Nico Nico

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In 2010, my university career ended with a whimper, and I entered the “real world.” Actually, I just continued at the job I already had and spent most of the next year or so wondering what to do for a career. It was a somewhat depressing time, in a way, but hey - I still had my Japanese cartoons.

Now, at this point I’d seen enough that fewer and fewer shows offered really new experiences for me. Most of the shows I saw in 2010-11 stood out because they excelled at something that I’d already seen elsewhere. I also find it difficult to say much about some of these shows because they’re so recent that I can’t quite contextualise them yet. After reflecting on how to go about sharing my experience from these years, it occurred to me that the most significant event is probably a shift in how I watched anime. So here we go - how I watch anime in a modern fashion.

So, nico nico now has an English version of their website [Note from 2024: the site is now dead],  and they’re doing a live broadcast from SakuraCon. Having comments appear directly on a video seems like it’d be really damn annoying, but honestly I’m finding it a lot more fun than YouTube. That may just be novelty value, but somehow it feels more like you’re interacting with other commenters than having comments appear just below the video as on other sites. Of course, the comments are pretty much smartass central, but I’m not one to take anything on the internet seriously anyway.