Aniblog Reminiscing! (While drinking!)

Ahaha! 2008. I was 17 and my blog was only somewhat not-totally-shitty. I had, however, just passed through the shittiest period of my blog up to that point because I hadn’t been watching anime but had still been trying to blog about it. Anyway, that part’s boring; the cool part is Oi, Hayaku!

For my first year and a half of blogging, I wasn’t aware of any “anime blogosphere”. I’d started my blog because I’d seen other people on megatokyo forums had them, so I made one. I learned of a couple of blogs because of people who commented on my own site. This, I think, was how I discovered Baka-Raptor, who quickly became my favorite anime blogger to read! 

So in like October 2008, Baka-Raptor became a member of the new team blog Oi, Hayaku!, which was apparently a Pretty Big Deal (or at least it made itself out to be so much that I believed it). It was certainly getting more attention than any blogs I’d seen or heard of up until then!

Which reminds me, now that I’m completely breaking flow and chronology, that before Oi, Hayaku! ever existed, I had also found out about a team blog called The Yukan Blog, similarly by comments on my blog and probably also Baka-Raptor. Yukan blog was lead by this girl named ffffffuck I don’t remember, I just know I really grew to dislike her especially because she left really shitty comments (Blissmo! That was her name!), but anyway that blog existed, and when I found out about it, they were looking for writers.

I quickly offered to become a writer, thinking that as a “Team blog” we would actually all work together on posts and there’d be a sort of governing direction behind it all. (NO, I DIDN’T ACTUALLY READ ANY POSTS ON YUKAN BLOG BEFORE I JOINED. NOR AFTER FOR THAT MATTER.) So they let me join, and I quickly became disheartened with the process and made some lame episodic posts about random shit. I was also being emo because my own blog was lame at the time (this was the aforementioned shitty period). So I made THE WORST POST IN THE HISTORY OF THE ANIME BLOGOSPHERE!

It was called “Essential Anime,” or something to that effect, and was a gigantic douchefest where I listed a bunch of shows I thought were essential, gave the thinnest of reasoning as to why, mostly saying things like “if you don’t watch it, fuck you,” and my tone of voice was so aggravating that even though I can’t find the post itself, just the quoted tidbits I found elsewhere sent me into a fit of rage. If that wasn’t bad enough, I was viciously attacked in the comments section and completely reacted by “NO FUCK YOU” and other such comments. This was how I became someone intensely hated in the blogosphere!

And it was right around the time of this Oi, Hayaku thing! So anyway, through comments on Oi Hayaku, ghostlightning had found out about my blog, and at the time, he’d been purposefully going around to every blog he could find and leaving great comments so that people would check out his own blog, which he’d just opened. Ghosty’s first comments on my posts were so awesome that I immediately talked him up on MAL and wanted him to do a collaboration with me. (I guess he’d mentioned collaboration somewhere and I jumped on that shit.) He was really excited about the idea, so we planned out a collaboration which never managed to happen! But anyway we were becoming friends.

Unfortunately, after my BIG TERRIBLE POST, ghosty realized that he’d just tried to befriend a complete and total idiot. Moreover, he’d assisted otou-san and lolikitsune in becoming aware of me (or I think so?) only for them to be like “dude holy fuck this guy is retarded” (can you tell this is heavily colored history?) 

Anyway, somewhere along the line, ghostlightning managed to join Oi, hayaku! And since I now wanted to be his BEST PAL and follow him around (plus Baka-Raptor), I started begging Riex, the leader of OH!, to let me join. I’m prety sure that I didn’t even know Riex had been a co-runner of Yukan, which I’d taken a huge dump in and then left like weeks before asking to join OH. However, Riex had seen a lot of potential in me, especially because of the multi-media projects I’d put together to advertise Oi, Hayaku in their contests (where you advertise them for a chance to win a membership (I think?)). 

So, Riex was like “bro, I think you have potential to be totally what I want for this blog (because of my passion and interest in multimedia) but you have to chill the fuck out and not start any controversy.” So I begged and promised, and he let me join! 

All kinds of cool stuff happened from there. My first post project for the site got me back into watching anime, and I started doing my best work to (that) date, both on my site (blogging Toradora) and on OH!’s. Plus, I was talking to ghosty more and more and becoming friends.

At that time, I also became introduced to Lolikitsune, whom I’d heard of long before because of Baka-Raptor, but only as some kind of mysterious troll person. Lolikit had joined OH! (though I’m still not sure what he was doing there?) and he and ghosty started leaving comments all over my blog, both of them trying to give me advice on how to be better.

I was reluctant! I didn’t take well to criticism or advice back then, always taking an “I don’t care! I do what I want!” stance. Including to things like grammar, though at least lolikit and I think otou-san also convinced me to start spell-checking my posts.

Now we bring up otou-san! I knew back then that he was a member of Oi, Hayaku, but I hadn’t even realized that he’d also been a member of Yukan blog! We never really talked, though he commented on some of my posts. Otou-san was harder on me, just like he is now, but back then I just thought he didn’t like me, so I didn’t warm up to his advice. I was more open to taking advice from lolikit because he was always joking about how we were gay lovers and stuff and I guess gay jokes are the fast-track to becoming one of my friends? (no seriously?)

FAST-FORWARD A LITTLE BIT, and Oi, Hayaku suffered a sad death. Meanwhile ghosty and I went on to become BFFs, and lolikit disappeared for a while, then came back and we became SUPER WRITING BUDDIES, and then he disappeared again and now he’s kind of there somewhere?!?!?!

Meanwhile, I *completely and totally forgot* about the Essential Anime post, which shocked the living shit out of Ghostlightning and his friends when I came to visit them in the Philippines, since it had been scarred eternally into their minds. Ghosty’s co-founder and BFF mechafetish had been unwilling to read me at all after that post until this one time when I wrote a huge post about how amazing one of his posts had been (he told me this was an awkward as shit moment). I had to be reminded everything about the post and was like, “ohhhh, that’s why I was so controversial!”

But what of otou-san? Only after he’d already bowed out of the blogosphere did Ghsoty make me realize how he’d only been trying to help me be better all along and I’d been a dick to him and shit. In 2010, I spent the whole year taking peoples’ advice a lot, so I was like, gotta get me some of that otou-san advice. And then he become prolific on twitter and I found out he had similar musical taste to mine, plus ridiculously vast musical knowledge! So we bonded over music, and then I was like in love with him by the time he reopened his site.

I wasn’t sure if it was my place to try and join his site after seeing ghosty become a member, but I wanted to INCREASE OUR FRIENDSHIP so I did. Then I realized that this was our third time being in a team blog together! This time I could make up for all the past lost opportunities!

And that’s how Equestria was founded! And that’s how I met my best buds in the blogosphere!