The real reason I’m writing this post is so that I have an excuse to post a few pictures from the summer vacation I just got back from; but, I’m going to cover up the off-topic nature of this post by talking about a couple of thoughts I had about anime while on vacation and upon coming back.

Once again I spent my summer vacation relaxing in a beachfront home along the coast of Lake Erie. The location was so perfect, literally spitting distance from the shore, that we didn’t mind that the house lacked air-con.

Just about every house one can rent for vacation nowadays advertises that they have internet service but what they define as “internet service” is always an interesting surprise. This house had no landline phone or any sort of router that I could find but there was a wireless network my laptop found that I was able to connect too. I didn’t feel comfortable feeding this connection any of my various account names and passwords so I wasn’t able to blog or post comments but I did feel comfortable enough to fire Azureus up and continue grabbing anime that I wanted to watch. (I’m not sure what that says about me but I’m sure it means something.)

Very quickly I realized that it was going to be impossible keeping up with the 20 or so anime series I’m watching right now. There was important vacation related activities – like swimming at the beach, watching gorgeous sunsets, looking for beach glass, relaxing on the patio, marveling at all the stars that one can see outside of a city, etc – that limited the time that I was willing to sit down to watch anime. Also, the internet connection was junk; I felt that I time-traveled back to the dial-up days. It took forever for a single episode of anything to download.

Not the most relaxing way to spend time on vacation but it was a very memorable episode.

This naturally forced me to decide which anime I’m watching right now was worth it and the ones I couldn’t live without was sometimes a surprise to me. The anime series continuing from spring that I had to keep up with were three: Steins;Gate, Nichijou, Tiger & Bunny. No surprises there – Steins;Gate is All-Time Top 10 bound if it doesn’t fumble the ending, Nichijou is the best comedy series by KyoAni ever, and Tiger & Bunny has finally gotten serious about showing it’s full potential and it’s been a nail-biting ride (I hope it continues). Hyouge Mono would probably be in this category but it’s been forever since a new episode has been subbed so I don’t know for sure. Of the continuing spring series there was two series that I found that I could wait till after coming back from vacation to watch – Ao no Exorcist and Hanasaku Iroha. I like both of these series a lot but if I’m being critical I know why neither anime got watched. The fight in episode 15 of Ao no Exorcist currently feels like the high point of the series with it treading water since then and I’m not sure if A-1 can make the ending top that episode. As an original work, there is no excuse for pacing issues but Hanasaku Iroha continues to stubbornly stick to being completely random even after 19 episodes and there’s really no compelling reason to why it needs to watched as soon as possible.

Of the new summer series only Natsume Yuujinchou Season 3, Mayo Chiki, and Dantalian no Shoka made the cut. No surprise with Natsume, it’s one of my favorite series of all-time and the location – near the lake with the sound of waves lapping the beach in the background – actually enhanced my viewing experience. Mayo Chiki continues to remain surprisingly engrossing and the best new comedy/fan service series this season. I’m starting to conclude that Dantalian no Shoka will not be among the best series this season but will continue to be an interesting anime to watch.

It definitely was worth the wait though.

Two of the new summer series – Mawaru Penguindrum and Ikoku Meiro no Croisee – I dearly wanted to watch but the former didn’t air that week and my preferred subbers of the latter were slow (which was okay, I understand stuff happens but going through a Yune withdrawal is a painful experience). I initially didn’t think I’d miss either series as much as I did but I guess there’s truth in that saying about absence making the heart grow fonder.

This left a pile of new anime series that I didn’t watch that waited for my return home; including, R-15, Nekogami Yaoyorozu, Sacred Seven, Yuruyuri, Itsuka Tenma no Kuro Usagi, Kamisama no Memo-chou, Blood-C, and Kamisama Dolls. There’s some good stuff on this pile but not good enough to get me to drop all the important vacation stuff I was doing. Speaking of which, while watching an awesome sunset, I got into a discussion about the best type of sunset. I argued that a sunset under partly cloudy conditions was the best type of sunset and clearly superior to a cloudless sunset but I was in the presence of someone who held the opposite. Neither of us was particularly serious but I thought this would make a good poll question that I could ask an impartial audience such as those reading this blog to answer. To help make the decision easier, I’ll include pictures I took of both types of sunsets while on vacation this year and you can vote below.

Cloudless Sunset

Partly Cloudy Sunset(s)

View This Poll

Thanks for the vote. The rest of the vacation was pretty typical vacation stuff. On the clear nights I saw a fair amount of Perseid meteors leading up to the peak night but I got clouded out on the peak night itself. There were a couple of storms that blew through which made for interesting viewing on how the coastline can quickly change and I even got to see several lightning strikes out over Lake Erie at night and was mesmerized at how bright and crisp they looked. However, the most exciting thing that happened during the vacation was when a P-51D Mustang buzzed the house.  In the pictures below you can see how the house sits in relation to the lake. The P-51 flew past at the same level as the first story windows and only about 75-100 feet from shore. It was really bookin’ it; a blink and I would have missed it. Thankfully I was looking outside when I first heard the engine growling towards me, though I almost missed it because I was looking up for it. I never thought I’d actually see a P-51 in-flight. Growing up I went through a phase where I learned everything I could about WWII and, even today, the P-51 has remained my favorite plane of the era.

Picture of the house I stayed at, taken from the beach

The view from the second story balcony

Vacations always end and before I knew it, I was back home and all the anime that I left alone was staring back at me wanting to get watched now. I was tempted to drop many of the lower quality series because I have a hard enough time psyching myself to watch the weekly R-15 or Sacred Seven but for a couple of these series I had two episodes to get too and for the others I knew another episode was just a few days away at best. All without my normal trick of layering together the better series with the poorer series because I’d watched all the really good ones. In the end, I trudged through telling myself that if I got through these series I would get to rate them as low as they deserve. And I was left with a bigger appreciation of how seeking balance is sometimes the right thing to do.

In closing, I’m back home with my high-speed DSL connection and the light pollution that washes out most stars at night and a clear anime backlog.

I’m sometimes amazed how disrupting a vacation can be to one’s life but that’s not the reason for this post (though it does help explain where I’ve been for the last 3 weeks) nor is it an excuse to post pictures from my vacation (though I will post some)  but because I had a thought about slice-of-life anime while I was on vacation and I took the above pic to remind myself of this thought so I could share later.

Since the summer vacation of 2008 where I tried out vacationing without a purpose except to relax and the small fall vacation from Fall 2008, I’ve really gotten into the whole renting a house for a week+ somewhere and doing nothing type vacations (see 2009 and now this year). So there I was sitting on the beach, listening to the lapping waves of water, watching the sun set and eating mint chocolate chip ice cream – immensely enjoying myself, far beyond what I should be allowed to feel and it hits me; I’m practically doing a live action slice-of-life anime by myself. Practically because I don’t happen to be a high school girl in a band who likes tea or a high school boy that can see ghosts  and has a fortune cat as a sidekick or a gondolier on a terraformed Mars but it’s still close enough to make me realize that the reason I like slice-of-life anime so much is because I love those small normal goings-on that are the center of these shows. Going to the beach? Awesome, I love the beach. Picking tomatoes, creating a feast and inviting all your friends over? Sweet, wish I doing that right now. Going to a coffee shop run by a android that drinks more coffee then she sells? Bring on the apocalypse, that’s my idea of the perfect day trip. I just wish it was easier to make these shows sound interesting to other people.

Sorry if that wasn’t such a deep philosophical point but it is slice-of-life anime we’re talking about.  Now here’s some other pictures from my vacation and the other reason why I’ve been slow with the posting is that I’m teaching my one younger sister how to drive (this’ll be the fourth sister I’ve taught to drive) and we’re trying to do it in only a month and a half which means I’m going out everyday  for at least an hour and it’s really sapping my strength.  And it’s not like she’s a bad driver but I’m exhausted nonetheless. This would be episodes 8-9 of my life as a slice-of-life anime but sadly, not many Japanese learn to drive (using anime as a judge) and thus this would feel out-of-place in an anime. The only example I could think of was Sunohara from Clannad.

Same sunset as the first picture

Same sunset as the first picture

Same sunset as the first picture

The beach house we rented had a lovely lookout.

The owners overstated their beach access but I wanted to get a picture of this cliff from the beach below and after a climb down the near vertical ravine and across the rickety 2 ft. wide bridge without anything to hold onto to keep balance on, I got this picture.

Time-lapse pic of the nearby road from the 2nd story deck, the stars were pretty as well from here but we only got a couple nights clear enough to go star-gazing.

This butterfly let me run into the house, grab a camera, and come back outside without moving so I could get this picture.

Another sunset pic but from another night

Filed under: anime, meta/office keeping, other wallpapers and pictures

As you might have guessed by the title, yesterday marked the start of my match in the second round of the Aniblog Tournament. You may have also guessed that this post is the type of post that at some point, maybe after trying a bit of bribery or trash-talking or arguing for my superior worth, I’ll ask people to please go here to vote for The null set. And you’d be right on both accounts, but I’ll try to keep this interesting for you nonetheless.

Three Reasons Why You Should Vote For The Null Set

1.   I Have a Cute Nephew

And I have the pictures to prove it:

If that’s not a good enough reason to vote for me, I don’t know what is.

2.   I’m From Youngstown and I Know People

Sure some cities have nice sounding nicknames like ‘The City of Brotherly Love’ or ‘The Big Apple’ but my hometown has cooler sounding nicknames:  ‘Mob Town, USA’ and more recently ‘Murder Town, USA’. And don’t think these nicknames are misnomers, in the 90’s, for instance, Youngstown had the highest per capita homicide rate in America for many of the individual years of the 1990’s and we were either #2 or #3 all the other years.

3.   I’m Part Elven

If J.R.R. Tolkien is right about how elves develop a yearning for the sea the first time they get near it then it’s conceivable that I’m part elven because I seem drawn to it. Look how often it’s come up on my blog, here and here and here. In two months I’m going on a week long vacation at a beach house and that’s in addition to the beach trip I just went on (found a bunch of nice sea glass) and another trip sometime in June. Here’s some new pictures I took on the most recent visit.

Isn’t my blog the most awesome, so go here and vote for The null set now.

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Okay, so this list wasn’t a serious one, though, everything said about me true. I do have a cute nephew and I’m proud of being from Youngstown and I do enjoy going to the beach. I included being from Youngstown because it is an important part of who I am. If you look past the nicknames and the murder rate and the inability to park your car on the street because sooner-or-later someone will break the windows in – I still think of it as a great place to live, it’s got the second largest urban park in America behind Central Park in New York City; the people are by and large good, hard-working people; and I’m optimistic the worst of it has past and the future will be a better one for Youngstown.

Now for the serious list as to why I think people should vote for The null set.

Three Reasons Why You Should Vote For The Null Set

1.   Unique Philosophy to The Null Set

I wanted The null set to be a successful anime blog and not wither away after a few short months. To do this, I needed to find something that would separate this blog from other blogs and I needed to believe that whatever this blog did, it had some importance to my potential readers.

What I eventually came up with as The null set’s mission is to get people to watch good anime, even if that means trying something they normally wouldn’t and to steer people away from wasting their time with bad anime. This influences everything I do, even if it’s not apparent. I normally write my anime posts as if the audience reading them has not seen the anime in question which means including as few spoilers as possible, among other things. The types of anime posts I write mainly – impression posts of new anime, series reviews, season previews, and seasonal/yearly anime awards – are designed with this mission in mind. I’d rather have people spending time watching good anime then spending time reading what I have to say about good and bad anime.

2.   Wider Variety of Content

I have only the highest respect for episodic blogs and their ability to cover the same shows week in and week out; I’d probably burn out quickly if I tried. I think the format, however, is very constricting and it would limit the quality of my blog since many of my most read posts and the posts I’m most proud about wouldn’t fit into that format.

For example, there was my rebuttal to Mr. Sherman, president of Bang Zoom, about the impending death of anime in America and from a couple of years ago, my two-part (1, 2) rebuttal to the “documentary” that Otaking put out. There’s also this post where I used the licensing patterns of the anime from 2008 to show that instead of blaming fansubs, maybe studio execs should be looking at the shows they license; the post still holds up well though there’s been some more licensing of 2008 anime shows since I wrote it back in November.

From time-to-time I like to pit two series or two characters against each other to see who would win. The most read one remains the Haruhi vs. Gurren Lagann one I did back in 2008 but the one I had the most fun putting together was the Haruka Minami vs. Ibuki Ikaruga battle because I was surprised by the winner.

I also enjoy dabbling with Photoshop because it exercises my creative side a different way then writing does. The result is often posting wallpapers that I’ve made. The Soul Eater ones (1, 2, 3) have been the most popular; my Toradora ones actually got linked to by a Japanese anime blog which I thought was great. My favorite wallpaper was one I did for Bakemonogatari that splices Araragi and Mayoi onto a picture I took while on vacation at Washington D.C.. I also once tried out vector tracing using Muraski from Kure-nai. And I also sometimes take the time to stitch together those pan-up shots the animators do of a really awesome outfit/character. The latest was one I did the other day after watching episode 5 of Katanagatari and I might as well share it with you know as thanks for reading this far down.

There’s also those posts that are hard to categorize except to say that something about the anime I was watching or manga I was reading at that time interested me and I wanted to share. There was a recent post about fixing a joke I read in the Sayonara, Zetsubou-sensei manga, there’s this post where I mention anime songs that make me cry, the post about how animators seem fascinated with the night sky, a post about how anime needs more mature characters, and the post where I talk about When an Anime Becomes a Keeper.

3.   Winning Would Do The Most Good For The Anime Blogosphere

I struggled with how to word this one without sounding presumptuous and I still don’t think I quite got it right. I’m not saying that my anime blog is super important or even more important than my opponent, Bokutachi no Blog, but the feedback I received during the first round and pressure to make my blog competitive for the second round pushed me to improve The null set and winning in this round will push me even harder to improve the quality of The null set to make it competitive for the next round. I have several ideas that I think would make very interesting posts which have been kicking around in my brain for a while now, waiting for a good time to get written, and trying to win in the third round would be a very good reason to get them written. I’m even thinking about bring back my weekly anime review.

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So, hopefully, something I said has convinced you to go here and vote for The null set in the Aniblog Tournament; I’m currently behind by a little bit but with your help, I might just win.

Yes We Can! With your help The null set can win.

I wasn’t going to try the bribery route but I just had an idea that attempts to bribe while still keeping within the parameters of running The null set like normal. If I win my second round match-up, I’ll watch and write a series review of any one randomly selected anime (up to say 40 episodes in length) picked from a list generated of people leaving a comment at this post saying that they voted for me and the name of the anime they’d like me to review. Of course, I can’t verify if the winning person did, in fact, vote for me but I’m willing to trust in my readers. And  no matter the legitimacy of the comment, I’ll still be reviewing a show I haven’t done yet and I’ll only do it when I win so it’s a win-win for everyone involved.

Filed under: anime, general anime interst, meta/office keeping, other wallpapers and pictures

Today it hit a balmy 40 degrees F (4.4 deg C) so my family decided to take the 1.5 hour drive up to see how the beach looks in winter time. Turns out, it’s really cool both figuratively and literally. In the picture above I’m standing about 20 feet from shore over Lake Erie itself – the mixture of ice/snow/sand felt solid but it still was a bit unsettling to know that I was walking on the lake itself. Below is more shots that I took including one of the snowman that two of my sisters made.