FunBlog

I thought everyone followed Jonathan, but apparently the way he mixes up anime with the hollywoodism repulses people. It’s understandable…

–Author, アニ・ノート, Those Pesky Pronouns

Well, of course I write to please myself, and I take it for granted that my tastes may not be the same as yours. Still, it’s a bit unnerving to hear that this site “repulses” people.

So if you feel that the combination of anime and movies is too much like steak slathered in strawberry sherbet, let me remind you that you can bookmark or subscribe to a subset, e.g.

Category: Anime
Category: Movies
Feed: Anime
Feed: Movies

I just upgraded to WordPress 2.7. “First decimal place” upgrades like this are more likely to cause problems than the usual bug fix upgrade. If you see anything on the site that seems broken, please let me know by leaving a comment (or use the “Contact Me” link on the right.)

I approached this series with a certain amount of apprehension. On the one hand, it’s widely regarded as a great classic. On the other hand, many people will tell you that it has a terrible ending–in fact it’s the series that inspired the term “Gainax ending” .

It actually wasn’t all that bad, and I’m prepared to give it a qualified recommendation. If you have watched lots of anime and consider yourself something of an expert, you really need to watch this, if only so as to know what the other fans are talking about. If you have only watched a few series you should watch this only if the description below really appeals to you–otherwise there are plenty of other series that you will enjoy more. If you have never watched any anime but you are curious about it, and somebody told you that this is the greatest series ever made, you should stay far away from it. If this is the first anime series that you watch, you will probably never watch another.
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I just upgraded to version 2.6.1 (after leaving the site at version 2.5.1 for a dangerously long time.) In the past a “second-digit” version upgrade has sometimes caused trouble.

If you notice something obviously wrong with how things display, leave a comment and I will try to fix it.

This is mostly interesting as a proof of concept: a demonstration that if you were sufficiently talented and fanatically dedicated you could create a professional-quality anime all by yourself, or perhaps with the help of a few friends.

In 2001 Makoto Shinkai quit his job as a video game developer and spent about seven months working head-down full-time to create this 25-minute anime on his computer. A friend handled the music and sound effects; Makoto and his fiancée did the voice acting. (It was later redubbed using professional seiyuu.)
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After testing the site with Safari for the first time I ended up making some massive, long-overdue changes to the stylesheet, which hopefully will allow things to display better in more browsers and screen resolutions.

In particular I eliminated the use of pixel metrics, replacing it with logical sizes (inches and points.) I also reduced the dependence on bitmap images for formatting and fixed some malformed relative URLs, which Firefox and IE handled correctly but Safari didn’t like.

If the site now looks WORSE in your browser, let me know what your configuration is and I’ll see what I can do.

I have added two new pages to make it easier to find reviews on this site: the List of Anime Reviews and the List of Movie Reviews.

When I first set up this blog I selected the WordPress option to use “numeric” permalinks for posts, which just assigns a sequence number to each post. Over time I became increasingly unsatisfied with this. Among other things it makes it hard to interpret the http logs.

So I just switched to a date-name format. By default this would have the effect of breaking all the existing links to this blog, so I am also using Dean Lee’s Permalinks Migration Plugin which should automatically redirect all the old URLs to the new ones.

So everything should work transparently without any problems, but if you notice that any links to or within this site seem to be broken, please give me a heads-up by replying to this post.

I’ve crossed my fingers and switched everything on the site to WordPress 2.1. If you see anything that is obviously broken, let me know via the contact form.