Digibro Never Shuts Up 12 – My Top 100 Favorite Songs (and Brandon Tolentino’s)

Surely this makes up for months of silence. In this five-hour epic recorded over two days, Brandon Tolentino and I break down our “top 100 favorite songs” lists, which we’d written months ago, and I’d never finished writing a post about.

This track-by-track breakdown of both lists involves lots of esoteric explanations, random singing, and a truckload of overly obvious passion for music. And if anyone asks—yes, I actually listened to the whole thing back myself.

The lists are below for the sake of keeping up/listening. Note that Brandon’s numbers are reversed for some reason (i.e. his 1. is actually his 100.). Also, as mentioned throughout the podcast, both lists are incomplete and in need of changing, especially Brandon’s because his list was written while he was depressed. These listings do not account for any changes discussed in the podcast.

Digibro’s Games Journal (End of July 2012)

Two months ago, when I started playing video games regularly, I began a journal of all the games I’d played so that I wouldn’t lose track of them before I could find some means of databasing them. I intended that at some point I’d post a list of what I’d played so far with commentary, but before I knew it, the list got out of hand. Therefore, before I end up with half a billion games to go through in one post, here’s my video game journal as of the end of July. I might do these monthly or, like, I dunno, something.

This list is broken up into sections by how much I enjoyed the game, with games listed alphabetically within each section. Recommendations of what I should play next based on this list will be greatly appreciated!

Brony Media Overview [Tons of Embeds]

Image by Paradise Wonder

My quest through Equestria Daily‘s media section is finally over after more than two months. I only made it back through June 2011, but due to a series of events, I lost my place, and EQD’s page system makes it difficult to go through their archives. Besides, the further back I go, the less high-quality media there is, and these days so much is produced that I hardly find time for my archive plumbing. Therefor, I’m calling it here.

I’ve listened to several hundred songs, watched at least a hundred PMVs, a few dozen animations, YTPs and flash movies, not even getting into the dozens of games I’ve played and thousands of images I’ve looked at. I’ve gotten deep into brony media culture, and I’m only going deeper. Here are my findings at current depth.

Amazing as Equestria Daily is, the site is unreliable. After all, it’s a blog, not a database, and only wants to be as much. My tastes don’t always agree with those of the EQD review staff. They post up plenty of shit PMVs and tons of generic electronic music that has little in the way of pony—not to say that their tastes are generally bad, just that I intook more than enough crap that I didn’t care for, while finding other stuff that I did looking on my own.

(Totally not butthurt because nothing I’ve submitted to EQD has ever made it :p)

Nevertheless I can’t discount how valuable it is to have a site that delivers large amounts of worthwhile content to an incredibly wide audience. I only hope that a good portion of that audience goes to find things on their own as well. This might be an insane demand actually, because I know firsthand that keeping up with EQD alone is incredibly time-consuming (even if, like me, you don’t read any of the fanfics they post). You probably have to be a jobless, schoolless pony fanatic like myself to intake as much pony as I do while accomplishing anything else.

There are no words to describe the whole of pony media, except that all of it contains pony (and even then, that assessment is questionable at times). Pony media spans every medium and genre, and probably creates a few of its own. There’s pony stuff that I like in every form, and getting into all of it will be a nightmare.

This post will contain a list of each song, video, etc. that I’ve downloaded or favorited on sites like youtube, deviantart, fimfiction, etc., largely without comment. I’d like to say things about them all, but it will be just gushing unless I could dedicate a full post to each item.

Here is a bit more than the tip of the iceberg of all the pony stuff I like. I’m sure I’ll eventually make a full-on canon of all things pony which I enjoy in the future.

In order to keep this list from getting too crowded, I’m limiting it to one item per artist. You’ll see something like “JHaller’s x, x, and x,” while featuring the work which I like most. Everything is largely out of order, but I tried to position the best stuff at the top of each category.

What Was The Best Year In Anime History? (tl;dr: 2007)

“Anime is dying!
Everything is killing anime!”
– the anime sphere

No, that’s not really what the anime sphere is saying. That’s what a small handful of ragers are saying, and half of them are just trolling. But every time I read it, it gets me thinking: what was the best year for anime?

It was the year when this shit happened.

My Top Ten—Percent! – Another Favorites List Theory

I have a curse. No matter how much I try—no matter how frustrating it can be—I can’t stop fucking around with my favorites list; and now I’ve found yet another way to structure it, based around Sturgeon’s Law.

Unrelated images all by Aruru no Zaki

Why The Hell Not: My Top 10 J.C. Staff Shows

For a long time I’ve wanted to make a post about how great J.C. Staff is, since they get so much shit from the Western anime community in general (though they also get plenty of due respect). Now’s a good time to help raise awareness because a bunch of dumbasses are making top 10 lists of J.C. Staff anime—so I’m jumping into the fray.

It began with a random-ass survey on some Japanese website whose top 10 was then transplanted to Sankaku Complex. Top 50 is long, but since it’s a good way to look at a lot of shows at once, it’s a good way to start this post. Please note that the order of this list is absolutely fucking ridiculous (as in, I can’t fathom how the results came out this way).

(800) Days of Fuzakenna! And Eight Awesome Eighth Episodes of Anime

I tend to miss my blog’s benchmarks. I realized in June that my third anniversary had passed in April, and I’m not sure when I broke 300,000 hits, but I’m already halfway to 400,000. But most of all, I’ve missed my specially-numbered posts, or realized after the fact that I’ve made them. Well, today I was lucky and noticed that this will be my 800th published post! It’s a great mark to have, because 8 has always been a special number to me (I was born on August 8, weighing 8 pounds and 8 ounces) so to mark the occasion, I’ll be listing 8 of my favorite ‘episode 8s’.

8 tends to be an important episode number in anime. In a lot of 26-episode shows, the 8th episode marks the transition from plot set-up to actual movement of events, and will often feature a shocking twist or revelation that changes the way things will happen from there on out. This is a common enough practice that I could make a list of just transitional eighth episodes, but of course, being an important episode doesn’t necessarily qualify as being a memorable and awesome one, so this list will take eighth episodes from any series. The requirement for consideration on this list was that the eighth episode wasn’t just great, but was one of the most memorable or amazing episodes in the entire series. Oh, and you can count on there being spoilers for each episode.

Implications of a Like vs. Enjoy Conflict in Writing A Favorites List

No conflict here, 10s across the board!

This is a continuation of this post wherein I described how one can separately ‘like’ and ‘enjoy’ any given show. Some people pointed out that ‘like’ is a very horrible term to use here, however, the suggested term ‘respect’ does not fully convey what I’m getting at here, so bear with me. In the future, I will never use the word ‘like’ this way again, but for the purpose of this post, please assume that when I say ‘like’, I mean to say ‘something that meets one’s personal standards’, and that when I say ‘enjoy’ I mean ‘something that I was pleasured greatly by partaking in’ (think ‘sex’). That out of the way, I want to talk about what separately ‘liking’ and ‘enjoying’ something means for one’s (namely my) favorites list.