Best anime of 2012, at least to me

Kininarimasu

Out of everything I watched this year, Hyouka was my favorite. There was other good stuff, and bad stuff, but in the end this is the one I remember and hold most fondly. Not that there’s much readership here to care.

It was also the one I got to enjoy in the best of company.

And had the best school festival plotline.

Secret Santa 2012 – Hoshi o Ou Kodomo

Listening for signals

Dusting off the blog for another year of Reverse Thieves Secret Santa; this being my third year doing so.

My Santa recommended three items, Fate/Zero (both seasons), the first season of Natsume Yuujinchou, and Hoshi o Ou Kodomo. As you may have noticed it’s been a while since I’ve posted here, because well life; that and participation in National Novel Writing Month, which I won by the way.

I chose to watch Hoshi o Ou Kodomo. I’d like to watch the other recommendations sometime, but with the holidays and travel, the shorter one won out. I have seen portions of the movie before, but hadn’t ever really given it a fair shot because of some bias, which I’ll get into in a little bit. I think properly sitting down in a dark room, by myself, curled up in a blanket was perfect for getting into a Makoto Shinkai movie.

You can’t resurrect the living

That is not a hamburger

 

Here are some first impressions for the glorious new anime season. I think, for once, I’m actually semi-timely with this kind of thing.

Good Stuff:

Sengoku Collection – Is it me or is there a “Sengoku” show every season where cute girls are center stage instead of manly sweaty men? I would think it’s amusing to see all the different interpretations, yet they all aren’t very good. This still fits “not very good,” but it’s just dumb enough that I’ll turn my brain off to watch it. Honestly, I like the animation, and its healthy PLOT. Brains Base running this doesn’t hurt either.

Fifty…

Art by シェフの気まぐれサラダ

 

I’m usually not one for these things, but I’m bored and I guess lots of people are doing this now. Not that I’d know since I just found out about it, because I’m about as close to living under a rock as you can get. So here’s fifty answers to some questions you might care about:

1. Who is your favourite male anime character?

Satou You from Ben-to. Unapologetically male and the best male lead in modern anime. Kicks ass, and eats dinner. Kenshi from Isekai no Seikishi Monogatari is also an excellent male lead.

2. Who is your favourite female anime character?

Utena Tenjou.

She packed my lunch every week for 12 weeks. I’ll never forget her tights.

Toilet Humor

What, you were expecting something else? Mind out of the gutter people, I just watched some anime, figured I’d tell you what you probably already know about some shows I watched.

Amagami SS+

The original show was not really good, but it’s four episode format at least kept the show feeling fresh, and boring arcs ended sooner than later. So this is like two episode arcs showing more…more doesn’t mean that I really care that much.

Rihoko finally got her boyfriend, which seemed to make the internet happy.

Honestly, this second season is quite boring, and I guess I don’t care for it that much, but the “I must finish everything” person in me must watch.

Secret Santa 2011 – 12 things I love about Overman King Gainer

Welcome to this year’s Secret Santa review. In my second year participating, Santa decided that my list of anime was missing some action. While I enjoy the occasional mecha series, I don’t seek them out, so I polled my twitter friends and two of the three respondents (shows how people love me there) recommended I watch Overman King Gainer, because it was in their words, “Ridiculous.”

I needed more ridiculous in my life after the year I’ve had, queued up the first episode, and almost quit right then and there. Choice quotes, “WTF is with this opening,” and “Oh shit, I picked the wrong anime to watch for Secret Santa.” I powered on through to the second episode and I found something I didn’t expect to find after that first episode: gravity. I think about five people just fell out of their mechs during the second episode. Suddenly, I understood what the twitter respondents meant by, “Ridiculous,” and kinda fell hard for the show.

What I learned from National Novel Writing Month

This year I participated in the 2011 National Novel Writing Month, or otherwise known as NaNoWriMo. I got familiar with the activity last year, but just thought it was a novel (see what I did there) idea. Since my initial familiarity with it last year, I have dabbled with a bit of writing, blogging (rarely), and even the beginnings of a work of fiction in my head that had a couple “chapters” make it onto a written page.Thing is, I haven’t done a great deal of writing. Between the project from hell at work, and general other things that took up my time, I just never had the time I wanted to devote it. Then the project from hell ended, time began to open up and there I was on November first, talking with a friend about NaNoWriMo and it’s actual start being that day. I created my account on NaNoWriMo.org, still not sure whether to do it or not. By the end of the work day, I had decided to make a go of it.I cheated a bit as I really didn’t write fiction, but the important thing to me was that I was writing. I had this idea in my head that my family had made my life somewhat interesting so I started the idea of, “How The Old Country Died in America.” Conceptually this was my growing up in America, with the slant that my family brought me with their upbringing in eastern Europe. What mattered, to me, was that I was writing.

This being my first experience with NaNoWriMo, here’s what I learned:

• For the month of November, I watched a lot less TV.
• Holy crap! Distractions!
• I have some supportive folks around me, especially Flak, my wife, and certain members of my family who read a few excerpts and gave me a bit of feedback.
• I learned that I want to know more about my family, because to truly depict their lives correctly and respectfully, I need to write more than what I know, but about them and their views.
• I can actually write (not sure how well, but I can put words on a page in a coherent manner).
• Scrivener is a pretty cool writing instrument.
• 50,000 words is a whole lot of words.

So, as much as I enjoyed the experience, for someone like me, trying this for the first time, it’s pretty daunting, even near impossible.

There are a few things NaNoWriMo could do to make the experience…I don’t want to say better, but more palatable for less experienced writers. NaNoWriMo is held in November, which is where most of the drawbacks exist:

• November is short
• November has a major holiday that most people likely celebrate
• For students, November tends to be near the end of fall semester which certainly doesn’t help get things done

Now those drawbacks can be overcome, I just couldn’t do it. Once you fall behind, it’s daunting to try and catch up. To hit that 50,000 words, you have to write around 1,666 words a day, which is doable, but pretty challenging. Personally, my subject matter was practically already written in my head, until I hit the wall of what I didn’t know, but when I fell behind, I found myself trying to make up that deficit the next day, which was nearly impossible at some point. At the end, I started using NaNoWriMo’s dashboard tools with Scrivener to figure out better daily goals that were more palatable.

In the end, I enjoyed the experience, even if I didn’t hit the goal for the month. I wrote almost every day, save my wedding anniversary and Thanksgiving. So, not that you all care, but I did get 28,440 words down and the intent to write more on the subject.