Roving Thoughts archives

I've been doing a lot of my 'blogging' on Twitter

If you follow my Twitter as well as this blog, you've probably noticed that I write a lot more commentary on Twitter these days, commentary that maybe could be blog entries. I think there's a number of reasons why I've wound up doing so much on Twitter compared to here:

• It's simpler and lower-friction. I don't have to come up with an entry title, open up my editor, and so on; I can just Tweet. My client's 'new tweet' entry bar is right there.

• It's socially accepted to be terse, casual, unrefined and so on, because the medium itself is short. No one really expects carefully elaborated deep thoughts in 140 characters. Whenever I write actual blog entries here I feel the need to carefully lay out my views in paragraphs, elaborate on things, answer possible counter-arguments, and so on.

  (And if 140 characters is too short, I can string a few Tweets together.)

• It's okay to be short (indeed, it's expected). By contrast, if I try to write a blog entry that's only a couple of sentences long it just seems wrong; it's too short and somehow disappointing. I have an irrational but definite feeling that blog entries should be multi paragraph things.

• All of this makes it faster. I'll probably spend a hundred tweets worth of time and effort on this blog entry by the time I'm done, and the reality of my life is that I only have so much time and energy to write (and the lion's share of that will always go to my techblog).

• And I have to be honest and confess to another reason: I suspect that I have a bigger audience on Twitter than I do here. At one level I don't care about how much of an audience I have; at another level I am conscious both of the reach to effort ratio and the fact that if I want to influence people, Twitter may be a better payoff.

In short, it's much easier to fit tweeting in around the edges of my life. I can throw a brief unrefined thought or reaction out there in a minute and be done, in contrast to the much more of various things that I put into entries here.

I do feel that I want to blog here more. I have ideas for entries, but I generally don't get around to actually writing them (or I write them very slowly). I don't have any answers, though. In part I'm writing this entry in the hopes that just writing it will encourage me to blog more.

(Perhaps I should start copying what I feel are noteworthy tweets from Twitter to here, such as my periodic tweeted reactions to episodes of shows (eg, also).)

Checking in on the Summer 2015 anime season most of the way through

I almost decided to not write a 'midway' update since I'd delayed it so long and I felt I didn't have anything really to say, but I've abruptly changed my mind. So now it's time to update my early impressions.

Based on my Twitter reading, some people have been feeling that this is a weak season. I don't feel that myself; I've been watching about my typical number of shows and I've been about as enthused for them as usual. But this season has felt slower than usual for one reason, which is that everything I'm watching comes out from Friday through Sunday (and these days I'm watching shows promptly due to APR voting). That leaves the rest of the week basically empty, making the whole thing feel slow.

Great:

• Gatchaman Crowds Insight: This show is saying so much and in such a complex way that I don't really have anything to say about it, not with better thinkers and writers than I doing writeups. After I read their work, anything I have left to say feels relatively obvious (although I did blurt out some thoughts on Twitter at one point).

• Senki Zesshou Symphogear GX: This continues to be very Symphogear, which makes it great for people who like that. Which I do. The latest episodes make it clear that we're going to get a very Symphogear finish too.

Enjoyable:

• Rokka no Yuusha: This turned into a mystery show and I've been enjoying it on that basis (including trying to outguess it). Some people would call it a psychological study of the characters but I don't feel that's really right; we haven't been inside the heads of most of the characters, in part because the show needed to keep the mystery going.

• GOD EATER: This is my nominee for underappreciated show of the season. Yes, it's basically standard shonen jive (tm Evirus) and the art style's unusual, but I've been finding it quite well directed and put together.

  (Unfortunately it seems to have been plagued by production problems and has already missed a number of episodes.)

Things I'm still watching:

• Ushio to Tora: This has remained the distilled essence of 90s shonen, which has both good and bad sides. I'm not sure I'm a sufficient fan of 90s shonen to stick with it all of the way, especially since it's often a 'monster of the week' show.

• GATE: This is not a well written or well made show; the writing is often cringe-worthy and the production is clearly trying to save money. Why I'm still watching is that it's been pretty good popcorn entertainment, at least most of the time. Setting aside the show's questionable politics, it's still kind of amusing to watch the JSDF go to town on bad guys and impress (and scare) people.

  (I cannot watch GATE without thinking of Japan's nasty pre-WWII history in Korea and Manchuria. The show is not directly attempting to whitewash it, but one can draw implications.)

Suspended recently:

• Gangsta: This is technically well made but the more I watched the less actually engaged I've felt. At this point I basically don't care about what happens to the characters, especially since I don't think anything deeply interesting is going to happen in the remaining two episodes.

  (It's interesting to think about how this contrasts with Black Lagoon, but that's an entry for another time. One obvious difference is that Black Lagoon was smart enough to never put forward an existential crisis for its setting.)

I've also sort of started watching Fate/kaleid liner Prisma Illya 2wei Herz! because it started this season's big fight. I didn't bother watching the early episodes, I just dropped straight into the fight.

(I regret to report that I haven't been using the slow midweek time to do anything particularly worthwhile as far as anime watching goes.)