Kurogane's Anime Blog

Praise be to our Goddess Madoka, for She died for our sins and gave us Hope.

Man, I didn’t expect my joke to go this far, but I guess I should lay down some guidelines before it gets out of hand.

What is the Church of Madoka?

The Church of Madoka commemorates the sacrifice of our Goddess Madoka, who gave up her existence in order to free the Puella Magi of the cruel fate of being Witches, thus releasing them from despair and giving them Hope.

What does the Church of Madoka preach?

There are only two messages the Church preaches: (i). to remember the sacrifice of our Goddess Madoka and (ii). to never lose hope.

Who leads the Church?

Our Prophet and Saviour is Akemi Homura. In real life, I don’t really see a need for someone to lead it.

How do I become part of the Church of Madoka?

One only needs to remember the sacrifice of our Goddess Madoka and to never lose hope. No obligations otherwise should follow. Religion is about faith, not material needs or social validation.

I’m not satisfied with just that! What else I can do to show that I am part of the flock?!

Well, uh, you can like the Church of Madoka Facebook page, follow the Twitter account @ChurchofMadoka and maybe wear a pink ribbon to remind yourself of your faith. Be aware I do not run either Facebook and the Twitter account. If you have the financial means, there’s always the option of purchasing the Madoka Blu-rays. Volume 1 comes out on 4/27.

Questions can be asked below.

Lately I have been receiving a lot of solicitations in my email pertaining my blog.

I realize that after five years being up, I have a really high Google Rank so… I can say I wield considerable power with just one link. Or even a few. Or hell, even an entire endorsement post on the blog or perhaps a permanent ad fixture.

That being said, I have NEVER EVER thought of blogging for money or using this “power” for my own profit. Pretty much what I write is just my own hobby and I don’t feel that it’s worth enough to sell it for a few petty dollars of linkbacks, ads or endorsements. Which is why this blog has had minimal ads all this time (mainly to support server costs) and I have never written a single endorsement post.

I am fine if you think that I should get some press releases from time to time, but if you don’t hear anything back from me, I just hope you get the message.

This is awesome.

[...]a particularly exclusive group is the bloggers you could call intellectual aestheticians, who unironically judge anime based on its adherence to (their understanding of) the conventional canons of high culture.

And those are just some of the good parts.

Oh god, that was probably the best meta post about the animeblogosphere I’ve read since good ‘ol tj_han. It’s amazing how mt-i manages to parody their tone and language, yet still never does descend in to wall-of-text “tl;dr” style too much. I found that probably the best part of the post lol. Not forgetting how he ended the post itself!

Seriously, give it a read. It’s worth the 15 mins.

Will rabbit ears come back in vogue this year?

Happy Chinese New Year of the Rabbit to all my readers!
May this year be a happy and prosperous one to all!

Wishing all my readers a very Merry Christmas 2010!

Now, go and take this festive holiday a chance to catch up on Tantei Opera Milky Holmes if you haven’t yet :P.

So… some way or another I’ve actually reached the finals for the Aniblog Tournament! I’d have thought I would be “technical difficulty”-outed before the semi-finals but it looks like I managed to weather that too!

In any case, I don’t think I’ll be able to win against psgels, but the guy deserves it better than me considering my true objective for not losing was something less pure (te~he~). Well, still, it’d be nice if I didn’t lose by a margin of over 300 votes, but I guess that’s not gonna be easy if Kabitzin couldn’t do it either.

But really, thanks for everyone who has voted for me, whether they like me or not (I suspected I won semis mainly due to backlash towards Yi….) and for supporting me so far. It might seem I don’t really thank all of you guys much, but trust me, I’m pretty much still here thanks to all of you, for each comment and each page view that I get. As long as there’s still readers and time, you can trust me to be around for long long time!

And no, I’m not going to change much of my blogging style, because I really am most comfortable with just doing what I want to do and writing what I want write. Blogs should be fun, not a chore!

… or so they say. Amusing. My blog never looked this Web-2.0-ish though! In deference to mikoto/fangzhao’s ballsy-ness, I guess I will follow suit, XD.

In other words, I am finally up on ABT’s. I was having too much fun with the ANB vs Tenchi fan drama to notice until Nova told me.

Makes me wonder, if I posted that Fate/Stay Night was the pinnacle of anime production and the best TYPE-MOON adaptation ever, will I get my own personal stalker for the next six years? Of course, this is hypothetical because there is no Fate/Stay Night anime, right guys?

For Malaysian anime/manga fans, Otakuzone is probably a familiar name, as it is one of the first columns in a national newspaper dedicated to anime/manga news and reviews. Over the past 3 years (or was it 4?), I have been a regular contributor and reviewer for the column.

The past month has seen quite a few changes to the column, with it being moved to Wednesday’s paper instead of Sunday’s and changed to bi-weekly as well. However, that doesn’t mean the column is being downsized! In fact, Otakuzone’s expanding now, by moving in to cyberspace with a twitter account, Facebook fan pages (official and unofficial) and a temporary blog (official blog coming soon) as well too!

For my international readers, now you can read my manga reviews over at the Otakuzone blog (which I don’t publish on here to avoid conflicts of interest). My first one for the blog just came up there in fact. Feel free to leave any comments or brickbats here or there. Constructive criticism is always welcome!

It’s boring without some pictures isn’t it?

Because for one, they totally missed out a great chance to do so by emailing everyone chosen beforehand to notify them of their “participation”.

Okay, to be serious, a lot of things have really gone out of hand in my earlier post about the tournament. Initially, my post wasn’t really meant to discourage the organizers, but more as a slight jibe against the whole nature of the tournament itself and some of the failings it had.

My only major gripe really lies in how callous some of the organizers thought about the need for proper public relations regarding this event they are doing. Seriously, if you are going to do something like this on a big scale, isn’t it proper to inform ALL the participants before hand so they could have been prepared OR at least know that it was coming? Again, I am pretty sure that if you guys had the time to go through the almost thousands of blogs in the ‘sphere currently AND chose 96 of them, I am pretty sure, you would be having the time to compile a simple list of contact information from each blog’s About page or sidebar. Let’s side aside the question of WHETHER the information is available or not (any blog without proper contact information is probably not worth reading at all), but for those who DO have proper contact information displayed, they deserve to get at least a simple notice/template email about their participation in an event of this nature.

Instead, what one of the organizers said was that he was “not sure what purpose an email to the blog authors would have served” (quoted verbatim). It’s already pretty clear the tournament organizers aren’t going to ask permissions from the blog owners already, given that they are arbitrarily putting us all in, but we DESERVE a notice, for god’s sake. One of them even quoted AnimeBlips as an example, but even AnimeBlips had the manners and courtesy to send me and email notifying of my blog’s addition in to their scraper, even if I did not give them permission at all. So you see, the problem lies in not as much as the purpose nor the way the tournament is being conducted, but the method of HOW the news of the tournament is being disseminated.

It’s akin to publicly announcing a party but not sending any invitations out and then expecting everyone to turn up. Do you think it would work? Probably not. Just because you think that the blog authors do not need to put in any effort on their part for this tournament, doesn’t mean they don’t lose the right to be informed about it before-hand. And please do not compare it with link-exchanging or trackbacking, THAT is not the same level with getting put in to a popularity contest by random choice.

I will admit I have overreacted in my initial post’s edit when I removed the link. Yes, that was pretty juvenile of me, but I am not going to apologetic about it either because I do feel I am right. And personally, I do not once at all believe that a mere popularity contest will determine what is truly the best blog(s) for me. After experiencing 4 SaiMoe tournaments and reporting on three of them, I am pretty cynical about determining the quality of a blog based merely on the number of votes it gets via Internet voting. In fact, I haven’t read any of the two eventual winners (*coughRCcoughblogsukicough*) for probably years nowadays. So, my decision to remove the link wasn’t fully because of the organizer’s comment, other personal opinions and beliefs of mine also had a say in that.

Now, let me address all the “conspiracy theories” about how this is all a scam to route more traffic to the organizers’ blogs; it’s pure bullshit. While I might not have agreed about the email issue, I do believe that the guys aren’t really doing this just to “get more ad sales”. For one, none of them are running any profiteering ads apart from misc. affiliate links and etc. In fact, I would dare say I have probably profited more from the extra pageviews for my blog no thanks to the little flame war going inside my earlier post. Obviously, the organizers are going to get some spillover traffic from hosting such an event, but I personally do not think they are going to profit very much from this. There’s a ton lot of better ways to blog-whore and get increased traffic without going through all the trouble of creating such a big event.

I hope to have cleared up a bit of my stance regarding the Aniblog Tournament. I am not fully against the idea, but obviously the organizers have a lesson to learn about event management. I am not going to care much about the tournament, maybe randomly popping in once in a while to check what’s up. Unlike Nova I am not going to be withdrawing, neither am I doing the opposite either. I am just going to leave it up to the voters to decide when the time comes, hurr. If I do win, can someone please email me about it, eh?

P.S. Nova sums it up best.

P.P.S Nova again sums it up best, LOL.

Pic unrelated to content.

Recently there has been a huge hoohaa about the fact that certain countries are actively prosecuting and/or passing bills that are criminalizing 2D lolicon pornography materials (“materials” because it covers a wide range of media). I don’t think I need quote examples here, since anyone who is reading this is probably of the same demographic that cares about this issue at hand.

To be honest, most of the news really does not affect me, mainly because I am living in a country that is more concerned about other bread-butter issues, and we lack the free time from the politicking around to actually care about stuff like this. Therefore, I am pretty disconnected as to the impacts of those laws being passed in their country of origin. That’s not to say I will be not affected if those are passed, since it would make the materials harder to procure and to enjoy in a guiltless manner, haha.

Well, my personal stance is pretty passive about this issue, but I do think that censorship of any material, will in the end, backfire and cause more damage than it would have been if it wasn’t. For one, it’s almost impossible to police thought “crimes” (until someone invents mind-reading machines, and then I wish I will long and dearly departed by then, because it would fucking creepy if someone snooped through my head), and many “crimes” aren’t really criminal as such as just being anti-establishment. I think history has a loooooooong story to tell us about the “thought criminals” and how exactly such people have prevailed in the end. The current situation on the Internet is one such example of their legacy, but even now that is being threatened from many fronts.

I really think that the true issue behind the debate of criminalizing 2D lolicon art isn’t about the content. If you ask me, it is terribly hard to justify those materials, even if you claim it’s just merely a fantasy and for private consumption bla bla bla, but about the possibility of the act of censorship being extended to whatever subject that doesn’t conform to the current establishment’s ideals. China is a pretty good example of the future of the Internet if the worst case scenario happens, so it’s actually funny how people who can condemn China’s censorship policies can and will support the ban on 2D lolicon art.

Perhaps I am not exactly the right person to elaborate on this topic, mainly because I am not as much of a fluent debater as I would like to be, nor am I a very passionate activist for my beliefs and thoughts. Komidol of the Orange Farm has written a very long post explaining how to campaign against this, and Yes to Freedom is another good resource for anti-censorship supporters.

Finally I would say, rather than blocking access to undesirable material, it is better to educate people from young about the best way to differentiate good and bad. After all, if you give a man a fish, he will be full that day, but teach him how to fish, and he’ll never go hungry again.