Omonomono

A few years ago (2009?) some tweeters and bloggers got together on MyAnimeList and started a club talking about anime music. It was a good time–we talked about all kinds of anime music, specifically there weren’t any particular bias towards OP/ED themes and we treated random tracks from Hisaishi masterpieces on equal grounds as any guitar anthem marking the climax of your average late-night otaku fare. In the process not only all of us discovered all kinds of things–from how to work large spreadsheets to what BGM tracks people like, but we found new favorites and make new assessments on old flames. We complained together about how, for example, how hard it is to buy certain bundled OSTs or we all want to listen to more Suwano. We traded anime soundtrack opinions and tips. It was a place where it is possible to criticize and praise Yuki Kajiura and not sound like a troll or fanboy, usually.

Being able to do this with theme and background music is somewhat unique to Japanese animation, after all. It’s not to say there are no emotive or expansive list of songs and music for other types of animation, or TV and cinema, but given the volume of output for anime and the way that business works, a lot of different composition hits the floor than what you would expect. Everything is pretty low profile, and tie-in marketing is rather limited. More over a lot of this music is actually available for purchase (and thus is generally available thanks to rampant piracy of kind-of obscure music).

The main drive behind what we used to affectionately call #MALKeionbu (the whole endeavor overlapped with K-ON’s run, after all) is this guy. Zz-chan is soon going to move on into a phase of his life where spending hours crunching spreadsheets about anison is no longer something feasible, so says it here. But yeah, #MALKeionbu was a good time and this is a great way to put a ribbon on that.

In the spirit of MALKeionbu’s DIY nature, I’ll try to do something too. There are already some pretty cool entries covering the Tournament, as the nomination phase of the tournament is completed. A full list of nominated tracks (and the ones nominated but got cut) is available here. Thanks to that, we have some number-pushing blog posts:

• The lonely number ones
• General trends in nomination, recency bias

I hope there will be more to come. For now, there’s a twitter you can bother. And of course, the main site where it’ll be happening.

And look at what I found:

http://challonge.com/omochallenge

Presenting the Animusic Tourney Prediction Challenge!

Between now and uh… I guess Sunday morning US Eastern time (let’s actually say 2PM EDT, or July 28th, 6PM UTC), enter your predictions.

The scoring system is by a factor of two. A correct round 1 prediction scores 1 point, a correct round 2 prediction scores 2 points, round 3 scores 4 points, round 4 scores 8 points, etc (I think it goes like 2^(round number -1)).

To input your predictions, follow the link on top of the site about entering predictions, create an account if necessary, and drag-drop the choices you would like. If you have a question about a particular entry, your best bet is to google it if you have no clue, and then search for a video of it on youtube or some such. If not, leave a comment on twitter and I can probably help you.

This is mostly for fun and game and lulz, so there is a chance that the bracket input time frame may be extended to include more people. And winner might get a prize from me–this is something we’ll talk about later on once things are in full swing.

PS. I heard Saimoe 2013 is gonna be terribad, so it says.