2013: The Agincourt of Weblogging

That’s Agincourt from the French perspective, as last year’s success turned out to be shorter-lived than I expected.

Well, maybe “Agincourt” is an exaggeration, but it’s been a lousy year for me on all fronts. Leaving aside personal stuff, post quality was less even than I’d like, and update consistency fell apart in the second half of the year. I do seem to have gotten back on track now, though, and there were some good points throughout the year, so here’s the highlight reel for Everything Is Oll Korrect! in 2013.

I finished the Uncle Walt-a-thon, and most of the better posts of that series came this year. Like last year’s Anime Autobiography, posts tended to get better as the series progressed and I figured out the best way to approach each film.

I also got in a couple posts for the Maynguh Memories series, which continues to be as irregular as irregular can be: Maynguh Memories of a Long, Long, Long Time and Maynguh Memories of Japanese Japanese Comics.

It was an interesting year on the foreign language front. I’ve gotten back into serious study of Japanese with James Heisig’s book, as well as a more standard textbook for basic vocabulary and grammar. I’m taking a slow-and-steady approach this time, since my problem in the past has been getting bogged down and demoralised. This, of course, comes after a half-year of learning to read French, which I’m still not great at, but did allow me to take a shot at not only the Japanese Japanese comics mentioned above but a French Japanese comic - Chihayafuru.

Outside of the Disney films, I didn’t write as many review/impressions posts this year as last. That’s partly because I didn’t watch and read as much and partly because I felt more conscious of repeating myself from one review to the next. I did write a few, though, the best, or at least most memorable to me, being on the finale of Gunslinger Girl, early impressions of Bunny Drop (and those impressions stayed true through the ninth volume), Rozen Maiden: Zurückspulen, and Interstella 5555.

I also wrote a two related short reflections on why I like animation so much as a medium, Why I Watch Anime: An Internal Dialogue, and The Aristotelian Argument for Animation.

As a final highlight, from near the beginning of the year, some thoughts On Surrounding Oneself with Books.

By the way, I comment in that post that I had books stacked up all over my floor. A few months later, I moved into my own apartment and bought some extra shelves, so books no longer needed to habitate on the carpet, but lived on proper shelves.

At the end of this year, I’m proud to say that I’ve once again run out of shelf space and have a stack of books on the floor beside my desk.