Hi all,

I guess this is it. I’ve decided after a year and some nine or so months to board up shop. The Anime Academy blog officially ends today.

I say it is well overdue. I haven’t written anything all this year and it’s well past the half. Now, I still have plenty of ideas. I just wasn’t expecting to be this busy this year. Between work and family obligations, I haven’t even found any consistent time to keep up with my anime watching and the anime community. I’d often start one or two series only to not finish them. Let alone constructing consistent and coherent thoughts worthy of the standards of this blog (i.e. high school essay level) has been quite difficult. Adding on the my intent to apply to grad school and to buy a house within the next year, I don’t really know how often I’ll keep the blogging up generally.

The co-founder (i.e. my brother) also has quite the obligation ahead of him. While he did graduate from his undergrad, he took on the daunting task of getting his PhD straight from undergrad. And though he is able to follow anime much better than me, he’s got the PhD qualifiers ahead of him and it is probably best not to commit too much time to this (especially it takes quite the push to get him to write in the first place).

Which leaves sis and though she does have college applications ahead of her, she’s the only one consistently following up on anime and is fresh with ideas. But since I wasn’t going to commit to this as much as I used to, I decided to close this down with the intent that she will design and manage her own blog from scratch. This way she has complete control over the theme, design and content without being tied into the pathway that this blog has gone through.

With all that said, you’ll probably won’t hear the last of me. I’ll most likely guest author on sis’ blog when she starts it. Also, I’m hoping to make a more academic ready paper based on some of the ideas from this blog. Hopefully, some journals and/or some academic conference would like listening to a paper on computer science and anime.

I’d like to end by thanking those who came around to this site. I am especially appreciative of those who not only read our work but discussed it with us through comments and emails. I’m personally glad that we made some affect in the anime blogger community. And while the blogging community has changed quite a bit from when this blog first started, it still has some of its well-thought discussion-ready flavor which continues to draw me today.

I’ll leave you with one of my favorite sayings which probably best describes this blog. It originally ended the last volume of the Whole Earth Catalog and was brought to life through the words of Steve Jobs’ 2005 commencement speech at Stanford. “Stay hungry, stay foolish.”

Until we meet again, koneko-chan signing off.

After I finished watching episode 2 of Umineko no Naku Koro ni, the first thing that popped in my head was the party game Mafia. I’m not going to bother explaining the episode since there are so many blogs that summarize different types of anime so I’ll just go straight to my comparison.

So, if you’re reading this now, I hope you watched the second episode so I won’t be “exactly” spoiling it. Also, I’ll add that I have not played the game so this is all based off my view from the anime. Well, to me, Umineko is probably the perfect anime to compare Mafia to. First of all, it’s a murder mystery (I know that isn’t saying much). Second of all, it has the abundant amount of members even play a normal game of it. Thing is, when the “Mafia” kill someone (or a group of people) at night, they really kill that person (or people). I can’t compare their counterpart, Higurashi no Naku Koro ni, to Mafia because in Higurashi, the “Mafia” is aimed to only one person while in Umineko, the “Mafia” is aimed to the entire Ushiromiya family. Oh, almost forgot to add that the “Townspeople” in Mafia are allegedly on an island (so they can boot people off when they vote) like how the Ushiromiya family is on their own island.

Since I explained how I’m able to get Mafia out of Umineko, I bet you’re wondering who plays what part. Let’s see, there’s definitely a “Mafia” type person or group within the premises of Umineko. There is also your “Doctor”, who is Dr. Nanjo, and your “Detective”, who I believe should be Battler. Therefore, the rest of the family are the “Townspeople”. At the end of the second episode, the “Mafia” made their move and killed 6 “Townspeople” out of the 18 that were originally on the island. Of course, the “Doctor” failed to save anyone and the only thing the “Detective” can do is to get information on who might be the murderer(s). I’ll just have to sit back and watch how this game of Mafia plays out. I have a feeling that there’s going to be multiple games of Mafia since Umineko is done by the same producers who made Higurashi.

Because wine and cheese Tomoyo is fine too… (Thanks to -kairi- for the awesome vector)

What started out as good idea with monthly news stories over the course of 12 days kinda fell by the wayside with dull end-of-year news articles and with tons of holiday cooking (Filipino style). Oh well…

Merry Christmas from your fellow bloggers here are Anime Academy.

“First Kurt, then Tupac, and now the meter room…” 100 points so the person who can give me the reference.

Since bro just wanted to do a few and now that I’m officially on (paid) vacation (yay for the salary system), I’m going to take over for the rest of these posts. I noticed something odd when I was doing the research for this. It turns out that page 500 of the animenano aggregator doesn’t seem to work no matter what is on the page. After going on vacation from my partial job of finding computer program bugs, you’d think I’d able to avoid these.

September 2008 – Anime Blogger Panel at NYAF

In one of the panels in the New York Anime Festival included quite the interesting cast from the anime blogger world. jpmeyer, hinano and DS hosted the anime blogger panel. The panel itself included a fairly simple setup of a presentation and questions. But what attracted the attention of the bloggosphere is that a number of fairly notable anime bloggers were present. There was enough attention/hype that a fellow blogger recorded the event in high def.

Personally, I tried to find another article for September since we’ve already covered a Hinano-driven event already in the last month. But I didn’t really feel like talking about anything else and I might was well talk about the only significant moment in 2008 where both sis and I were present at. Looking back, there was a type of aura around the event to all those who follow the bloggosphere (since to everyone else in NYAF, we’re no Yoshitaka Amano). It was one of those one-of-a-kind events where most people there we’re just glad to be a part of in some fashion.

Other September 2008 moments:

• ADV announces that they acquired Clannad after losing all their other Key titles to Funimation during the Sojitz transfer a few months ago.
• Bandai Entertainment announces that they’ll release Sola and True Tears in box sets. The titles used to be in the procession of Bandai Visual USA before the liquidation of the entity.

Decisions, Decisions…

So I ended up not getting the present I had planned for kame because the stores I thought would have it didn’t.  Looks like I’ll have to use the internet to get Eternal Sonata.  Can anyone who’s played the game let me know if the Japanese voice track is available in Eternal Sonata?  Aya Hirano saying “Reberu Oppu!” adds to the appeal of the game.  Anyway, this will be my last contribution to the 12 moments collection.  Bro-ham will be back at the helm for September onward.  I’d like to wish everyone a happy holidays, and I’ll see you all in 2009.

August 2008 – Hinano Releases RenAi Blogger

The beginning of August saw the release of a dating sim that bloggers felt at home with.   Hinano’s RenAi Blogger game, is open to the blogging community.  Before Ex-Fansubber’s crash in Late November/Early December, blogonauts took their chance to win with fellow bloggers Jen, Natsuko, CJ, and Hinano herself.  

While the koneko and I here at AniAcad didn’t have the time to look at the game before the Ex-Fan’s crash (read: if someone can send Bro-ham or myself a link to the dl package, that would be awesome.), the response to the game was all positive.  Bloggers everywhere took a look and gave in their two cents, but it was all encouragement from the community.  Massive props to Hinano for the community building event.  

The other August 2008 story (Yep, singular.  What? It was a slow month… :

• Who Ya Got:  The Saimoe 2008 Preliminaries ended, the Main Bracket was put together, and the show got started.  For the second year in a row, Maria from Hayate got jobbed, getting ousted by Rena from Higurashi in round 1.