I don’t read as many other anime bloggers as I probably should, nor do I participate in any circles of anime bloggers. This probably hurts me a bit because it prevents me from getting some more exposure and readers. I’ve never been very good at getting people to read my blog, I assume people read it, as I have stats for this, minus GOOGLEBOTS. But with no comments and little feedback, I honestly don’t know if what I am doing is good, or utter rubbish.
I read a lot of video game websites, like GiantBomb and PA:Report. I also read many personal blogs on anime, games, politics, and special interests. A lot of people have noticeably dense writing styles, chock full of mid-to-high tier English. I had a love/hate relationship with English in school, I loved to read books, but I hated writing papers. I liked writing short-stories though, and teachers seemed to love my stories, but generally dislike my analysis of books. I’ve had the unfortunate fate of having read Animal Farm twice, due to having moved states between high school years, and where it was on the freshman curriculum in one, it was on the sophomore curriculum in the other. It’s not a bad book, but I got shit from my sophomore English teacher because I didn’t care to re-read the book, but I had to in order to write goddamn papers. Pain in the ass. I don’t like to spend very long talking about something I’ve read or watched, because my telling you what I feel about something might interest you, but you’re not going to derive one-hundred percent of something from my silly writings. Even I do not derive one-hundred percent of what I think about a video game from a review website. It’s like, their opinion, man.
At the same time, I try to take away a little bit from what I read and apply it to my own style. I’m not fancy with words like Jerry Holkins, but I like how he dances around many topics in one post without really setting up any transition, often in the same sentance or paragraph. Another blog I probably read most frequently is Nova’s Jinx!. I’ll likely never travel outside the country, or likely not much farther than a cruise ship might take me, so I enjoy the fact that the internet provides me an ecosystem to which people from other countries can partake in the same experiences I am. I’ve probably adapted some of my blog style to his lately, mainly centering screenshots on the full page now, which I honestly wonder why I wasn’t doing that before. Finally, there is one blog that I hit infrequently, but it’s always interesting to read, Mark Plays. This guy’s work is interesting because he is playing games and watching media from years and years past, for the first time. Not only does he offer a unique perspective sometimes from that angle, but his writing style is much like mine, very literal, like if I met this guy in a room, I’d know exactly how he’d speak and could get along with that. I’ve always had a knack for deriving people’s speech from their text. My old friends in high school used to wonder how I could pick them out in an AIM conversation when they were under someone else’s screen name. They all had distinct styles of writing, but they almost always matched how they spoke. I’m much the same way, really. I was born in the US south, but never lived there, and yet I find myself saying “y’all” a lot, except I write it “ya’ll”. It wouldn’t be hard to trace my writing style by someone who is versed in those sorts of things, but if I wanted to mask it, that would be how I’d go about it. I’d have to adapt it to someone else’s style.
As for this blog, I may not use fancy words or look deep into a show’s character’s soul, but what I offer is a reading experience for people who are looking for more than 140 characters in someone’s reaction of an episode. Sometimes I don’t have much to say on a show, because it wasn’t good, but other times I have enough to make an entire post on it. It depends on how much effort I want to put in I guess, I’m pretty straightforward with people, when I am lazy as shit, I am lazy as shit. I don’t make money from any of this, I do it because I enjoy writing, enjoy anime, and enjoy giving ten or however many people read this my two cents on their FAVORITE ANIMES. I won’t win any awards, won’t be featured on any websites, no one is going to want me to write a column for their website, and that is fine. A prominent webcomic artist thinks bloggers aren’t real people when it comes to journalism, that we’re out to scam hits to our sites by any means, usually negatively. My website and domains are one-hundred percent self-funded and administered. I write my own HTML and CSS, design my own graphics and banners, and try to source/credit other sites and artists for graphics used on the site, if any. There are no ads, and likely never to be if I can help it. My goal is just to provide a voice among a sea of voices about something. I’m not going to shout over others to be heard, but I’m not going to whisper either. Sometimes you have to make the plays other people aren’t willing to make. I think Scott is a great guy, and although I’ve never met him personally, I’d love to, I think we’d get along, but he and I likely share different views about social media and interaction, and writing and readership. He is a successful webcomic artist who makes fistwads of cash. I am a lowborn serf from the shittiest state in the Union, who works a 9-5 and writes as a hobby. That’s just how we’re going to perceive each other over a faceless medium like Twitter.
This blog will go on until I stop giving a shit, but with so much anime to watch, that isn’t likely to happen. A lot of people may wonder why I waste time on such things, that I’m almost thirty years old, that I should be doing more important things. You know what my response to that is?
Out.
