You may have noticed that I haven’t been updating all that much lately.

Or rather, to be more specific, I’ve been following the same Two Posts Per Week schedule which I had set for myself when I started this blog, but these posts seldom have any true substance. Instead, I seem to be making up ramblings extempore which have only the most marginal relationship to anime, and the subset of fandom which involves blogging about it.

This sort of thing happens in cycles. Sometimes I am brimful of brilliant ideas which I cannot wait to share with the world at large, and I trumpet these thoughts out in the space allotted to me here on this blog. At other times, I have nothing to say other than a simple “mrph”.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been working on my Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha fanfic. Most of the time spent on this endeavour is on discussion with other fans, rather than actual writing. I had been burned badly on this very fanfic, where an ill-explained piece of canon was slightly better explained in an out-of-series source, which nevertheless struck down the edifice of theory I had so carefully constructed and built my story around. And so I make sure that everything I intend to put into the story does not contradict canon, which is no mean task when canon itself contradicts common sense. (Seriously, it’s a mess.)

All this came to a head when I took a look at the calendar, and realized that it’s Wednesday. I’m supposed to write my Two Posts Per Week, and I haven’t even started on picking the topic. Well, a Card Captor Sakura episode summary always seems to go down well. I found the disc and popped it into the drive.

About ten minutes into the episode, I found myself looking at the clock. I was considering leaving it for tomorrow, but no, I’d mess up the screenshot order and I’d have to start all over again. I was trying to psych myself into a less melancholic mood, without much success, which boded ill for the actual episode summary, since I’d probably fill it with forced and unfunny jokes.

And then I realized something: I was watching my favourite anime ever, in order to comment on it as I have done many times before, all for the sake of a hobby blog, and I was not enjoying myself. I was forcing myself through it. Haven’t I heard about this from other, more experienced bloggers before?

This is burnout!

Yes, I actually said that out loud to myself. It was that startling of a revelation. I didn’t have anything compelling enough in the world of Anime Suitable For Blogging that I immersed myself in the far more interesting world of fanfiction, and when I had to pull myself away to discharge my obligations onto this blog, it was akin to being separated from a favourite toy. It may be an immature reaction, but one can hardly expect me to approach the responsibility of the blog with anything resembling good grace.

Besides, this is a blog about Japanese cartoons and the cute girls therein. I think I’m entitled to be immature, if only for the sake of consistency.

I’m not sure what I should be doing to solve this conundrum. I could bring my fanfictional ramblings into this blog: after all, it’s an anime fanfic. I also seem to remember a few conversations over on #AnimeBlogger which were unexpectedly encouraging about the discussion of fanfiction on anime blogs, possibly for variety. However, fanfiction also appears to be something of an Acceptable Target for jibes and barbs serious enough to leave wounds.

I could also just grab random screenshots from random anime, and give them incredibly discreet one-line captions with painfully understated jokes, just so that it would be as obvious as SCREAMING IN YOUR FACE, except approached from the other side.

The choice is yours. Unless I don’t get any responses at all, in which case I’ll just run head-first into a wall or something until another idea pops out.

My excuse for not updating much this week.

I am, as the evidence in the blog archives can painfully attest, not very good with self-induced blogging deadlines which approach me stealthily like some sort of dastardly rogue bound and determined to use all those extra Sneak Attack dice, leading to a desperate last-minute rush to hammer out a post extempore.

Plenty of other blogs have, by now, wished one and all a Happy Chinese New Year, or some equivalent sentiment, and I see no reason to be any different. Much has also been made about the zodiac animal baton being passed to the Rat, ranging from the direct reference to Yuki Sohma from Fruits Basket, to ranging further afield with rodents in general, featuring Chamo the ermine from Mahou Sensei Negima or Yuuno in ferret form of Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha. I’m sure that there are other rat-like beings or characters associated with such in anime which I am blanking on at the moment.

And of course, the title picture is Ayumu Nishizawa from Hayate the Combat Butler, whose attachment to Rodentia is what appears to be her nickname and animal totem, the hamster. Said hamster was the embodiment of her fighting spirit, albeit for the very brief time it was around before Nagi’s dragon ate it.

Nishizawa has vowed revenge. Possibly this may involve radioactive hamsters from a planet near Mars.

I have no idea what to do for the one year mark of this blog’s existence, and so I shall ramble aimlessly on nothing in particular, until someone either suggests something satisfactory, or comes to take me away for the good of all humanity.

Apart from the period of time when I did not actually have a computer upon which to make posts, I have kept my goal, admittedly not especially demanding, of two posts a week, until the day I die. Remember that I only promise two posts a week, without any mention of the substance therein, which you, gentle readers, may have to create for yourselves from out of the aether, in violation of the conservation of mass, save for arguments involving hammerspace, and possibly its close cousin hammertime. That, as has been noted before, is the sort of thing which we cannot touch.

In this year of blogging anime, as well as blogging about anime, I have learned a great many things about the hobby which I decided about one year before to engage in. For one thing, it requires a passion for both anime and writing which cannot be faked: I actually enjoy writing up these little posts which may not necessarily be read by anyone save myself, and I might well consider this blog a massive success if it merely stands as an archive of Card Captor Sakura episode summaries for my own perusal. Further experiences in blogging showed most indubitably that it also requires a good spam-blocker, because, in an unexpected application of a variation on Sturgeon’s Law/Revelation, ninety percent of the Internet sucks.

Most of all, though, I learned that I hate writing episode summaries, due to reasons of sloth.

For all that the subject of editorials vs episode summaries come up, I’ve found that writing an episode summary, even just a bland recounting of what happened in the episode in question, is much more difficult than writing an editorial. It could be just me, since I tend to be more than a little opinionated on certain subjects, and I have a great deal of experience in using far more words than necessary to pad out a single statement into a post two thousand words or so long.

Even so, perhaps “difficult” is the wrong word to use; “tedious” might be a closer approximation. I have mentioned before that content may elude me occasionally, but structure is a constant thorn. All I want to do is write something, anything, but before I can, first I must take screenshots and resize them and hammer out the IMG tags and make sure that they all point to wherever they’re supposed to and carefully arrange everything artfully and try not to stretch the blog too much and keep everything XHTML-compliant and so on and so forth in the manner exemplified by this inexcusably prolonged sentence.

When I write a Card Captor Sakura episode summary, it takes me about four hours from “I should write a CCS episode summary” to “okay, it’s done”. About half an hour is taken watching the episode and taking screenshots, and half an hour is spent writing up the actual text of the summary. The other three hours are spent trying to decide which screenshots to keep and which to discard, as well as resizing them and renaming them (thank you IrfanView) and then placing the skeletal framework of the post into the text editor and editing it all into something which works for this episode but which will need to be edited again for the next episode, and then carefully altering stuff like image file names one at a time, until my eyes glaze over as I realize how all of this seems very suspiciously like work.

In other words, one quarter of the time spent on an episode summary post has to do with the content, while the other three quarters have to do with making the post look pretty. This strikes me as an unfortunate and yet ineluctable state of affairs.

For the most part, I’m not keen on having a fellow co-blogger, since I have such a formidable raft of criteria before I can even consider anyone else writing in this blog.

Oddly enough, there aren’t even that many rules to follow. Be polite, be civil, don’t snark at other people, have good spelling and grammar, focus on what you love rather than what you hate, and always remember that this is supposed to be fun. I’m sure that there will be some loophole in these six rules (which I’ve been trying to follow myself ever since I started blogging, sadly not without lapses) that would infuriate me into tacking on all sorts of caveats and addenda, but if one takes the general view, there’s really only two things I’d demand from a co-blogger: Be coherent. Be nice.

When I outline this to other bloggers, they tell me that I ask the impossible. The thought that they might be right is depressing.

Having said that, I am sorely tempted to seriously consider asking for another blogger to share the burden, except that the burden I refer to is that of the technical side of blogging. In other words, someone to take care of all the stuff related to making sure the blog is actually there, before any content can be put in it. Someone who has an aesthetic sense which extends past my current “um, it looks good? I dunno, maybe it doesn’t”. Someone who doesn’t need to actually write anything in the blog, but to whom I will be grateful to if they only keep the blog running.

When I started this blog, I thought that my greatest fear would be Blogger’s Block, but now I know that few things hold as much terror as the little message when I check my blog informing me that I will have to update my Wordpress installation again.

And after I do that, I have to look for a theme which looks good but not too crowded, easy on the eyes, simple to navigate, distinctive enough from other well-known anime blogs to be relatively unique, supports the current Wordpress version, brings out a sense of peacefulness, so on and so forth. Then I have to actually update the installation and edit the sidebar and check that the plugins still work and see if any of them need updating and update those that do and disable those that died and come up with header images and suck horribly at image editing and throw it all together and GOOD GODS PEOPLE DO YOU SEE HOW MUCH TIME I’VE SPENT ON THIS I JUST WANT TO WRITE ABOUT ANIME DAMMIT and then I hide in a corner of my room curled up into a little ball weeping quietly for the death of my hopes and dreams.

And so, on the last day of the year Two Thousand And Seven of our lord and saviour Sephiroth the Pretty Kefka the Disturbing, I have once again engaged in Deep Dental Diving and ingested my daily dose of painkillers, hopefully for the last time, if only because I have a limited supply of brain cells teeth.

Being that I am mentally unsound to provide a post of actual value, I shall instead provide you with one picture from what I believe to be Comp H’s 2007 calendar, one year late.

If it helps, imagine the female three-fifths of the SOS Brigade giving the year a send-off, instead of welcoming it in.

Occasionally I wonder if some of the references I toss out here and there in my loquacity is too byzantine for the casual reader to truly connect to, in the manner of one speaking in tongues as yet unknown to the rest of the civilized world. I cannot even claim the defense of Pop Culture, since it is such a miniscule and mildly eccentric corner of aforesaid Popular Culture which may not fit the definition of Popular, much less being Cultured. It is the corner occupied by the sort of person who is far more interested than is psychologically sound in the little details of a given setting or lore, even if he completely misses the point of the story in question.

It may well be the case that the only person who gets all of my references is myself, since it is not a given that the various interests and fandoms being alluded to will overlap with the average reader’s experiences. I try to explain these as best as I can without spoiling the joke, mainly by linking to the Wikipedia article or some such. For some, like the more esoteric discussions about my MMORPG of choice, I reword and rephrase until the sentence is structured to my satisfaction, for the balance of impact and understanding. For others, like a mention of some game mechanic in a Final Fantasy game, I just leave it as it is, since such things are ubiquitous, even if one does not personally partake of the fandom in question (for example, I do not even like the Harry Potter books, but I do recognize a fair number of references from it), and it is an educated guess that a reader is likely to recognize that offhand comment about One-Winged Angels accompanied by Ominous Foreign (generally Latin, being Foreign to everyone still reading it, effectively a dead language) Chanting.

And yet sometimes, explaining the joke in any way would ruin it, which is why I doubt anyone not already in the know can truly comprehend the amusement I obtain from the confluence of Portal and Eddie Izzard.

Therefore (using this convenient segue), like the events in the Enrichment Centre, further passageways and links are made in these labyrinthine Walls Of Text and the reader is led through logic-defying apertures and might very well end up upside-down or inside-out or whatever orientation is the most inconvenient for figuring out where one needs to go next. The best way to deal with times like these, I find, is to jump right in, after quicksaving.

The analogy could use some work, I admit.

On a side note (pun unintended), thanks to what may possibly be overuse of the theme, or perhaps simply a leitmotif for a character with much screentime, I cannot quite think of Kotomi without hearing “Etude pour les petites” (literally, “Etude for children”) in my head. For those wondering, it’s that chamber music-style melody which plays whenever Kotomi appears, and probably a few other occasions.

In what may well be the beginning of the inevitable downward spiral into creeping featurism upon this blog, I’ve installed Gravatar support into the comments. For those as yet unaware of gravatars, and I admit to some ignorance myself as to whether it is a Proper Title which should be capitalized or merely a common noun undeserving of such, they are, according to the site, globally recognized avatars which presumably can be viewed on any blog which supports them.

I have to confess to some bias in this matter: I started out blogging, in the Public Diary kind of way rather than any actual intention of providing useful information to the masses, on Livejournal, and the second best thing about Livejournal in my rather subjective opinion is the availability of user avatars, which I have grown used to in a manner which is completely removed from any actual tangible benefit of the feature. Commenters transform from arbitrary names in my mind to equally arbitrary and yet reassuring images, tiny rectangles of indistinct colours and shapes recognizable at a glance.

The downsides of this arrangement are immediately apparent, of course: first on my mind is site load, which I have no way of checking in a systematic manner, and even if I did get some hard numbers out of it, playing MMORPGs has proven to me that numbers are insigificant compared to the User Experience of “it just feels weird somehow…” I am not expecting major issues to erupt due to gravatars, but I will probably be watching comments about it very closely, and I might pull the plug on gravatars if it comes to that.

And of course, to get a gravatar, one has to sign up for it. The inertia of apathy is difficult to overcome, and I’ve had several opportunities pass me by because I am just tired of having to register for yet another site or service of limited scope and use. Nobody is, by any stretch of the imagination, obliged to get a gravatar; this is mostly for those who have already obtained one prior. I signed up for one only very recently, mainly because It Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time.

For now, the actual gravatar support has been implemented somewhat haphazardly, due to a severe lack of any sort of design sense on my part. I’ve provided a very standard default avatar for the gravatar-less, all while taking no responsibility for any headaches incurred from unravelling 436 petabytes of the non-reversed SOS Brigade logo squeezed into an 80×80 square.

Surprisingly, this is not an actual official lifting of the two-posts-a-week restriction, as much as a warning that my posts from here until several weeks later might be a tad more surreal than strictly normal, due to influences from assorted painkillers and local anesthetic.

What may be of greater concern, or at least relevance, would be that I’m planning on upgrading the Wordpress installation of this blog. Site strangeness may or may not result; I’ve done all I could to back up everything, but These Things Happen.

Also, I wanted an excuse to use this picture, because like Miyuki, I’m really scared of the dentist.

The picture doesn’t have anything to do with the topic today. I just wanted to get your attention.

Recently, I’ve noticed that several spam-busting solutions on other blogs were eating my completely legitimate comments, mostly because I was a “new commenter”, which presumably meant that I didn’t have enough “good karma” with the spam-solution in question. Normally this would be only a very minor inconvenience at most, but when the CAPTCHA image failed to load in the first place (due to server load, I imagine), I had to rely on the good graces of the blog owner to check through his/her moderated comments manually.

Now, considering the Akismet stats on the amount of spam out there (I don’t use Akismet, although not due to anything other than laziness; the current spam solution for Moe Check is Spam Karma 2, for lack of anything better than default), I don’t really blame the spam-busters for being overly paranoid. I mean, look at the graph: all that orange is spam, compared to the blue of legit comments, small and lonely. I’ve been told that this is normal, which makes it even worse, since we have apparently progressed to the point where only one out of ten comments, if that, is legit, and nobody believes that this is odd. I’m well aware that each spam comment is essentially free, or at least has insignificant and trivial cost to the spammer, but all the effort expended in trying to block spam is beginning to feel like trying to inhale a hurricane. It’s depressing, and it’s even more depressing that I appear to be one of the very few who even think that it’s depressing instead of Life As Normal. Zetsuboushita, and all that.

Moe Check receives something along the lines of fifty spam comments a day (down from a hundred a day), which isn’t anything compared to the really popular blogs out there, which I’ve heard get something like a thousand spam comments every day. This means that it’s still (barely) possible for me to go through each and every one of the moderated comments every day, checking that no legit comments got accidentally eaten. I worry every night that I’ve missed something, and some unfortunate commenter out there is wondering why his or her comment hasn’t shown up yet, and will never show up.

And if my spam-buster solution is messing up somehow and eating legit comments, it’s not like I’d know until I checked. Even if it does happen, it’s not like I know what to do to allow these legit comments without working even harder to moderate away all the spam which slips through.

I’m not even going to touch the issue of scrapers and splogs, which I don’t have a clue on how to deal with.

In any case, based on observations on how Spam Karma 2 works, I’ve come up with a few ideas on how to make sure that your comment won’t get flagged as spam, either by automation or manually:

• Use proper English. This is extremely important. If English isn’t possible, I also accept comments in Chinese, Malay, and Japanese. Please check your spelling, grammar, and punctuation; the worse it is, the more likely I am to conclude that it is spam. On a related note, if you comment in a language I don’t understand (ie anything other than the four listed: English, Chinese, Malay, Japanese), I can’t know what it is, and I’ll err on the side of paranoia.
• Make your comment relevant. “I agree” and “I dunno” and “Interesting”, with no other references, are one of the favourite tools of spammers. At the very least, say something about the content of the post in question. Just quoting the title is almost a sure sign of a spammer.
• Don’t list Geocities as your website host. This one is Spam Karma 2’s problem: Geocities is very blacklisted, possibly because of the large number of ad sites hosted there. Listing a Geocities site pretty much guarantees that your comment will be marked as spam, through no fault of your own.
• The fewer URLs per comment, the better. Spam Karma 2 deducts points based on the number of URLs in a comment. Three is pretty much the maximum before Spam Karma 2 gets too suspicious. Five is right out.

It’s a sort of Catch-22 situation, really: if my spam-buster is eating comments, I’d like to know, but for me to know, the quickest way is for someone to comment, and those affected can’t comment due to the spam-buster eating said comments.

EDIT: In what is probably an extreme case of irony, I am locking pings on this post, because in the course of half an hour, I received no less than five pingbacks from various scrapers and splogs. These are pretty easy to weed out, since they invariably go “BlahBlahBlah wrote an interesting post today, here’s an excerpt”, and then get the blog name wrong.

If I get spam comments on this post anyway, I’ll be locking those too.