I’ve expressed some of my reservations about the ABA elsewhere but Stripey’s been pestering me about it and Impz is just tooo cute. No tsundere boners here.
I still have reservations about some of the nomination categories and these are explicated below. I’m also not entirely sure what are the benefits of one animu blogger having up to three slots for each category; this may create administrative problems e.g. how do you weigh the nominations: One blogger with three nominations has each nomination weighed at 1/3 each? Or one blogger with three nominations effectively has two more votes than a blogger who only nominates one? Wouldn’t one man, one vote is not only easier to administer but also fairer? If I’m not mistaken, don’t citizens who live in actual democracies use that system? To put my ballot paper where my mouth is, I’ll be limiting myself to one nomination for each category. And I generally prefer MOAR animu blogging and DO NOT WANT meta blogging (blogging about blogging). And… well, my list of gripes is endless and I can continue to moan until GAINAX comes up with the inevitable third Evangelion remake.
But there’s a time for be compraining and a time to be a votin’. At the end of the day, I’ve been convinced by Impz’s pert greenhaired trappiness the good intentions of the ABA and bandwagon of my peers to get on my high horse and charge headlong into the animu valley of inevitable doramaz. GG, ABA gang! (Yes, even bad cop Owen S who I think should be voiced by Rie Kugimiya if animu blogo doramaz is ever animuted. It’s a toss up between Mamiko Noto and Ryou Hirohashi for Impz…)
My nominations are as follows:
Best Episodic Blog. Subculture Anime Blog. Episodic blogging is hard work and a very good episodic blogger needs a lot more discipline than any editorial blogger. He/she/trap needs to balance between numerous competing imperatives; timely but also accurate, comprehensive but also smooth flowing, straight reporting but also retaining the feel of the blogger’s personality. An extremely valuable resource for me when checking my understanding of raws.
Omni’s work at Random Curiosity is still the gold standard IMHO and I deeply appreciated Aroduc of Tenka Seiha soldiering on with StrikerS but Totali has been covering a good many series that interest me over the past year so my nomination goes to the latter.
Best Editorial Blog. DEATH TO EDITORIALS, EPISODE SUMMARIES BANZAI! Minaide hazukashii. Sharp, erudite, clear, humorous. And not obnoxious. Some, probably rather sad, folks may love an obnoxious ‘editorial’ but IMHO that’s confusing rudeness and bad behaviour with being thought provoking; in any case, sarcasm and irony bite so much more deeply than loud invective. IMHO it’s more challenging to present elegantly written posts that are neither bombastic, self-righteous or takes oneself too seriously. The LOLgoodmix. jpmeyer haz it.
I’m not really sure why this category is distinct from ‘Most Thought-Provoking Blog’ because being thought provoking seems to be the sufficient condition for a great editorial blog whereas ‘knowledge, clarity and a strong point of view’ are merely necessary conditions. Or to put it another way, the latter set are the means while the former is the desired end state. As such, for the sake of consistency, I’m nominating Minaide… again for Most Thought-Provoking.
Best Team Blog. Sea Slugs! Anime Blog. Ah, endless fun thinking of what parallels can be drawn between Kabitzin, Ender, Kungfucius and Osaka, Chiyo, Kaorin. Very distinctive styles and interests that distinguishes each writer as well as a fun and funny dynamic amongst the team members. The whole is clearly more than the sum of its parts. Until the next Sea Slugs! coup d’etat though! LOL
With continued development, THAT and RIUVA will be strong contenders in the coming years, once they have spawned more overlords.
Most Influential Blog. Okazu. THE yuri anime/manga blog. I am probably one of the minority of bloggers whom Erica Friedman is *not* old enough to be my mother but, since the ancient times (2002), Erica has had a not inconsiderable influence on my ideas about not just yuri in particular but also more generally about fandom/dumb, the anime industry, not taking things too personally or seriously. Some of my very first two posts were, in fact, about attending a Yuricon event in Tokyo.
A very very close second would have to be Sea Slugs! Anime Blog. Ender unmasked Stripey’s ‘penchant for… sis-con‘ to the shock horror of the animu blogging world and thus contributed strongly to the present dynamic between the latter and myself (nii versus nee!). Kabitzin singlehandedly came up with the tagline that defines Stripey’s raison d’etre as well as most of the technical decisions affecting both Hontou ni blogs (such as templates, plugins, dealing with sploggers/scrappers).
Best Dorama. lolitron for running loli battle which is IMHO the most fun, least emo but also still rather creepy chara voting contest out there, no doubt being watched with great interest by the Feds.
Rookie of the Year. Furu Anime Panikku. A wide mix of engagingly written posts on a still familiar corpus of subjects with a great rhythm and groove.
Funniest Blog. Karmaburn. I’m not entirely sure if Evirus sets out to be funny but I usually have to control myself from LOLing when he tosses up seemingly nonchalant observations.
Best Satire Blog. I am also nominating Karmaburn for this category because oh it burns, it burns! And because satire is the highest form of comedy though I suppose this reflects my selective absorption of British culture.
Best Seiyuu-Orientated Blog. hashihime. My first stop for seiyuu news, really can feel the seiyuu love from the author.
Most Thought-Provoking Blog. Minaide hazukashii. See note on Best Editorial Blog.
Best Figurine Blog. HappySoda. Oooh, this was a toughie. There are so many great anime figurine blogs like mukyaa~, lololol, Toys Workz but super rats’ work had the edge simply because the choice of featured figurines appealed most to my taste. One day, there will be a challenger to the Japanese supremacy!
Best News Blog. Canned Dogs. Instead of just linking, cutting and pasting from English anime news websites about stuff that everyone knows about already, CD adds a lot of value by trawling and translating Japanese websites in its distinctive punchy, informative and succinct way. Heisei Democracy and Danny Choo are institutions in their own right but I thought I’d await the return of the Momotato Daioh with Zepy.
Best Blog-related Comic. Daijoubu. I’m not hot about Clannad but the dangos are really hilarous. The characters based on other animebloggers are great too, particularly Ninaho. LOL
And Everyone’s STILL Gay for Impz goddamit!
It’s true what they say; you catch more flies with honey traps than vinegar. Take that XKCD!
I think the nomination phase is just to pare down the set of sites readers needs to consider. It’s a peer review that lets you pick a few sites and those sites that get mentioned the most will be presented for the standard one person one vote portion.
Glad to see you changed your mind and took it as an opportunity to point out some great bloggers. I’m really interested to see who wins too, because I don’t think bloggers always see the same thing that readers do.
Thanks for the kind words, Zyl! I took a look at the ABA site, but it seemed that a few people had friends, relatives and employees stuffing th ballot box pretty hard. It left me with the choice of supporting sure losers, stuffing the ballot box myself (minions - go!) or just ignoring the whole thing as the wank it is. Your paragraph means a lot more to me than an award from people I don’t know - and probably wouldn’t like, based on their blogs, anyway. LOL
Instead of being yet another child of mine, you can take your place in the lesser numbers of cosmic little brothers I have collected. I think you’re cosmic little brother number three. How does that suit you? ;-)
Cheers,
Erica
Hungry for Yuri? Have some Okazu!
http://okazu.blogspot.com
I’m very disappointed that the “best trap blog” category did not get approved.
I wonder who this Ninaho could be!
Anyone else who loaded this page get an ad about ‘meeting gay men’? Maybe someone needs to adjust the keywords in here a tad…. ;)
-_- i am not a green haired loli trap. I AM ALREADY AN OLD MAN. DAMN IT DAMN IT DAMN IT!
That said, glad that you are interested in it ^^. I am glad my “good” intentions came through \o/
“I wonder who this Ninaho could be!”
She’s of Russian origin, sells doujinshi, likes to cosplay and is rumored to be a tsundere.
Impz, give it up and prepared to loved by everyone already! *cuddle*
Kabitzin, it’s partly your fault too. Houtounia marches to the beat of the Sea Slugs! drum. ;)
Erica, I would be honoured. Esp with such a funky title. :D
Haesslich, it’s still better than some of the ads that gets featured on Stripey’s page (e.g. sex offender registry LOL).
BTW why does Ninaho have a ‘木’ symbol on her ushanka?
That makes me :(.
A main, main point of the exercise is to introduce others to blogs that they haven’t heard about beforehand. To expand on the animeblogging community and so on. Besides, people are naturally only going to vote for what they know, so if you dislike what’s there, feel free to add your own. I don’t see the ends as the important point here, but the means. I wouldn’t be a part of the ABA committee if I didn’t believe that to be the case. The point is to have fun doing it. Animeblogging isn’t serious business. :3
Zyl, thanks for explaining your choices here. It’s good to know the motivation behind making them, and these posts are starting to make me feel like I have to do that as well. :P
> TheBigN said “A main, main point of the exercise is to introduce others to blogs that they haven’t heard about beforehand. ”
Maybe it’s changed, but when I went to look, a large portion of the categories were filled with nominations for *one* blog. One. The same one over and over.
Even if we are not meant to nominate ourselves (and I didn’t see that we couldn’t,) is it any better a representation of anime blogging to have friends stuff the ballot box for us? When that one blog wins multiple awards, are you still going to insist it was about introducing people to smaller, less known blogs?
There is no such thing as fair when it comes to awards. Either you’re basing your awards on the biases of the audience, or the judges. I appreciate the effort, but I don’t see the point of the exercise. The winners will certainly feel very externally validated that they have enough friends to force the win, I’m sure. :-)
Zyl - You are now officially my “Cosmic Little Brother, Number 3.” ;-)
Cheers,
Erica
Hungry for Yuri? Have some Okazu!
http://okazu.blogspot.com
Zyl, sorry for wasting some space here to respond. :(
Well, if you sign up to participate, you’re unable to vote for yourself in the first place.
And I’ll still insist that the for me (since I don’t know what other’s motivations are, but hopefully their for good), awards are for introducing people to blogs they haven’t heard of before. That’s one reason why the nominations are transparent, and that’s why I say that the means are more important than the ends. :3
I haven’t seen any blogs gaming the system, and I feel like I said before: the blogs that people vote for are the ones that they know. And if they’re ones that are popular, naturally those are the ones that will get the most votes. Impz is planning on doing a “Sundance-like” set of awards for more “indie” blogs, so this isn’t hopefully a one time deal. It isn’t going to be a perfect process, since none are. And if you don’t want to participate, that’s fine too, but it makes me kind of sad. :/
I hope you don’t think this is a personal attack on you or anything like that. You are a blogger that I admire. :3
No worries, TheBigN. I can see that both you and Erica disagree strongly but the exchange certainly isn’t flaming, doramaz or even SRS BIZNESS.
Sorry, Zyl, but I’ll have to join in with N on answering Erica’s concerns, so I hope you’ll excuse this bit of Q&A. I also have to say that post-Clannad, I will only settle for being animated if Ryou Hirohashi voices me. I accept no other alternative!
Erica: Sorry to hear about your reservations. I’m part of the ABA organising committee, and I hope you’ll hear me out on this one.
Frankly, I’ve got to say that this was the most ideal situation we could create with regards to the quality of nominated blogs — yes, it’s true that the same names do appear over and over, but it was either the Oscars or American Idol, and I chose the former over the latter no thanks to it being a matter of peer review more than a popularity contest.
Regarding “introducing” — I’d have to say we succeeded in that area. The thing is that you seem to view the awards as the be all end all, with the results being the end, but the nominations, for me, hold much more weight than anything else, and they’re what I hold in higher regard than the results. I even made a post about it.
It’s through the nominations that I have actually been introduced to blogs I wouldn’t have heard of otherwise, and I wouldn’t have had it any other way. As for ballot stuffing… well, I can’t really convince you on that if you’ve already made up your mind that it’s all been fixed, but I have links to posts where a few bloggers that I know of have listed their nominations and the rationale behind nominating them in detail, and would be glad to forward them to you if required.
I was wondering about the ki myself. Initially it looked like DS simply wanted to portray a red star, but used ki instead of dai by accident. But now I’m starting to suspect some kind of interference in his head, because his Russians sometimes say “derevo” in the comic. Why? A mystery.