Tag: Personal

Categories
Conventions Special Features

Anime Detour 2024 – Panel Materials and Convention Thoughts

Hi all! I’m about a week out from Anime Detour 2024, which is my “home” anime convention in Minneapolis. I’m sure there are those of you who have sought out this post for my panel materials and such, so without further ado they’re linked below:

Shiny New Anime: PowerPoint Presentation (please note: this presentation requires a full version of PowerPoint because of the embedded videos. If you’re using the online viewer, please download the clips separately if you want to see them).

Shiny New Anime: Hand Out

Shiny New Anime: Clips

AMV Contest: YouTube Playlist (note that not all entrants list their AMVs on a streaming site and it’s not an entry requirement for them to do so, and sometimes if they do they will wait to “premiere” them until the conventions they’ve entered them in have occurred. This playlist includes entries that were available when I put the playlist together, which is the majority of them but not all).

Now, read below for more of my thoughts and reactions to this year’s convention!

Continue reading “Anime Detour 2024 – Panel Materials and Convention Thoughts”
Categories
Meta Personal

Happy New Year!

Hey all, I hope everyone had a satisfying end to their year and are at least trying to be ready for whatever unpredictable nonsense that 2024 is likely to throw their way.

Normally I’d want to take after Anime News Network and most of the other blogs that I follow and put together some sort of “year in review,” but the honest truth is that, after about April/May I didn’t watch very much anime at all. I had all these notions that, while on maternity leave I’d have nothing but time to sit in front of a TV with my husband and baby and binge watch shows, but with the lack of normalized sleep, each day flowed into the next and all I had the mental energy for was to keep a constant stream of Seinfeld episodes running in the background. I have since become somewhat insufferable in my use of Seinfeld references in everyday life, but I was always a little insufferable anyway.

Continue reading “Happy New Year!”
Categories
Personal

There and Back Again – A Harrowing Year and a Break From Anime

Content Warning: Discussion of pregnancy complications and other medical situations.

Well, it’s sure been a year, hasn’t it? Calling it a full year isn’t entirely accurate in that I think my last actual post here aside from some convention information was back in October 2022, but it’s close enough I suppose. Like most of the “breaks” I end up taking from this blog, this one was as unintentional as any other, but as I mentioned back then a large part of my inability to focus this time around was due to undergoing fertility treatment – the medication regimen itself and the fact that caffeine (my way of self-medicating my ADHD) became a big no-no put a real damper on things.

Continue reading “There and Back Again – A Harrowing Year and a Break From Anime”
Categories
Personal

Social Media Updates (AKA “Where to Find Me”)

Hi all, once again it’s been a long while. I briefly mentioned this in my previous update (following Anime Detour), but I kind of fell off the face of the Earth due to being pregnant and dealing with some medical issues related to that. I’ll probably write more about that harrowing experience in a separate post but I’m at least happy to say that at this point all is well and our baby is here. Of course, over the past several months the social media landscape has gotten kind of interesting following the degradation of Twitter/X and the creation or proliferation of several social media services hoping to fill that void. I must say, for all its issues I’ve always enjoyed Twitter and I’m sad to see it fall apart due to the incompetence of its ownership, but as someone who grew up with the rise of the Internet, this isn’t the first implosion I’ve watched happen in real time and it definitely won’t be the last.

Continue reading “Social Media Updates (AKA “Where to Find Me”)”
Categories
News Personal Site News

Empathy with Zombies

*Brushes off dirt and picks off cobwebs*

This season at the anime club I attend we’re watching both Zombie Land Saga and Shiki, two series in which (and sorry for for this very basic spoiler of both shows) the existence of the undead is integral to the plot of the story. I can’t help but feel a little bit of empathy for these reanimated characters, because for the past couple of months I’ve also kind of felt like I’ve been shuffling around with creaking bones and and a jumbled-up mind.

Continue reading “Empathy with Zombies”
Categories
Personal

Brief Update

Good morning, all (or good afternoon or evening, depending on where and when you’re catching up with anime blogs). I just wanted to provide a brief update on reviews and articles related to this current (Spring 2022) season.

It’s always my goal to (eventually) get around to every non-sequel series airing in a season, and that hasn’t changed. I realize I’m not the quickest (and in fact am probably the slowest) at posting these impressions, and my process and writing isn’t especially unique, but I find it valuable to give everything a fair shot as I’m able to no matter how long the journey happens to take. That said, there are some extra obstacles to timeliness that have been causing me a lot of problems over the past month or so in particular, and especially the past couple of weeks, so I thought I should post something just to air it all out.

Continue reading “Brief Update”
Categories
Personal

It’s Not a New Year’s Resolution

I’ve never been a fan of New Year’s resolutions. In fact, I’ve never been one for big goals or long term planning – usually I make my goals too large and ultimately unattainable, so after a couple weeks of enthusiasm I spend the remaining months feeling terrible about my inability to stick to a plan. But that doesn’t mean that I find intention-setting to be a fruitless venture and though I don’t want to let my writing stagnate due to a complete lack of forward momentum that I could have addressed, so here I am with some thoughts about the general direction of this blog, my writing, and my general anime fandom as we enter the cusp of the transitioning year.

I’m going to be laying out few concrete goals here; concrete goals are historically what I’ve been unable to meet, and I don’t want to set myself up for easily-defined failure. But at my day job the management is sort of enamored with an idea called “Start, Stop, or Continue,” in which the person participating in the exercise, annual review, or whatever, defines the actions that they’d like to start, stop, or continue going forward. I’ve found that to be a more helpful way of framing things in my life, so despite the fact that I find the professional world to be a little bit jargon-y and silly at times, I feel that in this case at least its heart is in the right place.

Continue reading “It’s Not a New Year’s Resolution”
Categories
Personal

Blue Blazes and Attempting to Tame the Imposter

This essay contains spoilers for the Japanese live-action series Blue Blazes.

I’d wager that most of you reading only know me for my writing here and perhaps from my occasional self-inflicted speaking engagements at local Minnesota conventions. Part of my day job involves providing specialized onboarding and ongoing training in a professional setting. It’s a job I sort of fell into after a while, but I enjoy being able to help people along in their learning processes, and it’s also nice to be the person with all (or at least most) of the answers.

One thing I’ve learned over the years as I’ve tried to independently become a better trainer, is that adult learners tend to operate on a fairly predictable continuum when it comes to learning a new task or process. Before they start hands-on training, most folks are eager and willing to learn a new task. It’s kind of an “ignorance is bliss” state of being, because whether or not they’ve done any pre-reading or observation before embarking on their learning process, they still don’t always have a full picture of what the upcoming task entails. Once they’re actually starting to perform the task is when vulnerability and self-doubt creeps in – they’re confronted by portions of the task that they didn’t expect or don’t understand right away, and their confidence dips. This is natural and expected; most folks go on to build their skills and become proficient in time. However, the time period while they’re still learning can be a struggle, especially for those of us who are prone to self-doubt. It’s the feeling of being a sort of imposter, fooling everyone around you into believing that you’re good enough to do something that you’re still unsure of.

Continue reading “Blue Blazes and Attempting to Tame the Imposter”
Categories
News Site News

Taking a Break

Hi everyone! I know the title of this post might seem a little bit ominous, but please don’t take it that way. If you’ve been a frequent reader of the site, you’ve probably noticed that I’ve been on a one-post-per-day streak for a little bit over a month, which I’m really proud of. That said, without a constant barrage of new episodes to take in and comment on, it’s difficult to keep up that pace and remain the thoughtful writer I strive to be. So even though this is typically the pattern for the blog, this time I’m stating formally that I’m going to be dialing things back for a while to probably a couple of posts per week. This ought to give my brain a break and give me a little bit of time to gather my thoughts and notes on some longer pieces I’ve been thinking of writing, but haven’t had the time or energy to do so.

This is by no means me stepping away from the blog like I’ve had a tendency to do on occasion and by surprise – I’m feeling good about my writing and don’t feel like taking an extended break. But I’ve also got other things to do in “real life” and a big work deadline coming up fairly soon, so I wanted to be realistic and avoid burnout.

My priorities in the near future are to catch up with my Odd Taxi episode reviews (there should be another up in the next day or so) and to finish a couple of full-series reviews/essays that are sitting partly completed in my drafts at the moment. I’m also planning for some future entries in the “Anime Club no Densetsu” series, because those are a lot of fun to write and have been a great way to revisit some fond (and maybe no-so-fond) memories from my many years attending anime club.

I hope everyone is enjoying this season’s new anime – there are so many great series, I’m not quite sure if I’ll be able to drop any of the ones I was initially interested in! So I’ll be using some of my extra time keeping up with those and catching up on some unfinished business from prior seasons, too.

Thanks, as always, for reading and making anime fandom a great place to be.

Categories
Personal

Maybe It’s Unreachable for Me: Inadequacy in “SK8 The Infinity”

Note: This post contains spoilers for recent episodes of SK8 The Infinity (episodes 7 and 8 specifically).

It will come as a surprise to no one that much of my sense of self is tied up in my life as a hobbyist. I entered my mid-20s as a mediocre college graduate, employed but not in a field I was passionate about, and began to develop my passions elsewhere by watching a lot of anime and writing about it. I also did fan-art (sometimes) and played some video games here and there. At least as far as those activities were concerned, I felt pretty good about myself. I’d always been praised for my artistic ability as a kid and for a long time I had deluded myself into thinking that I was better than most people, at least when it came to drawing anime-inspired cartoon characters (and any art teachers who may have critiqued my chosen subject matter were just art snobs with nothing to tell me). And as far as video games were concerned, I always managed to play through the most popular ones and when I was younger I’d even give tips and walkthroughs to my friends who were stumped. I spent a long time on the phone walking people through the dungeons in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, that’s for sure.

Setting foot into the broader world disavowed me of a lot of those assumptions about my own skills. I was never too broken up about realizing that I was “just okay” at video games, because it became clear as I got older that I had less and less time to devote to the sort of sprawling, epic RPG’s I’d loved as a teenager. This felt to me more like an artifact of getting older, and while that’s disappointing to have to confront it’s also predictable. I still play and enjoy games when I get around to them, but I never had dreams of being some big-name gaming journalist or live streamer, so I’ve just never been left with a major sense of loss.

Continue reading “Maybe It’s Unreachable for Me: Inadequacy in “SK8 The Infinity””