The first rule of Blog Club is… Sorry, I couldn’t resist.

So, without more ado or further gilding the lily, here’s my Blog Club submission:

The community for this round is Anime. After history, anime is the smallest community on 9rules with just three blogs. In one respect that makes it a good (and easy) place to start. At the same time my heart fell because the amount I know about anime could be poured into an egg cup and still leave room for a decent sized egg. So I apologize at the start of this post for any factual errors and confusions that are bound to rampage their way through my words.

Japanese movie and television animation, often having a science fiction theme and sometimes including violent or explicitly sexual material.

That’s the definition my dictionary widget provides me. A dig further using Wikipedia doesn’t exactly clarify matters in my brain.

In fact I could spend this entire post talking about what is and what isn’t anime, leaving both you and myself even more confused, and not talking about the pretty blogs I discovered, so I won’t. In my mind ‘anime’ is 1) animation, 2) Japanese. Let’s just leave it at that.

For someone who has held a life long love of science fiction and fantasy, has played one or two role playing games, and watched a fair few cartoons growing up, anime never really figured on my radar. You’d think I had geek credentials enough but clearly not. So when someone says “anime” to me I think straight away to the two Studio Ghibli films I’ve seen (and loved), Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle. Then I remember that I got Appleseed out of the library on DVD on impulse and really rather enjoyed it. But that’s it. Three animes (is that an appropriate plural?) in near twenty four years. Ouch. My geek hat is clearly slipping.

As I pretty soon exhausted my own experiences of anime, my thoughts started to wander into territory that isn’t strictly anime: cartoons and graphic novels. In my brain anime, cartoons, and graphic novels all share something, and that is their artwork. It is the artwork that links them all together. I read V for Vendetta in the same spirit I watch anime – sometimes with the words, sometimes without. Each time I come away with a slightly different story because I’ve ‘read’ the pictures differently. For someone who is much more comfortable with words, this is slightly odd, but I can stare at this form of artwork (graphic/manga/anime) for stretches at a time and understand volumes.

With anime pictures really are worth a thousand words.

I love how meaning can be conveyed without speaking. I also love how drawn characters can be more believable and truthful than standard actors.

More than all that though, I’m left with the impression of how frelling pretty anime is. Even when portraying horrific war and destruction it’s… breathtaking.

Now, I’m not saying I’m going to rush out and empty Forbidden Planet of their entire anime stock this weekend, but if anyone has some anime they’d like to lend me (burn to DVD and post me, whatever), I’ll be more than happy to watch it. Look on it as a way to fill in what I’ve just realised is a big gap in my education.

blog club, blog_club, 9rules, anime

So my previous post got just the teensiest bit misinterpreted.

Who’d a thunk it? Just one more example of my own unique blend of British sarcasm, humour and sheer insanity not translating too well to the written word.

Just to set the record straight here, in case y’all are starting to get the impression I am a delicate flower who needs sheltering from the rough and tumble of the real world (don’t you just love it when analogies up and die on you in the middle of a sentence like that?) –
I am not scared.

I never for one moment contemplated jacking in the blogging gig. It would take far more than one moment of internet randomness to make me stop what I’m doing.

I love that I never know who is going to walk through those salon doors next. I love it that someone I haven’t met in a couple of years randomly stops by the blog, reads a bit, and goes “Hang on… She’s familiar…”

I write as “Cas” instead of my real name because, well, I’ve always been Cas online. It’s quicker to type if nothing else. It’s not an attempt to remain anonymous. Frankly, “Cas” is just way cooler than “Claire”.

I’m getting off my point here.

Tristan, you did nothing wrong. In fact you left me with a grin a mile wide on my face most of the day. The whole thing was just so deliciously unexpected. I’d probably say “out of left field” if I was actually in the habit of using baseball metaphors (I think it’s a baseball thing anyroad 😕 ).

The point I was trying to make with that post was not that I was knocked back in a bad way by someone I used to know outside of the blogging sphere stumbling across Bright Meadow. Rather I wanted to point out how amazing and wonderful I found the whole thing. You really never do know who is going to read your blog and, far from sending me quaking behind the sofa, it’s made me even firmer in my convictions that getting your audience talking back is a good thing.

So there you have it everyone. I like the random. I celebrate the bizarre. I embrace the unexpected. I like old acquaintances popping out of the woodwork and making themselves known.

People – you’re the reason I blog and leave my comments form open.

I’ve just knocked the ‘coco peeps’ box and the ‘subscribe by email’ box out of the sidebar. The first because it was slowing down an already hefty site to load (I need to go through things an tame K2 a little bit when I have the time). The latter because no one uses it. If you think I’m wrong about either of these decisions, let me know 🙂

… or why it’s time to stop blogging.

Hell, that was a little unexpected! Turns out my Thunderbird knight in shining armour is an old acquaintance.

We’re not talking long-lost-soul-mates here, but still – someone I’ve shared a few cups of coffee and one or two pints with a couple of years back.

No idea how he stumbled across Bright Meadow and you can colour me all kinds of surprised that he recognised me, but it did get to thinking on how the world is far too small a place, especially this little ‘blogging’ community we inhabit. When you’re wrapped up in it is all too easy to think of it as an all encompassing phenomena, but take a step back and really it’s a very small group of people involved. There’s only a finite number of people interested in certain things and like does tend to gravitate towards like.

Still, do the math on the number of blogs in existence, and the number of ex-boyfriends of old friends, and the chances of one of the latter stumbling across my example of the former is pretty slim.

Anyway, it made me wonder what other skeletons might come clanking out the wardrobe. Almost enough to put a girl off blogging 😯

A little question for you –

I use Thunderbird for email (since Mail upped and died on me so spectacularly a while back) and I am getting used to its foibles.

One thing I would like to do however is change the default ordering of the accounts in the ‘folders’ pane of the viewer. I have no idea how the current order occurred – it certainly isn’t alphabetical – perhaps it’s the order I added them? I don’t know. But I would like to change the order.

Can anyone help me?