Akemi’s Anime Blog

I haven’t thus far commented much on the workings of AAW itself here, but to change that:  If you think there’s nothing going on with the rest of the site, you’re right in terms of what’s been publicly posted in the last long-while, but wrong in terms of what I have in the pipeline.

In particular, I’ve been working on an entirely new and drastically improved layout for about the past year (first draft was in Feb 20 of ‘09, looking back reveals–wow that’s a long time), and it has just hit the final-candidate stage at which the design is pretty much finalized and the work switches to implementing said design in a manner that works in a reasonable variety of browsers (Internet Explorer, how I hate thee: Let me count the ways… but at least IE5 is functionally dead, a different state of affairs from the last major redesign). Then comes the even more daunting task of making sure the roughly 300 official reviews and 100+ reader reviews, hundred-or-so other pages, dozens of supplemental pages, this blog, and the forums all get transitioned properly into it.

Yikes.

This may take a while (there are still things that haven’t been converted into the last redesign, which I intend to remedy), and while the bad news is you won’t see any of it until I’m actually finished, the good news is the site should be significantly improved for it. I’ve learned quite a bit about design, coding, backend structure, and most importantly believe I’ve come to a better understanding of how to best serve the people who actually read stuff here. I intend to apply all of this, along with every optimization trick I’ve picked up in the past four years, to give AAW as good of a foundation as I’m able, and one that should carry it through a nice long while before I start to get bugged by how much better I could do with new tools and techniques. I’ve also, I think, come up with a somewhat more coherent, and more fun, overall site concept that I intend to do something more major with in the mid-distant future when other life circumstances permit.

Bottom line is the site will be faster, easier to read, prettier, more coherent, more fun, and have less loose ends and mistakes than currently. I’m also planning on having some fun with new and more creative contests once everything eventually goes live–got a whole shelf full of not-entirely-crappy prizes lined up.

In terms of, you know, content, I’ve not been lax on writing reviews, I just take a (very) long time to prune and polish them–there are about a dozen in the pipeline, with a half dozen all but ready to post. I’ve also got a bunch of Japanese lesson stuff in the works for a little farther out, but I’m making some layout changes so am holding off on that until the new look is done so I’m not doing the formatting twice.

I’ll probably wax technical once things are more finished, for those who care at all about such things (being a geek, I do, so even if that audience consists entirely of me, I’m still going to), but in the mean time wish me luck if you’re so inclined.

I just posted a Dennou Coil review which is worth reading if you haven’t already watched the series, as it will hopefully encourage you to do so.  In the spirit of this blog being about the process behind AAW I thought I’d make a few comments on what goes into writing a review for me.

Or rather, what comes out.  When I write a review my instinct is to try to point out everything about whatever I’m reviewing–goods, bads, analysis if I have any, and interesting things I noticed about it.  Dennou Coil is a relatively long series with a lot going on in it, though, and with shows like that a review can get ridiculously long very, very quickly (at least it can when I’m the one writing it).

My goal is generally to either give people a solid idea of what to expect were they to watch it or to give some (hopefully) interesting observation about the show, for people who like to read reviews after they see something.  Preferably remaining entertaining during the process.  I may or may not achieve this, but that’s the goal.

In the way-back days, I’d just post as much as I wanted to say.  At some point it occurred to me that that was a bad idea, because I can be very long-winded.  Good for writing papers in school, bad for writing things that are interesting–while a ridiculously long review might succeed at the first two goals (useful and interesting) it’s almost certainly going to fail on the “entertaining” front, and it’s exponentially more likely that somebody’s just going to skip reading entirely because it’s so damn long.

So, my ideal became to say as much as is necessary to get my point(s) across in as few words as possible.  The catch is, Samuel Clemens, Blaise Pascal, and whoever else the comment is attributed to were all right when they said (paraphrasing) “I would have written something shorter, but I didn’t have time.”  Writing long is easy.  Writing short takes forever.

So, basically, I set somewhat arbitrary limits for myself.  Ideally, a review will be between 1000-1200 words; 1400 if I must, and 1600 is an absolute upper limit (and already kind of ridiculous).  Trivial one-shots, I try to keep it under 800 unless I have a good reason for saying more–shouldn’t take longer to read a review than to watch the show (though Shakespeare analysis has proven it’s possible to build an entire category of literature on doing exactly that).

At first it was fun; I went back over old reviews hacking hundreds of words out mercilelessly.  In some cases I nearly halved the length, and in every single one improved the quality in the process–more understandable, more efficient, more to the point, and in some cases I even said more than before.  I can now see why ruthless editors enjoy their job.

But then I try to write a new review of a series like Dennou Coil.  My first draft was a monstrous 2000 words, and that didn’t even cover everything.  Two or three grueling revisions later and I had it down to a marginally more manageable 1380, but then I realized that I’d left out several major things and it rapidly bloated back above 1500.  I eventually got it a little under the 1500 line and after poking at it for probably a full week decided I’d been staring at it long enough to call it good and post it.

So now I’m left with a combination of satisfaction and frustration.  Satisfied that I’ve said quite a bit about a fantastic series that I enjoyed immensely.  But at the same time, I feel like the review should be 300 words shorter, and there are probably a half-dozen things I wanted to talk about that I didn’t include (the changing dynamic between Yasako and Isako, for example, or geekier ranting on successes and flaws of the way the virtual world is depicted, or why the cute anthropomorphized pet critter in this series actually works instead of pulling a Disney).  Then there’s that nagging suspicion that I did talk about things I didn’t really need to.

Still, after looking back at the me of the past and seeing how much of an enemy length is, I’ve vowed to keep up the fight.  I’m nigh-positive that my writing has improved for it, and hopefully in a few years I’ll be able to come back and cut even more from the things I’m writing now.

This is, incidentally, why blog posts take probably a tenth the time of a review, and why I prefer reviews–once I hit “post” the blog entry is done, but I periodically go back to random old reviews in my spare time and see if there’s improvements to be made.

There’s also the arbitrary call of what star rating to put on something.  It’s usually easy to pick a 1-point range, but with a series like this do I call it a “perfect” 5-star, because it’s got so much wonderful in it and as a children’s series is perfect, or do I acknowledge the occasional chinks as an adult viewer and shave it down to 4.5?  Particularly with a 26-episode TV series–it’s nearly impossible to draw anything out that long without slipping up occasionally.  Heck, even 13 episodes is hard to pull off without something going wrong (though it has been done)

Now to try and do the same thing to the 2500-word  monstrosity that is my Allison and Lillia first draft.  NHK, stop making me want to talk so much!  (The little word counter below this post tells me I’ve cracked 900 words… but good enough for a blog post.)

I’m hoping to add a number of blu-ray reviews to the site in the very near future, but I want to get it right before going live. I’m hoping to do some side-by-side image quality comparisons with the DVD version, so you can get an idea if you’re actually paying for some improvement or just for the fancy box. (The Gunbuster “movie,” for example, is remastered but has absolutely no business being on blu-ray–it just looks extra-blurry in comparison; Akira actually has something to gain from the added resolution of the format, plus the uber-fancy audio they spend several pages of the booklet talking up.)

However, the actual purpose of this is to mention that Amazon is running a big blu-ray sale for the next couple of weeks, and I didn’t want to let the good anime buys mixed in to go unmentioned.  The best deals (at least 40% off, which is about as low as I can find them anywhere, plus free shipping if you spend at least $25): Paprika ($23.50), Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles ($15, good movie!), Vexille (Special Edition) ($17.50), plus Afro Samurai ($15), Dead Space: Downfall ($15.50), and all of the Dragon Ball Z double features ($17.50 or less). They also have Tekkon Kinkreet at 40% off, but you can probably find it cheaper elsewhere.

Full disclosure: We get a cut if you buy through these links. That doesn’t make them any less good of a deal, though.