It’s been 2 weeks since the AcadimeAwards were announced and there’re 2 weeks remaining before it kicks off. A lot of people have come forth and been a great help, and more have stated interest, but said they’d wait for more positions to be filled. That’s the purpose of this post: a status report and call for those interested to fill the remaining positions.
Write-ups that I’ve received so far: Best Fight Scene (Robot), Best ED, Best Female Character, Best Movie
Dates I need write-ups by for other categories: Best Actor in a Supporting Role—Feb 3; Best Character Designs—Feb 5; Best Actress in a Supporting Role—Feb 6; Best Original Soundtrack—Feb 8; Best Movie—Feb 9; Best Breakthrough Performance—Feb 11; Best On-Screen Couple—Feb 14; Best Mecha Design—Feb; Best OVA For An Existing Franchise—Feb 15; 16 Best Villain—Feb 20; Best Original OVA—Feb 21; Best Actor in a Leading Role—Feb 22; Best Actress in a Leading Role—Feb 24; Best Writing—Feb 25; Best Male Character—Feb 26; Best Series—Feb 28
Categories which do not yet have a presenter (and dates I need write-ups by):
Best Animation (Movie/OVA)—Feb 7
Best Animation (TV)—Feb 2
Best Animation Director (If you even know what this entails, then you’re my wo/man)—Feb 10
Best Art Director (same as above)—Feb 13
Best Director—Feb 18
Best Fight Scene (Human)—Feb 12
Best On-Screen Team—Feb 23
Best OP—Feb 1
Best Scene—Feb 17
Thanks in advance for your help, and thanks again to everyone who’s contributed so far!
The response to my Acadime Awards announcement has been overwhelmingly positive, and a number of volunteers have already come forth. I’m excited to see how this’ll turn out, however, I think there’s been some confusion as to how this all works and what part you can do to help, so I decided to present a preliminary award to show what it’ll be like.
Being as I watched most of what aired in 2010 (and plan to finish some of what I didn’t in the coming month), I thought it’d be fun to do an Academy Awards-style ceremony to celebrate all the great elements of 2010 anime. Rather than talk about what I’m gonna do, it might be more helpful if I just showed you my list of categories:
Best Actor in a Leading Role
Best Actor in a Supporting Role
Best Actress in a Leading Role
Best Actress in a Supporting Role
Best Animation (Movie/OVA)
Best Animation (TV)
Best Animation Direction
Best Art Direction
Best Breakthrough Performance
Best Character Designs
Best Director
Best ED
Best Female Character (presenter decided)
Best Fight Scene (Human)
Best Fight Scene (Robot) (presenter decided)
Best Male Character
Best Mecha Design
Best Movie (presenter decided)
Best On-Screen Couple (presenter decided)
Best On-Screen Team
Best OP
Best New Series
Best Original Soundtrack (presenter decided)
Best Original OVA
Best OVA For An Existing Franchise
Best Series
Best Writing (presenter decided)
So basically, it’s like a fusion of the Academy Awards and the MTV Movie Awards, since while I love all the serious categories, I also care about all the non-serious ones. (If you have any suggestions for other categories, please leave a comment.)
I intend to do this up real big and run it through the whole month of February, with one award given out daily.
As for what gets the awards, the decision will ultimately be my own. This is meant to be a fun activity, not a serious one, and besides, I never agree with the Academy Awards, so fuck all ideas of “quality.” I will, however, be taking a lot of different peoples’ thoughts into consideration. And that’s where you come in.
For each award, I want to have a “presenter.” I’ll start off the post by announcing and saying a little bit about each nominee, and then introduce a guest to announce and talk about the winner. The idea here is that the presenter would be someone with a personal interest in that particular category. For instance, someone who knows a lot about seiyuu could help with the Best Actor/Actress awards, while someone who cares a lot about anime music can help with the Best OST category.
Here’s my request: if you would like to participate in this event, then contact me via email (digitalboyreviews@gmail.com) or instant messenger (gtalk same handle, AIM DigitalboyDB, YIM digitalboyreviews) and let me know which categories you’re interested in. I’ll then give you my list of nominations, and we’ll decide together what should be the winner. After a couple of weeks, I’ll post again with what categories still need a writer.
This series won’t begin until February, so we have plenty of time to set everything up. Whether you decide to participate or not, I hope you look forward to it!
I’m very satisfied with the way 2010 turned out, but I’ll have to set my standards even higher for 2011. If 2010 was me getting my life on-track, then 2011 will be me picking up speed along that track. To become the person I want to be, I’ll basically have to be one boss-ass nigga.
So, here’s what I’m going to do in 2011:
– Write at least 2000 words of fiction and at least 1000 words of non-fiction (blogging) a day. This can be in any form.
– Complete at least the first 2 books in the Tales From the End of the World series.
– Reach at least 450 completed anime (approx. 80 to go).
– Get my driver’s license (for real this time!).
– Continue to make good grades.
– Never go more than three days without at least one post on Dull Sword.
– Record at least 1 original song and 1 karaoke video per month.
– Make at least 3 short films this year.
– Draw at least one piece of art per month.
A lot less general, more direct, and, I think, reasonable goals than last year (after all I’d like to think I’m a much more mature person than I was then lol). Still, reasonable as they may be, these are pretty big goals. I’ll be pushing myself to the limits to complete everything, and that’s exactly what I want from myself in 2011.
What to expect from Dull Sword in 2011:
– Starting January 9th, I’m reinstating Digiboy’s Character Database of Love. I’ll still be accepting submissions, so contact me if you want to write for the series.
– Tomorrow I’m going to announce a big project that should flood the site through most of February~
– Since it’s occurred to me that I never formally announced it here, this is a good time to mention that I’ve joined Otou-san’s Shameful Otaku Secret blog alongside he and ghostlightning. (Basically the perfect team.) I’ll probably do a lot of random episodic posts and micro-reviews there, in replacement of Scarlet Monochrome, which will become decidedly not-anime-focused from here on out.
– I say it all the time, but I’m really hoping to turn this site into more of a shrine to my favorite anime/things, and I hope to accomplish that in 2011.
– Sometime this year, I hope to episodically blog Kure-nai, finish my episodic posts on Sora no Woto, and do a lot of creator profiles.
Oh hell, I’ll never end up doing this thing right. Change of plans for my last 3 Kurisumasu posts: they’ll come out later; mostly because I’ve run out of moments that I particularly want to talk about. I’m thinking there’s one moment I want to save for last, and then the other posts will be a bigger cumulation of moments, but since I didn’t plan for this ahead, I’ll just push the posts back. Plus, I’ve still got a couple more shows to finish before the year clocks out. So far, I’ve probably watched more anime in December than I did in, like, the entirety of 2009.
Anyway I would’ve felt bad if I didn’t announce that, but I’ve sworn against doing any posts that don’t directly deal with anime in some way, so here’s some brief thoughts on the show that just ended/I just finished, Kami Nomi zo Shiru Sekai.
Yes! The hiatus is over! Rejoice! This was by far the longest I’ve ever been down. Digital Boy’s Anime Blog/Euphoric Field/Fuzakenna!/My Sword Is Unbelievably Dull has been around for nearly four years and suffered three major drags: first in June of 07 when I stopped watching anime for a month; next, two and a half weeks in January 08, which felt like forever; things got a lot more consistent last year when I *almost* reached 365 posts, but the gears rusted until they jammed over the course of 2010.
I simply ran out of things to say. At this point, I’ve exhausted all the broad concepts I can think of. Things that would’ve made a full post in the past can now be condensed into 140 or 280 or 420 characters. My personal life has been completely shoved over to tumblr. Eventually, the well ran dry, so I took up my shovel and dug until I hit oil.
So why the name and site change?
In early 2009, I was faced with graduating high school and having to enter the world. In my naive and desperate mind I thought, “what if I could turn anime blogging into a career?” I also wanted a better page design than what WordPress offered, so I bought hosting and a domain name (very cheaply, I might add.) Eventually, I realized that nothing was marketable about my blog and that my web design sense was shit, and by now, I don’t feel the need to make a statement with my blog anymore. Plus I kept crashing the host server, so I had to hide some posts and shrink my front page.
The first idea to change hosts came when I set up a different blog using wordpress and discovered the Under the Influence theme, which didn’t exist “back in my day.” I thought “fuck, if this theme had existed back then, I never would’ve had to buy hosting!” (Not true, back then I wanted a three-column, elastic layout, but whatever.) Feeling like I was wasting money on a blog that was ugly and hard to maintain, I came back to wordpress.
I wanted to change the name because I do so at every opportunity. If you were reading me when this was Euphoric Field, you might remember how I changed the full name constantly to things like “Euphoric Field ~Suspended Animation Dreams~” and “Euphoric Filed ~ULTRA BEATDOWN~”. (I stopped when I realized it was fucking up my google ranking.) However, Fuzakenna was such a perfect brand that I didn’t want to throw it out.
fuzakenna.wordpress.com was unavailable, though, so I said fuck it, changeroo!
Keep your pants on, I'm getting there!
The theme for this change in style is returning to my roots. I want to get back to being a guy who basically talks out loud to himself and is super-happy when someone turns out to be listening. Discovering other blogs changed me irreversibly, which I’m glad for, but over time I’ve stopped reading other blogs and have begun to distill my style to a core that pleases me. I don’t blog for anyone but myself anymore—I do it because I love it. I’m happy if you like my stuff, but I’m not going to try to appeal to you anymore. From now on, I’ll post things that’re more obscure, more ‘who the hell cares kono-otaku!’, and less hipster stuff. That said, I’m totally covering this entire season in a number of ways.
The best title for my new blog, I thought, would be a reference that was very important to me as well as very obscure. I almost used a Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou cross-reference in the form of “Does Alpha Dream of Electric Sheep?”, but besides it being a little too muddy, I haven’t read the book nor the manga, so I’d look like a poser.
After much deliberation, I turned to a different kind of ‘favorite’ of mine: Garzey’s Wing. I love Garzey’s Wing to death, and there’re so many lines from it that’ve become memes among my friends. My favorite part of the OVA is how the main character constantly complains about his shitty weaponry, including the randomly-shouted line, “My Sword Is Unbelievably Dull!” —And there you have it.
Now, since I’ve gone and made the title of this post a reference, and because I’d hate to kick off my new blog with a boring status post, here’s some actual anime blogging!
Sex face. Art by heirou.
Meditations on Ore no Imouto ga Konna ni Kawaii Wake ga Nai!
The prevailing conversation on Imouto has been about the underlying incestual themes present in the series. This was to be expected, and while it’s disappointingly predictable, I admit there’s not a whole lot else to talk about in the show. That’s why I’m covering my angle on the issue.
For the sake of alleviating confusion in this post, I will refer to my 17 year-old brother as “Zack” (since he’s playing Zack Effron in a school play), and to my 13 year-old brother as Cirno (because he worships Cirno.)
I don’t have a sister, so I can’t claim to understand what real brother-sister relationships are like. Moreover, my sibling relationship isn’t like any that I’ve seen in anime (except maybe FullMetal Alchemist and Binbou Shimai Monogatari, for Zack and Cirno respectively.)
My brothers and I are all ultra-super close. We all know each-others’ business, spend time together every day, and get along very well (although I constantly aggravate Zack because I’m an ass.) I don’t know what it’s like to have siblings that you don’t pay much attention too, don’t know very well, or don’t like, which seems to be how most siblings work.
I do, however, have two very close friends with younger sisters that fall into the same age gap as Kirino and Kyou-chan. The younger friend (17) has a terrible relationship with his little sister. The two of them are hardly on speaking terms, so they’re not a good example for this. However, the older friend (19), AKA No Name, has a younger sister in the 9th grade, and with his family also being Asian, they make for an easier comparison to Imouto (albeit they’re Vietnamese.)
The relationship between Kirino and Kyou-chan matches my outsider’s perspective of No Name and his sister very well. In their case, No Name is the super-god-level otaku and certainly doesn’t need a family member’s council, but pushing away the superficiality of the show’s plot, let’s look at the people that are the characters.
In episode 6 or 7, Kirino screams “you’ve ignored me up until now, and suddenly you start acting like my brother?!” or something to that effect. I thought, “oh, Kirino, you’re brother’s grown so much, and so have you!”
Kids are brats. Teenagers are angsty. Even the more mature teenagers only get level-headed around the 16-year-old range.
Growing up, my brothers never got along. Zack was always jealous and angry at the spoiled little brat who always got his way, and he grew up to be an impressively angry individual (not violent, just angry). Throughout his childhood, Zack treated Cirno like shit—I mean, he resented him to the point of bitterness—and Cirno, being a bratty, spoiled little kid, didn’t make it any easier on himself.
As time went on, Cirno became a big kid (and, having been spoiled, was much brattier than either of his predecessors had been), which inspired even more rage in a now-tween Zack who resented that a creature so bratty could’ve come from his family (I’m kinda dramatizing this).
Now, I was always the super-nice big bro to Cirno, so he grew completely attached to me and slowly learned to give Zack his angsty space. Finally, as Zack began to grow up, he learned about tolerance and recognized his responsibility as an older brother (a huge relief for me who’d been wholly responsible for both of them). It helped that Cirno was now entering double-digits and learned to be a lot more sociable.
There was a period of time where it seemed like Zack was coming into realization that he was, in fact, an older brother, and he attached himself to Cirno and started feeling it was his job to protect him, accompanying him to places and keeping track of what he was up to. It was kinda cute.
It wasn’t long-lived. Soon, Zack finally became social, and now, in his senior year, school consumes his entire existence, so I’m back to being the only one spending time with Cirno; but I’m sure you can still see how this comes back to effect my perception of Kirino and Kyou-chan’s relationship.
We're getting into it now!
Getting back to No Name: he and his sister don’t have the ultra-gay, super-close relationship I have with my brothers, but they do in some way love one-another. I’ve heard them argue a lot over the phone and at home, and it sounds almost exactly like the shouting matches Kirino and Kyou-chan have.
(Aside: I love Kirino’s tongue-sucking sound whenever she’s irritated at Kyou-chan—totally an annoyed-little-sister thing to do.)
While I’ve mostly seen No Name and his sister stay out of one-another’s business, they still do things together and hang out every once in a while. No Name’s mentioned how his sister will just show up in his room and ask to watch some anime or play some video games with him. As he puts it, he doesn’t really get why, and probably no brother does, because, hey, little sisters, what can ya do?
My point in this whole story is that I don’t think Kirino and Kyou-chan’s relationship is incestual in the slightest, even if it implicates such for laughs because of the plot backdrop. Kirino’s discovering love for her brother is just that—love for her brother—sibling love that the two of them are only now mature enough to have together.
The fact is, siblinghood is full of ultra-gay moments. (Mine probably more than most, what with Cirno constantly fucking hugging me.) Siblings occassionally do things together out of boredom or loneliness that maybe they wouldn’t have thought they’d do with their sibling. I loved the scene in episode 7 where Kirino drags Kyou-chan to a love hotel, because I could completely see something like that happening.
Brother+sister doesn’t work quite the same as other sibling relationships—close sisters might do something like practice kissing together—close brothers might look at porn together (ah, youth)—a close brother and sister aren’t likely to get so embarassingly intimate, but really, who better to trust your visit to a love hotel with? A hell of a lot better than if she went with someone outside the family, right?
Siblings exist for stuff like this! Helping each-other out with things that we couldn’t possibly ask anyone else for! We torment each-other one minute, and the next, we’re asking for the most embarrassing help in the universe!
As a theater student, my brother knows how to apply makeup, and as much as I know my mom would love to do it, if I ever needed to know how, I’d come to him. Ultra-gay, but less embarrassing than my mom doing it!
So, uh… yeah. WELCOME BACK, DIGIBOY!
BONUS: If you haven’t seen this yet, you truly owe it to yourself.
I know I said I don’t do hiatuses because I always end up posting anyway, but this time I’m for real. Fuzakenna is going on hiatus for a while, and when it comes back, there’ll be a bunch of posts already queued up. This hiatus includes the Character Database series, which has run out of previously queued posts, so it’ll come back when everything else does. I’ll still be posting on Scarlet Monochrome.
There’s no particular reason for this hiatus other than that I have no ideas for posts anymore, and don’t want to have to publish each new post I come up with as soon as it’s written in order to keep the blog alive. The bad thing is that the blog dies for a little while, but the good thing is, it’ll come back really strong. This in combination with my lessening twitter, tumblr, and greader usage will make me seem like a ghost, but I’ll still bubble up to the surface whenever I hear the call – phantasmal, like bubbles.
Maybe you’ve noticed, but in these past three months, Fuzakenna has slowed down considerably, and the ratio of quality posts has been on the ugly side. At first, this was due to me writing a novel and getting back to school, but as time’s gone on, the real reason has become apparent – I’m bored of it. The things I want to write no longer coincide with the way I perceive this blog’s style.
So, it’s time to evolve again. Basically, I’ll stopping with a number of the post types I’ve been doing, holding onto others, and changing my focus altogether. You won’t see any more overly personal posts (with the exception of the very occasional Diary post), no more “Finish or Fail” or “Completed” posts, and no more posts about broad concepts in anime and otakudom. With the first and third, I feel I’ve said all that I need to say for now and don’t want to start repeating myself any more than I have been. As for the others, I’m just not interested in them anymore. I know I haven’t really done it anyway, but I’ll no longer bother with being ‘current’ or following any anime or blogger trends (in other words, no Fall season preview.) I’m also not going to do any more meta posts – from now on, I only post about anime, and if I need meta, I’ll do it on twitter or Scarlet Monochrome.
From here on out, I’ll be doing things along the lines of my Great Scenes in Anime and How To Watch Kure-nai and Like It posts, with a lot more narrow focus and attention to minute details of shows. Rather than talk about an entire show, I’ll more likely talk about moments of dialog, directing, and animation, or detail a certain notable element of the productions, or study a certain character. On that note, my Character Database of Love is still set to go on for, hopefully, eternity.
I hope you’ll enjoy what this blog will have to offer from here on out, and I look forward to writing on these new subjects~ [F]
I won’t lie – for at least the first two years of the three that this blog has lived through, my writing sucked. Most of the posts said very little in far too many words, and any post with salvageable ideas either has or should be redone. For the most part, I’m happy with what I’ve been producing since September of last year, but since then I have still been learning to tighten up my ideas and write more fully realized posts. In this past month, I’ve been proud of every post I’ve put out, having felt that I’ve been doing a much better job of fully expressing my ideas. However, I’ve begun to take issue with my writing style from a more technical standpoint.
As you may have noticed, I’ve been trying to build a reputation as an “Otaku Gonzo Journalist,” and this is still my goal. To accomplish this, I try to pour myself into every post and allow the reader to grasp my perspective on the topic. Sometimes, doing this to the most extreme extent possible works for me, as it did in my Evangelion 2.22 post and my Kara no Kyoukai post, which were very special and rare cases that I was writing solely for myself. However, in most of my work, my misguided attempts at gonzo have lead to overly lengthy and complex posts that should have stayed in the editing stage for a while longer.
This hadn’t really become apparent to me until my English teacher brought it to my attention in my draft of our first assignment (detailed in theseposts on my tumblr.) Upon realizing just how excessive I was with unnecessary details, I went and reread my most recent post and was floored by how much crap was not important to the central idea of the post. It had come to 1300 words, and I realized that it could have easily been 500+ words shorter without losing anything.
I admit that I suffer from an addiction to being contrary. I am the type to brag that I am ‘breaking convention’ or ‘being myself’ when I am really just being hard-headed, and will usually come to realize this way down the line. I’ve bragged about the fact that I write my posts all at once, revise quickly, and then push them out, but this is actually a problem. I realize now that I should hold my posts back until they have been really finished and tightened for maximum readability.
I’ve also defended my garish red-on-white color scheme, which I chose because red, black, and white were my thematic colors (“Scarlet Monochrome” as I call it) even though the scheme simply did not work for a blog, where ease of reading and clarity of images are important. As you can see, I have dramatically changed my blog layout and colors. The idea was to find colors that would work well with the dark red that permeates every page of this blog, so a rustic style seemed most appropriate. You might think of the color scheme as a parallel to my change in writing style – I’m still the raging red ball of passion that I’ve always been, but now more subdued, readable, and, I hope, accessible all-around.
The reason I shut down the blog while I changed the theme and made this post is that I want to view this as a fresh start of sorts. In anime terms, this will be like moving into the third season with a much higher budget and better animation studio. Or better yet, it’s like the Rebuild of Evangelion – the same old story that I love to tell, but in a more focused and complete style.
Feedback on the new layout and colors would be very appreciated! Nothing is final yet. If you think the type is too big, or should be a different font (if you think that, please recommend one), or just completely hate the colors, let me know. Depending on who you are, I might take the ideas to heart ;D
(Is there any movie that stoners WON’T synch Tool albums to? Although this scene is a perfect representation of the lyrics, haha)
I added a J-list ad. I like J-list, even though their site design is terrible and I’ve never bought anything from them, but I’ve always felt that if I had ridiculous amounts of money to spend on totally random shit, I’d go there. I also like that they let me choose basically what the ad looks like, and I picked the one most suited for this site. This ad most likely will not bother you, because most of my readers follow me through Google Reader and shit anyway. The ad is unobtrusive and not visible when you first open the page. Your ad-blockers probably won’t work on it, as J-list ads always show up for me. I’m just telling you about it as a heads-up, because I feel I should let my readers know about any way my site would possibly be receiving money.
Now, on to the inevitable whispers of me selling out. I don’t need to even say anything. Tool put it perfectly back in the 90s with their track in reaction to such claims, Hooker With A Penis. It’s directed at a certain boy who claimed that they were ‘sucking up to the man’ and selling out.
“Well, now I’ve got some advice for you little buddy – before you point your finger you should know that I’m the man! I’m the man and you’re the man and he’s the man as well, so you can point that fucking finger up your ass! All you know about me is what I sold ya, dumb fuck, I sold out long before you ever even heard my name, I sold my soul to make a record, dipshit, AND THEN YOU BOUGHT ONE! All you read and hear and see on TV is a product rated for your fatass dirty dollar, so shut up and BUY MY RECORD! FUCK YOU BUDDY!”
And that’s how I feel about it. The only reason I never put up a J-List ad before is because I thought that they contacted you about it. I finally asked someone, and when I found out I could do it, I jumped on it. Making money off of doing what I love? Fuck yes, please! I’ll take any fucking endorsement deal you throw my way. Just take note: I’ll never do it in a way that I don’t like. You can ask Netprice Japan about that. Oh, and by the way, Netprice Japan agreed to send me 10 bucks. FUCK YEAH!
EDIT: Changed the ad, because the other one had Yume Miru Kusuri in it. I like this one a lot more because it has Reimu on it. As well as ‘Futanari Cat Girl Visual Novel’ (I’m tempted myself)
My Sword Is Unbelievably Dull 