradora or adding it to my podcast review, but I thought this would be better written out in it’s own post, as it basically is an editorial.

I’ll say it right front:  I was a Ryuji/Minori shipper in Toradora until the very, bitter end of the show.  Of course, it became increasingly obvious as the show drew closer to the end that this would not come out to be, and I knew it was a longshot from the start.  However, I had hoped that the show may dare to not follow the predicted path, but alas, the ending was once again predictable from the time the first episode aired.

However, this editorial isn’t going to be about my complaining about a lack of Minori ending, per se.  Instead, I think the main problem with the ending of Toradora is that Taiga and Ryuji’s transformations from liking Kitamura and Minori to liking each other is sudden and largely without any obvious foretelling other than, simply put, that it was their destiny, as the two leads in an anime, to do so.