by ETERNAL on May 30, 2009
Because succinct post titles can be more effective than wordy ones.
Anyway, as much as it pains me to say it, I’m afraid that the dreaded H-word has finally seized control over me after a thoroughly enjoyable 9 months of blogging. I’m not burned out: I’ve been watching anime for years and I know that I still have a lot to learn. I’m not sick of the blogosphere: I”ve actually learned more about the world from you guys than from the mandatory careers class at school. I didn’t give up: I know that it takes time to get better at anything, and I’m nowhere near ready to abandon my dreams.
by ETERNAL on May 25, 2009
Spring has sprung and con season has begun, but unfortunately for some of us, it has already come to a close. Canada’s biggest anime convention, Anime North, has been a tradition for me since my early days of fandom in junior high, and it has once more left me with a bottomless pit of bittersweet memories. Well, maybe that’s an exaggeration, but anime cons are a great occasion for fans to get together, geek out, buy questionable merchandise, take pictures of attractive goth-loli cosplayers, eat overpriced Pocky, and avoid contracting the Narutard virus.
Strange as these things may sound, however, they all come together quite nicely when you’re with friends, and even if you’re not, there’s some kind of aura present at conventions that allows for the impossible. Unfortunately, I didn’t get a hotel room and I don’t have a car so I didn’t spend 100% of the weekend at the event, and I was too busy lazy to take many pictures, so think of this as a general impressions post rather than real coverage.
by ETERNAL on May 21, 2009
Mutsumi Sasaki is another one of those popular eroge artists that you’ve probably noticed at one point or another. He’s been in the industry for quite some time, designing characters for the Memories Off franchise (the anime adaptations were mediocre, but that’s another story), and, more recently, titles like Chaos;Head and Myself;Yourself. Putting the inappropriate use of semicolons aside, neither of the aforementioned shows struck me as anything spectacular, but one of my favourite aspects of them was the character designs. Why? The answer should be obvious. I love Mutsumi Sasaki, and while he might not be my absolute favourite artist, his work always holds some sort of mysterious control over me. Est is his most recent professional artbook, and suffice to say, I wasn’t disappointed.
by ETERNAL on May 19, 2009
I was an otaku before an anime blogger, I played my first visual novel before reading The Animanachronism. I collect things that have pictures of attractive 2D females printed on to them just because I can. The acronym of my blog’s name spells a familiar word. If I wore glasses, surely they would be rose-tinted.
But that’s not the point. The point is Akiyama Mio. You know, Mio. That Mio, that Mio, that Mio, that Mio…and yes, even that Akiyama Mio. So what does this mean, aside from the fact that Nasu’s pen has infected me? It means that Mio is popular.
…
…And it also means that I’m going to try and figure out why, because that’s what I do!
by ETERNAL on May 17, 2009
Serious business is serious. And it’s also important. Very important. Life, after all, is usually pretty serious, and since many works of fiction take on darker subjects than real life contains, it’s only natural that stories should be suitably heavy-hearted. However, the funny thing about seriousness is that there’s a very fine line between “serious” and “too serious,” and I’m sure we’ve all seen far too many times cases in which the creators of a show fail to notice that line.
The problem is, understanding how much seriousness to use is ridiculously important, to the point that a careless mistake can destroy an otherwise good story. And yet, the right balance between dark and light subject matter can make a good story even better. It’s one of those simple aspects of a work of fiction that’s easy to understand but hard to master.
Of course, this all begs the question: how serious is too serious?
by ETERNAL on May 6, 2009
Pardon me for going off topic – yes, I have no way of justifying this post and claiming its relevance to anime – but as I shift in and out of the mood to pursue Japanese cartoons with unparalleled amounts of zeal and energy, irrelevant ideas occasionally cross my mind. Having recently mentioned gaming in a post that was intended to have far more to do with anime than it did, I found myself taking a little break from this medium that we know and love, and indulging in a few solid hours of adventure and conquest.
Now, as for how this is relevant to the topic at hand: in taking a good look at the medium of video games from a perspective that has widened dramatically in the last several months, I’ve come to realize a few things that I never noticed before. In short, I think the enjoyment that players derive from games can be divided into three broad categories – entertainment, competition, and art – and that the mystery behind why some games appear to be “good” while others are “bad” is far less of a mystery than it appears.
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