It’s been on and off I know, but over 1,500 posts and over 2,200 comments later, Josh’s Anime Blog is six years old. It’s kind of amazing that I’ve stuck at this (however badly) for as long as I have. It’s kind of weird to think that I’ve been going at this blog for longer than I’ve had my job. I was still taking classes in grad school when I decided to start blogging.

My blog is finally old enough to attend school!

If I remember correctly, I wasn’t even really aware of other anime blogs at the time. My main connection to anime at the time was Anime News Network. I’m not even sure I could tell you how or why I got into anime at this point, or why DNA² was the first show I watched. I actually think renting DNA² was the reason I first signed up for Netflix.

In any case, after regularly celebrating this blog’s birthday, this is actually my first “birthday” post in about 3 years, because I always seemed to be in a hiatus around this time for the past couple of years. But I actually feel the best about blogging right now that I’ve been in a while, so…here’s hoping to more regular blogging.

Have a Merry Christmas!

I know I haven’t been very active on my blog for a while, but I still wanted to wish people a Merry Christmas today. And may everyone have a great 2012 as well.

Yep, that’s right, this is version 10 of Josh’s Anime Blog. I hope you like the new design. Some of my new versions have been big changes, some have been small. This is somewhere in between I think.  The general design of the site hasn’t actually changed too much.  The main outwardly differences have been moving the blog title from the image to the space above the image and, obviously, the change in the colors.

The backend has seen a larger change, moving from using thematic as the base theme to using twenty eleven as the base theme.  This ended up being a challenge because I had to convert my stylesheets from styling XHTML to HTML5, and the fact that twenty eleven isn’t quite as vanilla as thematic, so there were some styles I had to override that weren’t there in thematic.  However, twenty eleven does have some plusses as well.

In any case, if you notice anything out of wack on the new design, please let me know. I tried to check everything before activating it, but I could have easily missed something. One thing I have noticed…and I’m not sure how to fix it or if I can fix it, is that, because of the Caching issue, the same header image is showing everywhere despite being set to random.  Not really sure that’s a big problem, but I did notice it.  In any case, I hope you enjoy the new design.

One always has to love it – get a couple weeks off. You think “hey! I’ll have tons of time to catch up on anime!”  Except it’s not that easy when one is spending the time with family over Christmas and New Year.  And so, total number of anime episodes watched while off from work: 1.  And not even a show I was currently blogging.

Luckily my backlog isn’t too horrible (only about 1 month’s worth) so I hopefully should be caught up in not too long.  Football season ending should help as well.  Also, my blog was apparently hacked sometime during my break.  Based on twitter and google, it probably happened within the past week or so.  I’m not sure what happened, but thanks to doing a full backup when I had to reinstall Vista not too long ago, and my blog emailing me automatic DB backups every week, nothing was lost.

So I should be catching up on blogging here hopefully over the next week.  Oh, and go J.E.T.S. Jets Jets Jets tomorrow.

No, I haven’t abandoned this blog already.  I have three things I’m currently watching which I’ll hopefully post about soon (Gurren Lagann disc 2 and Now and Then, Here and There are the main two).  However, I did want to make a quick update, since I do administer the site.

For a while I’ve “maintained” (maintained being in quotes because I haven’t really done anything with it for a while other than keep it online) a DNA² Wiki at http://www.dna2.info.  Well, I’m getting rid of the host that that wiki is being hosted on, mainly because I’m not really maintaining any of the sites.  As a result, I’m in the process of moving everything that is on the soon-to-be-delated dna2.info and moving it to http://dna2.wikia.com.  In the process, I’ll also try to add more information and make some improvements to the wiki, though a lot of the information was already there and, given that the series came out something like 15 years ago, hasn’t really changed all that much in the meantime.  However, if anyone wishes to add to what I’ve posted on there so far, feel free to.  Part of the reason I haven’t posted as much is that I’m moving some of the other stuff that I have hosted on the domain to a WAMP server on my computer, since I was really only using the PHP and MySQL database available as part of the hosting for stuff I was personally doing, and that stuff I can do easily enough on my computer.

I’m not really sure how many people care about that, but I thought I would post a note about it anyway.

Alright, I’m once again taking this blog back off life support (or, is it putting it back on life support after it flat-lined…again), this time with hopefully a somewhat new strategy as far as blogging.

Instead of doing lengthy episode reviews with several paragraphs and a big gallery of pictures, I think I’ll do reviews of…well…pretty much everything – episodes, DVDs, online episodes, whatever.  However, I plan on having these reviews be more of the shorter nature – instead of 24 pictures and 6 or 8 paragraphs or whatever it was before, I’m going to try to make them 1 picture and maybe only 2 or 3 paragraph, depending on the length of item I’m reviewing.

I’m also “clearing the slate” if you will, as far as old series.  What I mean by that is that I’m going to allow myself to talk about/review/whatever series I have already reviewed in the past.  I’ll keep all my old reviews and posts up as a sort of archive, but just because I’ve already reviewed, say, Kanon, doesn’t mean I might not go through and review it disk by disk as I rewatch it in the future.

That kind of brings me back to: what am I reviewing.  I kind of said what above, but to be more specific, I’m restarting my Netflix subscription so I can get DVDs that way again.  DVDs I get through there is one source I will write reviews from.  If I stream episodes online from Netflix (or Funimation or Crunchyroll for that matter), that is another source.  DVDs I own will be another, and then on top of this, new anime episodes currently airing in Japan.

With the exception of newly aired episodes (probably, though there might be exceptions, especially if I get behind), I’ll probably review episodes 4 to 6 at a time, whether that’s because that’s how many are on a DVD or just because I’m just taking them as such a group when watching them online.

This will let me do a few things

1) Actually write about series I’m currently watching without waiting until the very end.  One problem I had before with some series is that I’d watch it, but by the time I was done, I had forgotten half of what went on when trying to write a review of the series

2) It opens up the anime library that I own as a source of material for the blog

3) This still allows me to blog certain series that are airing.  Some series I might do an episode at a time, while others I may still do in groups of 2, 3, or 4 episodes, depending on the series.  That will give me some flexibility there as well.

Regarding other non-episode blogging portions of the site, such as anime dvd/manga releases and the anime credits…I don’t know.  The anime credits I’ll probably keep, if for no other reason than I like scouring YouTube for anime credit sequences I wouldn’t normally have seen otherwise.  For the new releases…It’s sort of useful for me I guess, but if no one else cares about it, it might be more trouble than it’s worth.

Ultimately, my goal is to post somewhere around 3 posts a week (hopefully at a minimum).  Of course, if there are any editorial topics I randomly feel like writing about, or news stories I see that I want to chime in on, I’ll write about those as I always have.

I had planned on renaming my blog with a new URL and everything, and while I guess I could have done it at the same time as this restart, I thought I’d do one thing at a time for now.

This blog has been kind of going through some hiccups recently with me going on hiatus, coming back for a while, going on hiatus again, me coming back, and so on, and it seems to hit another hiatus point now.

I don’t necessarily want to give up anime blogging, but it seems episode blogging is just not giving me the motivation to keep doing it it seems.  I’m able to go at it for a while, but eventually I either just get bored of the series I’m blogging, or don’t have the motivation/time/whatever to actually do write-ups of the episodes.  And once I get behind on those, everything else seems to go downhill with it.

So I guess I’m going to do a bit of soul searching as far as my blogging is concerned.  I’ll keep this blog up (as in online) for the time being but I’m going to reassess how/how often/what I blog to see if I can come up with something that works for me better.  I hate to post less often, so I don’t know about doing some sort of omnibus type posts, and I just don’t know if I watch anime enough to effectively keep up the blog via editorials only.  But I’ll try to come up with something.

The good thing about my job and doing blogging using WordPress is that I can swap what I learn from doing one into the other, since we’re currently looking at using Wordpress MU (or creating a “blog network” in WP3) at work.  So I took this opportunity to both research some stuff for work, as well as look at some of the new features and how they might apply to this blog.

Menus

This looks like it will be a nice addition to Wordpress.  My main nav is currently also a mix of pages and categories – something which I pretty much had to do by ripping out the menu and creating my own using functions.php.  With the new menus functionality, I should be able to build the menu I want right in the WordPress interface.  My only question about it might be…what if I’m building a theme from scratch? Or I have two menus in two different places (above or at the top of my banner, and then below the banner?)  How would that, work exactly?  They at least did to think to make a sidebar plug in to allow you to  add one of the menu’s you made into the sidebar, so that won’t be a problem.  If you want to see a video of how some of the menu stuff works, you can check it out at Woothemes.

Custom Background and Headers

While I think this is something to do with the 2010 theme and isn’t necessarily going to be there for all themes, I think it’s still cool.  If i could find (or make) a theme where I could just plop in a new header in the WordPress interface, that’d be cool. Now they only need an option of having it randomly rotate or something.

Page/Post Types

This wasn’t as thrilling as I thought it was going to be.  It’ll help with organization, but one of the things I was hoping for was that, say, when I do a review, I could kind of break the segments up into blocks, which each had their own field, or something, which were then placed on certain places on the page, instead of having a giant blob in a single edit box.  It looks like that, if that is even possible i the first place, one would have to do it via the custom fields thing that already exists.  It’ll still be nice to, say, have a “Reviews” or “Anime Credits” button that I can just click on to do a post, but I’m not sure exactly what more it adds.  If this had allowed me to do that, I might have waited until WP3 came out to restart doing series reviews, but as it is I might go ahead and start posting them again now.

Other than that, there really isn’t much new to see (well, other than the merger of the core and MU, which doesn’t really apply to this blog).  They haven’t gotten around to updating the admin UI yet, so I can’t really comment on that.  In any case, a little non-anime (though still blog related) post to fill your day with.

As people might have seen, I went on a rather long hiatus from the blog this time (with a brief come back over Christmas break), which was probably the longest in my blog’s history.  I think I went an entire month without a post (February 2010) for the first time in the blog’s history.

This was mainly caused by getting more interested in a few other things than I was in anime, and thus doing those things went higher on my priority list, and I basically didn’t have time for anime anymore while I was doing those things.  However, I believe I am back on track as far as doing anime things again so, hopefully, I’ll be back for a while.

Over the next 3 to 4 days, I’ll be catching up on my blogging (10 to 11 episodes of Kobato plus an episode of Shana S), so pardon the slew of posts of old episodes during this week.  As far as blogging series in the Spring season – I haven’t decided yet.  On the one hand, I’m afraid of going straight into blogging something right after coming back from such a long hiatus, but on the other hand, if I don’t blog something…I’m not sure what I’ll write about, and thus possibly risk going back into a hiatus again.  I’ll probably make a decision sometime next week after I investigate what series are airing in April.

Also, as you may have seen, I’ve once again updated the design of the site.  I thought I probably should to help launch me out of a hiatus (and, heck, if I have the time/energy to redesign the site and catchup on 12 or so episodes of blogging, hopefully that’s a sign that I am actually back).  This is version 8.0 of the blog (yes, there have been that many) and I hope people like it.

As visitors to this blog probably noticed, I ended up having a two month hiatus or so from blogging, which I think is the single longest stretch that I ever went without blogging anything.  I think this mostly resulted from just getting into one of those funks where I fell out of interest for a while with anime before getting back into interest, which is pretty much where I am now.

As you probably have noticed, I’ve started catching up on my blogging of Kobato and will hopefully be completely caught up posting those episode reviews by Wednesday.  I also need to catch up on all the anime I had been watching in the fall season as well, because when I said a funk, I meant a funk, meaning I didn’t watch anything over the course of the past two months or so.  It’s not that I’ve been busy or anything. I just…didn’t feel like it for a while.  In any case, this will probably delay some of my end of year top 10 lists and such since I can’t really make, say, a top 10 anime of the year list without actually finishing the shows I was watching in the fall season.

Otherwise, I wanted to go back and see what I missed over this time, and this appears to be the highlights:

• Funimation’s new initiative to co-produce new anime shows based on non-Japanese franchises.
• Funimation licenses Sekirei and both Birdy the Might DECODE series.
• Sentai licenses The Skull Man, Maria Holic, You’re Under Arrest: Full Throttle, Yozakura Quartet, and Tayutama: Kiss On My Deity

OK, not a whole lot I guess, some interesting news from Funimation and 8 series getting licensed.  Nothing like the 12 days of Christmas licensing fest or whatever like we had last year.  At least it seems like The Studio Formerly Known As ADV (aka Sentai) is busy licensing new titles, though I’m sure they’re all going to be sub-only like their others.

Also, I finally got a blu ray player for Christmas myself, so hopefully I can start trying out some of these anime series on blu ray, though they still seem to be somewhat few and far between right now.

Spam Hackers are Annoying People

After a long and arduous testing process, I am pleased to announce  my addition to the Josh’s Anime Blog Team. **fanfare**  Who the hell am I?  Well, strictly speaking, I’m no one particularly special.  By day I am a lowly Code Monkey, a rare species that turns coffee and junk food into corporate software.  By night (and sometimes during the day too, shhhh…) I turn into Polaryzed, an anime obsessed fool who’s old enough to know better.  This is my first foray into any real type of blogging so please be gentle on me for my first time, k?  My journey here is probably fairly common to most anime bloggers:

1. Watch anime
2. Watch a LOT of anime
3. Read anime blogs
4. Read a LOT of anime blogs
5. Decide that you’d like to be abused by trolls the world over and post your own thoughts on anime

I’m actually late to the anime game and by no means an expert on the matter.  I started watching anime about 5 years ago when a co-worker got me to watch the first Full Metal Alchemist series during it’s original broadcast run.  After that I was hooked and watched as much anime as time allowed.  I’ve seen my fair share of series/movies/OVA’s in that time, but compared to other people (even ones half my age), I suppose I could still be considered fairly green.

Genre-wise I tend to gravitate towards series that entertain me, everything from shounen to shoujo and a lot in between.  I’m a sucker for a good love story, so I typically watch at least one or two shoujo series a season.  I also fancy drama series as long as they’re not too campy and melodramatic.  That doesn’t mean I’m an elitist though because I also like to watch fan-service comedies as a ’stress reliever’ for the mindless humor .  Some of my favorite series include ‘classics’ like Evangelion and Cowboy Bebop.  But I also enjoyed Mushi-shi, Minami-ke (first season), 5cm per Second,  FMA, Haruhi, Black Lagoon, the list goes on and on.  I’ll try almost any series for at least a few episodes since you never know what’s going to turn out to be good (I’m looking at you Bakemonogatari), and I try not to drop a series if it still shows promise after that.

Due to my penchant for the dramatic/romantic, I have been know to shed a few manly tears on rare occasions (the worst being Grave of the Fireflies and Pokemon ), but I try to keep that bottled up inside (that’s healthy right?).  Overall I try to keep things light and optimistic by interjecting some humor here and there and I’ll try not to gush too much about how great I think a series is.

Since I’m new to this anime blogging scene my plan for this season is to blog one or two series that pique my interest.  One show that I am definitely going to blog is Kimi ni Todoke, but I haven’t decided if I will do a second show.  Crap!  This post is already over 500 words and I think I’ve already babbled on for too long, so I’ll cut it off here.  Please look forward to my upcoming posts! “Amen, Hallelujah, Peanut Butter.”

-Polaryzed

Josh’s Anime Blog is going to have a special announcement tomorrow, so be on the look out!

In the meantime, here is a video to tide you over:

Well, I had a nice adventure over the weekend with my blog being suspended by my host because it was apparently sucking up the server’s CPU cycles.  I did some reading and saw that Wordpress was generally seen as a resource hog.  That at the fact that I couldn’t find any real evidence that my site had been tampered with made me wonder if my blog was just pulling too much processor time on my host’s server.

So, I went and implemented several things which will hopefully help this site out.  The first was implementing WP-Super Cache as well as a complementary caching plugin that caches my sidebar widgets (since they use quite a bit of php to cycle through things to create the dropdowns).  Next, as you might have seen, I cut down the number of posts per page from 10 to 5.  Maybe that will make the page more manageable too.

I also eliminated a few things on the administrative side such as a couple of plugins that were doing things like creating huge database tables (and that i wasn’t getting much use out of) and turn off post revisions, which I’ve used maybe twice ever.

I’ll probably get in touch with my host before the end of the week to see if these changes are making a noticeable difference.  If not, well, I guess I’ll have to find another resolution then, depending on how much information they can give me on what’s causing the problem.  I just put down a non-insignificant amount of money to extend my hosting for 2 more years only a couple months ago, so I don’t exactly want that to go to waste, and I don’t have the money to upgrade to any sort of semi-shared or dedicated server.

After all of this, hopefully the site will load faster, anyway, with the caching.  My YSlow score did improve from an E to a C after all the things I did (and most of the rest of the things it’s complaining about, I can’t do a heck of a lot about).

As my review of the Fruits Basket manga series yesterday obviously demonstrates, I’ve finished reading that series (after getting the final 2 volumes not too long ago, and trying to get through the entire series again, including marathoning the last 16 or so volumes over the weekend).

Finishing the manga series reminded me of something that I had thought about for quite a while since reading the manga when it got well beyond where the anime went: what about a 2nd season?  I think there is so much good material there that, in a perfect and just world, I think it should definitely get a second season, if not a remake. (I actually think they may be better off doing an FMA style remake where they go ahead and do a 52 episode series from the beginning.)

I won’t necessarily go over all the details about why or why not a second season may or may not occur.  AstroNerdBoy already did that way back two and half years ago in his post on the topic.  I guess the only thing I could really add is that, the prospects of a sequel, or a remake are even bleaker now than they were then because it’s been something like 8 years since the first season came out, and it’s been 2 years since the last manga volume was published in Japan.  There seems little reason to actually make a new series unless someone just suddenly gets the urge to.

However, this also made me wonder about other series that should get a sequel or a remake done of them.  So I decided to go through the list of shows that I’ve seen and see which ones I thought were worthy of a remake or sequel, and this is what I came up with:

• Bokura ga Ita: It’s been a while since I’ve seen this series, but from my memory (and reading my review of it), I was furstrated by the fact that it had a wide open ending that drove me crazy.  Of course, I’m not sure I particularly liked the show anyway, but I suppose I’ll still include it on my list.
• Cardcaptor Sakura: OK, guilty pleasure for me.  The only real reason I’d like to see this remade is to see it with top-of-the-line current animation (though the new HD releases go a long way in satisfying my improved animation wishes).  My only fear is that they’d muck up the story and ruin it if they ever redid it.
• His and Her Circumstances: Really? Is there any greater crime than ending a series, mid-story arc?  I haven’t read the manga, but I’m sure this is one series where the manga goes far beyond where the anime went, and it could sure use a continuation.
• Kannagi: This series really needs a sequel.  I think there were just too many loose ends left and it could really use another season.  Really.
• Video Girl Ai: A 6 episode, 17 year old OVA series just doesn’t give a 15 volume manga series justice.  I think this would be one of my prime candidates for a remake.  I does a sort of sufficient job of telling the story to the point in the manga that it reaches (which, if I recall, wasn’t very far) but there is so much more to tell.

What other shows do people think are badly in need of a sequel due to a an insufficient or left-wide-open ending, or do you think should be remake because it either flat out sucked and could be done better, could use an FMA-style reboot, or is old and could do with some updating? (I intentionally left out series which I might like seeing more of, but it was pretty much concluded in the episodes that aired).