Why I Blog
I’ve been mulling over this topic for a while now – partly out surprise for my resilience for keeping this up as long as I have and partly to honour the on-going theme of this site. That being, as the site name suggests, my attempts to accurately define why I enjoy all this Japanese crap so much. Hopeless‘ recent post about ‘how to blog’ spurred me on a fair bit too; if only to enforce the belief that most of what he said is plain common sense.
My blog ethos relates to the simple idea of doing it for yourself. Being stubborn and naturally contentious makes it easier for me to say this, as well as helping to avoid a lot of anime blog trends, but ultimately I just want a platform to write my opinions. It’s purely egotistical in that sense, but there are a lot of finer points to consider and collectively they play a massive, massive role in explaining why I blog. So for the sake of clarity I’m going to bullet point these MFers. Roll on.
- Writing – first and foremost, I do this as a means to practise writing. It’s actually got to the stage where I’m aware of my writing mojo – how naturally/unnaturally I’m expressing myself, when’s the best time to write, (which typically is stupid o’clock in the morning), what kind of syntax is most effective etc. etc. All these things are incredibly useful to know, and, assuming I get my shit together enough to make it happen, will be beneficial when I inflict myself on the world of journalism. Just the act of writing about something as varied as anime and manga this often means your reviewing technique gets a decent work out and it becomes much easier to write on command.
- Community - considering we’re all meant to be a bunch of socially inept, fap-happy fools, the anime blogging community is least elitist, most intelligent, social bunch I’ve come across on the Internet. Perhaps the niche nature of it means there’s less opportunity for idiocy, or maybe my deluded naivety had blinded me from drama that’s happening elsewhere (that graph nonsense doesn’t count), but for me you guys fucking rock. The #animenano irc channel, all the blog aggregators, the people listed to the right – they’re all juicy vats of knowledgeable, articulate spiffiness with interesting views and high degrees of awesomeness. If the shameless desire for self-improvement is the number one reason for me doing this then the community is the number one-point-five reason. I wouldn’t have half the motivation to do all this if it weren’t you guys. OMG I LOVE YOU ALL, SERIOUSLY. BUMSECKS PLZ.
- Fun – it probably goes without saying, but doing all this is great fun. I get to talk shit about stuff I’d watch and talk shit about anyway, and all with the added bonus of feedback from people who know more than I do. I don’t get Memento or Sea Slugs levels of comments, but when I do they’re usually interesting/discussion-fostering and I love it. Getting to be flippant about Naruto or needlessly pretentious about Ergo Proxy is a lot of fun for me. Perhaps that says a lot about my personality, but ya know, so does the mindless adoration of FLCL. I’m kinda weird.
I dunno. The more I write about this, the more it becomes blatantly obvious why I blog. Manga and anime are both things I consider to be a hobby, and I’ve always been the kind to yammer on mindlessly about things I enjoy. Having a solid community to act as a soapbox for such behaviour just encourages me further.
It’ll be interesting to see how the anime blogging community develops from this point onwards. It seems to be steadily growing and I wonder how many will survive. As with most things, the resilient fuckers are usually the best. How a nexus-like IRC channel like #animenano will effect things is also an interesting point to consider. I’m hoping drama by the boatloads. It’s going to rock.
Speaking of which, here’s a nugget wisdom from #animenano’s own digiwombat. I think someone should start a blog with this as the tagline and rant about how much they hate anime. OH WAIT.
<digiwombat> BUT FUCK THOSE SLOTTY EYED MURDERERS!
Lawwwl.
P.S. Because I’m clearly on the pulse of all this community stuff, Anime Nano have a new podcast and it’s great. You should all listen.
July 18th, 20063:03 am at
Well, you’d better keep it up. I happen to enjoy the pretentiousness of your Ergo Proxy posts.
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July 18th, 20067:39 am at
You must have missed yesterday’s bout of idiocy then. The irc channel yesterday was in FULL caps and had vulgarities every other word. ALl in good fun though.
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July 18th, 200610:37 am at
The reasons you’ve brought up for blogging are almost exactly the same as mine. I’m blogging mostly to improve myself, too. It’s funny how blogs are supposed to be informal personal things, because I don’t treat mine as such.
“when’s the best time to write”
I used to try and work this out too, but it started getting stupid when I was up reviewing DVDs at 1am! Late night writing is good for mad “theories”, but doesn’t do much for fludity of reading (at least in my case, anyway!).
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July 18th, 200610:50 am at
I started my blog mainly to brush up on my English skills. It’s not my native language. Of course, eventually, it morphed into something else.
As for the time of day I write, it’s mostly after midnight. Usually after I get home from work. It’s a big stress reliever for me.
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July 18th, 20068:52 pm at
I’m rather shocked at how people are taking something I wrote as a piece of blog filler due to spending too much time either vacant or watching anime/reading manga as a serious post!
My reason to blog is perhaps the opposite of improving my writing. I adore writing, and the type of style I use academically is honed for that purpose. With my blog, I wanted to try writing more imformally and succinctly than I general do, with less emphasis on the grammatical style and the writing’s quality and a greater personal feeling to the writing. I wanted to write without employing the same style I’ve developed and used for essays and assignments.
Due to this, I came to enjoy blogging, at times more than actually watching the anime that I’ve blogged in the past. I have no set direction to what I post each day, unless I fear I will be occupied during the week and just post something to appear each night. At the moment, I’m utterly oblivious to what I am going to post tomorrow, or the day after, but I hope whatever it is will be worth writing.
I generally post around 7-9pm GMT at the moment, but in all likelyhood those posts have been written earlier in the day or even long before; I have a post on anime music that I began to write about three months ago which still has not been completed and posted.
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July 18th, 200611:16 pm at
Michael: Don’t worry, there’s no stopping me with that :3 Plus Ergo Proxy is pretty maligned in the blogsphere. The few of us who blog it need to show the love.
TJ_Han: I vaguely remember seeing lots of f-ing and blinding, but I don’t take that seriously. We’re pretty mild for an IRC channel.
Batezi: Yeah, the formality of blogs is a strange thing. I guess I see blogs more as a form of self-publication, so any kind of style is fair play.
Ten: Surprising! Most of your stuff is written better than mine, and I’m English…
Hopeless: Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t mean that in a negative sense. I wrote that out of surprise over the reaction you got as well. And I use quite informal language, too. How I write here is definitely not how I write for a Lit essay at uni. :D
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