The hell is this shit?

Get back to work.

Love,

Your boss.

As you all might remember, I spilled my guts and admitted my love for Taiga. Since then, things have been going well. She's making her way over here in the next couple of weeks. Kagami has come to terms with all of this, and the three of us should be living together happily.

But, I have one addition to my confession that is sure to set my waifu situation in trouble. You know the second Toradora! OP, "Silky Heart"? If not, I'll remind you:



Well, the music has made its way into my running playlist, and I must confess, it's become the centerpiece. Starting as soon as I've passed the 1.25 mile marker, "Silky Heart" starts playing. My heart starts pumping a little faster. The adrenaline flows. And then, when the chorus hits? I kick it up to a full-out run (around 9 mph) and imagine that I'm chasing after Taiga, much like Minorin was towards the end of the series.

I can't help it. It inspires me to run as fast as humanly possible, trying to reach my goal. In order to keep the pace, I follow it up with Endoh Masaki's version of "God Knows," which usually gets me across the finish line when I need it.



So, I'm sorry Kagami: Taiga is quickly filling my head more than I would have ever thought. You still have precedence over her, but you'd better do something to keep your top spot.

--

On a serious note, what sort of otaku music gets your motor going? Is there anything that fuels your runs or workouts?

I don't find much use for a personal blog of my own. After spending a chunk of my day writing on here and then talking about my own life on Twitter, I don't find much sense in writing about the same stuff all over again on Wordpress or Blogspot.

So, I may as well use my own site's community blogs to talk about things that are somewhat relevant to me: my goals for the year 2010.

1. Move out of the house. Most people, upon meeting me, take a guess that I'm somewhere between 28 and 30 years old. It's because of my voice and appearance, I suppose, and my professional stature and mannerisms. The fact of the matter is, I'm 22 and just graduated from college. I'd like to be able to earn enough money to move out into my own apartment, wherever that might be, and really start living on my own. It's my driving force every day, right after working on Japanator.

2. Pass the JLPT level 2. Ideally, this one will be done by July, when the Level 1 and 2 tests are given out. I've yet to take any of the JLPT exams, but my thought process is "go big or go home." So, I'm going to try and buckle down and get through as much kanji and vocabulary as I can in an effort to actually pass the JLPT 2 and prove my skills.
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3. Get myself a Burberry coat.[/b] Getting a job and planning to go to Japan this year isn't really feasible, so instead I'm going with one of my fashion goals: buy myself a Burberry coat. I've always admired their outfits -- especially their coats -- and that's one of the first things I want to buy with a full-time job. So, that's going to be my one splurge item this year.

4. Get a first draft of my book done. Yep, I'm working on writing a book. I'm working on a collection of essays about Japan. Mostly anime and manga stuff. I'd like them to work together as part of a larger, more cohesive theme, so I'm still working on that. But if all goes well, I might actually be able to get it published. Shocking!

5. Get a new screenplay done. This is the stuff I actually went to school for. I should probably put my four years of education to the test and produce something that's more marketable than the projects I've done in the past. Those I'd like to clean up, but for now I'd rather focus on creating something new than holding onto past ideas.
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6. Break 1 million visitors a month on Japanator.[/b] We're doing pretty damn good when it comes to traffic, and the 1 million unique visitors in a month is a fairly reasonable goal. We've got some features coming up that'll help this, but please remember to tell your friends about us!

So, those are my goals for the year. Let's see how many of them I can make. I'm hoping that voicing them publicly like this gives me some sense of duty to actually get it done. What are your resolutions?

First off I'd like to thank everyone for discussing and sharing with us their ideas during the course of our top 50 titles. I'm always curious to see some numbers, as well as to answer people when it comes to our preferences, so I wanted to take a minute and answer a few things on my day off.

"How did you guys vote?"

The process worked like this: I asked everyone in the staff to name a bunch of anime that they felt deserved to be on the list. I seeded in some titles, and we had a list of about 90 different items.

From there, I asked everyone to list their top ten, in numbered order. Once I got those back, I assigned point values to each rank. #1 got 10 points, while #10 got 1. From there, I simply added things up and that's how we got our list.

I did some tinkering and adjusting in the list, either because some items were ranked just too high or some didn't really make sense to be on the list. They were more out-of-left-field-type titles, so it wasn't like I cut Kino's Journey or anything.

"Why wasn't X on the list?"

We probably didn't watch it.

Really, that's only true for some of the titles (Kaiba). When you're restricting yourself to 10 choices, invariably there are going to be another 10 series you really want to see on the list, but not quite as bad as the ones you've picked.

So, in the end, some series did fall through the cracks, and could have filled up other slots, but such is life. It's something I've learned this year, and I can carry that knowledge with me for whenever I want to do a big project like this.

"X should have been higher/lower!"

Clearly, numbers are serious business.

"Your list was horrible. You should apologize for how horrendous your top 50 was!"

The only apology that I can offer is this: I'm sorry that every member of the staff has not watched every single anime that has come out over the last ten years, and then proceeded to vote for it in your favor.

Now that I've gotten that bit of sarcasm out of the way, I wanted to get down to some numbers.

The Studios

In the world of anime, it's usually easiest to assign a show' success to the studio that produced it, rather than a single director or writer. So here's a list of all the titles that we highlighted and the studios that produced them. Ghibli, Madhouse and Comix Wave got a bit of a bump because they encased 3-4 titles in one rank.

Madhouse: 11
Bones: 5
Production IG: 5
JC Staff: 4
Comix Wave Inc: 3
Gainax: 3
Gonzo: 3
Kyoto Animation: 3
Studio Ghibli: 3
A-1 Pictures: 2
Shaft: 2
Sunrise: 2
AIC: 1
Artland: 1
Brain's Base: 1
Imagin: 1
Palm Studio: 1
Satelight: 1
Shirogumi Inc: 1
Studio Comet: 1
Studio Pierrot: 1
XEBEC: 1

Clearly, we're Madhouse fanboys. It's official. The studio is one that's gigantic and yet allows for so much freedom and innovation, we can't help but love it. The studio's president is a regular guest at Otakon, so I'm hoping that we'll get a good interview with him this year.

The years

People claimed we were biased towards more recent stuff, so I went ahead and plugged in each season that a show aired during into a list, and came out with this yearly breakdown.

2000: 3
2001: 5
2002: 9
2003: 7
2004: 14
2005: 11
2006: 14
2007: 23
2008: 12
2009: 9

2007 sure produced a lot of good anime. Or at least a lot of shows that aired solely/mainly in 2007 with multiple seasons did well.

Not all of us have been here for the last ten years in the anime scene, and those that have aren't necessarily disposed to solely old titles. Well, except for Tim. But he's ancient. So, that's how we get the breakdown. But it's interesting to see the years that didn't do so well: 2001, 2003, 2005. I say 2005 because that had a lot of spill-over between other years, and that's why it's numbers are higher.

In conclusion

I hope you enjoyed our list for the fun that it was, and you'll stick around on the site. For whatever disagreements you have with us here on the site, you're more than welcome to share them. We're not the type of place who will ban you for hurting our egos -- we value the legitimate discussion, as long as you refrain from ad homenim attacks.

Was Sawako always that flat?

Also, this episode made me HHHHHNNNNGGGG pretty damn hard. How about for you?