This is a long form comment for this blog post. Chaos-kun does good work and I feel the call to pitch in:
I am genuinely interested in how other anime bloggers approach watching and writing about anime – so in a rare show of audience solicitation: let me know in the comments or in a post of your own how you go about this blogging malarkey.
But, see, I don’t write about anime. I watch anime, and I write as a part of that experience. My horse is squarely in front of the cart. The funny thing is I also write for a site where the writing comes before the anime, or at best together. In short, writing, discussing, participating in the fandom for anime, may it be for a specific title or thing or the broader identity-political community and everything in between, greatly influences my watching.
It’s actually similar to how having a “theater room” and nice a TV (or projector or whatever) and sound system can have an impact in how you watch anime. In that sense you get out as much as you put in, except in a different way. For example, a long-time observation is that anime viewing in the west is a largely decontextualized exercise. It’s like how you might watch a comedy about an indigenous African interact with a Coke bottle in the ’80s, you can do the same with Americans and Europeans with Japanese cartoons. All I want to do is be able to not only have the option to re-contextualize my anime (like, for example, understand all the references; but also understand how Japanese fandom interact with anime and how anime answers back; Â how anime is a part of their lives), but also be able to enjoy it for what it is, with or without context. I mean, all I seek is understanding. And it isn’t like I can’t enjoy Star Blazer or Robotech, I just can’t stop there.
To use the anime diet analogy (we’ll come back to this in a moment), it is the difference of being able to digest the nutrients of what you eat versus being able to understand the palettes excited by the food particles that went through your mouth, and write it down in floral and verbose texts to put on a blog post. The latter is why I write about anime; some anime is friggin awesome and I have to deal with what happens after I watch it. The former is kind of like the true enjoyment value of what I’m watching, or maybe the educational or thematic payload. This might be part of what makes B cinema fun to engage in, but I think the analogy stands to all kinds of other entertainment.
In that sense, I enjoy watching anime because of both. There are plenty of crap anime, guilty pleasure, plain pleasure, kind of guilty, tits and ass, or whatever other people call it. If it fits my constitution and I have the time for it, then I would watch it. This is also why I think of Africans and Coke bottles because you have people complaining how something is of poor nutritional health and others are saying it tastes great and have less filling. I’m like, geesus, nobody said you can’t drink light beer, and nobody is forcing you to. Except instead of light beer it’s just some late-night TV anime.
But when we go on the long haul, things are different. A balanced diet is the turning point between an obsession and a lifestyle. I say this partly as a warning–being in fandom for some time I’ve seen people falling in and out of it, and for all sorts of reasons. Some people may OD and burn out, but that may not always be a bad thing. For others because they have found balance in how to incorporate this anime hobby thing into the way they live, and are comfortable of the sacrifices they make for it, they are still doing this anime thing as if it’s 1989. I’m not judging, but each should judge within themselves to make the right decision. Well, rather, only if you are in the long haul and sufficiently distant and comfortable with the thing can you make a rational one anyway. Although for some the rational one might not even be the best one.
It’s like when I think about a friend who has a series of NAS and dozens of terabyte+ drives, who spent thousands of dollars and who-knows-how-many hours on his rigs, where a majority of that storage is just BakaBT seeds, I question the point behind the exercise. I’m not really judging, but at some point you can go beyond that point of balance. It’s just coming from someone like me, who at best downloads some fansubs just so I can delete them after I watch them (I’d rather spend money on anime goods than another HDD), it seems a little alien. But at the same time I feel my money is just going into a drain somewhere given the nature of what anime goods tend to be in this part of the world, where has you can always use a NAS. It’s like the difference of living to watch anime and living where anime serves as a specific aspect to the way you live.
[This is why I have no love for US DVD/BD releases outside of Aniplex and the occasional NISA boxes; they feel like POS. It’s like I can spend $400 on those R2 Fate/Zero BD sets and be like, “hey Mandarake is still selling them for 2/3 of what I paid them for” just because of what I actually bought in a physical sense–a finely, thoughtfully craft collector’s item. Not some wannabe, crappily crafted collector’s item that makes up far majority of such releases in R1. Because that sort of context matters not to Americans.]
But that is just more context and background. So when I make caps from CR for my too-legit-to-quit anime writing gig, I basically use the “view in dedicated window” feature, pause wherever, screen-cap the window (720), and paste it in a psd file in photoshop. In that psd file I have a pre-defined selection that crops exactly where the video is. The only real challenges in capping a CR stream is the seeking of a streaming file, and accidentally capping with the timestamp pop-in within the image. The occasional CR watermark may show up but I stopped giving that a damn. Oh, I guess sometimes I do turn off the subs, case-by-case.
This is a rather laborious method than hot-keying every-so-often to do a screen cap (or what some people do which is use some program to do it for you then sift through that), so instead I make sure I watch what I do episodic-blog at least more than once, so I already know which scenes I want to capture. Naturally, I don’t episodic blog much here, because just this one aspect of blogging kills any momentum I have about blogging anime. And when I did, I basically used a camera. Remember my Xam’d posts, guys?
After I’m done capping I use some simple Photoshop features to save for web, and resize/crop when it needs to be done. That’s basically it. And as you can see, FUNi’s streams is simply uncappable using this method, so to hell with that.
But the funny thing is, even with a file (of the right format) it still takes me a good amount of time to cap. I just take too much time thinking about that, and it doesn’t really make my life that much easier. Because all of that teeth pulling makes up my think time about writing about anime.
Ultimately, when I blog about anime it’s because there’s a specific idea or ideas I want to express, or some specific thing I want to say, like an observation or even a funny little detail. Without it, it feels really retarded to just have an opinion on something. I need some kind of context to put it all together. A story, a narrative, a gut feeling. Whatever it might be, that should what drives what you write.
The great anime for blogging, for me, are the shows that fills me with these things after I’m done watching them. The ideas come easy. I know where to screen cap. The words write themselves. So that tends to be the stuff I write about, because they fight the crud in the way of enjoying anime to the fullest. Also it would just seem I have more to say, and higher chance of something worthwhile to say about it. The opposite is true too, both in that some shows I watch don’t really fill me with ideas so I don’t write about them, and shows that I have a hard time watching and understanding typically are shows I don’t write about either.
As an aside, I love anime bloggers who are actually thoughtful about what they write. Almost as much as those who put sweat equity into what they write. Those people are good people.
The way I watch anime  has changed over time along with the nature of anime and the technological advances and changes. The way I write also reflects that change, but in ways that don’t show up in a typical blog post “made for consumption.” In a sense that makes my writing much harder to understand in a gut feeling kind of way, because it’s as if I’m cracking inside jokes to myself. Anime fandom has gotten younger and more vibrant, where as I am not so much. Compare to my younger self, today I am probably more interested in appreciating anime for what it is than the stuff surrounding it, but only because I’ve gotten beyond all that jazz. Ironic, I guess, but it’s more like there’s a fine line between worrying about blogging than worrying about having something worthwhile to say. Now THAT is ironic.
But that doesn’t make me immune to the minutiae. Right now, my number one worry is that dead Sony receiver of mine. The low-end receiver went kaput like 2 months past the warranty. LOL. The HDMI inputs don’t switch right anymore, and maybe this week I can score a low-end receiver for an appropriately low price. As you can see I don’t put a lot of stock in sound, but probably more than many, like everything else about my anime viewing habits.
So for now the annual introspection series can wait till next week. As you know, all I’m going to write about is The Idolm@ster anyway.
