So now there are Anime Blog Awards. Too bad I can’t participate. According to the rules, “… you are required to fill in at least 9 nominations in 9 different categories in order for your nomination to be accepted.” Unfortunately, there aren’t nine categories of anime weblogs with which I am familiar enough to make nominations. Thanks a lot, guys. I notice also that there is no category that applies to The Kawaii Menace, no “most eccentric,” “most frivolous” or “most desultory.”
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One more peculiar search term: “maoist anime.” I can’t think of any series offhand that reflects that point of view, and I’m not particularly interested in finding one. However, if you’d like a maoist interpretation of an anime, here’s a review of Serial Experiments Lain:
A further serious flaw in “Lain:” it makes no references to reality outside of imperialist-countries. The decadence of imperialist society is not just a matter of internal ennui, violence, and f******-up gender relations: it’s also predicated on the imperialists’ oppression and exploitation of the colonies and neo-colonies. “Lain” assumes all of humynity can connect to “the wired.” In our world, less than 10% of the world’s population has internet access (619 million of 6.23 billion).(1) For that matter, countries like Afghanistan, Burma, and Liberia have less than one telephone line per 100 population, and only 28% of India’s population has access to improved sanitary facilities.(2)
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Garfield minus Garfield. (Via Eve Tushnet.)
I got clarification: it’s a guideline, not an absolute rule. It was made in order to scare off those who’d vote in like 1-2 categories for 1-2 people or something. Perhaps you have like 5, 6, 7 potential nominations? That’s fine.
What is “humynity”, as if I didn’t already know? Sheesh.
This morning I received an email from those guys doing the awards. To their credit it was directly addressed to me, by name, even though the body of the email was obviously a canned message.
Did you receive such a thing? I’m wondering how widely they cast their spam net.
Nope.
I wonder how they got onto me, then. Maybe it means I’ve been nominated for something. (Can’t imagine what, though. Silly list of categories.)
What disturbs me about the nominations:
1. I never heard of 90% of the nominated blogs, and 95% of the participating blogs.
2. Riuva was nominated in almost every category. Bah!
3. I have no idea who’s doing this and what their credentials are to be doing such a thing. And they don’t tell you.
4. I can find no entries before 3/18/08 at this site; in fact, their registgration didn’t exist before then
5. The message: “We need money. Badly. 🙁 Donate Now.”
I think I’ll be steering clear of this…
Questions and questions:
1. I will be rather surprised that you do not hear 90% of the nominated blogs, since they are highly popular with good readership. You might want to explore a bit more in the community. In that scenario, it already works since you are exposed more about other anime blogs in existence, no?
2. Yes, I(Impz, you can do a google search on anime blog to find out who I am) emailed you since I went to each personal blog to verify the status of the anime blog. I didn’t do any special crawling/spamming methods. I make the effort to find each blog one by one, particularly those that are not that linked to notify them.
The people who are working on this are also anime bloggers. They are trying to work things out and we will be glad to chat with you from msn, email, irc or any other medium to convince you of this. I am sorry that I feel a bit hurtful that you consider it to be spam.
3. We do not want to mention names on who created this award because it will create a bias. All 5 people in the committee are anime bloggers of varying degrees of popularity. The issue with mentioning names is that it tends to cause a bias (which I already did in my earlier post).
4. It has no entries because it has just initiated. The idea has already been existent for more than 6-9 months, but we are currently swinging it into action. It is the first time that anything of this degree has been created for the anime blogs, and I welcome you to join.
5. If no one bothers about the community (like how 90% of all anime bloggers cannot care less), someone else has to pick up the slack. Our aim in this project is to expose anime bloggers to others in order to know more. We wish for new bloggers to have some chance to promote themselves, the older bloggers to update themselves and the good bloggers to gain recognition.
6. It’s nominated in every category. Nice hyperbole ^^. Honestly, that is part of nomination. Vote to change it. We believe that you have the choice.
7. We need money is just a donation drive for ab.net, the biggest anime community. We do not require to donate or anything.
As you can tell, I am very keen to chat with any of you to persuade you how we wish for everyone to participate, no matter how much anime bloggers might slam this. It’s definitely saddens me when people go like “meh, who cares” or “I’ll be steering clear of this…”, but still we work on to make this work. Thank you for your time ^^
Questions and questions:
1. I will be rather surprised that you do not hear 90% of the nominated blogs, since they are highly popular with good readership. You might want to explore a bit more in the community. In that scenario, it already works since you are exposed more about other anime blogs in existence, no?
2. Yes, I(Impz, you can do a google search on anime blog to find out who I am) emailed you since I went to each personal blog to verify the status of the anime blog. I didn’t do any special crawling/spamming methods. I make the effort to find each blog one by one, particularly those that are not that linked to notify them.
The people who are working on this are also anime bloggers. They are trying to work things out and we will be glad to chat with you from msn, email, irc or any other medium to convince you of this. I am sorry that I feel a bit hurtful that you consider it to be spam.
3. We do not want to mention names on who created this award because it will create a bias. All 5 people in the committee are anime bloggers of varying degrees of popularity. The issue with mentioning names is that it tends to cause a bias (which I already did in my earlier post).
4. It has no entries because it has just initiated. The idea has already been existent for more than 6-9 months, but we are currently swinging it into action. It is the first time that anything of this degree has been created for the anime blogs, and I welcome you to join.
5. If no one bothers about the community (like how 90% of all anime bloggers cannot care less), someone else has to pick up the slack. Our aim in this project is to expose anime bloggers to others in order to know more. We wish for new bloggers to have some chance to promote themselves, the older bloggers to update themselves and the good bloggers to gain recognition.
6. It’s nominated in every category. Nice hyperbole ^^. Honestly, that is part of nomination. Vote to change it. We believe that you have the choice.
7. We need money is just a donation drive for ab.net, the biggest anime community. We do not require to donate or anything.
As you can tell, I am very keen to chat with any of you to persuade you how we wish for everyone to participate, no matter how much anime bloggers might slam this. It’s definitely saddens me when people go like “meh, who cares” or “I’ll be steering clear of this…”, but still we work on to make this work. Thank you for your time ^^
You can’t say it’s damn shady because you’ve never heard of the nominated blogs. It’s your damn fault if you haven’t read them. What, is everything shady if you haven’t experienced it or read about it yourself? The Anime Blog Awards are an opportunity to discover other blogs and interact with the community through commenting and maybe even collaboration. It can be a positive event but all you (as in Don and the commenters) do is see this in a negative light. If you want to steer clear of a community-based activity, that’s fine, but don’t bother to complain that this isn’t trying to foster the anime blogging community. I’ve discovered plenty of blogs that I’ve never heard of, and I’m grateful for it. Reading other people’s blogs, which some of you do not seem to do, is something that allows your own writing to grow.
You can’t say it’s damn shady because you’ve never heard of the nominated blogs. It’s your damn fault if you haven’t read them. What, is everything shady if you haven’t experienced it or read about it yourself? The Anime Blog Awards are an opportunity to discover other blogs and interact with the community through commenting and maybe even collaboration. It can be a positive event but all you (as in Don and the commenters) do is see this in a negative light. If you want to steer clear of a community-based activity, that’s fine, but don’t bother to complain that this isn’t trying to foster the anime blogging community. I’ve discovered plenty of blogs that I’ve never heard of, and I’m grateful for it. Reading other people’s blogs, which some of you do not seem to do, is something that allows your own writing to grow.
Thing is, Impz wouldn’t have known about the mee.nu blogs if I hadn’t mentioned them (Yes Steven, it was me). I’m not sure if you think it was a good idea or not, but there are good blogs that people don’t know about since it seems to be secluded form everyone else. And based on Ubu Roi’s comment, it seems the other way around as well.
I want to help expand the anime blogosphere, and I hope that the ABA helps out with that. Of course people are going to vote for what they know though, and we can’t do anything about that. At the same time, I don’t think it’s a bad thing. If you think people don’t know what’s good, then you can show then what you think it good. Otherwise, the opinions here come out a bit… elitist.
*show them what you think is good.
Bah. Spelling.
*show them what you think is good.
Bah. Spelling.