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!

Some Guy Doesn’t Like Me and Louie is Depressing

…not the anime fan whom I most recently knew as angelsharkbite, but the TV show by Louis CK. I’d never heard of Louis CK until the other day when I followed a link in a glothelegend post to his story of being told to suck a bag of dicks. Afterwards, I watched hours of specials and live videos, thinking, “I’ve found my favorite comedian.” Last night, I discovered he had his own show (I say this but I’d just woken up and am still up), so I watched it on hulu and got through three episodes before I couldn’t take any more of the utterly depressing humor.

Louis CK’s act is about making funny the miserableness of his life and of life in general, while taking refuge in audacity and vulgarity. His show is the same thing, only it’s not talking about this misery, but showing it. Yeah, it’s still funny, but when presented this way, the viewer is basically confronted by it. At times, it’s pretty intense. This is the story of a fat, forty-two year-old, just-divorced man with two daughters, failing at dating and facing the fact that his health will only ever get worse …and this is all true of Louis CK. It’s impossible to see his act and his show and think that this isn’t pretty much what his life is like. No—to think that this is simply how life is. It’s something oppressive and very difficult to watch, at least to me. 

When I’m thinking about this show, and thinking about stuff like my own loneliness and boredom, for some reason it’s strange and funny to me when some random guy that I don’t know professes his dislike of me. It seems weird to me that this guy exists and that this thing happened. Like, why?

Maybe it’s because I’m so far gone from the aniblogosphere and being social in general that I practically forget anyone whom I don’t know exists. This is silly because a lot of the commenters on my blog are still people whom I don’t know, but I guess I’m distant from my blog at the moment. I only post on it about once a week now, episodically, and right before that I didn’t do anything ambitious for a very long time. It’s really funny to me when this person is saying that I’m a try-hard, because I used to be one! Like, very, very hard! Can you imagine if this guy had been reading me back when I was writing Fuzakenna?! Now he’s finding a try-hard in a guy who’s neglected his blog for months and posted nothing but random shit popping into his head?

Maybe it’s because I made some really strange Lain posts, or that one huge thing about what was the best year in anime. I wonder if he understands that those are the easiest things in the world for me; that I put no effort into them at all; that is to say, effort in a sense that I was seeking to accomplish something or felt like I owed something to myself or someone in the creation of those posts. I made weird Lain posts because I was really into using microsoft paint and because me and ak have a kindred love for that kind of weirdness. I made the “best years” post out of curiosity and my unending desire to blow entire days doing incredibly repetitive tasks. You should see this picture I’ve been drawing for a few days—it’s called the “Land of Birds and Gravel.” I’ve been drawing gravel, one rock at a time, for a total of some 6 hours. It’s about 40,000 tiny circles. This is not being a try-hard—I just want to draw a ridiculous amount of tiny circles because that, to me, is fun. I dunno.

Disliking me or making fun of me made more sense back when I gave a shit; back when I was all ready to defend myself and took myself all seriously. Or back when I was showing off or being an exhibitionist. Yeah, Colony Drop’s insistence on making fun of my posts was always stupid and boring, but it was something bound to happen. It’s like, I’ve been so dislikable in the past, and now I’m being disliked at my least dislikable? (This actually makes no sense either.)

I wonder where he gets the energy to dislike me to such an extent that he went and posted about it on his blog. I’ve done it before in the past, but now I don’t know what that was like anymore—to dislike someone enough to mention it in public where they’ll see it. Don’t get me wrong, I talk shit about anime bloggers on an almost daily basis in IM conversations with friends, where it’s mostly like “god that ghostlightning is such a faggot” and then we move on with our days. I don’t even know any blogger I dislike enough to call them out except for kluxorious. And I only pick on her so much because she doesn’t give a shit and keeps reading me anyway. 

I wouldn’t even react to this at all if it weren’t for the fact that the guy apparently wants me to. He tracked back to me, mentioned my inattention to his existence, and then was gratified of my attention to it. I feel like he’s inviting me to say something, defend myself, somehow care about this complaint of his which, when I first read it, I didn’t understand and had to re-read the post. Was he really saying that I try too hard? I don’t know how I can be more relaxed on my blog. I would have to be as drunk as glothelegend, and even then I don’t think I’d be able to pull it off. It’s just weird to me. 

So I wrote some comments on the post to this effect, but even there I’m pretty much lost for words (of course my version of “lost for words” is still four paragraphs, but you should’ve seen the essay-length defenses I used to type against hecklers). I guess I should just ask Flora straight-up, what does he want from me?

Meta Has Ruined Me To Writing Fiction

I have found that I am currently incapable of writing fiction, and I think it’s because I have ruined myself to it through blogging. I used to be able to write fiction when I was young the same way that I imagine anyone does it - you look at the things you like and then you put your spin on it and produce. However, I can’t seem to do that anymore.

I am too obsessed with not writing something I’ve read before. Every time I try to write, I keep dissecting what I say in my head. It’s because I spend most of my time not only dissecting fiction, but also reading other peoples’ dissection of fiction. I always end up feeling like if everything I write doesn’t have a deep meaning or subtext then it won’t be worhtwhile. 

What I forget is that I am the one dissecting this fiction, not itself. Fiction has to exist before I can tear it apart, and I am tearing my stuff apart before it even exists. I sit there and tear apart my words until they lose meaning to me. A scene that might be just as good as the scenes from anything I am influenced by (Baccano, Black Lagoon, Gunslinger Girl, Boogiepop, Catcher in the Rye, Lovecraft, etc.) is instead torn apart by me for being just like those scenes. This doesn’t make sense, because I love those works! Why NOT be like them? I don’t know. 

Quentin Tarantino is my favorite director because he takes the things he loves, incorporates them, puts his spin on them, and makes them work. I want to do that, but I get so hung up on my meta attitude that I can’t write. I end up trying to write things in a way that dissects themselves. My characters end up being overly self-aware, to the point of breaking the 4th wall. I can’t ever write someone without them sounding too much like myself, because I am used to writing myself - I do it every day. 

I could write a novel that is closely tied to my own experiences and told in first person, but I don’t want to because even though I could, it would bore the fuck out of me. Not that it’s not what I would want to read, but I don’t like the idea of regurgitating my experiences (which I’ve already incorporated in better ways into blogging, etc.) without any greater purpose to it all. 

Maybe I just need to instill the influences more strongly. Maybe literally be reading-watching the stuff I like all at once before writing. Or while writing.