Generic blog update post

Since gg have yet to sub the latest epis­ode of Hetalia and I’m not in the mood for drag­ging out another post that’s been sit­ting unfin­ished in my drafts for sev­eral weeks again, I guess I might as well use this time to post a gen­eric blog update post. Not the most excit­ing post in the world but essen­tial read­ing nevertheless.

Metab­log­ging Failure

Ok, fail­ure is def­in­itely too strong a word but I don’t feel my metab­log­ging posts for Sora no Woto are really work­ing. The prob­lem is two­fold. One is that my ego is massive and I want to write what I feel about an epis­ode, not copy­paste what oth­ers have said. I find myself not look­ing for the best quotes from other blogs but lines I can use to express my own opin­ion. Plus when there is a really good com­ment I can rarely find some­thing extra to say about it. Second prob­lem is com­ments. Even though I’ve really enjoyed read­ing Crys­tal Tokyo Anime Blogs’ posts on Sora no Woto, I don’t think I’ve left a single com­ment on his site. I also find it hard to reply to com­ments on my own post because I feel I’ve already ‘replied’ to someone. It’s an odd mind bar­rier I have and if I don’t feel like I’m put­ting out good con­tent, then I doubt my audi­ence is either. This format might work for other writers but I don’t feel it works for me. I’m going to fin­ish it with Sora no Woto but then that will be it.

NAIDR Suc­cess

On the other hand, I’ve been delighted, and rather sur­prised, by the suc­cess of the ‘No anime is dropped forever’ posts. They’re incred­ibly fun and easy to write but I found myself won­der­ing why any­one would want to read them because it’s just me bitch­ing about anime I didn’t really like. But they rake in the hits and com­ments so clearly the les­son here is that if I enjoy writ­ing them, then the audi­ence prob­ably enjoys read­ing them.

Next sea­son plans

Sora no Woto ends this sea­son but both Dur­arara and (if it ever gets bloody subbed) Hetalia still air so I’ll con­tinue to blog both of them. As for new anime, the two I have my eye on are Giant Killing (foot­ball anime with proper tac­tics? I can see myself enjoy­ing writ­ing about this) and Arakawa Under the Bridge. Obvi­ously things depend on how good the first epis­ode is and I’m slightly wary of what Shaft will do with Arakawa (it says some­thing about how exas­per­ated I’ve got­ten with Shaft that I have more faith in a Deen adapt­a­tion) but most of the rest of the anime I’d prefer to leave to more qualified/excited/interested peers. This does mean I’m pick­ing up 4 anime in one sea­son, which is quite a lot, but at heart I think I’m an epis­odic blog­ger and the rest is simply addi­tions to that. Again, this is just me exper­i­ment­ing as I usu­ally do so we’ll see how I cope.

Irish Blog Awards

I know that tag thing say nom­inee but I’ve some­how passed the first round of judging and I’m on the (not so) short­l­ist. There’s one more round of judging before the grand finals being held in a fancy hotel in Gal­way. Now if I pass the next round I have the tough decision to make. Do I haul myself to Gal­way (which, incid­ent­ally, is the total oppos­ite side of the coun­try to where I live), pay €150 to book a night at the hotel and an extra €15 entry fee into the awards cere­mony to watch someone else win the award because they use the Irish Lan­guage in their blog and I talk about for­eign car­toons, OR do I drive about half an hour into Dub­lin, spend 10–15 euro to see an anime film fest­ival where they’re show­ing the two Evan­gelion movies on BIG screens, tak­ing into account that I haven’t seen these movies yet des­pite the fact that the TV series is on my top 30 anime. Oh, these two events hap­pen to be on the same day. Hmmm…