DESUpowered

The past two weeks have seen a number of things happen, most relevant amongst them being the complete and utter lack of any blogging on my behalf. I guess the foremost amongst them would be that it’s fairly typical of me, I grab hold of things and have plenty of energy to start off with but after a while I fade out rather badly unless there’s enough motivation there.

With the reviews I’ve basically run out of motivation – it was a nice idea, but I found myself running out of steam as time went on; I might have another go next season though it would be in a very different way, most likely only the basics and ten-second summary and done in a short timeframe to escape the feeling of it dragging on.

Ironically though on the other hand I’m still finding myself tracking down and re-encoding albums from C76, mainly because I’m doing it for a community of people and they’ll pop up now and again with requests, which I do my best to fill and then throw a couple more albums along with it as a bonus and a way to do a bit more. Honestly I really enjoyed doing this as it exposed me to a huge amount of artists I would never have had listened to before – both for the better and worse – as well as introducing me to programs I didn’t use but now do and being a learning experience in generally (and some hard work, too).

Furthering the whole learning experience deal, for a while I have been toying with the idea of joining a fansub group – something I’m sure has crossed the minds of a vast majority of people out there who watch a decent amount of anime – and about two weeks ago I started looking into it a bit more seriously. To cut a long story short, after a few days of keeping my eye out and one aborted attempt I applied to join a group as a timer / typesetter and after a short test was accepted (and not long after that approached by a second group which I now lend a hand to).

I have to say it’s been a bit of an eye-opening time, you think you what what to expect and what goes on because you’ve been watching fansubbed anime for years, but being there and getting your hands dirty turns your view of things around; I now look at fansubs differently whenever I’m watching an episode, and it’s made me a bit more critical and disappointed at certain groups as well.

Anyway, all of this is a bit of rambling and removed from the main reason that I actually started writing this post, and that is the Otaku Elimination Game. The link to this was posted in one of the fansub staff channels by someone who didn’t understand why everyone was going on about it and then whined about how it was stupid and just blog-bashing, and I think that about sums up the opinion of the side of this rift that doesn’t really understand the weight that the title of otaku carries with it.

For me the OEG is something I can completely agree with; otaku is a term that now seems to be so worthless that anyone who has watched an episode of any anime and liked it just grabs hold of it and proclaims themselves to be one without knowing nor caring about what it really means. It grates on my nerves to see it paraded around by the Lucky Star watching, japlish spewing masses who seem to treat it as something cool you have to call yourself and to remind everyone around you about it at every opportunity. Sure, it’s not always that bad but to me it’s always felt like a heavy title, something that you might reluctantly accept if someone else asks you if you are but not something to go around calling yourself .

The second thing to come from reading over OEG was what really sparked this post, that being the reason for this blog. In short, they pointed out on some of their targeted blogs that there really isn’t any reason to blog about something that thousands of other people are already doing unless you provide something fairly unique, and what could be less unique than writing anime reviews? That hit home a bit, so I’m having a think over what it is exactly I’m doing here with this blog and how I can turn it into something that I can believe provides something of real value. I doubt I’ll figure it out overnight though, so until then I may just end up rambling for a while, who knows? Either way I’m glad I took the time out to read over the OEG blog (and that I happened to see the link).